80-mile crack forms in Great Lakes ice and is visible from space 

An 80-mile-long crack through the ice of frozen Lake Erie occurred and was caught on video by a NOAA weather satellite. It's been a relentlessly cold winter across the Northeast and Lake Erie was about 95% covered in ice when the huge crack formed on Sunday. The crack stretches from Port Burwell, Canada, to just outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Watch the dramatic video below as the crack can be seen forming from north to south. 

Lake Erie is on the verge of reaching 100% ice coverage, a milestone reached only three times since 1973 when record-keeping began, according to AccuWeather. The lake last hit 100% ice coverage in 1996, just when climate hysteria was beginning to pull on its pants. 

Although some have tried to pin this year's historic cold snap on climate change, the reality is that climate alarmism is on a downward trend in 2026 as a sense of normalcy is returning to many facets of American life since the election of Donald Trump to a second term in the White House. The return to normalcy is even happening overseas in some cases, including with the rhetoric political leaders and the media use around climate change. 

As Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, pointed out in an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times, "the global retreat from climate alarmism is a good thing." Lomborg, who's been interviewed on The Rubin Report multiple times, noted that Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission President, "didn’t mention the climate transition even once in her" in her 2026 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. That's notable, Lomborg writes, because she's made climate dogma a mainstay of her Davos speeches in recent years. 

Lomborg partially credits the shift to the atmosphere Trump has brought to the world stage, but he argues something more fundamental is at work around the world. "Voters have become sick and tired of constant climate alarmism," Lomborg wrote in the op-ed, adding that "climate change ranks low even compared with other environmental concerns" among the concerns of voters in the U.S. and elsewhere. As a result, he says, many are changing their climate rhetoric or abandoning it altogether. "The media and leftwing politicians are catching up with the public," Lomborg says. 

For many in the eastern U.S., the winter of 2025-2026 has been the coldest in memory, as evidenced by the fact that Lake Erie hasn't reached this level of ice coverage in about 30 years. All of the climate hysteria aside, these brutally cold winters do create some remarkable spectacles, like what was witnessed with the giant ice crack in Lake Erie.