Comment by cosmic_cheese
11 days ago
> Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore.
In my inland US east coast hometown there’s been a big shift in winters. It used to be that it consistently got quite cold after late September to mid October, winters consistently came with several feet of snow, and spring hadn’t fully arrived until well into April. For the past several years winter has almost disappeared — many years there’s almost no snow and it sometimes doesn’t even get that cold. It’s kind of an indistinct smudge in between fall and spring.
Things have changed where I live now on the northern half of the west coast too, though I wasn’t here to witness the change. Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer depending on exactly where you’re at.
Serious change is afoot, that much is undeniable.
People used to ice skate on the lake near my house during Winters up until the 70s. Now they're swimming there throughout the winter. We had a ski lift fifteen minutes from my house 20 years ago. Now in a good winter, we have a week where there's enough snow for kids to go sledding.
Very similar pattern here (UK): circa 1900, ice skating on the local pond every winter. The ice was thick enough to walk on the pond twice in the 1980s. For the last decade, the pond hasn't completely frozen over once. We got about two days of 30% coverage this Jan.
As a kid (I was born in the 80s), my home town would get 3ft of snow almost every winter. We even saw 10ft some winters.
By the time I hit highschool, seeing a 3ft snow in the winter was pretty rare.
Over the last 4 years, there's never any snow on the ground. They are lucky if 1 inch sticks around.
https://xkcd.com/1321/
sure, though New York has gotten a real honest-to-goodness winter this year. There's been a foot on the snow on the ground continuously for the last month, and it's been cold enough that the pipes in one of my bathrooms froze. I think it's easier from the West Coast to bemoan the end of East Coast winters than to live through one :)
This has been a decent, classic winter. It’s an important part of the regional character. We need to have snow occasionally, remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society.
Sorry about the pipes.
> remembering to shovel the sidewalks is an essential “on the ground” indication that everybody is still doing society.
Are they still doing it?
I had a few "proper winters" in the UK during my early 20s. The roads are gritted (and ploughed if necessary) by local councils in lorries, but the footpaths are supposed to be done by residents. The first proper winter, after the snow had refrozen a few times overnight, the paths were lethal. We have these yellow grit bins scattered everywhere that residents are supposed to use to get grit to do the paths. But nobody was doing it. Anywhere. As a pedestrian you just had to walk in the road. This was a real "society has failed" moment for me.
Not that it matters any more, though. Such winters seem a distant memory. The last I can remember was 2018's "beast from the east", but that was more of a freak event than a normal winter.
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We all have in Europe and the US - but it too is a sign of harsh climate change, because the reason it is cold "down here" on our latitudes is that the arctic is super hot, pushing the cold down to us.
Perhaps some added details would be nice?
In Nuuk they have had 11 degrees celsius. January has been, on average, 8 degrees above the norm. They are having the highest temperatures since 1784.
It is warmer in Greenland than in Denmark.
They now have to close down ski-slopes in Greenland.
It has been brutal, and very cold, and we have not seen the sun. Send help!
The problem is that one cold winter doesn't mean we fixed the problem. We need to look at the average change throughout the years, and that's very worrying.
No disagreement there!
> Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer
This is something that's scared me ever since I learnt about air conditioning and how it works in the 90s when I was like 10.
Air con heats up the outside, so air cons are fighting with each other to cool down their respective buildings. So, more air con, using even more power, all heating up the outside a little bit more. The snowball effect is going to be enormous.
I guess I thought as a 10 year old that some adults would have this under control. Or maybe I realised, even back then, that the only thing really separating adults from children is big bodies and that you don't get told off for being greedy any more.
Unless you're in a dense urban area, the effect of your air conditioners on neighboring houses is negligible. There's so much other thermal reservoirs around (like the ground and plants) as well as circulation from the wind that the extra heat from the air conditioner has only a small effect on the environment.
Compare the volume of your house to the volume of area around your house (including several hundred feet vertically, since that is easily part of the circulation). If you're cooling your house 20 degrees then that would correspond to heating an area 20x the size by 1 degree. How many times bigger is the circulating area around your house (100x? 1000x?)?
It’s honestly terrifying. I’m in the PNW and we haven’t had winter yet. Extremely low snowpack in the mountains and not even a single day below freezing where I live.
I’ve been observing the change for the past 10 years or so here and this is the first year that’s it’s been so “in your face” obvious instead of just subtle changes and effects.
If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for.
Climate change needs to be the number one focus and policy for every nation on earth right now. Not AI, not economic growth, not wars.
Here in the Seattle area, plenty of sub-freezing days (which is itself unusual for the area, in 25 years of living here), just no precipitation. And you know what Seattle is known for, especially in the winter? But when we do get precipitation, it’s warm enough in the mountains that it comes down as rain, not snow. Rough year to be a ski area.
>If this is our new normal winter and/or gets rapidly worse we will have a major water crisis sooner than anyone is ready for.
This is a certainty.
Scientists have been ringing the bell since at least the late 60's and our only reaction was to laugh at them and floor the accelerator pedal and continuously increase our emissions over 5 decades. It is unlikely to change with the AI boom.
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There are many things in the world that happen slowly right up until they suddenly don’t. It’s very possible the climate is one of these.
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Climate change will probably solve itself within 10 years due to exponential growth of solar panels, batteries and electric cars.
That is delusionnal. The growth is globally way too slow and too late to have a major impact, especially when the climate is already provoking chain reactions like the large emissions from melting permafrost.
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