e pluribus unum

Subsidence inversions are a very natural part of the winter climo in the West and it's tough to juggle record warmth in the higher elevations with record warmth in the valleys in December and January. Massive ridges in the West in the mid-winter often lead to colder than average conditions in the valleys. The PNW actually had the perfect storm of warmth in December with the jet stream lashing us the entire month and enough warm air advection in the higher elevations to screw them up as well. Down in CA they were far enough removed from the jet for the inversion to hold at the lower elevations.

I don't think any reasonable person is going to argue that cold anomalies aren't possible moving forward. Obviously that's an irrational take. And I don't post often but I've had an account on here for over a decade. I think you're missing the initial point which was that what we've seen this winter across North America still aligns quite well with what you'd expect to see in a warming world.

That's because some of the warmth in the West this season is all time record level and objectively more statistically significant. The cold in the Eastern U.S. this season really isn't even close to unprecedented. That's the idea, that the warm anomalies in a warming world are simply going to outweigh the downstream/upstream cold anomalies. The West has also had some decent cold winter stretches in the last decade (2016-17, February 2019, 2022-23) but nothing as historically impressive as the warmth that's happened this season thus far out here. And in those stretches the East was generally seeing historic levels of winter warmth that outweighed it.

Salt Lake City is at 0.1" of snow this winter with no subfreezing highs this season thus far. Both are literally unprecedented through this point of the season there. To your point, this season does fit pretty well with the concept of a warming world. Cold anomalies will obviously still exist to some extent, but there's a good chance that there will still be a yet more extreme standard deviation in the warm direction in some adjacent region.

Right, although they put the estimated wind speeds at 175-185mph which is a little below the upper threshold of EF4. That makes me think they probably aren't leaning too heavily towards an EF5 at the moment, otherwise I think they would have gone 190-195mph as they did with Mayfield or Rolling Fork.

Death toll in the Edwardsville tornado is now up to 6.

I would check out May 31, 1997 if you're looking for a severe weather analog. Of course there's the April 5, 1972 event as well, which produced the deadliest tornado in Western U.S. history.