Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow…

I remember listening to NPR a decade back when they had a news report detailing the loss of snow in the mountains that would shut down most ski slopes in Europe and America.  They lamented the loss of a key recreational business even as they picked on us for not believing that it could ever happen.  Before you assume that I’m just a vindictive right-winger, I’ll note that in a similar timeframe they had a stellar report on how New Orleans would be an utter mess if a cat5 hurricane ever hit it, which unfortunately Katrina’d it’s way into existence later.

But to the point, is the snow really going away?  Well, here’s a report that says no.

The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall – a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.

John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have increased the effects of global warming.

The heaping piles of snow that fell in the Sierra last winter and the paltry amounts this year fall within the realm of normal weather variability, he concluded.

Now honestly, one report is not definitive on either side.  Here, though, is a counter-point that can be made whenever anyone starts saying how all the “weird weather” is indicative of the fact that humans should be exterminated from the planet if the planet is to survive.

Should we attempt to curb pollutants and gasses in the air that might affect us?  Yes.  Should we do it so forcefully that business can’t survive?  No.  Between those two points is a happy medium that needs debate.  I have no problem with the sides that people take in that debate, just how “settled” they claim the science really is.

Recent studies by Scripps scientists have found that over the last 50 years the southern Sierra snowpack has gotten larger while the northern Sierra pack has shrunk. Although they have predicted the overall state snowpack would decrease over time as a result of climate change, nobody has claimed that it has happened yet, Dettinger said.

What’s significant in terms of global warming, he said, is the fact that the snowpack has declined over three quarters of the western United States, an area that includes Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico. Scripps researchers, in coordination with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, have concluded that 60 percent of that downward trend is due to greenhouse gases.

So the counterpoint is also potentially valid, and I enjoy the scientific debate when nobody’s screaming about carbon nazis.  Let’s hope it continues that way.