Shouldn't we be past being "stunned"? The past 11 years are the hottest 11 years on record.
Climate catastrophe is coming, soon. Everybody knows this, even the vocal deniers (the ones with power, not the sheep they feed propaganda to). They've simply decided to profit off it instead of trying to slow it down.
The "drill, baby, drill", "clean beautiful coal" lunacy and wanting to invade Greenland and Canada are all directly related.
Yes, winters are getting worse and worse, but this year was really bad, way worse than any predictions. I was in Park City in February and there was so little snow it looked like summer, and that was before the streak of warm and dry weather this article is talking about. I literally hiked up to the 2002/2034 Olympic facilities in 55 degree weather with no snow on the ground, while the Olympics were still going on in Milan. And I was in Park City because they had more snow than Colorado...
Can’t remember the exact quote, but there is something in The Omen II about future wars being fought over food (Thorn corporation being involved in agriculture/fertiliser or something).
Last time that I saw it I wondered if the Ukraine conflict might be about control of the “Breadbasket of Europe” as much as anything.
Control over European food supplies might have been a minor factor in Putin's decision to invade Ukraine but that was secondary to establishing a greater Russian empire with defensible strategic depth. A lot of Ukraine's wheat exports went to Egypt and they have suffered significant food cost inflation due to the war.
The polar bear population has steadily been increasing since the 1960s [1]. Basically double what it was. The more falsifiable information you use the less you are helping the cause.
This report was published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which according to Wikipedia "is a climate change denial lobby group registered as a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom. Its stated aims are to challenge what it calls "extremely damaging and harmful policies" envisaged by governments to mitigate anthropogenic global warming. The GWPF, and some of its prominent members individually, practise and promote climate change denial."
To be honest, I just looked up the report and did not not notice it came from there. My only agenda was that it was the only report that clearly showed the average and CI of the different studies throughout the years. WWF links to the actual report [1] which is found at [2]. They try their very hardest to not show that the population is either stable or increasing. If you look at decreases, for example in Davis Strait, it is a loss of 1% with 0% in the 95% interval.
Anyway, I do admit that linking from that website is not a good look but all I did was link the report and I am not advocating for anything else on their website. My larger point, the climate change community does not need the polar bears to drive their point. It is a bad example and we should use one of the many other verifiable sources (ice sheet loss, sea level rise, droughts, etc.) instead.
> Experts say the rising tally of polar bears reflects an increased ability to track bears – not an actual increase in the population. The graph is based on various estimates of the global population that include unscientific estimates, extrapolation and insufficient data sets, according to scientists.
There are quite a few comments here talking about how comparing images from feb/march isn’t useful. Here’s data on what’s going on. This snowtel location is within the Utah picture in the article.
Our whole flood control and water supply system is designed around the expected storage of water as snow.
Ignoring horrifying drought scenarios, it is also troubling to think about how this will change if we start having warm winters and more of the winter precipitation as rain.
I think the worst case would be if we end up like some tropical countries, where they can have disastrous flooding and then drought in very short cycles. The water comes all at once and you cannot hope to control or contain it. But there are also gaps that strain the ability to store enough water and manage consumption rates.
I have to ask because this makes no sense to me: In the article, there is a picture of 3 workers taking a snow survey and finding "zero measurement of snow". This is reported as "the second lowest since 2015".
How is any measurement of a quantity of an item less than zero? You can't have negative snow to my knowledge.
I believe what they're saying is that the 2015 measurement was also zero. So this year's measurement isn't the "second-lowest", it's the "second equally lowest". That's the only way I could interpret it.
I don't see the point in comparing photos of snow coverage in feb 2026 to the same area in march 2026. March is a spring month, of course snow coverage will be worse. Itd be more shocking if the snow coverage increased. they should show march 2026 vs. march 2025/2024/2023 etc.
March might be a "spring month" where you live, and also a "spring month" based on the equinox, but in the American West, peak snow pack statistically occurs at the end of March.
Use numbers, not vibes, when deciding if something like this is unusual. Dismissing this because march is a "spring month" is like asking someone who lives in Miami if they consider it unusual to have no snow on the ground in February.
Where I'm at in the Sierra, March is typically very close to as snowy as Dec/Jan/Feb and the snowpack is still increasing, not decreasing. Late March is typically the peak depth. March avg snowfall is 62", this year we got 1", the driest March on record, on top of it being incredibly warm.
As a naive tourist, I did not know this. I drove up to Sequoia National Park in March 2011 hoping to camp. The roads were plowed, with eight feet tall snow on either side of the road. I drove up to a visitor center and asked where to camp. The park ranger said I could camp anywhere I wanted. Maybe he assumed I knew what I was doing. But I did not. After walking around the parking lot for a bit, with nowhere else to go, I drove out.
They actually get more snow in March at these elevations, it doesn't melt until later in the spring... so while I agree a direct month comparison would be nice to see... this is still significant.
> The snow is melting so fast in the Sierra that, if it continues at its current rate, little would be left by early April. It’s unlikely to keep up this astounding pace, but there’s still high potential for the earliest melt-off on record in the state, according to Swain.
> “It feels like we skipped spring this year and dropped straight into a summer heatwave,” said Karla Nemeth, the DWR director, during Wednesday’s briefing. “What should be gradual snowmelt happened suddenly weeks ago.” This year’s was one of the quickest surveys they’d had, she added.
