Environmental Talk

“Hey, gang! Next year let’s have a bad climate model party….”

Someone got me a subscription to E Magazine for Christmas. E Magazine is a lot like Parade Magazine except it features issues about the environment instead of ads for collectible hand-painted Garfield figurines.

The cover story of the first issue I ever received was “Losing Winter: As Climate Change Takes Hold, Our Coldest Season is the First Casualty.”

There were gloomy predictions of shortened snowboarding seasons and snowmobile makers going out of business. On the plus side, at least they were talking about people rather than worrying about polar bears.

Still, its hard to manufacture a crisis when the worst thing you can say about climate change is that it could limit your choice of leisure time activities.

The E Magazine article was full of people taking matters into their own hands. “Marshall Heaven of Greenwich, Connecticut got tired of waiting for the snow to fall, so he bought two Backyard Blizzard snowmakers and can now promise 15-foot drifts as early as late November.”

I guess it might be fun to confuse the crap out of the local squirrel population, but other than that it’s hard for me to fathom why someone would go to these kind of lengths to try to insure that every one of his winters always followed the same pattern.

What we’re finding out in the great global warming rhubarb is that all climate is local. While we’re lamenting lack of rain in Georgia, the Pacific Northwest is getting inundated with precipitation. While Artic ice is melting, ice in Antarctica is setting records for growth and coverage.

So, it’s probably not surprising that E Magazine went to great lengths to trumpet the fact we’re “Losing Winter,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration came out with the following facts this week:

- The average temperature across both the contiguous U.S. and the globe during climatological winter (December 2007-February 2008) was the coolest since 2001

- During January alone, 170 inches of snow fell at the Alta ski area near Salt Lake City, Utah, more than twice the normal amount for the month, eclipsing the previous record of 168 inches that fell in 1967

- Mountain snowpack exceeded 150 percent of average in large parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oregon at the end of February. Spring run-off from the above average snowpack in the West is expected to be beneficial in drought plagued areas

As the first buds of spring start to pop out here in the Northeast, many people will decide it’s a good time to put their sweaters in a plastic bin to be put in storage for another year.

If there’s room, you may want to throw some climate models and a couple of back issues of E Magazine in there, too.

Despite their repeated ability to forecast anything other than embarrassment for their designers, the models and the gloomy headlines are sure to be unpacked again next year.