Twenty years after the original “thing of the past” forecast, the BBC pushed the date back another twenty years.
Climate change: Snowy UK winters could become thing of the past
Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past – Environment – The Independent
Breaking news. the twin cities of Minnesota have tied their all-time record warm year – 50.9 for 2024. tied the record from the year 1931. in 1931 the twin cities had a metro population probably 1/5 what it is now. Urban heat island effect maybe? nonetheless it tied the record. it was not a hot summer in central Minnesota but we didn’t have any cold months. no daily hot summer temperature records were set that I can recall. I live about 40 miles north of the twin cities and our average temperature for 2024 was 3° colder than the twin cities. no doubt due to a much smaller Urban heat island. looks like the warm weather is over. our January forecast is for the coldest January in 11 years. probably a few reasons why 2024 was warm in central Minnesota. one of them is we had almost no snow cover last winter and so far this winter. FYI when you have one foot of snow on the ground, (which is typical in a Minnesota winter) your temperature is going to be 10° colder than it would be when the ground is bare. drought years tend to be warmer years. what is Joe biden’s response to having the twin cities tie a record from 1931? Ban gas water heaters. no kidding, it’s in the news. what do you think would happen in 1931 if one of our politicians said we had a warm year so let’s ban gas water heaters. they would be laughed out of the building.
A daily record is kind of meaningless ( to me anyway) in climate terms. We haven’t been keeping data that long and even if we never messed with the actual data, I would expect it to swing out to the outliers ever so often. I would guess that the fact that it took roughly 90 years to break the last outlier means that we are in a fairly stable climatic time. If we just looked at estimates of temperatures over the last 500 million years, we would have to say that right now, last million years, we appear to be in a cold outlier period.
That’s some interesting info about 1 foot of snow 10 degrees cooler.
This would eventually mean that end of snow would lead to global warming without any warming at at, but just because the snow is gone.
(that was probably also one of the reasons they tried to cover the arctict with soot to save us from ice age.
And it was so effective that it lead us directly into global warming).
Now that Minnesota has experienced the Apocalyptic warming first hand (without anyone realising if there were no reports),
one can pretty well guess how harsh comming record years will be.
Once again, realclimatetools.com provides some context. In looking at my town, I can see that there might be some heavier snow years in the 1880-1900 and 2000-2020. There were some memorable snowfall events in 1960-1980. I was surprised to see just how many winter days had no snowfall, often weeks in a row with no new snow.
If I add up all of the snowfall measurements from all over my midwestern state for all dates, there is no trend at all. None.
+1