So the alarm here is the rate of melt, it should be sustained over a longer period. This is a problem because this is a natural "store" of water for downstream sources... if it's all released earlier it evaporates quicker and isn't replenished with more melt throughout the season.
> March is a spring month, of course snow coverage will be worse.
Peak snow cover in the west (California) is expected to be in early April. December was an intense month of rainfall and the snowpack was trending towards above average, but then a dry Feb and a heatwave in March not only ensured the pack didn’t grow but pretty much nuked whatever cover early season rains brought. It is shocking because in December it was looking like historical snow and it went into catastrophic shortage in 3 months.
Beside that, the measurements are of how much moisture is left to melt off:
It’s not just the amount of snow left on mountaintops that’s concerning experts, but the amount of moisture still frozen within them. “Snow water equivalent” (SWE), a measurement of what could melt off to supply natural and manmade systems, is exceptionally low.
California did quite well in December. Then late February and early March came along, and a rain event at high altitude melted a lot of the snowpack, followed by a not-uncommon heatwave in mid-late March melted a lot of what was left.
In Utah it's atypical to not have just as much if not more snow in March than in April. The snow pack in the mountains should last all the way until August. This year will likely be very bad for wildfires.
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Climate catastrophe is coming, soon. Everybody knows this, even the vocal deniers (the ones with power, not the sheep they feed propaganda to). They've simply decided to profit off it instead of trying to slow it down.
The "drill, baby, drill", "clean beautiful coal" lunacy and wanting to invade Greenland and Canada are all directly related.
Last time that I saw it I wondered if the Ukraine conflict might be about control of the “Breadbasket of Europe” as much as anything.
I would say climate catastrophe is already here... at least for them.
[1] - https://thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2024/02/Crockford-State-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foun...
So it sounds like they (and I assume you) definitely have an agenda you're trying to promote.
https://www.iucn-pbsg.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/PBSG-St...
Read that and explain why the population is decreasing — the only point he made was that it was not.
Anyway, I do admit that linking from that website is not a good look but all I did was link the report and I am not advocating for anything else on their website. My larger point, the climate change community does not need the polar bears to drive their point. It is a bad example and we should use one of the many other verifiable sources (ice sheet loss, sea level rise, droughts, etc.) instead.
[1] - https://www.arcticwwf.org/wildlife/polar-bear/polar-bear-pop... [2] - https://www.iucn-pbsg.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/PBSG-St...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/01/27/fac...
> Experts say the rising tally of polar bears reflects an increased ability to track bears – not an actual increase in the population. The graph is based on various estimates of the global population that include unscientific estimates, extrapolation and insufficient data sets, according to scientists.
https://www.cbrfc.noaa.gov/dbdata/station/swegraph/swegraph_...
On a more positive note, one random person in the area unexpectedly confirmed that they thought global warming was indeed real.
Ignoring horrifying drought scenarios, it is also troubling to think about how this will change if we start having warm winters and more of the winter precipitation as rain.
I think the worst case would be if we end up like some tropical countries, where they can have disastrous flooding and then drought in very short cycles. The water comes all at once and you cannot hope to control or contain it. But there are also gaps that strain the ability to store enough water and manage consumption rates.
How is any measurement of a quantity of an item less than zero? You can't have negative snow to my knowledge.
I believe what they're saying is that the 2015 measurement was also zero. So this year's measurement isn't the "second-lowest", it's the "second equally lowest". That's the only way I could interpret it.
Use numbers, not vibes, when deciding if something like this is unusual. Dismissing this because march is a "spring month" is like asking someone who lives in Miami if they consider it unusual to have no snow on the ground in February.
Which of course isn't an antithesis to the lack of snow in the west, and likely is literally the flip side of the "same problem". but interesting
> The snow is melting so fast in the Sierra that, if it continues at its current rate, little would be left by early April. It’s unlikely to keep up this astounding pace, but there’s still high potential for the earliest melt-off on record in the state, according to Swain.
> “It feels like we skipped spring this year and dropped straight into a summer heatwave,” said Karla Nemeth, the DWR director, during Wednesday’s briefing. “What should be gradual snowmelt happened suddenly weeks ago.” This year’s was one of the quickest surveys they’d had, she added.
So the alarm here is the rate of melt, it should be sustained over a longer period. This is a problem because this is a natural "store" of water for downstream sources... if it's all released earlier it evaporates quicker and isn't replenished with more melt throughout the season.
> March is a spring month, of course snow coverage will be worse.
Peak snow cover in the west (California) is expected to be in early April. December was an intense month of rainfall and the snowpack was trending towards above average, but then a dry Feb and a heatwave in March not only ensured the pack didn’t grow but pretty much nuked whatever cover early season rains brought. It is shocking because in December it was looking like historical snow and it went into catastrophic shortage in 3 months.
Beside that, the measurements are of how much moisture is left to melt off:
It’s not just the amount of snow left on mountaintops that’s concerning experts, but the amount of moisture still frozen within them. “Snow water equivalent” (SWE), a measurement of what could melt off to supply natural and manmade systems, is exceptionally low.
California did quite well in December. Then late February and early March came along, and a rain event at high altitude melted a lot of the snowpack, followed by a not-uncommon heatwave in mid-late March melted a lot of what was left.