7 ms·

Researchers forecast a hard-to-imagine West – one without snow

79 points by neom 5y ago

grecy 5y ago
This is not something for the future, this is happening right now. Sitting on the chairlift in Canada just pre-covid it was a daily occurrence to talk to an American who had come up to Canada for a week because their local ski resort had no snow. They all said their resort used to get a ton, now it's lucky to get a foot for the whole season. This is a reality now. EDIT: Also worth mentioning the capital city of Alaska had zero recorded snowfall for an entire winter for the first time in recorded history. Yes, it's very real.
- vmception 5y ago
  Sometimes, more often than prior decades, but sometimes
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    The great thing about the concept sometimes is it covers a few times, all but one or two times, and actually all the time.
- BitAstronaut 5y ago
  While we are in the process of getting dumped on here in Colorado, the lack of snow has been depressing so far.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  I grew up in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. Right in the middle of the bare Canadian prairie and near Winnipeg, commonly called "Winterpeg". In my teenage years and during university (late 2000s, early 2010s) I could look forward to returning over Christmas and going for a skate at the outdoor skating oval or going cross-country skiing at some trails in the Brandon hills. Not so for the couple years prior to covid. I haven't returned during the pandemic but it also wouldn't have been possible to do winter outdoor sports if I had. Christmas is considered "early season" now I guess.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- treis 5y ago
  >This is not something for the future, this is happening right now. What you're describing is due to the La Nina effect: >La Niña could also worsen California's ongoing drought and make its wildfire season even more of a threat. As Bloomberg explains, the state usually gets most of its annual water from rain and snow between November and April — the same period when La Niña is predicted to shift storm tracks north and away from the region that needs it. https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1046313870/la-nina-winter-weather-us-temperatures-rainfall https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1046313870/la-nina-winter-wea...
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    Agree, my relatives have stories of Christmas in the 70s in the Midwest. And then sometimes there's ice storms. Extreme weather is not itself a good argument for climate change, you need to show you've bucked 100+ year trends (which has been done).
- chrisco255 5y ago
  No, it's not: https://globalcryospherewatch.org/state_of_cryo/snow/fmi_swe_tracker.jpg https://globalcryospherewatch.org/state_of_cryo/snow/fmi_swe... Northern Hemisphere snow mass is one standard deviation above 1982-2012 average. Anecdotal data points are meaningless in systems as complex and dynamic as weather.
  - new_realist 5y ago
    “excluding mountains” Further, the aggregate for all of North America hardly excludes the possibility of regional snow drought.
  - AbrahamParangi 5y ago
    My personal experience growing up in the northeast is that storms are warmer and wetter than they used to be (maybe that means more snow on net), but with winters on the whole being warmer snow doesn’t accumulate like it used to. The line where snow sticks around for the whole season has been steadily moving north.
    - fwsgonzo 5y ago
      Same for me here in northern Norway. The winters are milder, less snowy. It's clear as day to me and the people around me.
  - it_does_follow 5y ago
    What does the total snow mass for the entire Northern Hemisphere have to do with parent's observation (especially since it explicitly excludes mountains, the subject of the parent's point)? It's completely possible that the Northern Hemisphere also has more rainfall then ever before, would that mean that lake Mead isn't drying up right now? I find it a bit hard that you're really posted that information in good faith given it would require an almost willful misunderstanding of what the parent is saying and how hemisphere wide observations completely miss essential regional variation in weather patterns.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Anecdotal data points are meaningless in systems as complex and dynamic as weather. Exactly. "global warming isn't real because it's still snowing" gets ridiculed (as it rightly should), but I find it appalling that "global warming is real because it snowed really late where I lived" gets a free pass.
- edgefield 5y ago
  I don’t understand why the OP is being downvoted. Climate change is real and causing temperature and weather anomalies all over the world, including record warm temps and droughts in the western continental United States.
  - it_does_follow 5y ago
