I don’t like using snow as a measurement of climate change. Snow is weather. Global warming is not weather.
If the gulf stream closes, we’re going to have ice ages in Europe and scorched earth and soup like oceans in the Americas.
It’s bad, m’kay.
There are in fact meaningful trends in snow cover
Thanks, more data is always appreciated, but of course there is trends in snow coverage. Global warming is going to affect everything. Including snow coverage. I’m not worried about snow coverage.
And I’m sure none of the ecosystems or communities that rely on snowmelt for drinking water are worried about it either, so it’s fine.
Snow is very noticeable. It’s weather that is very pretty and visual, but also impacts your daily life.
I remember how many snow days I had back in school, and how kids now often don’t have any
It’s very visceral and memorable weather - most other things are vague and easy to write off, or they’re a life changing catastrophe that is basically up to luck.
If snow is what makes people understand, viscerally, “things are changing very, very fast”, then that’s fine
That’s where we are right now. People generally believe it’s happening, but only intellectually - they have no sense of scale or urgency. Most still think they’ll be gone by the time it gets bad, and that it’s a long term problem.
Any and every way you can make people understand this is a “right now” problem helps
Up to this point, the winters where I live have definitely been getting warmer.
When I was a kid, it wasn’t uncommon to have stretches of -30°c, and we used to hit or almost hit -40°c once or twice per winter. It seems like that dropped. Now, the stretches are around -20°c and we hit the -30°c once or twice per year. Instead of snow, we’ve been getting lots of freezing rain.
It used be be rare to hit 30°c in the summer, but we’ve been getting many more days that hit around 40°c. Last summer was brutal, and I hadn’t seen smog from wildfires up until then. It was practically unheard of where I live.
Just wait for another handful of years. The weather is already becoming increasingly more difficult to predict.
I saw a forecast earlier where the weather person was saying that either the models are broken, or that certain parts of North America will hit historically cold temperatures. If it was accurate, parts of California might drop down to almost -40°c.
People need to learn that climate change isn’t only extra heat in the summertime. It’s a very complex system with lots of variables. I wish more people actually took the time to learn a bit about it. Freaky shit.
Yeah I’m living through it right now. We’ve never had this much snow since I was a kid. I encourage my kids to go out and dig into it like I dug in to it forty years ago and I’m trying to explain and hope that they understand the oddity of it and not just taking it for granted whether or not it comes again every year or never again from here on.
Climate change is scary only because it affects our way of life. Get over it, humans are like that.
Our way of life ? Like breathing life?
Yes life will continue. For the methane breathing bacteria. Humans not so much.
The rich won’t survive either. Money and all the bunkers in the world are worthless in what is to come by continuing the pursuit for money.
There’s no existential threat to the living beings on earth from climate change according to the IPCC reports. We/they’ll have to move according to changes in local climate, sure, but that’s not the same as general extinction.
Doomerism doesn’t help climate action.
JSYK one of the most progressive states, Vermont, has said that they see their snow season ENDING in 2050. Meaning we are in the throws of climate change already and have been for 20 years. OOPS!
The narrative will now be “we are in climate change, too bad, deal with it.”
We were led here by certain types of humans. The weak, stupid, billionaire water carrying, self righteous ones.
Yet anyone I speak to is thrilled to not have winter weather to deal with. I have to bite my tongue to stop ranting about how it’s not good.
(Sample of people: doctors, nurses, cashiers, neighbours)
Similar thing is happening where I live too. Living on the Great Lakes, we’re usually being dumped on with -20 to -40 degree temps. Right now, we’re barely below freezing and there’s no snow on the ground. The Lake is struggling to freeze and we’re at that time of year where it should be close to 100 percent ice cover by now.
We have a lot of events this time of year that are dependent on ice (Ice fishing tournaments, ice races, marathons where you hike across the frozen bay), and I think all of them have been canceled. It’s crazy, I’ve never seen anything like it
Yeah I’m in southeast Michigan, and I’m missing wintertime. I really don’t like summer, so I’m screwed.
You can see climate change happening in our popular culture.
The poem “Over the River and Through the Woods” mentions sleigh rides at Thanksgiving in New England, and was written in 1844.
About a hundred years later, the film White Christmas has a New England ski resort that can’t open because it hasn’t snowed by late December.
That, and the East Coast is getting smoke for the first time this past year. 20 years ago, the west didn’t burn like that. Didn’t have smoke like that. That was a very recent development in the past 10 years or so. Now the east is starting to burn like us.
I lived in the west and moved for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons was that the city nearly ran out of water twice within a handful of years. One year was a bad drought that depleted the river. The second, rain melted all the snow at once and caused floods that destroyed the water intakes for the city. Nobody could purify the water and the city had a day (1) of reserve water.
I moved to a more climate resilient city, but not everyone will be able to do that. We gotta take care of the planet better, because there’s not another earth-like world within a couple hundred years of us, at least.
