Why do cold snaps persist if the Earth is warming? This question has popped up in various forms online, especially on social media. Climate contrarians often use it as a rhetorical question to make the false claim that ‘global warming must not be happening if we still experience cold weather’.

Others may ask this question out of genuine curiosity – after all, it might be confusing to hear that the planet is warming if you are shivering in a cold spell.

But does anything actually prevent global warming and cold snaps from coexisting? Not at all. Cold snaps (short periods of very cold weather) occur when there are large southward dips in the jet stream – strong winds 5 to 7 miles (8 to 11 kilometers) above Earth’s surface that blow west to east