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For everyone claiming this is great cause it’s less cold in the winter, it’s not just less cold on average it’s more chaotic. Just a week or two ago we went fro
by lovich 4y ago
For everyone claiming this is great cause it’s less cold in the winter, it’s not just less cold on average it’s more chaotic. Just a week or two ago we went from 40s in New England to down to -30s with windchill and even -100 on one New Hampshire mountain. Then it was the 40s again a few days later.
Humans might be able to weather that chaos with our shelters but the plants and animals are having havoc wreaked on them with wild temperature swings like that. Especially when you have swings going from 60s to below freezing and back. I already saw certain trees by me start budding twice as they reacted to the warm weather with thinking it’s spring. They’re not dead yet but they wasted a large amount of energy on failed leaf growth that’s made them unhealthy. Then theirs the insects whose life cycles typically require storing honey and going into a low energy state or storing eggs that hatch come the warm weather. If those get totally wiped out by wild weather swings we’ll see several tropic layers of species die off as they are supported by the energy from feeding off those insects.
- nlowell 4y agoFWIW the NH mountain (Mt. Washington) is a freak of nature and its experiences don't generalize to New England as a whole.
- lovich 4y agoIt was a freak of nature driven by climate change. And the -30 did generalize across New England from mass to Maine at least.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoIt was cold enough in downtown Boston that a woman froze to death walking a few blocks home, to say nothing of all the homeless people whose deaths probably went unremarked in the media.
- nradov 4y agoIs there a good metric that we can use to quantify changes in weather volatility over time? I'm thinking of something like the VIX stock market index, but for regional weather.
- midoridensha 4y ago>For everyone claiming this is great cause it’s less cold in the winter, it’s not just less cold on average it’s more chaotic. Just a week or two ago we went from 40s in New England to down to -30s with windchill and even -100 on one New Hampshire mountain. Then it was the 40s again a few days later. So basically the headline is wrong. It should say "climate change is making New England winters a chaotic nightmare", not "stealing" them. We really should get away from this "global warming" phrase: people in overly-cold places like New England or Minnesota or Edmonton would be happy to have warmer winters, but not the extremes you describe.