The Midwest experienced some bizarre December weather on Wednesday. Even the New York Times and other national media took notice of the events in Flyover Country.

I should know — I live in the Kansas City area and we had 70-degree weather and high winds all day, topped off with a strong but short-lived thunderstorm in the evening. A friend posted on Facebook that his house shook from the wind during the storm. Our house didn’t shake, but the lights flickered.

Other, more rural, parts of the Midwest had even more extreme weather than we did. Elkhart, Kansas, for example, had dust bowl conditions.

"DUST BOWL 2021" This video from Main Street in Elkhart, Kan. is just one example of the severe conditions wind and dust are creating across Kansas. https://t.co/RaVNioniQB #kwch12 #storm12 #kswx pic.twitter.com/n2QJdzX0RJ

— KWCH Eyewitness News (@KWCH12) December 15, 2021

Meanwhile, tornado sirens went off in Nebraska. According to the National Weather Service, several tornadoes popped up in Nebraska and Iowa over a four-hour period in the afternoon.

And there goes the sirens! #Tornado #Nebraska pic.twitter.com/PqOKnnyay1

— AINigMA (@HermaJestar) December 15, 2021

In addition, grass fires started along an interstate near Kansas City, Kansas. And as I’m writing this, the smell of smoke is pervading the air in the Kansas City metro.

No, it’s not from those grass fires. Instead, the smell is coming from fires in western Kansas.

The weather impacted the Midwest in all sorts of ways, and here are just a few:

• Flights were delayed or cancelled in airline hubs like Denver, Chicago, and Minneapolis;
• At Kansas City International Airport, air traffic controllers evacuated the control tower for 40 minutes due to wind;
• Schools closed early in some Iowa towns;
• Winds tossed trucks off highways, and some roads in Kansas were closed due to the dust storms;
• And, by Wednesday evening, over 376,000 customers lost power across Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri.

Yes, it was definitely an unusual December day in the Heartland.

Meteorologists were scratching their heads as to the reason for the weird Midwest weather, since these kind of storm systems are quite unusual for December. For example, Andrew Ansorge, a meteorologist in Des Moines said, “The storm system is unprecedented. We don’t have anything to compare it to.”

In addition, Bill Borghoff of the National Weather Service in Minneapolis tweeted, in all caps, too:

“TODAY’S VOLATILE DAY OF WEATHER HAS NOT BEEN SEEN BEFORE IN MID-DECEMBER.”

But you know what this is about, don’t you? The media is not just reporting unusual weather. Instead, they’re whipping up climate change panic porn.

And right on cue, here’s Axios:

“Human-caused climate change is making such warm spells more likely to occur, and unusually mild waters of the Gulf of Mexico are playing a role in Wednesday’s weather.”

They just can’t help themselves, can they? After all, this is coming on the heels of last week’s tornado devastation in Kentucky, when climate change Karens shamelessly piled on with their hair-on-fire lectures, as Nina pointed out. So now they’ll use Wednesday’s Midwest storms to say See? See? If we don’t change our ways we’re going to all burn up/blow away/drown/pick your death.  

Giphy.com. 

Nonsense, points out meteorologist Joe Bastardi. The current administration and its media toadies use these events to weaponize weather, as he puts it.

The more I reflect on the whole tornado situation the more I realize that it is not insanity, Its not madness, Its a well-orchestrated and brilliant plan given the mindset of many to weaponize weather. So its calculated and really the opposite of my reaction

— Joe Bastardi (@BigJoeBastardi) December 15, 2021

In addition, Bastardi also points out that 2021 has been a low severe weather season, despite the tragic tornadoes in Kentucky. What’s more, the number of severe tornadoes have been decreasing. And as for those wildfires?

Biden at it again. Blaming climate change for fires. This year near average amount and below average acreage burnt. 10 year average 20% of 10 year average 1925-1935. Does he even look or better still do his advisors? No. its weaponization, pure and simple

— Joe Bastardi (@BigJoeBastardi) December 15, 2021

Now I’m not a meteorologist. However, I am a native of the Midwest and have spent my entire life there. I grew up near Chicago, lived a few years in Wichita, Kansas, and now make my home in the Kansas City area. And I can tell you that while there are differences in the weather between those three cities, they all have one thing in common: The weather can be completely erratic.

In fact, we Midwesterners have a saying: Don’t like the weather? Wait ten minutes and it’ll change. 

As a kid I lived through the 1967 Chicago Blizzard, which brought the area’s largest snowfall on record. We had about 24 inches of snow in my hometown — and no school for at least a week! But did anyone point their finger and blame human activity and climate change?

Of course not. We just recognized the blizzard for what it was: a freak snowstorm. And we moved on.

Or take the “October Surprise” which happened in the Kansas City area in 1996. This was a sizable snow storm that occurred in October, when wet snow covered leaves that were still on the trees. As a result, the weight brought many trees crashing over electrical lines, which brought on power outages over both the Kansas and Missouri sides of the state line. At my house, we were in the dark for a week.

Climate change from human activity? No, just a haphazard storm in the Midwest. The kind of stuff that happens around here every now and then.

I’ve seen 100-year floods of both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. I’ve also watched the snow fly in May. And have hunkered down in basements more times than I can count. So I don’t expect that the crazy weather I experienced on Wednesday will be the “new normal,” as climate change zealots insist. What’s normal in the Midwest is that the weather here is often crazy, brought on by winds that howl south from Canada or up from the Gulf of Mexico. And farther north, the Great Lakes affect weather patterns, too.

No, we’re okay here, despite Wednesday’s wild weather. Folks here will fix the stuff that’s broken. But forget about us. If you have some prayers and some money to spare, think about the folks in Kentucky, who could really use everyone’s help about now.

Welcome, Instapundit readers! 

Featured image: Tindo2-Tim Rudman/flickr/cropped/CC BY-NC 2.0.