Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The recent Mothers Day Freeze which smashed cold records across the Midwest, East and South has not deterred Northern Illinois University from making an end of snow prediction.
Climate change could dramatically reduce U.S. snowstorms
by Northern Illinois University
MAY 26, 2020A new study led by Northern Illinois University scientists suggests American winters late this century could experience significant decreases in the frequency, intensity and size of snowstorms.
Under an unabated greenhouse gas emissions scenario, the study projects 28% fewer snowstorms on average per year over central and eastern portions of North America by the century’s last decade, with one-third the amount of snow or frozen precipitation and a 38% loss in average snowstorm size.
“If we do little to mitigate climate change, the winter season will lose much of its punch in the future,” said Walker Ashley, an NIU professor of meteorology and lead author of the study, published today (May 25) in Nature Climate Change.
“The snow season will start later and end earlier,” Ashley said. “Generally, what we consider an abnormally mild winter now, in terms of the number and intensity of snowstorms, will be the harshest of winters late this century. There will be fewer snowstorms, less overall precipitation that falls as snow and almost a complete removal of snow events in the southern tier of the United States.“
…
The study is believed to be the first to objectively identify and track individual snowstorm projections of the distant future—from minor snow accumulations, to average winter storms, to crippling blizzards.
…
Read more: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-climate-snowstorms.html
The abstract of the study;
Reduced frequency and size of late-twenty-first-century snowstorms over North America
Walker S. Ashley, Alex M. Haberlie & Vittorio A. Gensini
Nature Climate Change (2020) Cite this article
Understanding how snowstorms may change in the future is critical for estimating impacts on water resources and the Earth and socioeconomic systems that depend on them. Here we use snowstorms as a marker to assess the mesoscale fingerprint of climate change, providing a description of potential changes in winter weather event occurrence, character and variability in central and eastern North America under a high anthropogenic emissions pathway. Snowstorms are segmented and tracked using high-resolution, snow water equivalent output from dynamically downscaled simulations which, unlike global climate models, can resolve important mesoscale features such as banded snow. Significant decreases are found in the frequency and size of snowstorms in a pseudo-global warming simulation, including those events that produce the most extreme snowfall accumulations. Early and late boreal winter months show particularly robust proportional decreases in snowstorms and snow water equivalent accumulations.
Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0774-4
Climate alarmists just can’t seem to help themselves. Their most extreme models might hindcast absurdity, but climate alarmists choose to believe in their models anyway, so they follow where their models lead.
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“Here we use snowstorms as a marker to assess the mesoscale fingerprint of climate change, providing a description of potential changes in winter weather event occurrence, character and variability in central and eastern North America under a high anthropogenic emissions pathway.”
Shorter: If we assume global warming there will be less snow.
Well, duh!
Old.George said, “Shorter: If we assume global warming there will be less snow.”
Except when there’s more snow, which can be blamed on global warming, too, because there’s more water vapor in the atmosphere due to global warming. Gotcha both ways.
Stay safe and healthy, all.
Bob
I was hoping that similar and more up-to-date graphs would appear in this article. This is on the extreme weather page of WUWT:
– JPP
Increase your value by making simple tasks complicated:
Northern Illinois University would not gain from extrapolate the trend you pointed out, they prefer prefer the more flexible hindcast from the virtual future reality.
This technique profits from being much more complex and “scientific”, and will appeal to the Green investment, whereas a simple extrapolation of actual historic data can be done by a 5th grader.
So Northern Illinois University shouldn’t look at past data from 1967 to help predict the future – just rely on their NIU models
There are a lot of other graphs which show pretty much the same data.
Maybe they should get some input from the 5th grader.
Just sayin…
– JPP
there’s a rule in climate science….all predictions must be at least 50 years out
“late this century “
“The study projects 28% fewer snowstorms on average.” That could only be right if snowstorms were beneficial. Climate change is always for worse.
But think of all the tow truck drivers whose livelihoods will be threatened, like polar bears.
