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Snow thoughts

My backyard under ~ 1 m of snow

It’s been snowing continuously here for about 2 days.  The heaviest snows I’ve experienced in my life (for any significant amount of time) were an inch an hour, but this has been half that — amounting to a foot a day.

If it were to keep snowing like this for a week, it would be a major emergency; if for a month, the area would become uninhabitable.


GCMs tend to have forecast lower snow cover with rising global temperature, indicating a positive albedo feedback.  That much seems clearly wrong.  On the other hand, it’s not totally counterintuitive that rising energy input in the tropics could cause more evaporation, feeding more water into an atmospheric conveyor leading to more snow in the cold places.  This could actually form a negative feedback in the climate system, putting an upper limit on global temperatures.  There has to be some kind of such a limit, since something appears to stop the positive feedback loop (between temperature and CO2) that drives the exponential takeoff out of ice ages into interglacials.

Anyway, snow.  Whatever the reason, we’re about 3 months of what it’s doing right this minute from an ice age.  I don’t have a clue how likely this is to happen how soon, but looking at the last million years of climate, ice age is the normal condition of Earth and interglacials are few and far between.

We can only hope we’ve had the sense to develop real nanotech before we’re back in one.

4 Responses to “Snow thoughts”

  1. TheRadicalModerate Says:

    I’ll buy the extra water vapor content argument, but that doesn’t really explain why the average temperature here in Austin has been 7 degrees F below normal for the whole month.

    Of course, the argument is silly: This is weather, not climate, and furthermore weather in an El Nino year.

  2. Brett_McS Says:

    It’s only relatively recently that new satellites have been measuring the energy flows in the atmosphere fairly accurately, so we may not be far from finding out what goes on. The non-satellite records have been so tampered with by the frauds running climate ‘science’ it will take a massive effort to reconstruct any useful information out of them.

  3. James Gentile Says:

    I know I always say this, but good post/point. In fact, a lot of things could happen that would be really bad without ‘real’ nanotech, people who don’t prioritize ‘real’ nanotech are gambling with humanity’s existence. Not too mention, even a year delay in making ‘real’ nanotech could result in millions of unnecessary deaths. They always say “who wants to be the last soldier to die in a war” – well I would say “who wants to be the last person to die before death is cured?”

  4. DC Says:

    Mr. Hall, given your comment that the norm in the past 1 million years has been an ice age climate, perhaps we should be burning more fossil fuels and not less to stave off the next ice age.

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