It's cold. It's January.

Child in cold weather, 1912.

Apparently this is news.

I don't really believe it is.

Every year it seems the national news comes on with some absurd story in December through February about it being record cold.  As in this is the worst stretch of cold since the Pleistocene.

Bull.

American soldiers in Arachangel, 1919.

It gets cold every year in the winter. Some winters are a lot colder than others, and we can debate the trends and why that is, but just because some person with a Metro Geo can't get out of his driveway in New Jersey in January doesn't mean its the coldest January since the history of Januaries.  It's just January.

Some of this, by this point, I'm pretty sure is due to confirmation bias, which gets me to another topic.

I've read more than one account that claims the World War One years or the World War Two years were the coldest years in Europe in eons.  I don't believe it.

American ambulance stuck in the snow, Europe 1917.

I do believe that if you spent four years rotating in and out of sodden trenches it would seem to be the wettest and coldest four years you'd ever seen.  Sure, if you otherwise spent January in your hovel in Dusseldorf or Wickham, it's freaking cold.  Likewise, if you walked from Omaha Beach to the Rhine in 1944 and 1945, much of that would have seemed really, really cold, particularly if you'd otherwise been working in a Bethlehem Steel plant where it's as hot as the surface temperature of the sun in January.

American soldier drawing water from a stream, December 1944.

But that doesn't mean it was the coldest set of years in all time.

Moroccan soldier in Italy, 1944.  Bet the weather seemed really cold to him.

But, you are saying.  I don't live in Dusseldorf and haven't been sent to the trenches.  Hah!

Nope, the logic still applies.

Unless you live in a draft house insulated with newspaper and heated by wood or chunks of coal, and spend the better part of your day working outdoors everyday, or walk to work from your ill heated apartment to work in an ill heated office and walk home at the end of the day, you really don't experience the cold weather that much anyhow.

You would have, if you'd lived a century or more ago.

You don't.  You probably live in a nicely heated home and travel in a nice warm car or nice warm train and don't actually get out that much.  So a cold snap is really remarkable for those short periods of time in which you are out.

But its not really novel, in a real sense.