Life was different in the 1950s. Homes cost less than a quarter of what they do now. Living room TV screens weren't much bigger than a modern laptop. Construction was starting for the Glen Canyon Dam. Humans had yet to travel to space.

Someone who grew up back then can tell you something else: Winters were colder and longer.

Over the past seven decades — the span of the average human life — the number of freezing days has shrunk by weeks in most places across the United States.

Minnesota: Dog sledding, ice fishing, pond hockey

“If you're going to live here, you can either shut yourself in for six months, or you can find a way to thrive. And a lot of people do that,” said Kenny Blumenfeld, a senior climatologist at the Minnesota State Climatology Office.

But winters in the Midwestern state are not what they used to be. On average, they are getting warmer.

It doesn’t mean every winter is warmer than the last, Blumenfeld said, adding that there are ups and downs from natural events like El Niño, but for a state that relies so heavily on winter, the inconsistency can still have consequences.

“It's kind of like [an] unnerving sense where we can't depend on winter,” Blumenfeld said.

Warmer winters have disrupted many events, big and small. In 2025, the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon, a 300-mile race, was postponed for two months because the lack of snow and ice had made the course unsafe. In 2024, the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships, in Minneapolis were canceled because warm weather made the lake ice unplayable. In neighboring Wisconsin, the American Birkebeiner ski race also has been shortened and canceled in recent years.

Minnesota’s lakes have lost an average of 10 to 22 days of ice cover in the past century, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. 

Though the season is still long enough to go ice fishing, the timing of the freeze is also important. For example, if it's not icy by the time winter break starts, some people might cancel reservations at cabins, Blumenfeld said.

'One-two punch' on snowpacks

Our analysis shows that in cities that had fewer freezing days, the coldest temperature of the season has increased by an average 5.7 degrees since 1956.

And when temperatures get warmer, that’s bad news for snowpacks.

“The warmer your atmosphere is, the more likely you’re going to get closer to that melting point, and you’re going to start seeing more of that winter precipitation falling as rain instead of snow,” said Elizabeth Burakowski, a research assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire. “That has a one-two punch on a snowpack.”

When snow falls on snow, it accumulates. But when rain falls on snow, it can accelerate melting. White snow is bright and reflective, but as it melts, it exposes darker ground underneath. This absorbs more of the sun’s energy, warming and melting the snowpack in what is known as the albedo feedback loop.

Towns and cities across the country rely on winter activities like skiing, snowboarding and snowmobiling to support their economies. Cold, snowy days are a basic requirement.

Even considering the cold chill in the East at the start of the winter, the contiguous United States had its second-warmest winter in 131 years of recordkeeping, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In January, Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz told investors that season-to-date skier visits were down 20% compared with last year. In the Rockies, 11% of terrain was open in December.

The vast majority of resorts use snowmaking, which sustains about 1 in 6 skiable acres, to run their operations, according to a report from the National Ski Areas Association.

Though it can help during years when not enough snow falls, temperatures still need to be cold enough – a couple of degrees below freezing if the humidity is low, but ideally colder.

Colorado researchers and consultants had projected that shorter winter recreation seasons could lead to the loss of millions to tens of millions of visits annually by 2050 in the state and around the country.

Less water, more fires

Communities across the West are preparing for water restrictions this year – including those that control how often people can water their lawns, how often their sheets are washed at hotels, and whether they are served water when they eat at a restaurant.

And the effects of drought can be felt long after winter is over. A recent study found that an earlier spring snowmelt contributes to a longer fire season with more area burned, and that lower snowpack accumulation can lead to more severe fires in the West.

More ticks and mosquitoes

As the frozen season shrinks, some insects and animals are thriving – much to human dismay. The range of bark beetles has exploded, allowing them to ravage more forests.

“Because of warming, we’re getting fewer frost days which, would provide these killing temperatures for these kinds of pathogen species, so they are able to survive in these areas where historically they weren’t able to occur,” said John Kimball, an ecology professor at the University of Montana.

Ticks, which carry Lyme disease, have been marching north and west. A 2019 paper noted that most ticks are active from “the time that the snow melts in the spring until the reappearance of the snow cover in the fall.”

Increased temperatures lengthen the season when ticks are active, increase their survival rate and expand their habitat.

Lyme disease can cause rashes, fever, facial paralysis, and muscle and joint aches, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some mosquitoes also benefit from warmer winters.

“They don’t regulate their own body temperature, so whatever temperature it is outside is the temperature that the mosquitoes’ body is, and its metabolism depends on that temperature,” said Erin Mordecai, a Stanford associate professor of biology.