    In recent years HN has becoming increasingly aggressive in it's climate denial. Not in the classic sense of denying that there is climate change at all, but generally holding these assumptions as a sacred: - climate change is not happening in a meaningful way now. - the future impacts of climate change are wildly overstated. - all potential issues that may come up with climate change can be mitigated through technology. Any comments that violate any of these assumptions will be aggressively downvoted or often times even flagged. I have alt accounts that have had the latter happen frequently and I know because the flagged comments are always unflagged on review (conveniently hours after the article is no longer on the front page, and the discussion is effectively over). This tendency may have always been a part of this community, but it has become a bigger issue in recent years because it has been increasingly apparent that severe climate impacts are being felt "faster than expected" right now, there is absolutely existential risk at play (on both a civilization and species level), and that nothing short of immediate reduction of the use of hydrocarbons can prevent extreme impacts (i.e. no techno solution). Personally I think this is largely because these ideas pose major challenges to the ideological foundations of most of the HN community. In general people are brought here out of a common interest in the future, and the belief that technology (specifically VC funded technology) can solve any problem out there. Our current understanding of climate change and its impacts shake this ideological foundation and makes a lot of people uncomfortably in a very profound way. Their only way to react is to try to make it go away. Down voting and flagging comments happens precisely because these realities of climate change hit a bit to close to the bone.
    - _3u10 5y ago
    - gruez 5y ago
- t-3 5y ago
  > EDIT: Also worth mentioning the capital city of Alaska had zero recorded snowfall for an entire winter for the first time in recorded history. Yes, it's very real. It's also worth mentioning that the recorded history is rarely more than 100 years, and in almost no case more than a thousand.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  pretty cool that SLC hosted the Winter Olympics while they had the chance
tony_cannistra 5y ago
The recent Nature Reviews article that this article references : https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00219-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00219-y
- mistrial9 5y ago
  264 cited references https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00219-y#Bib1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00219-y#Bib1
throw3849 5y ago
Milder winters could be good. Snow is nice but gets old very fast. No more plowing, smaller heating bills...
- crowbahr 5y ago
  The major concern is less snow on the mountain = less water in the summer. Droughts are going to become worse in the west because of warm Winters.
  - donatj 5y ago
    Wont that same water just be rain? Seems to me like it also has the upside of less flooding when it all melts at once.
    - ip26 5y ago
      Rain flows straight down river instead of melting slowly. January rain doesn’t water August gardens.
    - jmann99999 5y ago
      In mountain locations, rain tends to run off the ground and into rivers as it rains. This depends on the region, but happens often in Spring/Fall. Snowmelt, when the weather warms gradually, will slowly melt. It will seep into cracks and replenish underground water sources. It will also slowly replenish rivers often into (and sometimes throughout) the Summer. So, a gradual snowmelt helps with the water cycle.[1] If warm weather comes fast, then the benefits over rain are diminished. Then less desirable effects like flooding can happen. [1]https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/snowmelt-runoff-and-water-cycle https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  Milder winters mean huge swathes of the world where certain disease-ridden and economically disastrous pests like ticks and termites are currently walled out from due to the extreme cold in the winter are suddenly going to be much worse places to live.
ComputerGuru 5y ago
It still hasn't snowed once in Chicago this year, smashing the record for latest snowfall. We're on the verge of breaking the record for most days without snowfall as well. I also don't think we've had a December with this many days over 50° F. The previous record was broken just recently in 2012, having stood since 1965: things aren't just getting worse, they're getting worse faster and faster. https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-weather-no-snow-record-when-will-it-in-2021-chicaog/11366582/ https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-weather-no-snow-record-when-...
- gremlinsinc 5y ago
