By Sid Perkins, ScienceNOW

For those who dread the heat that climate change threatens to bring in coming decades, take comfort. In a world plagued by gradual warming, there will still be cold months — even ones with record cold temperatures, although they’ll be far less frequent than they are now, a new study suggests.

December 2010 was the coldest December in northwestern Europe for more than a century. Although such cold periods may seem incompatible with the notion of global warming, they’re not, says Jouni Räisänen, a climate scientist at the University of Helsinki. They’re just a mat...