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#LookItUp: Northern hemisphere historical snow cover

15 Jan 2025 | Science Notes

Ah the snows of yesteryear. Where have they gone? Perhaps your aging alarmist auntie complains that before the climate crisis she used to walk through blizzards half the year and snow drifts up to her ears all winter. Of course memory does play tricks, and we tend to remember the winters that stood out for their intense cold and heavy snowfall. And if you grew up in the country and later migrated to a city you lost a lot of snow cover due to urban heat island effects, not climate change. So we need to look up the data. And if you and your auntie want to know what the trend looks like you can, thanks to this week’s entry in our #lookitup series, the Rutgers University Climate Lab.

Here is the Northern Hemisphere winter record from 1967 to the present:

Some years are snowier than others. But the overall trend is slightly upwards which makes it odd that people whose professional credibility depends on the accuracy of their climate coverage will tell us dogmatically that it’s vanishing.

To be fair, Northern Hemisphere spring snow coverage is trending downwards:

But before anybody yells “Aha! Climate Change!” take a look at the fall:

Oops, upward again. Somewhere the climate alarmist crowd is working on an explanation why global warming means more snow, whereas less snow proves the climate crisis is upon us.

5 comments on “#LookItUp: Northern hemisphere historical snow cover”

  1. The climate alarmists can say whatever they want because the intellectual curiosity of the public is waning near zero. Everything you need to know is on your favorite podcast without regard to who the disseminator is. To those without intellectual curiosity everyone is an expert. Little attention is paid to researchers who attempt to put the record straight…..to boring to waste time reading

  2. To be fair, climate is a meaningless historical construct. Humans, and the rest of the animal kingdom, care about what the weather is right now. That is what your survival is dependent on. No one knows what the climate will be 100 years from now, and can only estimate what it was 100 years ago. Life adapts, to the extent possible, on what the weather is now and that determines if we are around in next year. The goal of the climate religion is to destroy human civilization as it currently exits, to the extent that religion persists and expands will have a large impact on the survival of the human species. Given how dependent humans have become on the fossil fuel energy dependent civilization we now live in, it isn’t clear that destroying that fossil fuel energy dependence, and the vast shortfall in energy required to run the modern civilization, will be survivable for the species—it certainly will not be survivable with the current population. What will not have any impact on the survival of the human species is how the actual climate changes, which is easily adapted to be the current human civilization, assuming it can survive.

  3. I see only normal long-term variation overall in the snow extent.Like every other weather and climate-related event recorded.Odd that 1981's winter snow extent seems very low.This is many years before climate alarmism wormed its way into the political,journalistic,and scientific communities.Ironic too that just a couple years earlier,these SAME bodies were pushing a possible new Ice Age within a very few generations.

  4. The area of snow cover data, did not mention the depth of cover.
    On Halloween day in 1982 our street in Calgary was completely covered in packed snow. It was very cold walking with my daughter. It is much milder now. That year the tip of the Athabasca Glacier was much nearer to the highway than it is today. It has receded a great deal since then and lost a great amount of volume. Therefore, I observe there has been a warming trend (most likely for natural reasons).
    "Post Glacial Sea Level Rise" data indicates that the rate of sea level rise has slowed to a crawl since the Ice Age glaciers receded and the ocean levels rose dramatically thousands of years ago. It appears we a nearing a point of equilibrium, where the edges of the Arctic and Antarctic ice co-exist with the sea. There are many factors affecting earth's temperature, but taken together they culminate in sea level. Sea levels are very difficult to measure. Is the sea rising or are the earth's plates sinking / rising? Satellite systems are attempting to find out. Can we trust the results of these studies from agencies funded by political bodies?
    If governments weren't trying to scare us with piecemeal information, they would spend taxpayers' billions and trillions on desalination plants to compensate for reduced fresh water flows from the worlds rivers. That should take care of the world until the next ice age cometh.

  5. It is always interesting to me that the "follow the science" crowd is not doing that be following the scientific data! Without data this so called science of climate change is little more than a fairy tale designed to frighten children!

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