A snowy, cold start to winter follows a very warm fall. How are Illinois seasons changing?

After years of little snow across the Chicago area, recent record-breaking snowfall and below-freezing temperatures might seem to contradict scientific reports of winters getting warmer. But climate change is still transforming how locals experience the changing seasons, including this fall, one of the top 10 warmest recorded in Illinois.

“People are like, ‘Oh, look at this snow. It’s not climate change,'” said Trent Ford, the Illinois state climatologist.

But trends in recent decades point to an overall warming of average temperatures in winter as well as fall, spring and summer, from human activities such as fossil-fuel burning that release heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. And that overall warming doesn’t rule out some occasional outliers, including the extreme cold this week.