As Global Warming Takes Hold, Cold Snaps Become Rarer

I was looking for this AP story I saw in the local paper, and the amazing thing is that I found it at Fox News:

We've become weather wimps. As the world warms, the United States is getting fewer bitter cold spells like the one that gripped much of the nation this week. So when a deep freeze strikes, scientists say, it seems more unprecedented than it really is. An Associated Press analysis of the daily national winter temperature shows that cold extremes have happened about once every four years since 1900.
Until recently.
When computer models estimated that the national average daily temperature for the Lower 48 states dropped to 17.9 degrees on Monday, it was the first deep freeze of that magnitude in 17 years, according to Greg Carbin, warning meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That stretch - from Jan. 13, 1997 to Monday - is by far the longest the U.S. has gone without the national average plunging below 18 degrees, according to a database of daytime winter temperatures starting in January 1900.
In the past 115 years, there have been 58 days when the national average temperature dropped below 18. Carbin said those occurrences often happen in periods that last several days so it makes more sense to talk about cold outbreaks instead of cold days. There have been 27 distinct cold snaps.
Between 1970 and 1989, a dozen such events occurred, but there were only two in the 1990s and then none until Monday.
"These types of events have actually become more infrequent than they were in the past," said Carbin, who works at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. "This is why there was such a big buzz because people have such short memories."
Said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private firm Weather Underground: "It's become a lot harder to get these extreme (cold) outbreaks in a planet that's warming."
And Monday's breathtaking chill? It was merely the 55th coldest day - averaged for the continental United States - since 1900.
The coldest day for the Lower 48 since 1900 - as calculated by the computer models - was 12 degrees on Christmas Eve 1983, nearly 6 degrees chillier than Monday.

I remember extreme cold in the early '80s, 1989 and 1994, and those events were longer than a day and a half long.  This week's cold plunge sucked, but what was worst about it was the damned wind, which stole the heat from my house like nobody's business.  The fact that it only lasted about 36 or 48 hours made it pretty mild, but it didn't prevent all the climate change deniers to come out of the woodwork and say, "It's really cold.  Global warming isn't real."  As this article lays out, these cold spells are becoming much more rare, when they used to be pretty common.  That doesn't seem to support the deniers' case, but they've never been noted for their basis in fact.  It does surprise me that Fox News actually ran this story.  The only reason I can guess Fox News ran this story is because the story opens by saying Americans are becoming weather wimps, and that feeds into their attacks on Democrats making America soft.