• June 18, 2022

Does all this snowfall disprove climate change?

This has been a year of heckuva (helluva) weather on the East Coast. I’m sitting here as a five foot mound of snow piles up against my front door as snow continues to fall in a city where annual records have already been broken (I think I read that somewhere). We’ve had a very white Christmas, a two-foot dump in January, and now another monster storm that’s left us working from home (yeah, sure) and writing mediocre blog posts just to keep some sanity left inside us.

I was also in Orlando, Florida in January of this year when the high temperature was thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit. I don’t know where these people got all these hats and gloves, but I certainly didn’t have any and I was freezing my ass off. Needless to say, this winter has turned the Carolinas into a frenzy of winter extravagance.

Anytime we have this freakishly cold weather or excessive snowfall, people start saying things like, “How about global warming now, John?” And then they start giggling and fist bumping their conservative friends, and muttering things like, “silly tree hugger” under their breath. I often try to explain to them that global warming has only increased the Earth’s temperature by about 1 degree Celsius, and that climate change may actually result in more extreme weather on both sides of the temperate spectrum. This is usually countered with some form of laughter and a big sigh. I doubt we’ll get anywhere with this argument.


“In the simulations I’ve looked at, you can have pretty big blizzards up to the year 2040,” said Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago. “But between 2040 and 2080, it starts to get too hot to have a lot of snow and slowly it goes away.”

Experts say rainfall is likely to increase in many parts of the country, while others experience drought. In Illinois, storms with extreme precipitation have become more frequent by 3 percent each decade from 1931 to 1996, according to a study by the Illinois State Water Survey and the National Climatic Data Center.

Of course, global climate change hasn’t been proven beyond an absolute doubt, so there’s a chance we could be creating a big fuss, and of course a better world, for nothing. But evidently, in the minds of detractors, the consequences do not outweigh the sacrifices.

However, I think it is safe to conclude that snowstorms and abnormally cold weather do nothing to refute or discredit theories of global climate change. And if these big groups of scientists are right, we may be in for more extreme weather in the years to come, so hold on tight and enjoy it while it lasts, as it may not last forever.

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