The followup post I told tavella I'd write.

[randomness]

lilas pointed me at this article from the Weather Underground, which includes this colorful surface temperature departure from average map from the NOAA:
It just happens that the cold bits are in North America, Northwest Europe, and Northeast Asia, where lots of people--particularly ones well connected to media--live.

So you get stories like this one about the train that got bogged down in seven feet of snow near Jining in Inner Mongolia:

This being China, they got a couple thousand people with shovels to dig out the train.


18 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and seven feet of snow. That's some serious winter weather.