  I'm from ohio, but been living in Utah since 2013. Let me tell you, snow back east was just something you talked about, or moaned about, etc... Out here, it's a totally different thing. Economically it's extremely valuable, I mean the license plate reads: Utah: The Greatest Snow on Earth. Ski-resorts are a big industry out here. Tourism aside, the snow pack out here is crucially vital to farming(arguably a bad use, esp. considering 70% of Utahs' water goes to alfalfa (a high water sucking crop) farms of which the Governor owns one of the biggest), residential water systems, etc. I'd imagine w/ no snow the Colorado river could even mostly dry up. (Maybe I'm off on that, I'm not a geologist). Fire season starts earlier, lasts longer, covers more places, and I've seen 3 small fires start during storms in the past 2 years, never before that have I ever seen a forest fire up close. My point is Chicago, will survive easily without snow, the west... I'm not sure can exist at all without snow. Honestly, I'm not sure we'll last past 2035 unless there's a miracle. I'm certain there will be massive migrations by 2050 from the coasts inward, from the west to the east, from the hottest climates to cooler ones (esp if the temp exceeds survivable thresholds)... and then the resources in the middle of the country will start to struggle, maybe droughts there cause even more instability ...eventually there will be water wars. I'd bet my life savings on that. I can't say when, but eventually it'll happen. Again - unless we have some scientific miracle that completely reverses things... I'd like to see a huge space sun-shield device concocted ...our first mega structure in space... it would be kinda cool to see how they build something that big..
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
_3u10 5y ago
Whenever anything related to the weather happens now it’s climate change. Dry winter? Climate change. Wet winter? Climate change. Cold summer? Climate change. Heat wave? Climate change. Hurricane? Climate change. Doldrums? Climate change. Every religion has a global flood myth, climate change is just the one of the scientifically religious and its zealots get just as upset if you don’t believe it as if you think Noah’s ark didn’t happen. Similarly there is no way to disprove it. You can see the ridiculousness of the situation when it comes to how they prove it, consensus. Science has never involved consensus, it works on hypothesis and evidence. Similarly no one can agree on which model predicts the future so they run 80,000 models with different parameters and then 20 years later pick whichever one happened to randomly generate the outcome and ignore the 79,999 models which were wrong. I’m not a denier, I’m open to a single hypothesis, and a length of time in which we can analyze the results. In summary climate change is a global flood myth and the solution is Pascal’s wager. And predictably no one points to any evidence they just downvote because they have nothing to say.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  There are very clear correlations. The scientists aren't pulling the association out of thin air, it's observed. We have satellites that watch the atmospheric currents and temperature fluctuations, how those drag different temperatures of air to different areas, and back engineer why things are moving the way they are. The primary example is the weakening of the Arctic air currents causing the cold air to escape. The Arctic then warms faster, and causes short-lived, dramatic drops in temperature in the north Midwest. We do similar back-engineering with the dry spells on the west coast. The largest computers in the world are routinely used to simulate the weather and predict changes climate change will cause, and we are getting more and more accurate every year.
  - _3u10 5y ago
    Thank you, I appreciate the discussion rather than downvoting. Do you think that a weakening current with more water in the atmosphere (atmospheric rivers) will lead to more or less snowfall? Not being sarcastic, it’s just that if both things are true it would indicate that the prediction in this article is wrong. Unrelated, what are your thoughts on the carboniferous period with 800ppm CO2 and 0 degrees difference in average temp. (This is according to Wikipedia, I can appreciate if the answer is Wikipedia is not reliable on this matter)
xvilka 5y ago
All these articles suggest "if we don't stop", "if carbon emissions will not be reduced", they aren't realistic. Knowing people, I doubt it will be done enough in the right time. The only right strategy is to start preparing for the worst, adapting infrastructure, cities, villages, and agriculture.
MaxMoney 5y ago
dreamcompiler 5y ago
Coupled with the depletion of deep aquifers, this situation means most farming west of the Mississippi river will probably vanish in our lifetimes.[0] We all need to start thinking much more creatively about how we're going to eat in the future. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aquifer-ogallala-water-crisis-drought/621007/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aqu...

