Climate change is stealing New England's winters | Hacker News Reader

Climate change is stealing New England's winters

bostonglobe.com

25 pointsharambae23 comments

For everyone claiming this is great cause it’s less cold in the winter, it’s not just less cold on average it’s more chaotic. Just a week or two ago we went from 40s in New England to down to -30s with windchill and even -100 on one New Hampshire mountain. Then it was the 40s again a few days later.

Humans might be able to weather that chaos with our shelters but the plants and animals are having havoc wreaked on them with wild temperature swings like that. Especially when you have swings going from 60s to below freezing and back. I already saw certain trees by me start budding twice as they reacted to the warm weather with thinking it’s spring. They’re not dead yet but they wasted a large amount of energy on failed leaf growth that’s made them unhealthy. Then theirs the insects whose life cycles typically require storing honey and going into a low energy state or storing eggs that hatch come the warm weather. If those get totally wiped out by wild weather swings we’ll see several tropic layers of species die off as they are supported by the energy from feeding off those insects.

Is there a good metric that we can use to quantify changes in weather volatility over time? I'm thinking of something like the VIX stock market index, but for regional weather.

FWIW the NH mountain (Mt. Washington) is a freak of nature and its experiences don't generalize to New England as a whole.

It was a freak of nature driven by climate change. And the -30 did generalize across New England from mass to Maine at least.

It was cold enough in downtown Boston that a woman froze to death walking a few blocks home, to say nothing of all the homeless people whose deaths probably went unremarked in the media.

>For everyone claiming this is great cause it’s less cold in the winter, it’s not just less cold on average it’s more chaotic. Just a week or two ago we went from 40s in New England to down to -30s with windchill and even -100 on one New Hampshire mountain. Then it was the 40s again a few days later.

So basically the headline is wrong. It should say "climate change is making New England winters a chaotic nightmare", not "stealing" them. We really should get away from this "global warming" phrase: people in overly-cold places like New England or Minnesota or Edmonton would be happy to have warmer winters, but not the extremes you describe.

“Between 1896 and 2021, winters in Massachusetts have warmed by 4.5 degrees”

How much has it changed since Carl Sagan addressed Congress in 1985?

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI

He told us that coal would be a big problem, and he nailed it.

It is just beyond me how people still til recently and even now denied any human impact as we dumped large amounts of what has been stored away over millions of years into the ground by processes that don't exist anymore.. just by the most simple reasoning ... how (:

There's barely been any snow the past 3 or 4 years. I don't mind it. But the climate does feel very different than it did in the 80's and 90's growing up.

Yup. In Ontario, it feels like something is broken. Most of Jan and Feb was above freezing. Usually there’s only a handful of days above freezing.

In BC, seems we in a late cold snap.

Going from highs of 12s one week ago, to possibly some snow and highs of 0 degrees celsius next week at end of February and early March.

We use to get big dumps of snow, only a few times, maybe none/once in nov-jan.

Last year it snowed like twice, this year 8 or 9 times as already(I am at a higher hillside elevation).

And last summer we had record highs.

My spot in AB was down to -46C for a minute in December, and then like +5C last week. Turns everything into a hellish ice-scape when the pendulum swings back, too.

Thankfully that -40C weather lasted long enough to kill off the pine beetles and ticks, but it's definitely spooky.

I remember trick or treating as a kid in snow. Haven't seen that in ages.

There really hasn't been much snow since the 2015 where Boston had 3 ~25-30" storms in a row.

Bing Crosby's got his work cut out.

40 years of doing nothing about emissions and somehow nothing has been done about emissions. Who knew?

Whoa there, we've certainly done plenty about emissions! Unfortunately in the wrong direction.

https://archive.is/fqII4

There has never been a blizzard like the Blizzard of 78 since 1978.

The winter of 2014- 2015 was super snowy, though no individual storm matched ‘78.

‘78 was also bad because it was not properly forecast

Would love it if climate change could steal some of my northern ontario winter, please and thank you.

And honestly its cause for celebration for me as a New Yorker.

A warmer winter is generally more pleasant. There are both costs and benefits to global warming, and the benefits are underplayed in the media because it is feared that doing so will undermine support for efforts to reduce global warming. Many more people die from very cold than very hot weather, so warming should reduce the number of weather-related deaths.

My sense is that the benefits will mostly flow to the rich countries in the temperature north, and the costs will mostly flow to the much poorer tropical countries.

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