In the U.S., West Nile virus is now the most common mosquito disease, but it wasn’t always like this. It was first discovered in Uganda in 1937 and only at the turn of the century it got to New York. According to the CDC, it’s been reported in every state since then.

The virus can cause flu-like symptoms, but severe cases can end up with hospitalizations and death.

For an upcoming paper, Mordecai and her team looked at temperature, mosquito surveillance and human case data in New York for the quarter century after the West Nile virus first appeared there.

“You kind of get to this point in the springtime, where it goes from below 16.7 (degrees C) to above, and when that point is happening has been starting earlier and ending later in the year,” Mordecai said.

The researchers found that warmer temperatures have expanded the transmission season by 20 days, a trend that was more likely to occur because of climate change.

A sweet and fickle harvest

"I always say, if you ever wanted to see God say 'Hold my beer and watch this,' you try to make maple syrup," said said Blackman’s sister Jennifer Reisenbichler, sugarmaker and co-owner of LM Sugarbush in Salem, Indiana. “This is the hardest job I've ever had, if you can call it a job, because no matter what you do, you really can't control the outcome of each season."

In parts of New England, local governments gather with residents on Town Meeting Day in early March to vote on things like town budgets. Historically, it also marked the time of year when farmers would tap maple trees for sap, but over the decades as winters have warmed, that has been shifting earlier.

“If you wait until Town Meeting Day tap, you’re probably going to lose some of the season – you're not going to capture all the sap that you could,” said Steven Roberge, who works at the forestry extension of the University of New Hampshire.

Now, tapping starts on Presidents’ Day or Valentine’ Day.

To produce sap, maples need to go through a daily freeze-thaw cycle, which is why snow is crucial to the forest. It acts as insulation to protect the tree roots from getting too cold. It also moderates warm temperatures, because if it gets too warm, it can end production sooner.

“You can imagine being in New England during colonial times and prior with Indigenous people... Sugar was probably really important,” Roberge said, adding that up until the early 1900s, most of the production was for maple sugar, not syrup, because that was easier to store.

Though the season sometimes gets compressed from two months of normal sap flow into four or six weeks, advances in technology have helped the industry keep up.

Rather than just letting sap drip into a bucket, farmers now use tubing systems with vacuums to speed up the process.

Maple sap has about 2% sugar content. It’s boiled to remove water until it hits about 67% to form syrup. Reverse osmosis, the same technology used to desalinate seawater, removes some of the water from sap and shortens the boiling process.

Research is being done on alternative syrups such as those from sycamores and birch trees – but those don’t taste the same.

Roberge remembers growing up in northern New Hampshire, where every second-grade class would tour a friend’s family sugar house to experience the iconic activity.

“If something would happen to sugar maples, it would be devastating for a lot of people financially," he said. "But I think just from a cultural standpoint, it would be a huge loss here in the Northeast.”

Thinking about how North Carolina, which has a different climate from his home state's, can produce maple syrup makes him optimistic.

“Despite the headlines of climate change, I think there’s always going to be the weather in New Hampshire that will be able to harvest sap,” Roberge said. “But it just won’t be the same as it was 100 years ago.”

Search for your county

Explore the map below to see how many freezing days we experience now compared with 1956.

How we did it

We used a daily temperature dataset from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called nClimGrid-Daily. It provides estimates for square areas about 5 kilometers wide (roughly 3 miles). For every U.S. city or town with a population over 100,000, we used the data from the grid cell closest to its center. We then identified each day that the low temperature reached 32 degrees Fahrenheit or colder. We grouped these freezing days by “water year,” which runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30 of the following year (think of it as the fiscal year used in climate and water research).

For each city and year (1956-2025), we measured several indicators: the total number of freezing days, the first and last freezing day of the season, the longest stretch of consecutive freezing days, and the coldest temperature recorded. To understand how these measures have changed over time, we ran linear regressions for all cities that had sufficient data, which we defined as at least one freezing day in at least half the years – mirroring methods used by Climate Central and other researchers.

This approach helps distinguish long-term changes from natural year‑to‑year variability. We also tested whether the trends were statistically significant. We repeated a similar analysis at the county level. Counties that do not experience freezes every year were included to allow for broader exploration of the data. You can read a full description of our methods and find our code on GitHub. 

 Contributing: Sophie Hartley and Grace Hollars, The Indianapolis Star; Jennifer Borresen,  Alberto Cuadra,  Trevor Hughes,  Karina Zaiets, and Shawn J. Sullivan, USA TODAY. 