79 points by neom 5y ago

This is not something for the future, this is happening right now. Sitting on the chairlift in Canada just pre-covid it was a daily occurrence to talk to an American who had come up to Canada for a week because their local ski resort had no snow. They all said their resort used to get a ton, now it's lucky to get a foot for the whole season. This is a reality now. EDIT: Also worth mentioning the capital city of Alaska had zero recorded snowfall for an entire winter for the first time in recorded history. Yes, it's very real.

vmception 5y ago
Sometimes, more often than prior decades, but sometimes
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  The great thing about the concept sometimes is it covers a few times, all but one or two times, and actually all the time.
BitAstronaut 5y ago
While we are in the process of getting dumped on here in Colorado, the lack of snow has been depressing so far.
ahelwer 5y ago
I grew up in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. Right in the middle of the bare Canadian prairie and near Winnipeg, commonly called "Winterpeg". In my teenage years and during university (late 2000s, early 2010s) I could look forward to returning over Christmas and going for a skate at the outdoor skating oval or going cross-country skiing at some trails in the Brandon hills. Not so for the couple years prior to covid. I haven't returned during the pandemic but it also wouldn't have been possible to do winter outdoor sports if I had. Christmas is considered "early season" now I guess.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
treis 5y ago
>This is not something for the future, this is happening right now. What you're describing is due to the La Nina effect: >La Niña could also worsen California's ongoing drought and make its wildfire season even more of a threat. As Bloomberg explains, the state usually gets most of its annual water from rain and snow between November and April — the same period when La Niña is predicted to shift storm tracks north and away from the region that needs it. https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1046313870/la-nina-winter-weather-us-temperatures-rainfall https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1046313870/la-nina-winter-wea...
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  Agree, my relatives have stories of Christmas in the 70s in the Midwest. And then sometimes there's ice storms. Extreme weather is not itself a good argument for climate change, you need to show you've bucked 100+ year trends (which has been done).
chrisco255 5y ago
No, it's not: https://globalcryospherewatch.org/state_of_cryo/snow/fmi_swe_tracker.jpg https://globalcryospherewatch.org/state_of_cryo/snow/fmi_swe... Northern Hemisphere snow mass is one standard deviation above 1982-2012 average. Anecdotal data points are meaningless in systems as complex and dynamic as weather.
- new_realist 5y ago
  “excluding mountains” Further, the aggregate for all of North America hardly excludes the possibility of regional snow drought.
- AbrahamParangi 5y ago
  My personal experience growing up in the northeast is that storms are warmer and wetter than they used to be (maybe that means more snow on net), but with winters on the whole being warmer snow doesn’t accumulate like it used to. The line where snow sticks around for the whole season has been steadily moving north.
  - fwsgonzo 5y ago
    Same for me here in northern Norway. The winters are milder, less snowy. It's clear as day to me and the people around me.
- it_does_follow 5y ago
  What does the total snow mass for the entire Northern Hemisphere have to do with parent's observation (especially since it explicitly excludes mountains, the subject of the parent's point)? It's completely possible that the Northern Hemisphere also has more rainfall then ever before, would that mean that lake Mead isn't drying up right now? I find it a bit hard that you're really posted that information in good faith given it would require an almost willful misunderstanding of what the parent is saying and how hemisphere wide observations completely miss essential regional variation in weather patterns.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Anecdotal data points are meaningless in systems as complex and dynamic as weather. Exactly. "global warming isn't real because it's still snowing" gets ridiculed (as it rightly should), but I find it appalling that "global warming is real because it snowed really late where I lived" gets a free pass.
edgefield 5y ago
I don’t understand why the OP is being downvoted. Climate change is real and causing temperature and weather anomalies all over the world, including record warm temps and droughts in the western continental United States.
- it_does_follow 5y ago
  In recent years HN has becoming increasingly aggressive in it's climate denial. Not in the classic sense of denying that there is climate change at all, but generally holding these assumptions as a sacred: - climate change is not happening in a meaningful way now. - the future impacts of climate change are wildly overstated. - all potential issues that may come up with climate change can be mitigated through technology. Any comments that violate any of these assumptions will be aggressively downvoted or often times even flagged. I have alt accounts that have had the latter happen frequently and I know because the flagged comments are always unflagged on review (conveniently hours after the article is no longer on the front page, and the discussion is effectively over). This tendency may have always been a part of this community, but it has become a bigger issue in recent years because it has been increasingly apparent that severe climate impacts are being felt "faster than expected" right now, there is absolutely existential risk at play (on both a civilization and species level), and that nothing short of immediate reduction of the use of hydrocarbons can prevent extreme impacts (i.e. no techno solution). Personally I think this is largely because these ideas pose major challenges to the ideological foundations of most of the HN community. In general people are brought here out of a common interest in the future, and the belief that technology (specifically VC funded technology) can solve any problem out there. Our current understanding of climate change and its impacts shake this ideological foundation and makes a lot of people uncomfortably in a very profound way. Their only way to react is to try to make it go away. Down voting and flagging comments happens precisely because these realities of climate change hit a bit to close to the bone.
  - _3u10 5y ago
  - gruez 5y ago
t-3 5y ago
> EDIT: Also worth mentioning the capital city of Alaska had zero recorded snowfall for an entire winter for the first time in recorded history. Yes, it's very real. It's also worth mentioning that the recorded history is rarely more than 100 years, and in almost no case more than a thousand.
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
pretty cool that SLC hosted the Winter Olympics while they had the chance

