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Western US could lose up to 60% of the annual snowpack in the next 30 years

Wendy

Resurrecting the Oxford comma
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Seems that lately there are bloggers who are getting political. Really sad to me and I wish it would stop. I come here to share the fun of skiing. If I want to depress myself with politics and social justice, there are other places for that.
Not political, just a thread for some science geeks to have a conversation. It also revolves around our love of snow and wish for snowy winters to continue.
 

Scotty I.

I only care about the graphics
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Not political, just a thread for some science geeks to have a conversation. It also revolves around our love of snow and wish for snowy winters to continue

Come on. Any discussion of climate change is political unless the participants are all like minded - and even then. I just see a trend developing with this and a recent long discussion of social justice. I'm hoping that it gets nipped in the bud. Maybe a compromise would be to have a category for political posts. Then I'll know not to read them.
 

Tricia

The Velvet Hammer
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@Scotty I. Below you'll see what we have written about this type of discussion. At this time, the discussion is respectful, healthy and is being talked about as it relates to skiing.
As you know, communities like this are like a buffet. There will be some things on the buffet that you like and some that you don't.

Politics, Religion, and Hot Topics
This is a community for talking about skis, skiing, and everything related to skis and skiing. Discussion about subjects such as global warming as it relates to skiing will be allowed so long as it remains respectful and healthy; however, general discussion about politics, religion, and hot topics will not be allowed. We reserve the right to define these categories.
 

Wendy

Resurrecting the Oxford comma
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Come on. Any discussion of climate change is political unless the participants are all like minded - and even then. I just see a trend developing with this and a recent long discussion of social justice. I'm hoping that it gets nipped in the bud. Maybe a compromise would be to have a category for political posts. Then I'll know not to read them.

Science should never be political. Public policy, what to do with scientific findings, is....but that's not the focus of this discussion.
 

Monique

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Seems like there was a pretty great conversation going on, and then a few people have come in and decided to keep talking about how it's political, and attempting to stir up enough trouble to get the thread closed. Bummer. I was learning a lot and found the data interesting.
 

albertanskigirl

aka Sabrina
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This is probably a moot point, but many people like to correlate climate change to increasing weather unpredictability - someone earlier in this thread pointed out, rightly so, that weather and climate are different. But there are a whole lot of other indicators of climate change that point to a warming planet etc that have nothing to do with weather per se. Weather is always difficult to correllate to climate change, so perhaps we should be looking beyond weather for other indicators. As my SO points out (he's a microbial ecologist who studies high arctic hydrosystems, including oceans and glaciers), what we really should be looking at is not weather, but decreasing sea ice, and consequent decreasing biodiversity - which has a huge effect on the acceleration of warming (and again, this is water warming, not necessarily air). He argues that decreasing sea ice is one of the most important indicators of what our climate future holds:

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddar...l-sea-ice-diminishing-despite-antarctic-gains

He himself has monitored not only the increasingly small presence of multi-year ice (necessary for reflecting heat), but also the dramatic difference in microbial composition of the seas as a result of a lack of multi-year ice. By not having multi-year ice, we're dramatically changing the microbial composition of the seas (http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/v6/n1/full/ismej201176a.html), which also means that the carbon cycle on earth is being dramatically altered. For me, the bigger question is not: can we see patterns in weather change that correlate to climate change, but rather, how are we fundamentally altering basic planetary processes, like carbon cycling...

For me, there are more interesting and more convincing data sets than temperature or snowpack change, I guess...
 
Last edited:

Sibhusky

Whitefish, MT
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62? Montana? Nearly 2 months after solstice. That means you have your heater going full blast!
I meant in winter. Now it's hot except at night. We're not running any heat or air right now. Just open at night to let the cold air in, then shut everything up at 8am. Stays okay until bedtime. We just have to hope the nighttime air isn't smoky. That's getting iffy.
 

Pete in Idaho

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So weather as it influences skiing. So, here in the Inland PNW we have a weather guy at the Couer d Alene Press newspaper who has said many times (he writes a feature article every monday) that the world is presently in an approximate 30 year period of wild and often times extreme weather fluctuations. Approximately every 700-800 years this happens.
His other prediction is that in the winter of 2019-2020 or 2020-2021 that we will receive record snow fall, up to 800 in. at local resorts and 300-400 in. at lower elevations like Couer d Alene. The present record for snow in CDA Idaho is 176 in. in town and that occurred the winter of 2007-08.

It will be interesting to see if the is right.

A few years ago my wife and I visited a rebuilt original Viking camp that was approx. 75 yards from the Baltic sea. The camp was carbon dated to the decade of 1350 AD. When we were there in 2012 the water was 1/2 mile away. The Vikings went to Greenland and established a colony and grew corn. Now that was a "warm" period in the earths millions of years of history.

Man, here on the planet a very short time can site a plethora of statistics to show the earth is warming and deniers can do the same.