 Additional photography: Scott Olson, Getty Images; Forrest Brown, Cheney Orr and Anney Yang. 

During the course of this investigation, in March 2026, the first study connecting data centers to heat islands was published (Marinoni et al., “The data heat island effect”, arXiv). This “preprint” (a preliminary version released before going through peer review) reports an average increase of 2°C around the analyzed data centers.

The study drew methodological criticism from independent science communicator Andy Masley, the senior researcher for Omdia, Vlad Galabov and University of Bristol researcher Chris Preist, all of whom coincided on a single point: The study does not separate the heat produced by the servers from that which accumulates from simply replacing vegetation with roofs and pavement. Masley also pointed out that the paper does not compare other types of commercial buildings and that the resolution of the MODIS sensor used in the study (1 km per pixel) prevents one from distinguishing the data center from the surrounding area.

Amenaza Roboto’s analysis used Landsat, with a resolution 33 times greater, controlling for all of these factors. According to the literature reviewed, it is the first study of its kind to isolate both components.

The global data center industry consumes more energy than many entire countries. Unlike other industrial infrastructure, a data center converts virtually all of the electricity it consumes into heat and dissipates it from a single source, continuously, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Uruguay has positioned itself as a regional hub for this type of infrastructure. Antel operates three data centers—Pando, Pocitos and Lezama. It will equip a fourth server room at the Pando location and build two new centers in Aguada and at a yet-undetermined location. Google is building its own center. According to sources familiar with the industry, three additional private installations are projected to be built. Supporters like to point out that these projects bring economic investment, jobs and development of digital infrastructure.

When discussing the environmental impact of data centers, public debate usually focuses on the consumption of water and energy. The thermal effect on the environment—the heat that these places release into the surrounding communities—does not appear in the conversation. The data demonstrates that this impact does exist, is measurable and yet no one is keeping track of it.

Now there is a way of measuring this impact and a baseline for what comes next. The heat behind the cloud is no longer invisible—and it’s detectable from 700 kilometers high. 

Barring “one last run” when he gets bored of family life and gym ownership, it looks as though Cub Swanson has hung up his gloves for good. While he never achieved a world title, Swanson’s longevity has been astounding, and he was one of the last remaining veterans of the WEC fighting at the highest levels of mixed martial arts. He was even briefly part of the “guillotine revolution” among the lower weightclasses in WEC, before establishing himself as a sensational knockout puncher and never looking back.

That knockout power, and the ways in which Cub Swanson set it up, will be our subject today.

Shooting from the Hip

Swanson is one of the featherweight division’s more effective hitters, and in some ways his style reminds me of the great flyweight boxer, Jimmy Wilde. Wilde was called “The Mighty Atom,” and “The Ghost with the Hammer in his Hand” for the simple reason that he was a tiny man who could almost lift his opponents off their feet with his punches. He did this from a low hands stance, often leaping into his blows. When we talk about monstrous punchers in the lower weightclasses, there is an understanding that sacrifices must be made to textbook form in order to get more bodyweight into blows.

Swanson’s typically stands with a low guard, is crouched, and is high on the ball of his back foot—ready to spring in with either a left hook or his sneaky right hand lead. He does not bleed power by fighting with his hands held in a high guard until he throws, and in fact, Nate Landwehr’s performance against Swanson demonstrated that locking your hands to your head in a high guard can make it difficult to get going if the opponent simply shackles you with offence.  As Sugar Ray Robinson said, when you shadowbox in the mirror, you should be looking down the barrel of your fists the entire time, not at the bottoms of them.

The hands low guard—or perhaps absence of a guard—allows Swanson work very effectively with right hand leads. These shoot in straight off his chest or from down by his solar plexus. Here is an example from his fight with Shane Burgos.

By carrying the hands low, the fighter removes the telegraph of his gloves leaving his guard and his fists obviously changing orientation. If he can encroach on the opponent to the point where his hands are in the blind angle—the spot just below peripheral vision when looking at any opponent’s face or chest—he can create real discomfort in the opponent. It takes guts to try to crowd an opponent while carrying your hands down by your waist though.

The upside of dropping your hands and still standing close enough to box, is that the opponent can only make reads from what remains in their vision. This means that having low hands often amplifies the effects of shoulder feints.

Swanson has had great success through his career with a sort of lagged right hand off his shoulder feints. This is similar to the stutter jab, where a fighter steps forward, shoulder feints, holds for half a beat, and then delivers a jab with just his arm. The fighter deliberately ruins the kinetic chain of his technique in order to throw and land off-rhythm.

