It’s
only a few days before Christmas, and I’m finding it a little depressing. It’s been raining for days, the river near
our house is swollen and brown, and outside it’s inky black by four in the
afternoon. It shouldn’t be this way. It feels unnatural.
What’s
missing is the snow. Big fluffy flakes
should be falling from the sky, not rain, the river should be almost frozen
enough to ski on, and even the long nights should be more luminescent, with
white snow covering everything.
We’ve
been suffering unseasonably mild weather the past month, with temperatures hovering
just a few degrees above freezing, way too warm for snow. This time last year, our yard was covered in 60
centimeters (two feet) of the white stuff, though admittedly that winter was the
snowiest we’ve had in years. As it is now, we’re
well on our way to a non-white Christmas, only the second or third time that’s
happened in the twenty-five years or so I’ve lived here. The last time was in 2007.
I’ve
heard it’s been unusually warm in some parts of the States as well, despite a
freakily early winter storm that hit the Northeast in late October. Georgia saw highs of about 20 (68 F) last
week, prompting one of my Facebook friends to comment that if this was global
warming, he was all for it.
Of
course, as with almost everything else these days, “the weather” has become
politicized. My wife, who is a
scientist, was recently in a meeting where an agricultural researcher from
Kentucky told her how political correctness has forced American universities to
change the way they talk about climate change.
Already
some years ago, the term “global warming”, which is in fact a correct
description of what is happening to the Earth’s climate, fell out of favor. This was because “global warming” made it too
easy for skeptics to ridicule the idea whenever some part of the world
experienced weather that was much colder
than normal. The term “climate change” seemed
more acceptable. But, as the man from
Kentucky told my wife, today even “climate change” is not politically neutral
enough for the skeptics. Now the current
PC term is climate variability. It’s like trying to avoid using the word “war”
by instead saying “peace variability”.
When
the big storm hit in October, conservative commentator Erick Erickson tweeted
something to the effect that major snowstorms at Halloween are not exactly
making a strong case for “global warming”. Being from Georgia, he should know
better.
This
past summer, Georgia experienced extreme drought conditions across most of the
state. Temperatures in Atlanta were over
two degrees (4 F) above average. Rainfall
for the year has been about 25% below normal, with Atlanta even now having a rainfall
deficit of about 12 inches (30 cm). Water
levels in rivers and lakes are significantly down. Lake Lanier (the state’s biggest reservoir
and a major source of water for Atlanta) is currently eleven feet (over three meters)
below the “full” level. The “good” news
is that even as low as Lanier has dropped this year, it is still not as bad as
during Georgia’s last severe drought, in 2007, the same year we in Finland
celebrated Christmas without snow.
While
Erick Erickson was quick to crow about how (in his mind) an unseasonal winter storm
helps to disprove global warming, I suspect he didn’t come to the opposite
conclusion during the long summer of abnormally hot and dry weather. Nor should he.
One
bad early winter storm or even a whole summer of drought can simply be outliers
to the overall trend in the weather. They
are just single data points. What’s
important is the overall trend, based on a lot of such data points, lots of
observations over time. I tend to trust
the scientists who have looked at all the data and found the long-range trend clearly
pointing to a warmer planet. But the
data point that concerns me the most at the moment is the fact that, once
again, there’ll be no snow at Christmas.
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| Helsinki's Senate Square, as it should look this time of the year. Photo by Jonik |
