It’s been cold in Finland this week. Cold warnings are in effect for much of the country as of Thursday. Cold weather forced the cancellation of flights at an airport in northern Finland on Sunday, leaving thousands of tourists stranded.
Kittilä Airport is particularly busy this time of year as the area it serves is popular with skiers. A leading ski resort has reported that it has stopped operating chairlifts and chairlifts as temperatures have dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit to -39.9 degrees Fahrenheit).
The deep freeze in Finland this week is part of a weather pattern that is bringing severe winter weather to parts of Europe, including locally heavy snow.
Finnish residents are certainly familiar with cold weather. But the cold the country has experienced this week has been harsher than usual. The severe cold even affected the aircraft’s ability to de-ice.
The Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) predicts that temperatures in the northern Finnish town of Kittilä will drop to nearly -40 degrees Celsius on Monday, the Associated Press reported. This is the temperature at which Fahrenheit is the same as Celsius, which is -40 degrees Fahrenheit.
“At -40C, Celsius and Fahrenheit are no longer contradictory,” one Reddit user commented. “It’s so cold.”
While cold weather is now dominating the headlines in Europe, the latest global climate report highlights above-average temperatures across the continent.
Europe had its second-warmest November on record, nearly four degrees Fahrenheit above average. Temperatures are also only about a third lower than the 2015 record, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.
Many weather stations in Finland experienced the second-warmest autumn on record, according to FMI. Throughout November, Europe experienced its third warmest period so far this year on record.
This is the second warmest January to November on Earth since records began 175 years ago. The NCEI November Global Climate Report calculated that there is a 99.9% chance that 2025 will be one of the five warmest years on record. Earth has a “95% confidence interval for the second to third warmest years on record.”
For the first time, the three-year average temperature has breached an important threshold set by a landmark treaty a decade ago. The rise in temperatures is partly due to warmer weather in 2025 and has attracted concern from the scientific community.
Climate scientists note that cold snaps, even the severe freeze Finland is experiencing, are likely to occur in a warming world. Our overheated planet is warming most rapidly in the Arctic, disrupting the jet stream and making it more unstable. The jet stream then meanders and dips further south, carrying frigid air to lower latitudes.
Scientists recently discovered that “Arctic amplification” alters the latitudinal temperature gradient (LTG), which is directly related to the length of the European summer. A reduction of just 1°C in LTG would mean 42 more days of summer weather in Europe by the end of the century.
“For years, casual observers and anti-science pundits have cited snowfall and cold weather to question the scientific reality of human-caused climate change,” the Union of Concerned Scientists noted. This cherry-picked misinformation obscures the work scientists are doing to figure out how climate change affects weather patterns throughout the year. “
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