Winter is ripe – Atlantic Ocean

Produced by ElevenLabs and News through sound (Noah) Using AI-powered narration, listen to more stories on the Noa app.

Updated at 12:47 PM ET December 5, 2024.

Bing Crosby’s rendition of “White Christmas” in recent years sounds elegant to me. Some people may still get a white Christmas. But where I live in New York City, 2002 was the last time there were snowflakes on Christmas. That’s not really a climate-significant statistic. It’s more like an omen.

This winter, most places in the United States should expect it. less snow More than what many people—and the historical record—would consider normal. Climate change could make summer days and nights hotter. But winter is getting worse across much of the United States. Warms up faster than other seasons The cold front will be shorter. Cold nights will be fewer. And the coldest days are not as cold as this. The places experiencing the most global warming are the country’s classic winter wonderlands. In Albany, New York, winters are an average of 6.8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they were 50 years ago, according to an analysis by a non-profit research group. Central climate– Winter in Concord New Hampshire and in Green Bay, Wisconsin, temperatures were 7 degrees warmer each. Winter in Burlington was 7 degrees warmer. state of vermont Temperatures were more than 8 degrees warmer in places that have largely made America’s winter legends. Reliable images of snow-covered landscapes might be more appropriately replaced with images of bare trees and rain.

Snow will continue to fall for many years to come. Sometimes in large quantities But both the extent of snow cover in North America and the length of the season support it. It is gradually shrinking.– Spring snow is especially disappearing. and last winter Researchers stated that The “snow loss cliff” is a threshold of average winter temperatures below which the snowpack remains relatively stable. But above that, snow loss is accelerating, said Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth who was instrumental in the discovery. live in New Hampshire It was on the other side of the cliff that had lost its snow. Each level of temperature increase will cause the amount of snow to fall significantly. Now he thinks The “marginal operating costs” of the cross-country ski equipment he bought for his children fluctuated. “Cross-country skiing doesn’t really have snow. You just have what nature gives you,” he tells me, and now there are few days when conditions are more suitable for cross-country skiing than ever before.

When I called him this week He saw fresh snow outside the window. But that still lines up perfectly with weather forecasts. “This is a cognitive dissonance about global warming that we need to heal,” he said. “There will be winters where there isn’t much snow accumulation. And then there will be other winters.” What will change and what already exists is all kinds of consistency. The snow system becomes more variable with each increase in warming levels. “Snow isn’t as reliable as we imagined it to be in the 20th century. That’s gone,” Mankin said. “That’s something that challenges our imagination for a place like New Hampshire.”

But the winter rain has not disappeared. study Published in September, it found that the likelihood of a wetter winter, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, has increased significantly. Meanwhile, about one in 30 winters will be classified as very wet at this time. But that rate could increase to six or seven winters from 30 by the end of the century. But because the temperature will rise The amount of precipitation therefore falls as rain instead of snow.

Akintomide Akinsanola, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead author of that report told me he lived in Chicago for four years without seeing one of the major winter storms in a midwestern city. His findings suggest that most places across the country (Except for the southern Great Plains.) Seat belts should be buckled for winter flooding that increases as the century progresses. “People will experience that firsthand,” he told me. Most places should plan for that future. And they are thought to be resistant to new extremes. How can they

In some areas of the United States that require snowpack for water, such as the Mountain West, the implications of Mankin and Akinsanola’s report relate to water security. But in the Northeast and Midwest Such research points to less tangible losses, such as ice fishing. Skating in the pool and sled dogsAnd other parts of life that can’t be done in the wet, muddy winter. The uniqueness of these places will continue to disappear as long as global temperatures continue to rise. This will disappear until carbon emissions stop. “The likelihood of a snow-free winter increases with each million ton of emissions,” Mankin said. He expects both “mud season” and “branch season,” when trees are leafless but also have snow. That will extend to the best time of year in his state. This is when the soft white color should cover everything.

This article originally misidentified Dartmouth College as Dartmouth University.