Think of the children . . .
“Children just won’t know what a Flexible Flyer is.”
I know, right, who’d seriously send their kids to Northern Illinois University?! https://www.daily-chronicle.com/2020/01/30/niu-first-college-in-illinois-to-eliminate-sat-act-scores-from-college-applications/am76bp2/
Think of all the children the tow truck drivers will have . . .
Models again. And “… under a high anthropogenic emissions pathway” means RPC 8.5?
Less snow and warmer winters mean fewer deaths
Winning!!!
Presumably Dr David Viner is a consultant or maybe Director of Studies
Thanks for the links, Krishna Gans.
Stay safe and healthy, all.
Bob
At midwinter the snow pack was 18% above average.
Of course, Crispin, a paper will come out showing that 18% has to be due to Global Warming.
Okay, in response I’ll set up my save lists for snow gear, winter clothes, and snow removal equipment. Betting the other way with informed science and taxpayer funded global data systems against agenda science and promotion is the plan. I can also read charts of medium and long term ocean temp cycles and solar cycles in a world that has apparently lost this skill.
:“If we do little to mitigate climate change, the winter season will lose much of its punch in the future,” said Walker Ashley, an NIU professor of meteorology and lead author of the study, published today (May 25) in Nature Climate Change.” So what happens if we do a lot to mitigate climate change? That’s if you believe in a warming climate change , so another addmission that climate change is a warming change,hence as you believe no snow, but your forecasting ahead by some 60 years, has not the last 3 winters in the USA seen record cold and snow, oh I get it previous predictions that we would see no snow again and the poles would of melted were wrong ,so now your extending the time frame by some 60 years , no addmission to this failed prediction but you will chuck another one in for good measure.
Of course this is convenient as a looming GSM is rolling in , no predictions for snow accumulations in the near future,not some 60 years into a hazy future. Another source of data disappearing.remove the data remove the predictions ( near future) no one to carry the can.
Maybe by that time, I can move back to Indiana from Florida and not freeze my a$$ off.
DonK31 . Hey all is good in Indiana, but it was a cold spring. Cutting grass three times a week in Indy.
There are still ‘scientists’ in the UK warning that ‘any day now’ we will see a dramatic uptick in BSE, with thousands of people dying form the disease. Of course the govt. needs to take action now to prepare for this for this imminent disaster.
Eat bugs, EU tells it’s healty 😀
Yes that number of BSE deaths was forecast by none other than Ferguson from Imperial – using his really reliable modeling skills
Well, we have seen a dramatic uptick in BS, have we not?
I think we have reached peak BS.
BS cannot reach a peak.
Yes there was an uptick on the BSE, (Bombay Stock Exchange), recently, but I think that’s really a good thing
O G … Now CC will make Less Severe weather as well
“pseudo-global warming simulations” projected to the 2090’s? Northern Illinois? This is delusional self-importance on a ludicrous scale. They can’t predict the weather next week and they can predict the climate change in the 2090’s? Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life on this planet! Doubt me? What does the autopsia of George Floyd say? No done yet, you say? You can’t ell this by watching CNN (please don’t goof on me-it’s the only English channel I get). Stay sane and safe (even if there is insanity all around you!).
“in a pseudo-global warming simulation”
…… just about says it all. Is today “Honesty Friday”?
Better to wait to verify the unsubstantiated unverifiable models at the end of the current century before spending any money… otherwise this is no different than Club of Rome predictions.
Sell those snowplows now while you still can.
Again, portraying RCP 8.5 as Most Likely scenario. Tip-off in description as “high anthropogenic emissions pathway”. Junk science. We ran a model.
Yes,”Under an unabated greenhouse gas emissions scenario…” RCP 8.5 strikes again!!!
If you watch close, if they are studying something “bad” they use rcp8.5
If they are studying increased plant growth due to CO2 they use the minimum level
Sure, why not. The distribution of PhDs, stipends, and other secular incentives are enough to sustain the rational, and plausible, if not actual chaos (“evolution”). Statistical inference interprets facts as truths, with accuracy limited by characterization of a proper frame of reference, assumptions, assertions, axioms, etc.
