Essay by Eric Worrall
Record breaking cold in China, Russia and Europe doesn’t count, because “sleddable” deep snow hasn’t fallen in New York’s Central Park for 650 days.
Missing the feeling of a white Christmas? That might be solastalgia.
Finally, a term that explains the sadness of a whole season — and a way of life — melting before our eyes.
By Anna North Dec 21, 2023, 7:00am EST
A snowy winter in New York City brings with it a kind of magic. The air goes crisp, then bitter, and fragile snowflakes sift down in the early dark, silvering the trees and blanketing the sledding hills in the parks. After the first big snow, children and adults alike rush out to make snowmen, creations that delight passersby for the next two frigid months, until the snow finally thaws. When I took my older son, then a toddler, out for his first-ever sledding session, he squealed with awe at the crystalline world before him, shouting, “It looks like Frozen!”
Today he’s 5, and I doubt he remembers what sledding feels like. It’s been more than 650 days since Central Park, where snow is measured daily, got more than an inch of snowfall at one time; last winter, the park got just 2.3 inches in total, less than one-tenth the normal amount. In early December, Brooklyn saw a few anemic flurries, and my son told me excitedly that his friends had tried to build a snowman during recess. But there was nowhere near enough material to work with. They settled for “a pile of snowflakes.”
This sense of winter melting away before our eyes is not unique to New York: While blazing-hot summers and stormy autumns come with their own dangers, scientists say winter is actually the fastest-warming season. Snowfall is decreasing across the Northeast, the flakes slowly replaced by raindrops. The Great Lakes have experienced a 22 percent drop in maximum ice cover since 1973, and are frozen for a shorter percentage of the year. In December 2022, Utqiagvik, the northernmost city in Alaska, posted its warmest winter temperature ever at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, a full 36 degrees above the frigid average for that time of year.
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Read more: https://www.vox.com/culture/24001256/snow-winter-climate-change-solastalgia-warming
New York may have enjoyed a few years of mild winters, but other parts of the world stretching from Europe and Russia to China have been experiencing extreme and in some cases record breaking cold, so I suggest the assertion that winter has disappeared is probably a little premature.
In 2012 the VOX reporter who wrote the article above published a novel “America Pacifica“, about political intrigue in the colony of the last survivors of an extreme ice age, a new snowball Earth.
The reporter doesn’t seem to have published any novels about the grim survivors of our coming age of warmer beach weather. Perhaps warm weather isn’t scary enough for a dramatic novel.
