My father was born in 1935. He told me stories about the Danube freezing over pretty much every year during his youth. That detail matters, because the Danube is not some polite, meandering creek you step across in hiking boots. It’s a serious river. It moves fast. You can see and feel that speed even when crossing it on one of the many bridges in Vienna. For a river like that to freeze over, you don’t need a chilly weekend. You need sustained, brutal cold—deep freeze conditions lasting well beyond a few days.
I remember playing on the frozen river myself when I was a child. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the stories my father told—no horse-drawn carts crossing the ice—but still, it was real. Thick ice. Solid enough that you could walk from one side to the other without feeling like an idiot flirting with death. It happened often enough that it wasn’t treated as a miracle.
Then the warmer years came.
By the time I was an adult, seeing the Danube frozen over had become a rarity. Winters softened. Ice became thinner, unreliable, sometimes absent altogether. The warming was real. Observable. Nobody paying attention could honestly deny it.
And now?
Now the river freezes again—just like it did in my youth, and in my father’s. Thick ice. Extended cold. Conditions that, according to the simplified climate catechism, should no longer be possible. If CO₂ were the primary driver of warming in the crude, linear way it is presented to the public, this reversal should not exist. Full stop.
What we are seeing now was not unexpected. It was predicted—quietly and without moral theatrics—by those looking at a more complex reality: the interaction of Milanković cycles with known patterns of cyclical solar activity. Long arcs. Slow rhythms. Cold and warm periods rising and falling without asking permission from political narratives. None of this requires invoking a trace gas that makes up a fraction of a fraction of Earth’s atmosphere.
But narratives die hard. Very hard. Even when reality drags them into the light and beats them repeatedly with observable facts, they cling on— bruised, indignant, and still demanding belief. Rivers freeze. People remember. And still, the story must be protected.
