The Year Without a Winter

I don’t write that often about developments in the actual climate in these pages—it’s uniformly depressing, and it is the part we can do the least about. None of us has the power to change how much heat a molecule of carbon dioxide traps, nor can we alter how the jet stream reacts to changes in polar temperatures. All we can do is determine how much carbon dioxide and methane there is up there in the air—and so that’s what I concentrate on.

And yet the changes underway on our planet are now so extreme, and so remarkable, that sometimes we do need to stand back and simply gaze in awe and sadness. At my latitude (43.97 degrees north, or very nearly halfway between the North Pole and the equator) the changes in winter may be the most dramatic signs yet. And the most dramatic in my heart for sure, because winter is the time I love the most.

We are bleeding away the chill that is one of the hallmarks of our planet.

This year in North America has been about as close as we’ve ever come to a year without a winter—the geological obverse of 1816, the year when an Indonesian volcano put so much sulfur into the air that there was no real northern hemisphere summer. We’re the volcano now, and the gases we produce increase the temperature: it was 70°F in Chicago Tuesday, in February—which was also the day that the Windy City decided to join other American cities in suing the fossil fuel industry for damages. But that was just one of a hundred heat records broken in the course of the day, from Milwaukee to Dallas (94°F). But it wasn’t a single day of heat—it’s been an almost unrelentingly warm winter, with by far the lowest snow coverage for this time of year ever recorded (13.8% of the lower 48 as of Monday, compared with an average of more than 40%) and with the Great Lakes essentially free of ice.

We can surmise that this year’s puny winter has something to do with the strong El Niño in the Pacific, but of course the far deeper problem is the ongoing warming of the Earth—we’ve just come through the warmest December and January ever measured globally, and February seems certain to follow. There simply is a smaller supply of cold air in the Arctic than ever before. As The Washington Post put it on Tuesday:

The amount of cold air above the Northern Hemisphere this winter is near a record low, an unambiguous signal of the planet’s warming climate, according to a new analysis of 76 years of temperature data from about a mile above the ground.

The depleted cold-air supply means blasts of Arctic air generally lack the vigor of the past, while incursions of unusually mild weather—such as the one swelling over the central United States now—can be more frequent and intense.

The cold-air supply in the Northern Hemisphere is being evaluated using temperature data from about 5,000 feet high in the atmosphere. For about a decade, Jonathan Martin, a professor of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, has analyzed the size of the cold pool at this level—or the area of the hemisphere covered by temperatures at or below 23°F (minus-5 Celsius).

We are bleeding away the chill that is one of the hallmarks of our planet.

That comes with serious pragmatic consequences. In the high Arctic, previously unheard-of thunderstorms are melting ice faster than ever. As Ed Struzik reported last week from Greenland, “surface crevassing, which allows water to enter into the interior of the icecap, is accelerating, thanks to rapid melting. And slush avalanches, which mobilize large volumes of water-saturated snow, are becoming common: In 2016, a rain-on-snow event triggered 800 slush avalanches in West Greenland.”

Further south, those record winter temperatures let forests and grasslands dry out fast. That’s why Canada’s boreal forest burned at a record rate last summer, and it’s why huge blazes are driving Texans for cover today—the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Panhandle, which only started Monday, is already the largest blaze in the state’s history; it forced the evacuation of the country’s biggest plant for disassembling nuclear weapons.

The higher latitudes need the annual rest that winter provides. It’s how these places—and the creatures in them—evolved. In Maine, which has the largest moose herd in the lower 48, 90% of calves died last winter because they were sucked dry by ticks that can now last all winter long. Biologists find moose with 90,000 ticks; they rub their hair off trying to shed the pests. “Ghost moose” is what they call these hairless beasts. You can’t have the Earth that we’ve known without some cold at the north and south; it’s functionally required, a part of the Pleistocene.

It’s not functionally required that we be able to glide across the surface of the Earth—but losing that is a deeply human cost, at least for some of us. Winter is the most whimsical season by far: Nature releases friction for a time, and all of a sudden you can skim across the ground. I was in Minneapolis two weeks ago for the Nordic skiing world cup race—the first held in the U.S. in a quarter century—and two days beforehand the first substantial snowfall of the Minnesota winter rescued the proceedings, letting 20,000 people come out for a stinging cold day to watch the fittest athletes on earth sail across the trail. This weekend I’ll be helping man the finish line here in Vermont as 700 little kids from around New England show up for the annual cross-country festival at our local ski area. Or at least I hope it will—it was pouring rain Wednesday afternoon, and the forecast for race day is 55°F.

All of which is to say that the impact of the climate crisis is psychological as well as physical. The deepest patterns of our lives—the ways our bodies understand the cycle of the seasons and the progress of time—are now slipping away. The fight to slow the warming of the planet is the fight to save billions of people and millions of species, but it’s also the fight to hold on to profound beauty and profound meaning, not to mention sheer gorgeous powdery magic.