Seoul has a seasonality remarkably similar to the Virginia-New York swath of the United States -- with slightly colder winters and slightly warmer summers due to a higher general humidity on the peninsula.

However, it's useful to also understand that Seoul is at almost the exact same latitude as Seville in the south of Spain -- just a couple hours by car to the coast where you can see North Africa. The last time Seville even had a covering of snow was in 1954, and the last time it snowed at all was in 2010.

Winter in Korea is beautiful, it gets cold enough for lakes and rivers to freeze over, and the mountainsides, nearly ever present display even the smallest dusting of snow as a lovely blanket intermixed with wintered trees. It doesn't get so brutally cold that it's painful to be outside, so it generally makes it enjoyable.

The cities can be a challenge, the hilly landscape makes everything slippery. The construction of buildings is often done without any central heating and the ground levels of mixed-use and commercial buildings are often entirely unheated. I've stepped into more than one public restroom where the floor was entirely covered in a sheet of frozen ice as the cleaning staff did their duties, and the result of their work was temporarily memorialized in the cold air.

Being a soup heavy culture, there are few joys better than walking off the street into a 칼국수 noodle shop and sitting down with a giant bowl of steaming soup. Temporarily warmed from the inside out, you are ready to adventure back to your daily tasks in the city.

This doesn't seem newsworthy outside Korea. We see a lot of headlines like this - are they indicative of climate change?

There are twelve months in the year and at least four directions to report weather extremes (hottest, coldest, wettest, driest - there's also windiest and snowiest but let's lump them in with the other extremes). That's 50 chances per year for any given area to have its "most X month on record". Reliable weather records go back 100 years, give or take, so any place should experience its "most extreme month on record" approximately every two years.

There are 50 cities as big as 0.75 Seouls [0] or bigger. So worldwide, "megacity has 100-year weather event" comes up every two weeks.

Expand the number of weather axes, relax the definition of a megacity, or realise that many of these places only have 50 years of good record-keeping...pretty soon you can have this headline every two days.

I'm not trying to downplay climate change. I'm just saying you won't find it in these headlines. If you look at the number of places with the most extreme year on record, or model average air or sea temperatures over time, you can find more compelling evidence there.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities

Sounds like one of those polar vortex things: https://www.severe-weather.eu/long-range-2/early-data-weak-p...

(Air current around the poles contains the coldest air at the poles, this is destabilised by warmer overall temperatures leading to that cold air escaping and bringing cold snaps to random areas further from the poles.)

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