People fish along the Deer Creek Reservoir with the snow-capped Wasatch Mountains in the distance on Feb. 07 near Heber City, Utah. This state, like others in the West, has experienced a record-setting warm winter and snow drought. Mario Tama/Getty Images There was a decisive winner to the Lower 48 states’ split screen winter — a battle between frigid cold in the East and record warmth in the West. Anyone in the East who shivered through this winter could be in for a shock at the outcome. In the end, the warmth won out, and this winter will likely be ranked among the warmest such seasons for the contiguous US. In fact, two data sets preliminarily show that the Lower 48 states saw its 2nd-warmest winter on record. It’s an astonishing demonstration of how climate change works. Even our coldest colds can no longer make a dent in record-setting heat. That may come as a surprise to the tens of millions of people who trudged through severe cold, snow and ice for weeks on end in the Midwest and East, with new terms like “snowcrete” — sleet-encrusted snow resistant to melting — taking hold. But at the end of meteorological winter, which ran from December through February, few observing stations in the East had recorded a record-breaking cold winter, while dozens in the West and Southwest saw their warmest. The Western U.S. as a region had its warmest winter on record, and one with a paucity of snow cover. Many areas are now facing a potentially dire summer drought and wildfire season. The split screen was visible at the local scale, as well as regional. Numerous cities in the West set records for their hottest winter. In the East, however, while many locations ranked this winter among their top 25 coldest, no station with a long period of weather records had its most frigid. For example, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Cheyenne, Wyo. had their warmest winters on record this year, and that was not compensated for by record cold in the East. Denver even had more 60-degree days during the