The so-called polar vortex that hit the States last week is winding down. The economists are now trying to assess its impact. By comparison with Sandy, the hurricane that hit the eastern coast not so long ago, the vortex is a relatively mild event. Its cost is estimated to be around five-billion dollars, whereas Sandy was thirteen times more costly in terms of property damage alone. The vortex hit a much wider area and affected many more people, but that is about all. The main problem with all the estimates I have come upon so far is that the vortex is usually presented as a one-in-twenty-years’ event. Given rapid climate change, such reckoning is entirely meaningless, as I have argued several times already. Where do such expressions come from, though? They come straight from the denial that unusual weather events have anything whatsoever to do with climate change. Thus the reliance on the historical record, of course. And one-in-so-many-years verbiage comes straight from the United States of America. The country that is still to learn that rapid climate change changes all records at a clip. It renders them no less than useless in only a few years, too.