Reposted from American Thinker
I was recently reminded of one of the most common misconceptions about our changing climate that is often accepted as fact by climate skeptics and true believers alike. Last week a commentary written by a fellow geologist and colleague lamented the less snow and cold in recent winters compared to the winters of his youth in Kentucky in the 1950s and 60s. He also related a talk he had with an octogenarian in Europe over the holidays who told him that he also recalled common snow during Christmas in Germany but alas, no longer.
This nearly universally held belief that even the most skeptical of us tend to believe is “warming by recollection.” Virtually every person from snowy climes claims that winters today are nothing like they were when they were a child. This recollection reinforces the thought that we are experiencing global warming within our own lifetime. Never mind that the slight warming of ~0.6 oF (0.3 oC) that a typical 45-year-old may have experienced since that big snowfall when he was five years old is much too slight to be recognizable by anyone.
Before I looked at the actual data on the subject, I also believed that the snow of my youth in Pennsylvania exceeded any of recent decades. My research into snowfall records for my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, showed that my memory of snowfalls past was quite flawed. Snowfall here had been on the rise, rather than in decline.
Further examination from around the country revealed that this was not the exception, but the rule, as snow has generally been on the increase dating back many decades. My colleague’s recollection was equally flawed and records indicate that five of the top ten snowiest Februarys in his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, had occurred since 1975!
This notion is not a new one. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson expressed similar opinions about the moderating temperature and lack of snowfall.
Both heats and cold are becoming much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep…. The rivers which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scearcely (sic) ever do now.
— Thomas Jefferson 1801
Just like Thomas Jefferson in 1801, we remember those times that are remarkable, while forgetting the unremarkable. Our memories are filled with the times of extreme weather conditions as opposed to the moderate.
Big snowfalls periodically happen. Just like the picture below of me and my siblings in the snow in 1961, a six or eight-inch snowfall may come well past your knees when you are only five years old and three feet tall. It is a memory indelibly etched in your brain because it was so awesomely fun. (The odd-looking fellow in the bowler hat is my younger brother).
Increasing snow is not isolated to random sites in the United States but confirmed using data from the Rutgers Global Snow Lab (GSL) that reveal snow cover both in North America and across the northern hemisphere have been increasing.
The mistaken notion of decreasing snowfall in our lifetimes reinforces the idea that many people have that supposed man-made warming is more significant and impactful than it really is. Despite the evidence to the contrary we are warned regularly of the “end of snow” from warming driven by our use of fossil fuels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned us in 2001 that “milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms.”
Dr. Kathryn Hayhoe, no stranger to failed alarmist predictions, stated in 2008 that the California region would experience 70% to 90% reduction in snowfall due to warming. This was just three years before California’s snowiest winter on record of 2010/2011.
As with so many other climate fantasies the “end of snow” prediction doesn’t stand up to review of the actual data. Go ahead and buy those skis, you will be using them often in the decades to come.
Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist and author of the bestselling book, Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know.
Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/warming_and_the_snows_of_yesteryear.html#ixzz6CZZHk4Bh
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Regarding “the slight warming of ~0.6 oF (0.3 oC) that a typical 45-year-old may have experienced since that big snowfall when he was five years old is much too slight to be recognizable by anyone”: There was more warming after 1980 than that. HadCRUT4 shows warming of about .6 degree C (1.1 degrees F) since 1980.
Enough Said !
I’d expect more people around the globe don’t know what snow is then do…so I’m not really quite sure what the problem is..It’s like folks who don’t think it’s Christmas unless there’s snow and it’s cold out..For crying out loud, Jesus was born in the Middle East…
Carry on
I just had this conversation with someone, or a variation on this theme within the last few days. The person said that because of climate change he was forced to leave California. It isn’t anything at all like what he remembers it being growing up. All the droughts and floods now, and the fires. It wasn’t the time or the place to to get in a debate, much less an argument, so I just let it pass. Nonetheless, it serves as an example of how the casual observer can be mislead, or mislead themselves, into thinking there is cause and effect link to AGW. There so many complicating factors to California’s wild fires, and that drought cycles are normal climate in California.
