Where Did the Snow Go?

Almost no one in the United States experienced a white Christmas. Ski areas in the West are closed. The Great Lakes began the year with the lowest amount of ice in at least 50 years. Midwesterners are jogging in T-shirts in the dead of winter.

Record warmth and changing precipitation patterns mean most of the United States is not getting its usual snowfall.

The balmy start to winter isn’t just hurting skiers and ice fisherman: The snow that blankets mountain ranges in winter serves as a vital reservoir, cooling rivers, propelling hydropower systems and feeding irrigation channels needed for the nation’s apples, blueberries and almonds.

It is also giving many a new appreciation for living in a time of rapid planetary warming.

“It’s a big cultural shift to experience 50 yesterday and how disorienting that is from a geographic perspective,” Jessica Hellmann, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, told my colleagues Ernesto Londoño and Michael Levenson (50 degrees Fahrenheit is about 10 Celsius). “It’s a visceral feeling of what climate change looks and feels like for people who are accustomed to living in a particular climate.”

In the Northeast, a warm start to winter is starting to feel normal. Last year, New York City didn’t see any meaningful snowfall. It has now been nearly 700 days since Central Park registered an inch of snow.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “total snowfall has decreased in many parts of the country since widespread observations became available in 1930, with 57 percent of stations showing a decline.”

Weather is complicated, and there’s no single factor that can explain why it is that so little snow is falling in the U.S. these days. But it’s clear that the combination of record heat driven in part by man-made emissions and an El Niño that began last year are major factors.

‘What we expected’

Let’s start with the heat. The hottest year in recorded history was 2023, and large areas of the United States experienced searing, sustained temperatures.

Judson Jones, a reporter and meteorologist for The Times, said it was no surprise that the overall warming trend has continued into the winter months.

“When the winter is warmer, there’s less likelihood that you’ll get snow,” he told me.

Real time data from the Department of Agriculture shows that, across vast parts of the Western U.S., the snow pack is more than 50 percent below normal.

The onset of El Niño, a naturally occurring phenomenon that sees the Pacific Ocean release huge amounts of heat, also had meteorologists expecting an unusual year of weather.

“It’s kind of what we expected,” Judson told me. “Because of this current El Niño pattern, we expected less precipitation, especially where you would normally see it across the central U.S.”

To be clear, the rain is still falling, but it’s concentrated further south, especially in the Southeastern United States. And when precipitation has moved north, the temperatures have been relatively balmy.

“These big storms that are often called Nor’easters haven’t materialized this year,” Judson said. “The cold air just hasn’t been in place.”

‘Be patient’

Winter is not over, of course, and the weather could change.

The right mixture of Arctic air coming in from the north and moisture surging up from the south could yet deliver major snowfall. But that combination is increasingly what Judson called a “Goldilocks window.”

In fact, forecasters are predicting that this weekend may bring the first meaningful snow of the year to the Northeast.

“It has to be the perfect place,” he said. “The cold air has to be just right. And if that happens, you can get some big snows.”

Indeed, in the event that a major snowstorm does materialize, it could be a doozy. Warmer air holds more moisture, and just as we’ve seen rainstorms dumping more water in a short amount of time, the same could be true for a blizzard.

“Be patient,” Judson said. “It may just be fewer but bigger storms that dump more snow.”

The prescient posters of the environmental movement

The graphic artists tried to warn us.

Their posters aimed to scare people straight with pictures of ecological ruin. Or, they glorified nature, clean air and water, sunshine and verdure.

An exhibition at Poster House in Manhattan demonstrates these visual and rhetorical styles, and how they reflect the evolving movement’s shifting strategies.

This is the environmental movement as a marketing problem. First, people must know about your product. Then, you must persuade them that they need it. In the earliest works, a healthy planet seems like a self-evident good.

But as the years pass, it starts to feel like consciousness-raising isn’t enough. The tone of the posters acidifies. An austere illustration by Yen-chang Cheng and Hung-yu Chen from 2008 features a baby polar bear floating on its mother’s corpse.

The posters show some of the hidden forces behind famous advertising campaigns. The famous “crying shame” ad promoted by the Keep America Beautiful group was actually sponsored by a consortium of beverage companies who wanted to shift the onus of pollution to litterbugs and away from disposable packaging. (The actor in the ad was actually Italian American.)

Likewise, the idea of a carbon footprint, which makes individual consumers the problem rather than fossil fuels, is the invention of Ogilvy & Mather, hired by BP in 2004. — Travis Diehl

Read the full story here.

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