"We went from such a warm December to extreme cold," said Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford. "The lake is still responding to December; it hasn't caught up yet with January, so its temperatures are still above normal. It's a pretty warm lake reacting to some very cold air and that's really why we're seeing this dramatic effect."
"January started off pretty warm too until last week, and then everything changed. The main reason for the shift was because the atmospheric circulation changed and we suddenly started getting these cold air masses from Canada coming down which were absent or locked up in the Arctic."
Cold spells this intense might seem counterintuitive in the face of scientific evidence of climate change - specifically global warming - due to human activity. But overall trends show an undeniably hotter world.
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