tony_cannistra 5y ago

The recent Nature Reviews article that this article references : https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00219-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00219-y

mistrial9 5y ago
264 cited references https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00219-y#Bib1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00219-y#Bib1

throw3849 5y ago

Milder winters could be good. Snow is nice but gets old very fast. No more plowing, smaller heating bills...

crowbahr 5y ago
The major concern is less snow on the mountain = less water in the summer. Droughts are going to become worse in the west because of warm Winters.
- donatj 5y ago
  Wont that same water just be rain? Seems to me like it also has the upside of less flooding when it all melts at once.
  - ip26 5y ago
    Rain flows straight down river instead of melting slowly. January rain doesn’t water August gardens.
  - jmann99999 5y ago
    In mountain locations, rain tends to run off the ground and into rivers as it rains. This depends on the region, but happens often in Spring/Fall. Snowmelt, when the weather warms gradually, will slowly melt. It will seep into cracks and replenish underground water sources. It will also slowly replenish rivers often into (and sometimes throughout) the Summer. So, a gradual snowmelt helps with the water cycle.[1] If warm weather comes fast, then the benefits over rain are diminished. Then less desirable effects like flooding can happen. [1]https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/snowmelt-runoff-and-water-cycle https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...
ComputerGuru 5y ago
Milder winters mean huge swathes of the world where certain disease-ridden and economically disastrous pests like ticks and termites are currently walled out from due to the extreme cold in the winter are suddenly going to be much worse places to live.

ComputerGuru 5y ago

It still hasn't snowed once in Chicago this year, smashing the record for latest snowfall. We're on the verge of breaking the record for most days without snowfall as well. I also don't think we've had a December with this many days over 50° F. The previous record was broken just recently in 2012, having stood since 1965: things aren't just getting worse, they're getting worse faster and faster. https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-weather-no-snow-record-when-will-it-in-2021-chicaog/11366582/ https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-weather-no-snow-record-when-...