Another example: In conversation with a elderly woman in my home town, she mentioned that we don’t have quite the severe winters that we had in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Yep, those were years of a cooling trend that ended in 1979. She is not old enough to remember the 1930’s heat, though. That is why we keep records….. and why we don’t trust tampered with evidence.
Regarding the Pittsburgh snowfall graph: This is plotted over a time period that had two changes in measurement method. The first time was when about the time the National Weather Service started putting many of their official weather stations at airports, maybe a little before. The method after this change was to measure (for climatological purposes) snowfall on a snow board that gets cleaned every six hours. Before then snow accumulation was measured once, when the accumulation has stopped increasing. In addition, an aviation method was specified, which involved another snowboard that got cleaned hourly.
The second change was at about 2000, when the task of snowfall measurement at airports was transferred from government employees to private contractors who were allowed to measure the snow up to 2 nautical miles from the weather station. And, these contractors were only contracted and paid to measure snow by the aviation method. Sometimes the two methods disagree, and when they do the aviation method reports more.
Notably, when greater snowfalls were reported after the ~2000 change, climate activists including some activist meteorologists and scientists blamed global warming for the reported increased snowfall.
Right is wrong and wrong is right. Is that real today, or imagined? Confused and upside down thinking?
This reminds me of conversations I’ve had with my husband every time he goes on about “global warming”….he says something has changed because he remembers snow before Thanksgiving and all thru the winter in his childhood. I don’t ever remember much, if any, snow before or around Thanksgiving when I was growing up. But he also never thought about other reason why that might have been the case. One of those reasons (which I called him out on) is elevation. He grew up in a tiny one stop light town in the panhandle of West Virginia, while I grew up in a suburb between Baltimore and Annapolis in Maryland.
So I got tired of hearing him complain and I asked him what was the elevation of the town he had grown up in. He didn’t know, so I told him to look it up. He at first swore up and down that couldn’t be the reason but a quick web search showed his town was at roughly 2,600 ft above sea level. And my town was no more than about 100 feet above sea level. And I told him no wonder he recalled a lot of snow, having grown up in the Appalachian mountains! And this is still the case today – winter storms that bring rain to the Baltimore area will often bring snow to the Maryland and WV panhandle areas.
And then there is a client of mine, 87 years old, who also goes on and on about “climate change”. But she told me where she grew up – in a coal mining town in western Pennsylvania high up in the Allegheny mountains!
Also, she was too young to remember the roasting 30’s but old enough to recall the cold 40’s and 60’s. I told her about those cyclical variations and that yes, the climate changes and has varied up and down during her lifetime and just happens to be in a warm phase now. She had no answer to that….
So yes, there is also this little factor known as elevation above SL that can skew perceptions of snow and cold, or lack thereof.
As for my own memories in my low elevation, I do seem to recall some snowy winters in the late 70’s when I was a child, and some hot summers in the early 80’s. I can also see in my mind the cover of an issue of (I think) Time Magazine titled “The broiling summer of 80′”. Either my parents or grandparents subscribed to that and I would sometimes read thru issues when they were done with them. I also remember hearing something about an extreme level of sunspots in 1980 and there was an explosion of tent caterpillars in my back yard that summer. Plus, the sunsets were beautiful after Mount St. Helens erupted in 1981.
Jefferson was also known for modifying his clothing and even insulating his own following fashion changes to shorter waistcoats. January 12, 1801…
“In the winter of 1801, in a letter to William Dunbar, he lamented, “I have no doubt but that cold is the source of more sufferance to all animal nature than hunger, thirst, sickness & all the other pains of life & of death itself put together.”
I recall cold, snowy Thanksgivings from my childhood of the 1950s-1960s, but I also recall playing outside in shirtsleeves on Christmas some of those years too.
A colleague of mine tried to tell me we now have few winter seasons where the temperature dips below -20F. So, I took “winter season” to mean December through February, and compared 1960-1975 against 2000-2015. In the earlier, notoriously cold period there were only 6 winters where the temperature failed to dip below -20F (I was surprised it was not fewer), in the current unprecedented era it was 7.
Willis E. says look at the data.
The bar chart (blue lines) shows an R^2 = 0.0796.
While the dotted line (black) has an upward trend, neither of these things makes much of a case for weather variations, and none for “climate.”
