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Where Did the Snow Go? “A visceral feeling of what climate change looks and feels like.”
(www.nytimes.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
204 points (98.1% liked)
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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.
I'd appreciate a link to the report about California if you can find it
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.