“In all cases, there were significant decreases in both seasonal snowstorm counts (k = 1.0, P < 0.001) and SWE totals (k = 0.92, P < 0.001) from the CTRL to PGW simulation.”
These climate science guys don’t read the same journals I do. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jembe.2015.09.010
“The necessity of reporting the results of regression diagnostics is stressed; contrary to widespread practice in marine ecology, R2 and p-values alone do not provide sufficient evidence to form conclusions.”
It don’t matter, warming causes more storms that causes more warming and so on ad infinitum~~~~~~~~
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/12/1920849117
Thirty-years or it’s weather. Also, fractional anomalies, inference, consensus, brown matter, really?
the winter season will lose much of its punch in the future,”
Is that supposed to be a bad thing???
Grew up in Philly–have lived in Texas (mostly) since 1964. Couldn’t stand those black piles of plowed snow where cars would normally park lasting sometimes (back then) well into March
Make sure you save this paper so that our grandchildren (or great great grandchildren) can wave it in their faces in 2090
Here in Oz we are rolling into winter and are having a bumper snow season which started back just after easter (not uncommon in my experience). This comes straight off the back of a record dry spell then the horrific bushfires of last spring and summer. Similarly the Murray-Darling river basin is full of water again for the first time in quite a while. No endless drought, no ‘our kids will never know what snow is’ etc. The common factor, besides cyclical weather patterns? Green loon predictions of climate disaster and no more rain etc. The facts are that Oz has had a trend over the last century or so of increasing rainfall except for SW Western Australia and Tasmania which are most affected by the Southern Ocean systems.
On a rtating planet, orbited by a moon and in turn orbiting a sun in company of a set of other planets, asteroids and other solar system detritus down to dust size particles at a whole range of periodicities and setting up all sorts of gravitational and other interactions is it any great wonder that the weather, which is a giant dynamic fluid system, exhibits cycles within cycles etc like the surface of the ocean with its spectrum of waves forming the sea state or is that too sciency for the eco loons?
Warmists/alarmists can models anything, no wonder their thinking and answers are modeled based replies.
They live in a matrix believing to live in the real world 😀
Rational, even plausible, impractical and incongruent with reality in their established frame of reference.
These ridiculous predictions need to be mirrored on their own page perhaps. Sorted by Date/facility.
OK…Less snow means less disruption to the economy, less salt on the roads, less snowplowing, fewer floods, and likely a drop in people dying from cold…Yup, that’s really scary.
Shorter snow season means longer growing season, more food and crops, and less energy used to try and stay warm…equally scary.
They have convinced me…bring on global warming!
But, but, but – less skiing, and lost jobs at the resorts. And, more importantly, if it becomes widespread, less snowpack in the Sierras, and California goes into a prolonged drought.
But it is California.
The only problem would be Californians leaving and Cali-fornicating the politics of other states.
We’ll need to build another wall.
Who said ‘less rain?’
I didn’t read the paper but to me this appears to be a good result projection. You don’t see many of those. Yes, I’m sure the media will find ways to spin it as bad, but clearly less cold and snow will mean less accidents on our highways, fewer pot holes, a longer growing season, less disease, etc. Isn’t this actually good news?
Not if it is forced through anthropogenic carbon dioxide… carbon emissions. Recall that the goal of Greens, environmentalists, and moderates is to decarbonize the economy. Cooling then warming then climate change are merely em-pathetic appeals.
Less snow at the end of this century???
Who here is gonna be around in 80 years to fact check this lie?
The climate scam now depends on such lies being long forgotten.
No longer are they making 20 year out climate divinations that can get falsified within people’s professional career spans.
I guess we should ignore this graph eh.
On the chance that the projection is correct, one question: Are those who inhabit northern climes at the end of this century expected to be upset?