When Winter Becomes a Culture War

“Weather is a safe and non-controversial topic for any conversation,” reads an entry about small talk in an English-language textbook.

That advice is now hopelessly outdated. Our elites have managed to turn even the weather into a battleground in the culture wars. Like so much else—from energy policy to urban planning—what was once a matter of common sense and practical preparation has been ideologized beyond recognition. The result? Authorities who find themselves overwhelmed by phenomena as ordinary and predictable as winter.

Talk of my home city Berlin’s harsh winter is a case in point. With an average temperature of -1.9°C, January 2026 was the coldest in 16 years. Cold spells in the first half of the month brought lows of -14.1°C, and temperatures remained below zero into February. 

The first pitfall of innocent conversation is whether the pleasant period of mild winters has come to an end—and whether we’re now back “to normal.” After all, older Berliners remember similarly harsh winters in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yet in our fevered times, this observation risks being dismissed as dangerous relativization of global warming.

Then there is the question of who bears responsibility for the chaos and injuries. 

The facts shame the city. For weeks, Berlin’s pavements were so slippery that many people, especially the elderly, hardly dared leave their homes. The Berlin fire department reported a daily record of 2,270 emergency calls. Hospitals sounded the alarm as hundreds were injured after falling on icy pavements. “At times, we were fitting casts in three rooms simultaneously,” said a Charité Hospital spokeswoman. Apart from broken arms and legs, there were serious facial injuries and broken spines, with at least one fatality reported.

One dispute centers on road salt. While German municipalities once, very sensibly, allowed citizens to sprinkle salt on frozen walkways, this was banned years ago for environmental and climate reasons. When the Berlin government belatedly suspended the ban—only after hundreds of ice-related accidents—it was blocked by an environmental NGO through legal action, citing potential damage to trees and pets’ paws.

The outrage among large sections of the population at this NGO tyranny is hardly surprising.

“This man-made hellish winter is politically motivated,” wrote liberal commentator Wolfgang Kubicki (FDP), deploring the cynicism of the wealthy NABU NGO, which treated the injured like collateral damage. NABU, as Kubicki reminds us, owns around 20,000 hectares of land. It receives donations from some of Germany’s richest individuals but lacks any kind of democratic mandate.

Yet it’s also true that such NGO power would not be possible if its ideas didn’t enjoy the sympathy of our green-leaning establishment. This establishment has promoted an environmental ideology for years and clings to a romantic vision of nature as a quasi-divine system that we humans must not disturb at any cost.

Misguided political priorities present another issue. After years of campaigns about global warming, during which weather experts informed us that snow and ice would become “a thing of the past,” the reality of winter seems to have come as a shock to many in our establishment. It is their fixation on global warming—and global warming alone—that has led them to forget that it was, in fact, winters which, for centuries, posed the much bigger challenge to human existence, leaving the authorities looking hopelessly unprepared (at times, even bus, train, and airport services broke down).

It seems ironic that urban planners, politicians, and climate NGOs have preached “resilience.” Of course, their discussions about resilience have always been rather self-serving and one-sided. “Strengthening resilience to the effects of global warming is essential in view of increasing weather extremes (heat, heavy rain and drought),” states one report, with snow and ice conspicuously absent from the list.

However, the recent snowy winter has revealed a different picture: a society less resilient than expected. To deflect from policy failures, many in the administration have resorted to the old, familiar claim that this was an “extreme weather” situation. Yet even this constant invocation of “extremes” suggests our ability to cope with age-old phenomena like snow and ice is under threat.

All this is the consequence not of the natural climate, but of the political climate forced upon us in recent years. Anyone who refused to play along with the all-encompassing call to combat global warming (and to reach net-zero in the coming years) was quickly excluded from polite society and marginalized within mainstream parties—witness Wolfgang Clement, the former minister for economic affairs (SPD), who resigned from his party and who criticized Germany’s climate policy up until his death (in 2020). Bowing to Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future and their arrogant call to “listen to the science” (as if there were only one science) became the default position.

As a result, even simple, well-established measures that had served the city in past winters were either abandoned or neglected: gritting equipment in public parks, snow shovels in rented properties. Some homeowners cancelled winter maintenance services, convinced they wouldn’t be needed anymore.

This negligence shows that, far from understanding nature, we have in fact allowed ourselves to be estranged from it—despite the challenges of harsh winters having accompanied humans in the northern hemisphere for centuries. (Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous 1565 painting “The Hunters in the Snow,” which depicts three weary men returning from an unsuccessful hunt, serves as a reminder). We needn’t even reach back to the Little Ice Age to know what winter can mean. Berlin has a reputation for harsh winters occurring at regular intervals. One of the harshest was 1962/63, with over 100 days of frost and temperatures often reaching -20°C—at a time when many households still lacked central heating. Yet people coped, even managing to enjoy winter’s more delightful aspects.

In truth, winters have lost much of their threat—or should have. Thanks to modern heating and efficient public transport, snowy winters now bring some of life’s greatest joys: skiing, skating, sledging. For those for whom winter meant hardship and danger, there was always the comfort that spring and summer would return—a comfort eco-warriors have been keen to spoil too. Last year, warnings of a “heatwave summer” or even a “hellish summer” began with the first hot days—warnings that proved as unfounded as predictions of no more snow.

Napoleon once said that a general who is surprised by anything on the battlefield is a bad general. What, then, should we say of authorities who appear unprepared and overwhelmed by something as natural and common as winter?

If discussing the weather has ceased to be innocent, it is because it now puts our technocratic, aloof elite on the spot. They have invested too much in the rhetoric of saving us from global warming to ever change course. Even as winter continues, public media eagerly spread news that, despite being cold locally, this January was in fact the fifth hottest globally. This may be true, but Berliners sliding through their city won’t be impressed. They will demand safer roads and a government rooted in life’s realities, not in global climate statistics (which many feel their country can hardly influence anyway). They are right.