Sometimes I think mankind is so narcisstic - our species is not even a spec of sand on the beaches ofx the world compared to the time our planet has existed both in cold, warm and all the variations in between. This little trend will continue.
 

Monique

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Sometimes I think mankind is so narcisstic - our species is not even a spec of sand on the beaches ofx the world compared to the time our planet has existed both in cold, warm and all the variations in between. This little trend will continue.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's just, in the meantime, there are billions of people, a large fraction of whom will suffer and possibly die if the water level rises by a meter or two. I'm not worried about the planet. I'd just like to prevent human suffering if (big if) we can anticipate it and see a way to prevent it.
 

Monique

bounceswoosh
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And of course, keep skiing going ...
 

squill

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I read a good chunk of the draft of the National Climate Assessment that was in the news yesterday. It was interesting to see the predicted changes in some weather patterns but I do think an topic not often discussed with the subject is population growth.
 

Wendy

Resurrecting the Oxford comma
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This is probably a moot point, but many people like to correlate climate change to increasing weather unpredictability - someone earlier in this thread pointed out, rightly so, that weather and climate are different. But there are a whole lot of other indicators of climate change that point to a warming planet etc that have nothing to do with weather per se. Weather is always difficult to correllate to climate change, so perhaps we should be looking beyond weather for other indicators. As my SO points out (he's a microbial ecologist who studies high arctic hydrosystems, including oceans and glaciers), what we really should be looking at is not weather, but decreasing sea ice, and consequent decreasing biodiversity - which has a huge effect on the acceleration of warming (and again, this is water warming, not necessarily air). He argues that decreasing sea ice is one of the most important indicators of what our climate future holds:

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddar...l-sea-ice-diminishing-despite-antarctic-gains

He himself has monitored not only the increasingly small presence of multi-year ice (necessary for reflecting heat), but also the dramatic difference in microbial composition of the seas as a result of a lack of multi-year ice. By not having multi-year ice, we're dramatically changing the microbial composition of the seas (http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/v6/n1/full/ismej201176a.html), which also means that the carbon cycle on earth is being dramatically altered. For me, the bigger question is not: can we see patterns in weather change that correlate to climate change, but rather, how are we fundamentally altering basic planetary processes, like carbon cycling...

For me, there are more interesting and more convincing data sets than temperature or snowpack change, I guess...

This is some of the research that I find the most fascinating (and the scariest). Most people in the general public don't know this ,.but 'it's not widely reported in climate-related news. Many people don't know there is a carbon cycle of which the oceans are a huge part. I know the microbial ecosystems in the Arctic were being studied back in the 1990's.....one of the women in one of my remote sensing grad classes was working on this in Alaska for NOAA.

The above mentioned research is a big reason why the public needs to trust scientists to do their thing. There's a great deal more to climate research than is published in news outlets. Armchair meteorologists and weather observers, or those who cherry-pick just a few data sets, aren't seeing the whole picture.
 

Monique

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Armchair meteorologists and weather observers, or those who cherry-pick just a few data sets, aren't seeing the whole picture.

I heard someone, somewhere (super reliable, right) comment that USians are the only people who absolutely must have an opinion about everything. S/he commented that in most places, it's not expected for you to have an opinion about things outside your area of expertise/experience. I wonder if this relates. And I wonder if it's even true ...
 

Lofcaudio

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It's just, in the meantime, there are billions of people, a large fraction of whom will suffer and possibly die if the water level rises by a meter or two.

This is quite the alarming statement and I'm not sure there is any evidence that points to it being even remotely true.
 

Lauren

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Here's an interesting (and alarming) article I was reading a couple weeks ago about the sea level rise: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/sea-level-rise-flood-global-warming-science/

From the article:

"Sea level rise caused by global warming is usually cast as a doomsday scenario that will play out so far into the future, it’s easy to ignore. Just ask anyone in South Florida, where new construction proceeds apace. Yet already, more than 90 coastal communities in the United States are battling chronic flooding, meaning the kind of flooding that’s so unmanageable it prompts people to move away.

That number is expected to roughly double to more than 170 communities in less than 20 years."

"By the end of the century, chronic flooding will be occurring from Maine to Texas and along parts of the West Coast. It will affect as many as 670 coastal communities, including Cambridge, Massachusetts; Oakland, California; Miami and St. Petersburg, Florida; and four of the five boroughs of New York City. The magnitude of the coming calamity is so great, the ripple effects will reach far into the interior."
 

crgildart

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Monique said:
It's just, in the meantime, there are billions of people, a large fraction of whom will suffer and possibly die if the water level rises by a meter or two.

This is quite the alarming statement and I'm not sure there is any evidence that points to it being even remotely true.

I guess it depends on what you consider "a large fraction doesn't it?

ssrf-Global-TableRCP85-smaller-nums-take5_670_519_s_c1_c_c.png


http://www.climatecentral.org/news/new-analysis-global-exposure-to-sea-level-rise-flooding-18066
 

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