Snow shortage threatens Alps with wet winter season
bbc.com
bbc.com
This is just the "normal" heatwave now over Europe that occurs in winter.
Now, it’s getting cold again but even if it remains cold it’s too late to build up a decent snow cover for skiing.
So, IMHO, not really a bad thing in the long run.
Yes, many of these places currently rely on tourism as their primary source of income. So yes, they will have to change and find other sources or accept that people move away from these places.
I live in Switzerland. This year, we had mosquitos on January 1st. WTF?
It was 14 degrees during the day on 31 Dec. 20 years ago it was unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year.
Example: in my home city the winters have been getting warmer on average pretty drastically. I'm in my mid-twenties, around the time of my birth the average winter weather YoY was still cold enough to freeze the sound (not the audio one) near my home deep and hard enough anyone could walk nearly the whole width from one bank to the other. During my early childhood we had ~0.5m of snow nearly all winter but I can't remember having even a "white christmas" since I was ~14. Even this winter we had like 10-15cm of snow total, most of which melted as soon as hit the ground, a layer of ~5cm stayed for around a week a bit before christmas. The holidays themself were cold (not freezing) and it rained almost the entire time.
OP could have given a long, complex nuanced statement to appease pedants like "Due to climate change making warm weather and lack of snow in January far more likely than in the past, there was in fact warm weather and lack of snow during my planned trip, so I had to cancel my plans. The odds of this happening without decades of carbon emissions from fossil fuels would have been very unlikely".
Or, you can skip all that excessive cruft which is understood by almost everyone as being implicit and just say due to climate change.
Which it's true, it was stupid then to take a cold snap as "climate change is fake lol", but it's also stupid now to take a warm spell as "we are doomed climate chaaange".
This is one of those widely spread Mandela effect-style misconceptions.
The chances of a white Christmas in the UK are around 10%, and depending where you are in the US [0], especially if you consider the population density not pictured in that chart, even lower.
Humans generally hugely overestimate how often a white Christmas actually happens due to selection bias.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(weather)#/med...
Why do you assume the OP is in the UK or US? We’re discussing climate and weather in the Alps; there are plenty of places in Europe where a white Christmas really was not unusual.
To live anywhere where to quote OP "it [would be] unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year" would basically mean living in a skiable country itself, so I did do a lot of assuming there.
But then I don't ski. I wouldn't know if skiers take vacations around the world to see different snow.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei%C3%9Fe_Weihnachten_(Wetter...
Those around the Mediterranean, who’ve lived through 46°C last summer? Even England was miserably hot. Nobody wants it to get any hotter.
They did break records on the Atlantic side, with 43°C near Bordeaux and 40°C in Brittany (!)
> Winters did get warmer, and I don't see how that's a bad thing.
It is terrible for several reasons, for example:
- the plant’s cycles are out of whack, with flowers in January that are then destroyed by frost in March
- pests and parasites are not killed by the frost in the winter, which leads to a whole bunch of them in both spring and summer. Look at what this is doing to forests in California.
And that’s considering only local effects. Ecosystems are getting destroyed in real time in the mountains and in the Arctic, where the ground is not permanently frozen anymore, leading to all sorts of fun things (landslides, methane release, wildfires).
There are absolutely no upsides near the Mediterranean, where it never was particularly cold in the first place.
My canton uses nearly all renewables, but price increases are still predicted, mine are far less than other cantons, but it still goes up because of grid costs
/s
If this ""winter"" continues like that I believe we will even use less gas/coal than previous years.. not sure why you think this year is record-setting.. we just switched to different sources?