“Don’t be Fooled, Snow is Turning into a Factor of the Previous” • Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Ignore your lying eyes, what you are seeing is frozen heaps of global warming?

Don’t Be Fooled, Snow Is Becoming a Thing of the Past

Storms will keep happening, but the long-term trend is warmer winters with less snowfall, which will bring severe consequences such as water shortages and lost economic activity.

8 January 2024 at 22:00 GMT+10
By Mark Gongloff

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Winter storms like the one that blanketed parts of the Northeast in snow this weekend will keep happening but less frequently. The long-term trend, especially in the normally colder parts of the US and other countries, is one of warmer winters with less of the white stuff.

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Snow has been scarce in the US lately. Aside from the blizzard that swept the Plains and Midwest around Christmas, snarling travel, most of the country has been well below snowfall averages for this time of year, according to the National Weather Service. Only about a fifth of the country was covered in snow before this weekend’s storm, the lowest in more than a decade.

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At the rate we’re cooking the planet, this is all just a taste of what’s to come. The best thing we can do now is turn off the oven. As that’s unlikely any time soon, scientists and policymakers should be busy adapting to the headaches that shrinking winters and snowfall will bring — the agricultural impacts, longer allergy seasons, resilient pests, water shortages, lost economic activity and more. Whatever our feelings about the season in the past, there is no doubt we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-01-08/winter-storm-aside-snow-is-disappearing-because-of-climate-change?embedded-checkout=true

Back in the real world, the East Coast of the USA might have gotten off lightly for a couple of years, but China and Russia have endured extreme cold this year, and Europe and Britain are enduring freezing weather.

Given the widespread extreme cold in most of the Northern Hemisphere this year, calling the end of snow because the US North East got lucky with the weather seems profoundly ignorant.

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