Let It Snow

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/opinion/snow-climate-change.html

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HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — It used to snow here. Not all the time. Not like Vermont or the Adirondacks in upstate New York, where it snows on and off all winter, barely registering a mention at the corner store.

But in Westchester County, N.Y., and other parts of the Northeast, you could reliably turn the calendar from November to December and know that if there was going to be precipitation, it would probably arrive in the form of snow, not rain. Now it only seems to rain. This winter the rain has been so unrelenting that mud season has stretched across the once-frigid months of January and February.

Sure, we had one good snowfall, on Jan. 18, with a few inches of accumulation that lasted a couple of days. But as recently as 10 or 15 years ago, our children could expect a handful of snow days a year, sometimes using up their five-day allotment. (This winter the school district has yet to use one.) And the occasional blizzard would reliably bury our yards and streets under two or three feet of snow.

I used to document those snow events for The New York Times, where I often had the task of writing the weather story from my perch in the White Plains bureau. On March 7, 2003, my opening on one such article was simply “Ugh.” It wasn’t just that it was snowing in March, but that it had already snowed so many times that winter that Central Park had recorded 45 inches, double the seasonal snowfall average then of 22 inches. So far this winter, Central Park has recorded just 4.8 inches.

With climate change startling the world with its acceleration in recent years, a lack of snowfall is admittedly among the least of anyone’s worries. Australia’s people and animals succumbed to horrendous fires that burned an area roughly the size of South Korea. Fearsome heat waves swept across Europe; in France, nearly 1,500 died. Catastrophic floods ravaged Southeast Asia. It is a taste of the world we have sown with runaway carbon emissions.

Still, winters without snow should be noted, and mourned, at least in my small corner of the globe, about five miles north of New York City. When merchants and shoppers make small talk about the luck of a 60-degree day in January, I pipe up that it’s not luck, but climate change. While others excitedly share photos of crocuses in bloom in early February, well ahead of schedule, I wince.

When clumps of snowdrop flowers appear prematurely next to my driveway, their comely blossoms a harbinger of spring, I think of all the other mismatches unfolding in nature. Mild winters are unable to beat back invasive pests like the hemlock woolly adelgid, many of which will die off only at 4 or 5 degrees below zero. Some songbirds heading north on their annual migrations, governed by changes in light, will arrive too late for the feast of insects whose emergence is set off by warmer temperatures.

I realize that one year does not signal a shift in climate, which is marked by 30-year trends in temperature and precipitation, and that climate is not to be confused with weather. But worldwide, each of the last five years was among the five hottest ever recorded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the last two decades have included 19 of the warmest years since record keeping began.

Some parts of the country have already reached the ominous threshold of a 2-degree Celsius rise in temperature, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. That is the point beyond which, many scientists say, cataclysmic and irreversible changes in climate will occur, and that the Paris climate agreement (the one President Trump is withdrawing us from) aimed to keep the world below.

The Washington Post last year reported that a tenth of the planet has already warmed by at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit since the mid-to-late 19th century, including my county in southern New York as well as all of New York City.

The decline in snow in the New York region in the past decade has not run in a straight line, and it’s possible this year will turn out to be a bizarre outlier. But if you look at the five-year period from 2010 to 2014 in Central Park and contrast it with the five-year period ending this winter, you’ll see that the average annual snowfall dropped to 26 inches from 40, or 35 percent. In addition, both this winter and last saw the smallest amounts of snowfall since 2011.

Perhaps more alarming is a fact unearthed by the Weather Channel in a Feb. 23 report on this strangely snowless winter: In Central Park since Dec. 1, there had been “more 60-plus degree days than below-freezing days.”

So the snow might not be coming back — at least not in its historic abundance — and the joys of my children’s very recent childhood (they are now 18 and 21) might continue to recede in memory.

Those joys were visceral. Yes, snow stings and turns gray and complicates commuting. But when it is new and fresh, there is nothing sweeter: walking through a light snow, the usual sounds magically muffled; experiencing the vicarious thrill of a child’s first sledding expedition; seeing a cardinal alight on a bird feeder, red against white; striking up a conversation with a neighbor shoveling on a street where interaction is limited or nonexistent; lighting a fire as snow swirls outside.

These are the moments I will miss as we move deeper into a warming world. Bill McKibben, the climate activist and author of several books on climate change, recently told a conference in Manhattan that we cannot solve this problem “one Prius at a time.” But I am nonetheless taking ownership of the climate crisis (or climate emergency, as some prefer), vowing never again to buy a car that uses gasoline and signing a contract this month with a solar company to install panels on our roof. It is surely too little, and probably too late. But if nothing else, it is my homage to the snow.

Lisa W. Foderaro, a former reporter for The Times, is a freelance writer.

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