This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.
According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, this past winter was the coolest since 2001. A single season can’t determine a long-term trend any more than a single month can (see my previous post, "Did Global Warming Stop in January?"). But the recent cooler temperatures do offer an opportunity to talk about La Niña – a climate pattern that causes short-term cooling.
This winter’s La Niña is the strongest (coldest) since 1989, so we’d expect the weather to be cooler than usual. But even so, the cooling didn’t come close to offsetting the warming of the past 50-100 years. As you can see in the graph below, the cooling barely takes us back to 2001.
Data source: NASA. Each dot is a three-month period (season).