gremlinsinc 5y ago
I'm from ohio, but been living in Utah since 2013. Let me tell you, snow back east was just something you talked about, or moaned about, etc... Out here, it's a totally different thing. Economically it's extremely valuable, I mean the license plate reads: Utah: The Greatest Snow on Earth. Ski-resorts are a big industry out here. Tourism aside, the snow pack out here is crucially vital to farming(arguably a bad use, esp. considering 70% of Utahs' water goes to alfalfa (a high water sucking crop) farms of which the Governor owns one of the biggest), residential water systems, etc. I'd imagine w/ no snow the Colorado river could even mostly dry up. (Maybe I'm off on that, I'm not a geologist). Fire season starts earlier, lasts longer, covers more places, and I've seen 3 small fires start during storms in the past 2 years, never before that have I ever seen a forest fire up close. My point is Chicago, will survive easily without snow, the west... I'm not sure can exist at all without snow. Honestly, I'm not sure we'll last past 2035 unless there's a miracle. I'm certain there will be massive migrations by 2050 from the coasts inward, from the west to the east, from the hottest climates to cooler ones (esp if the temp exceeds survivable thresholds)... and then the resources in the middle of the country will start to struggle, maybe droughts there cause even more instability ...eventually there will be water wars. I'd bet my life savings on that. I can't say when, but eventually it'll happen. Again - unless we have some scientific miracle that completely reverses things... I'd like to see a huge space sun-shield device concocted ...our first mega structure in space... it would be kinda cool to see how they build something that big..
- dredmorbius 5y ago

_3u10 5y ago

Whenever anything related to the weather happens now it’s climate change. Dry winter? Climate change. Wet winter? Climate change. Cold summer? Climate change. Heat wave? Climate change. Hurricane? Climate change. Doldrums? Climate change. Every religion has a global flood myth, climate change is just the one of the scientifically religious and its zealots get just as upset if you don’t believe it as if you think Noah’s ark didn’t happen. Similarly there is no way to disprove it. You can see the ridiculousness of the situation when it comes to how they prove it, consensus. Science has never involved consensus, it works on hypothesis and evidence. Similarly no one can agree on which model predicts the future so they run 80,000 models with different parameters and then 20 years later pick whichever one happened to randomly generate the outcome and ignore the 79,999 models which were wrong. I’m not a denier, I’m open to a single hypothesis, and a length of time in which we can analyze the results. In summary climate change is a global flood myth and the solution is Pascal’s wager. And predictably no one points to any evidence they just downvote because they have nothing to say.

BobbyJo 5y ago
There are very clear correlations. The scientists aren't pulling the association out of thin air, it's observed. We have satellites that watch the atmospheric currents and temperature fluctuations, how those drag different temperatures of air to different areas, and back engineer why things are moving the way they are. The primary example is the weakening of the Arctic air currents causing the cold air to escape. The Arctic then warms faster, and causes short-lived, dramatic drops in temperature in the north Midwest. We do similar back-engineering with the dry spells on the west coast. The largest computers in the world are routinely used to simulate the weather and predict changes climate change will cause, and we are getting more and more accurate every year.
- _3u10 5y ago
  Thank you, I appreciate the discussion rather than downvoting. Do you think that a weakening current with more water in the atmosphere (atmospheric rivers) will lead to more or less snowfall? Not being sarcastic, it’s just that if both things are true it would indicate that the prediction in this article is wrong. Unrelated, what are your thoughts on the carboniferous period with 800ppm CO2 and 0 degrees difference in average temp. (This is according to Wikipedia, I can appreciate if the answer is Wikipedia is not reliable on this matter)

xvilka 5y ago

All these articles suggest "if we don't stop", "if carbon emissions will not be reduced", they aren't realistic. Knowing people, I doubt it will be done enough in the right time. The only right strategy is to start preparing for the worst, adapting infrastructure, cities, villages, and agriculture.

MaxMoney 5y ago

dreamcompiler 5y ago

Coupled with the depletion of deep aquifers, this situation means most farming west of the Mississippi river will probably vanish in our lifetimes.[0] We all need to start thinking much more creatively about how we're going to eat in the future. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aquifer-ogallala-water-crisis-drought/621007/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aqu...