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winter
The Year Without a Winter
We’ve just come through the warmest December and January ever measured globally, and February seems certain to follow.
Mar 01, 2024
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.
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I'm Dreaming of a Warm Christmas
I was left—winter-bundled in my own house—to ponder with awe how fully I take warmth and comfort for granted.
Dec 29, 2022
2:00 am. Boink! My eyes pop open. It's Christmas Eve, but it's not that I just heard Santa wandering through the house. It's far more banal: gotta use the bathroom. I crawl out of bed, step bare-assed into... oh my God... a learning experience.
Another one!
The heat was off. The furnace had shut down. And it was below-zero outside—apparently way below zero. The previous day, weather advisories had flowed in: lots of snow, cold as hell. And now here I was, naked in a house that had lost its heat. Uh... now what?
He left me with a space heater, which was capable of heating up about a foot of space in the house, and I spent the rest of Christmas Eve wedged next to it and covered with a blanket, staring at my computer.
Step one, of course, was to complete my intended task: go to the bathroom, which I did. But at 2:00 am, I couldn't envision any further productive action. I crawled back into bed, pulling the covers around me. I fell back to sleep, returned to the coziness of dreaming, at least for a while. But eventually I got up for real. Getting dressed didn't stop with putting my clothes on. I also wrapped myself in a winter jacket. Then I called the furnace guys. Problem solved, right?
Well, not exactly. This was Christmas Eve, after all: aka, Saturday, December 24. Turns out people throughout the Chicago area were having furnace problems and initially the person I talked to said she couldn't schedule an appointment for me till... good God, Monday. But she said she could also put me on a waiting list—if there's a cancellation or whatever, a technician might be able to work me in.
That was the best I could do, and I was left—winter-bundled in my own house—to ponder with awe how fully I take warmth and comfort for granted. Without warmth and comfort, I'm not free to be bored! I'm not free to be self-indulgent, annoyed, or even depressed, much less opinionated and politically angry. I just stood there shivering and staring into the unknown. Finally (warning: I'm about to reveal how complex my life is, at age 76) I decided that I might as well drive over to Walgreens and pick up the prescription they have waiting for me. I had nothing else to do.
It was on this brief journey, a mile and a half from my house, that I first felt a penetration of awareness—or something. Life amounts to more than just me.
Come on! I already know this. Nonetheless...
I parked my car in the lot, walked 20 feet through the frigid weather to the drugstore, and there was a guy... there was a guy... just sitting on the sidewalk next to the revolving door, a Styrofoam cup in his hand. He needed money on this below-zero day and he was sitting on the sidewalk. My brain swirled in confused empathy. I put a dollar in his cup.
Somehow I felt... what? Connected to his plight? I had been shivering that morning as well. We're all one? I picked up my prescription and, as l left the store, I dug into my empathy and gave him another five dollars.
That was it. I headed home, beset with a sense of collective guilt. Something big is wrong here, right? Even though I already knew this, my awareness in this moment felt, for God's sake, different: not merely abstract, but physical.
And shortly after I got home I was informed that a technician was on the way. Wow! Now I felt great. And all that collective guilt vanished as I prepared to reclaim "normalcy." Alas, it didn't happen quite that easily. Since this was Christmas Eve, the technician did not have access to the new motor that my furnace needed, and he shrugged: He'd have to come back on Tuesday. And suddenly I was catapulted back into a sense of shivering victimhood.
He left me with a space heater, which was capable of heating up about a foot of space in the house, and I spent the rest of Christmas Eve wedged next to it and covered with a blanket, staring at my computer. Ah, life! That night I stacked about 10 blankets on the bed and crawled in without removing anything except my shoes. The house temperature by then was in the low 40s, but the blankets and multi-layers of clothing kept me warm enough to sleep.
The next day was Christmas. Ta-da! "We wish you an ironic Christmas," ran the song in my noggin. Because of unusual circumstances, I had no particular plans that day. I had already celebrated an early Christmas in Wisconsin, with my sister and her family, and I was just planning to hang out, surf the Internet, ponder life, and (maybe) write something profound and change the world. I did have one actual plan: to call my daughter, Alison, the artist who lives in Paris. We talked, via FaceTime, and she saw her dad dressed as though he were calling from Antarctica. I tried to make it seem funny—I simply didn't want anyone to be concerned. But for some reason she was concerned.
And so she called her aunt—my sister-in-law—who a short while later called me and invited me over. Uh... I was momentarily hesitant as I sat wedged next to the space heater, but quickly felt the lure of warmth and normalcy. "Gosh, thanks! I'll be there." I packed my toothbrush, some socks, and underwear, whatever, and headed off to Skokie, to the home of my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. Apparently, I'm not quite the lone wolf I think of myself as. Their invite began warming me before I felt the heat of their house. And suddenly the irony disappeared from Christmas.
I spent the rest of Christmas and all day Monday being happily part of their lives, then returned home on Tuesday. The technician came a little after 9:00 am, installed the new motor—which was under warranty, so it cost me nothing—and for the rest of the day the house began warming up from 40°F. End of story.
Except... no way is it the end of the story. For instance:
"As people across the country brace for upcoming cold weather, many of those set to suffer the most are incarcerated in prisons and jails," writes Katie Rose Quandt at Truthout. "Each winter, people in old, drafty facilities shiver for months in their cells, struggling to function and fearing for their health. They have no control over cell temperature, and often little access to warm clothes or extra blankets. Inevitably, some outdated heating systems across the country will fail, leaving people in dangerously frigid temperatures."
And that's just one piece of it—men, women, children caught in the lethal cold, caught well beyond their own control, without hope, without space heaters, across the country, at our borders, around the world. I sigh into my own private warmth.
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