We in the Great Lakes area have seen little change in temperatures, in fact if anything, the winters are ordinarily less extreme and so are the summers. I can remember 40°C/104°F weather in Toronto about five times in my life but it's been over 40 years since that has happened.
The cold this year is due to a La Niña year where the undersea volcanoes east of the Philippines have been dormant. There are videos of the undersea volcanoes on YouTube (including one with sound!) that show incandescent rock but nothing boils due to the extreme pressure of 130 atmospheres / 1911 psi at 4400 feet down. The water gets lighter and rises to the surface, spreading heat to a much wider area and the surface of that area of the Pacific gets about 2 degrees hotter, changing weather patterns to the east as the west wind propels it to North America. Since they are dormant this year, there is nothing to stop polar air from coming down, which it naturally will now that days are getting longer and more solar heat is being delivered north of the Arctic Circle to expand the mass of arctic air.
As far as global warming is concerned, we are still not up to the temperatures that allowed the Vikings to settle Greenland and grow crops of rye. There have been some recent experiments with farming on Greenland but no one has grown enough crops to actually feed a settlement. This is important because it is a reliable thermometer from a time when thermometers did not exist and it shows that the Little Ice Age we are coming out of was the anomaly, not the more modern high temperatures.
