It snowed today. I live where I can look out my window on untrammeled water crystals coating the gardens and little hills of my yard. Some shrubs and trees wear blankets of anachronism, but that will mostly melt tomorrow and be entirely rained away in a few days. This is the new winter in the northeast US. Most of the winter, including nearly all of January, my yard has been bereft of snow cover.
We did get a six inch barrage of icy snow in December. The dense snow created an icy layer that you could cut out blocks from that would easily have laid the foundation of a three story igloo. This type of snow is indicative of the new winter . Up until about 10 years ago this kind of snow was a rarity, now we get this dense, nearly rain snow two to four times a winter.
That December snow took on one godawful three inch rain storm and won. That day the weather swung from 8 degrees (US old school, and stupid) Fahrenheit to fifty in under 24 hours. However, a solid week of far above average temperatures melted every last bit of that icy layer.
Given the prediction for two rainy days in the coming week, I expect this latest five inch snowfall to melt away within a few days as well. Alas, my pretty view will be gone. Even if we get some hard-assed winter weather, the kind that makes you suck in your breath carefully so you don’t scar your lungs, and it snows, the snow will not last.
Winter’s fury has become like a tepid faucet.
This is not the first tepid winter in the northeast. We can all see how the temperatures have changed, how every year there’s markedly less snow than ten or fifteen years ago. And the world of difference compared to winters prior to 2000 is evident to anyone willing to remember and then step outside.
Every year feels a bit worse than the last. The last eight were the hottest on record. Quite depressing, though there’s less and less need to dream of the Caribbean.
Of all the cascading terrestrial effects of global warming, the results of tepid winter weather are the easiest to see, and to see the effect on humans. Lack of snow fall is critical for year round moisture the world over. The conversion of what would have fallen as snow in the 1990s, into rain due to higher temperatures means winters former bounty is now in the ocean. Rainy winters have and will desiccate huge swaths of our planet that we rely on for food.
Examples are literally everywhere already, on every inhabitable continent, driving refugees like the former farmers from Central America driven off the land due to drought. The entire hydrology of the US west was based on snow slowly melting. Snow that will inevitably decrease, just as the climate models predict, no matter how many atmospheric rivers pop up in the future.
Prior to some recent huge winter storms due to the atmospheric river wreaking havoc in California, the hydrological systems were near collapse. Right now they’re just critically endangered.
I encourage people to seek out studies, articles, whatever. Try a search on “Are climate predictions underestimating the effects of Global Warming” and you can’t help but be worried about the very, all-to-near future. The bald truth about the lack of glaciers, the increased pace of melting in Greenland, the slow dissolution of the North Atlantic current Ben Franklin first discovered in the 1750s (fun fact) or the latest hunk of Antarctic ice sheet calving, is in plain sight.
And ignored. By us all. Ignored as it speeds up in plain sight.
As the United Nations 2022 Climate study put it: “Some extreme events have already emerged which exceeded projected global mean warming conditions for 2100, leading to abrupt changes in marine and terrestrial ecosystems.” They had “High Confidence” in that statement, one notch below the Very High Confidence level. The report is chock full of info, technocratic jargon, and statements of doom.
This issue receives the most attention with the least result of anything we face, well except racism, sexism, gun violence… Sure we fought over idiocy during Covid, but we somehow managed to develop amazingly effective vaccines that helped slow the death toll. If we managed to muddle toward that amount of effort, even with the kicking and screaming of those who would deny reality for political or monetary gain, it would be significantly more effort than we currently put toward the issue.
I don’t want to be right in ten years when parts of the US are sucked dry, literally heat wastelands. We can change this now. I believe we can still change the outcome technologically and through carbon capture (both natural and augmented). I also believe that without the US leading the effort it has zero chance of succeeding. And the thought of the effects on my children and grandchildren is heartbreaking enough, but the heat will mess with everyone’s lives and MUCH sooner than people are willing to believe. I’m in my seventh decade of sweet existence and even if I’m granted just a little more time, I too will feel the heat.
Is there the will to address the issue now? Will we listen to scientists and etc just pointing out the obvious? Just pointing out what everyone can see and feel?