Swanson shoulder feints his right hand, squaring his upper body. Then he pauses just long enough to surprise the opponent when he pumps out his arm in a weaker, but far sneakier blow. In Swanson’s triumphant retirement bout against Nate Landwehr, he used this repeatedly from both stances and even dropped Landwehr with it.

While he was known for his boxing, Swanson’s kicking game was the bridge that enabled him to leap in on opponents. It was never terribly fancy outside of the goofy stumbling kick mentioned above, but he got more mileage out of the simple right low kick than most fighters billed as kickboxing world champions. The trick of it is that there is not just one low kick: the right low kick can be thrown at a number of different ranges.

This is partly due to the length of the striking surface: you can connect with anything from just below the knee to the end of the foot. However, the further down your leg you connect the more you are likely to feel it. The variance in range based on striking surface can be seen on the high kicks of someone like Superbon, who can score high kicks from an infighting range due to his hip dexterity, and by connecting the kick higher on his shin. Superbon can, of course, also throw the long, foot to neck high kick we can all just about manage on our stiffest days.

When throwing the low kick there is the added variable in the length of the target. Most of the upper leg and all of the lower leg are available to kick. For extremes of this, take a look at Rob Kaman jumping in, turning over a low kick and chopping down on the quad, and then at Yuki Yoza standing almost on top of his opponent and kicking them only an inch or two above the ankle.

As an aside, when Cub Swanson made his UFC debut in 2011 against Ricardo Lamas, the first thing Joe Rogan commented on was Swanson’s targeting of the calf. This was a full year before Benson Henderson’s famous use of the calf kick against Nate Diaz and seven years before Demetrious Johnson put Henry Cejudo’s foot to sleep. Swanson did not seem to think the kick had any magical properties, but it hurt, and it took the opponent out of balance.

To return to the idea of range on the low kick. Most MMA fighters—particularly since discovering the calf kick—love a long, run up low kick. Longest weapon, nearest target, least scary way to engage. Here is Swanson establishing the low kick early against Dias, throwing long and landing on the calf with the end of his foot.

Yet Cub was only able to truly blend his low kick with his boxing game by insisting on kicking from closer in. Swanson would shimmy his shoulders, bob his head, and get himself close enough to kick the leg with minimal step and at a low angle, almost on top of his opponent.

After scoring this short low kick, Swanson replaces his kicking leg behind him, but in a longer stance and on the ball of his back foot. An exaggerated version of that sprinter’s stance that made Felix Trinidad one of world’s greatest left hookers. From this stance, Swanson jumps in with his left hook—which he can throw longer than most fighters because of his thumb-down over rotation.

This sequence: short low kick, long left hook, appeared in just about every Swanson fight in his fifteen years in the UFC. He did it against Ricardo Lamas and he did it this past weekend against Nate Landwehr, and if you judge from the Landwehr fight he got better at it through the years. It is something that could be applied by many other fighters if they put the time into it. But like much of Swanson’s game the deterring factor is that you have to be courageous. You have to know that you are going to low kick from punching range and accept that the opponent should be punching back. Swanson was great at slipping, pulling, and even shoulder rolling—as he did so well off his jab against Quarantillo— but most of the time off this low kick he would leave his right hand out to check the opponent’s left, in the split second before he ripped into the leaping left hook.

Here is a gorgeous example from the Dias fight. This short clip crystalizes the essence of Cub Swanson: shoulder feints to close distance, short range low kick, long leaping left hook that drops Dias, and the off-balance left kick as an afterthought.

With forty-five fights on Swanson’s record, he will probably always be a subject of fascination to me. Two years ago I wrote an entire article about his unusual get up from closed guard, when I had started reviewing Swanson tape with the intention of writing about his striking.

Though the meat of his game can be boiled down to these few things— the low hands, shoulder feints, long lead hook, short right low kick—there are many more wrinkles and moments from his fights where he sets traps or picks up on the opportunity to counter. The man tried a cartwheel kick in almost every fight and I cannot remember either talking about it on the podcast or writing about it in almost fifteen years of articles because there was always so much else going on in his bouts.

I cannot be sad that Cub Swanson is retiring because he strode off into the sunset about as well as anyone has, and it had to happen sooner rather than later to avoid becoming one of those sad final acts that outnumber stories like Cub’s about fifteen-to-one in this sport. It has been a blessing to witness Swanson’s career, and I consider it another great treat that he was discovered so early and that so much of it took place on camera and was preserved. On a sad, bad day in 2045, I can still picture a classic Cub Swanson fight being a salve for many of my woes.