Attribution of a record-breaking cold event and assessing future risks

The Earth’s surface marked the warmest since records began in the mid-1800s1; however, extremely cold winter temperatures occurred in China in mid-December 2023, in Northern Europe during early January 2024, and in much of the U.S. in mid-January 2024. Cold extremes in mid-latitude Eurasia and North America under global warming have resulted in increasing research attention and heated debates in recent years2-6.
Cold air that invades the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere typically comes from the high-latitude Arctic region. Normally, the prevailing subpolar westerlies in the Northern Hemisphere act like a “bandage”, trapping the cold air. However, in the context of global warming, the Arctic is warming at a rate nearly twice as fast as other areas [7], which weakens the meridional temperature gradient. This can cause the "bandage" to “loosen”, allowing more cold air to move southward [8–11]. From this perspective, global warming could lead to more frequent cold events.
However, previous attribution studies [12–16] on cold events have come to the opposite conclusion—that global warming has reduced the frequency and intensity of cold events. These seemingly contradictory conclusions have sparked our research interest to reconcile the debate of the relationship between global warming and mid-latitude cold extremes. Therefore, we decided to take the record-breaking cold event that occurred in December 2023 in China as an example to explore the role of anthropogenic climate change and attempt to further explain the results. The article was published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00886-w) [17].
Anthropogenic climate change suppressed the 2023 cold event and 2023-like cold events
When we analyze this specific event itself or 2023-like cold events, the suppressing effect of anthropogenic climate change can be concluded. We found that the 2023 cold event was mainly driven by anomalous large-scale atmospheric circulation (accounting for 83% of its intensity), while anthropogenic climate change had a dampening effect (accounting for −6% of its intensity). This means that the cold event was mainly caused by natural variability and would have been even stronger without anthropogenic climate change. Similarly, anthropogenic climate change also reduced the frequency and intensity of 2023-like cold events by 92.5±2.5% and 1.9±0.2 ºC, respectively.
The dynamic and thermodynamic effects of anthropogenic climate change
We further separated the effects of anthropogenic climate change into dynamic effects (changing circulation) and thermodynamic effects (regional warming). We found that the dynamic effects have strengthened the 2023-like anomalous circulation patterns by about 6%, driving cold events to be colder. However, the thermodynamic effects played the opposite effect and were much larger than the dynamic effects, leading to the overall conclusion that anthropogenic climate change have suppressed the frequency and intensity of 2023-like cold events.

Future risks
Future projections indicate that under an intermediate-emissions scenario, the frequency and intensity of 2023-like cold events will further decrease. However, under a very-low-emission scenario, by the end of this century, there will be cold events as common and strong as the 2023 cold event. This suggests that when we choose low-carbon policies, we need to develop appropriate adaptation measures to reduce the impact of 2023-like cold events in the future.
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[17]Ye, Y., Qian, C., Dai, A. et al. Attribution of a record-breaking cold event in the historically warmest year of 2023 and assessing future risks. npj Clim Atmos Sci 8, 14 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-024-00886-w
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