I’m from western PA, about 80 miles north of Pittsburgh.
Note the tall high bar in the years 1948-1953. Which year I can’t tell, but I was there.
Then there is the tall bar in 1961 (?). Again, I was there.
So I remember PA as snowy. Had I been raised there in the ’84-’89 period, or if I were there the last few years, I would not think of the area as getting lots of snow.
That being said, the last time I was there a few years ago I noted that the forests – cut down in the 1800s and sent down the Allegheny River to Pittsburgh, with Grandparents involved – had grown back with the same sorts that were removed. [American Chestnut, being the exception.]
To me, vegetation indicates “climate.” Same trees = same climate.
If you’ve maintained a diary/journal for several decades, you’d be familiar with the discrepancies between what you remember and what you wrote.
Seems we are discussing weather as if it were climate. Weather is very chaotic compared to climate, and this makes sense because climate is a running average of weather. I find it difficult to believe that climate is changing so fast we can get meaningful comparisons over say, 50 years (in most places).
I do believe, on average, the climate is warming. (GASP). I do not believe it is primarily caused by CO2. (oh the shame!) I also do not believe the ridiculous projections produced by climate modeling. Warmer air can hold more moisture – no one says it has to be a lot warmer air, just warmer – so air that is -20 C can hold less moisture than air that is -10 C. If the air warms a little, then producing more snow makes sense (assuming air patterns still deliver moisture to the region).
I for one have seen nothing over my lifetime that suggests snowfall or rainfall amounts have changed. The worst summer I experienced in Texas was August-September 1998 – nothing has come close to that. I have lived with tornadoes all my life and the worst in my memory was somewhere around 1973, and then of course the 1998-1999 seasons. I remember those because they directly impacted me – but I have seen nothing that makes me think tornado activity is getting worse – if anything the early warning and ability to find tornadoes has improved.
So really, historical weather is just a perception in the minds of people who experienced it. People believe things are getting worse because their TVs tell them it is. I don’t know that climate is even perceptible by the average person – at least in most cases. There could be a few extreme examples where there is a dramatic climate shift in one person’s lifetime, but those will be rare.
Robert, you have a lot of ‘beliefs’ (makes it sound like religion) – you should dump ‘beliefs’ & just go with the data.
Your last 2 paragraphs are correct & there is data to back your memory…no ‘beliefs’ needed.
When it’s really cold it usually doesn’t snow. 40 years of observation.
“Just like Thomas Jefferson in 1801, we remember those times that are remarkable, while forgetting the unremarkable.”
You don’t know that. Apologize.
Growing up in Toledo I walked to school from First Grade (1945) thru the Eighth Grade (1953). I know,I know, today my parents would be charged with child neglect for letting a six year old walk to school by myself. We all did it in the “good old days”, it was fun and safe. I remember it as a long, long trek. Often deep in snow in the winter while wearing those big buckle galoshes. My mother bought me a long leather coat to keep me warm on the long, long walk. I looked like a very small version of a Nazi Feldmarshall at Stalingrad. Recently I went on Google Earth and found that my long trek thru the heinous winter was exactly ONE MILE. Faulty memory of winter indeed!
Greta Thunberg rides a horse in Kazakhstan
https://imgur.com/gallery/WPlyt7B
Reminds me of a retired flyer (in his 60s -my age) here in Reno. Was telling us about when he was a kid, they used to get 12 – 15 feet of snow at a time. Dead serious.
http://www.thestormking.com/Weather/Nevada_Climate_History/Reno_Records/reno_records.html shows that for the entire month of January 1916 Reno got a record 66″. For the entire month. That’s 5 foot 6 inches for the entire month – not just a single snowfall. Legend (his nickname) wasn’t alive back then.
Memory is crap. I want to see data that was recorded in real time.
On the 31st of July it snowed in Northland, New Zealand for the first time in official records but only the second time in living memory.
Snowiest January in 12 years at Mt. Bachelor, OR. Base of 146 inches. And the Snowmageddons of past two yesteryears came in February.
In the spring of 2019, the snowpack in Colorado was 1300% of normal.
We all recognize that when we return to our places of our youth we are amazed as how much smaller they appear. I would put memories about weather in the same basket. It all seems difference than back in the day.