Dec 24 to Jan 25 was the 2nd biggest month-to-month temperature drop in the surface temperature record at 7.13°F in one month. 

As many readers know, we follow the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) closely here, keeping it updated monthly on the right sidebar along with the UAH global satellite record. I choose these metrics because I and others have shown the rest of the surface temperature record to be nothing more than a collection of warm-biased and unreliable statistically maladjusted garbage data. Be as upset as you wish, but that’s the facts, jack.

This fact is something you won’t see splashed across the headlines of the mainstream climate press: the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) just recorded its second largest month-to-month temperature drop in the entire time series, beaten only by the plunge from November to December 2009. That’s right—despite the endless drumbeat of “hottest ever” claims, the pristine, state-of-the-art USCRN network is telling a different story for February 2025.

Let’s set the stage. The USCRN, operational since 2005, is NOAA’s gold standard for tracking temperature trends across the contiguous U.S. With 114 stations deliberately sited away from urban heat islands and other human influences, it’s about as clean a dataset as you’ll find. No adjustments, no homogenization—just raw, reliable numbers. According to the latest NCEI report, January 2025 clocked in at a chilly 29.2°F for the contiguous U.S., already 0.9°F below the long-term average and the coldest January in the USCRN’s 20-year record. Not exactly the “scorching” narrative we’ve been sold.

Fast forward to February 2025, and preliminary data (as of February 20) shows a jaw-dropping slide. While the full month’s numbers are still trickling in, the month-to-month drop from January’s 29.2°F is shaping up to be a whopper—second only to the 2009 late-year nosedive. Back then, temperatures crashed by nearly 8°F between November and December, a seasonal anomaly that raised eyebrows but didn’t fit the warming script, so it quietly faded from the spotlight. This time, early indications suggest a plunge approaching 7°F or more, a rare event in a dataset designed for stability and precision.

What’s driving this? February’s outlook from NOAA hinted at a cold snap across the northern tier, with La Niña’s influence possibly flexing its muscle after a tepid start. But let’s not kid ourselves—attributing this to any single cause without digging deeper is premature. The USCRN’s strength is its consistency, not its ability to explain every wiggle. What it does tell us is that big swings still happen, even in a network built to filter out noise and bias.

Cue the inevitable spin: “This is just weather, not climate!” Fair enough—month-to-month changes don’t rewrite long-term trends. But when the trendsetters clutch their pearls over every heatwave, cherry-picking highs to fuel the crisis machine, a record-breaking drop deserves equal airtime. The USCRN’s full history shows no significant warming signal since it began, hovering around a flatline while global datasets scream “unprecedented.” Maybe it’s time to ask why the U.S.—with some of the best instrumentation on the planet—keeps defying the script.

For perspective, that November-to-December 2009 drop was a beast—almost 8°F (7.58°F) in a single month, dwarfing typical seasonal shifts. February 2025 might not steal the crown, but coming in second (seen at left) with one month 7.13°F drop in a 20-year record isn’t chump change. It’s a reminder that nature still has tricks up its sleeve, and the USCRN is catching them in real time.

So, while the NOAA climate establishment gears up for its next “State of the Climate” sermon, let’s tip our hats to the data doing the talking. The USCRN’s February surprise isn’t a debunking of anything—it’s just a fact. And facts, as they say, are stubborn things. Stay tuned for the final numbers, but for now, this is one cold splash of reality worth chewing on.

My thanks to Jaime Jessop for returning my attention to the subject of this piece, and my apologies to her for going over ground that she has already covered so well.

I first became aware of the return of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) scare story a few weeks ago when the You Tube algorithm pushed a Sabine Hossfelder video at me. In this she sought to worry viewers about the possibility of temperatures in north west Europe dropping by 5C or even 10C should AMOC shut down.

Around the same time the BBC website published an article with the heading “Could the UK actually get colder with global warming?” That in turn followed hard on the heels of another BBC article which appeared just a few weeks before that, headed “The ocean current vital to regulating our weather”. It’s almost as though the earlier article was setting the scene for the second article, and softening the public up for it.

It’s all rather odd, since it’s seven years or so since a study by Caesar, Rahmstorf, Robinson, Feulner and Saba put the cat among the pigeons. It was titled “Observed fingerprint of a weakening Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation” and it offered evidence of a weakening of AMOC by around 15% since the mid twentieth century. Why, seven or so years later, is the possibility of an AMOC shutdown suddenly once more in the news? This is where it gets even stranger. The renewed interest and claims seem to have been triggered by a study by Terhaar, Vogt and Foukal, which appeared in Nature on 15^th January 2025, yet the study headline (“Atlantic overturning inferred from air-sea heat fluxes indicates no decline since the 1960s”) ought on the face of it to defuse, rather than ignite, AMOC scare stories. The core conclusion from the abstract was as follows:

Based on the here identified relationship and observation-based estimates of the past air-sea heat flux in the North Atlantic from reanalysis products, the decadal averaged AMOC at 26.5°N has not weakened from 1963 to 2017 although substantial variability exists at all latitudes.

One might have expected that the BBC article that followed the publication of last month’s study (and to my mind might have been triggered by it), should have talked about its results, and offered a cautious degree of optimism for its readers on the back of the study’s results. Not a bit of it. Instead we were presented with a scare story, which ignored the study altogether, and appeared to cite the results of the 2017 study instead (while not actually referring to the study or its date of publication). The BBC chose to offer us this partial (and not terribly up-to-date) analysis:

But Amoc appears to be getting weaker...

…indirect evidence suggests it could have already slowed by around 15% over the last couple of centuries, although not all scientists agree.

A slowdown in Amoc – meaning less warmer water would be transported to this region – is seen as a possible culprit.

This is “a very clear signature and footprint of a classic Amoc slowdown” says Matthew England, professor of oceanography at the University of New South Wales….

…In 2021, the IPCC said it had “medium confidence” that Amoc would not collapse abruptly this century, although it expected it to weaken.

But some more recent studies have pointed to a growing possibility of Amoc passing a tipping point in the coming decades, beyond which full collapse would be inevitable….

…But many scientists are growing increasingly concerned. Prof Thornalley argues that, whatever the imperfections of individual studies, taken together they “lead to a conclusion that we maybe need to be worried”….

The BBC would no doubt argue that it has presented a report about AMOC which contains a number of appropriate scientific caveats, and that it can’t be criticised for it. Yet, the report is undoubtedly on the alarmist side of things, and a fully balanced report would have included the results of the most recent study. It didn’t, and I find that inexcusable. BBC Science editors will surely be aware of it (it was all over the internet in the few days after its publication) and failure to mention it seems like an unacceptable oversight.

I am still mystified as to why they have suddenly decided to scare us with the prospect of freezing instead of boiling. Is it because although we are bombarded almost daily with stories of a heating world, we in the UK have seen precious little sign of warmer weather over the last few years? Did they need to suggest that January 2025 in the UK, being 0.9C cooler than the long-term average, ushered in a new and scarier climate? Is it because in 2024 Iceland experienced its coldest year since 1998? Is it because in January 2024 Oslo experienced the coldest temperature ever recorded there? Or is it just because we have to be kept in a constant state of fear about climate change?