Researchers forecast a hard-to-imagine West – one without snow

Kudzu, scourge of the South, is limited in its northward spread by the frost line. Those images you've seen of it overtopping trees, houses, and utility poles are real (and surreal).

And that's only one of the visible signs. Many invasive insect species, including both those that attack crops and those that spread disease, are limited in northerly spread by freezing temperatures. Rising temps means more northerly invasion.

Ground freezes further limit insect, animal, and plant invaders. It's not clear to me whether or not the northern Plains states will see more or less freezing, my guess is that temperature swings will likely be wide and uneven, and with less snow cover, fluctuate to a greater extent through the winter months. This could kill desired plants (as roots that were previously protected from freezing do in fact freeze), promote invasive species, simply wear and weather structures and roadbeds to a greater extend (more freeze-thaw cycles). Less snow means more dark earth and higher solar absorption, which would tend to accelerate warming trends. Positive feedbacks tend to be dangerous.

And climate instabilty may mean more "polar vortex" events, with weeks of 60F (18C) weather followed by -20F (-28C). Rains followed by freezes create ice, snows followed by rapid warming, increased melt and flooding. (All of course dependent on precipitation patterns.)

How all this washes out is hard to predict. I strongly advise against simply hand-waving the issue away as "people will have one less thing to complain about".

At the other end of the seasonal cycle, dryer summers and higher winds may also mean wildfires, something that's far rarer in the Plains states, but not unheard of. These did accompany the high-wind storm a week or so back, in which sustained winds of 80--100 mph were registered from Colorado to Minnesota, effectively not unlike a hurricane-on-land.

Exactly. "global warming isn't real because it's still snowing" gets ridiculed (as it rightly should), but I find it appalling that "global warming is real because it snowed really late where I lived" gets a free pass.

Further, the aggregate for all of North America hardly excludes the possibility of regional snow drought.

The line where snow sticks around for the whole season has been steadily moving north.

It's completely possible that the Northern Hemisphere also has more rainfall then ever before, would that mean that lake Mead isn't drying up right now?

I find it a bit hard that you're really posted that information in good faith given it would require an almost willful misunderstanding of what the parent is saying and how hemisphere wide observations completely miss essential regional variation in weather patterns.

- climate change is not happening in a meaningful way now.

- the future impacts of climate change are wildly overstated.

- all potential issues that may come up with climate change can be mitigated through technology.

Any comments that violate any of these assumptions will be aggressively downvoted or often times even flagged. I have alt accounts that have had the latter happen frequently and I know because the flagged comments are always unflagged on review (conveniently hours after the article is no longer on the front page, and the discussion is effectively over).

This tendency may have always been a part of this community, but it has become a bigger issue in recent years because it has been increasingly apparent that severe climate impacts are being felt "faster than expected" right now, there is absolutely existential risk at play (on both a civilization and species level), and that nothing short of immediate reduction of the use of hydrocarbons can prevent extreme impacts (i.e. no techno solution).

Personally I think this is largely because these ideas pose major challenges to the ideological foundations of most of the HN community. In general people are brought here out of a common interest in the future, and the belief that technology (specifically VC funded technology) can solve any problem out there.

Our current understanding of climate change and its impacts shake this ideological foundation and makes a lot of people uncomfortably in a very profound way. Their only way to react is to try to make it go away. Down voting and flagging comments happens precisely because these realities of climate change hit a bit to close to the bone.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01186-6

This would help build credibility. Right now, it seems like many are quick to attribute any kind of unfortunate weather to climate change, even if it leads to ultimately contradictory claims.

For example, a few months ago Scott Alexander posed the question of whether climate change could reduce the number of cold-related deaths. In the comments for that article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28960588), many countered by saying that climate change is actually predicted to make winters colder on average, and/or increase the number of extreme cold weather events. It was no help that you can find news articles from prominent outlets that appear to make contradictory claims on this point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28963655).

It took a fair amount of digging into IPCC reports to determine that this appears to be incorrect; the consensus prediction is warming winters (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28963266). But in the thread we couldn't come to agreement on whether the consensus view predicts more or fewer extreme cold events.

I think when people first tried to model the three body problem, the planets would just fall apart. But in reality they don't, so they knew they had to try harder. I wonder if many doomsday models are like the three body models that fell apart. And newspapers go "scientists show that earth could float off into space soon".

Do you think that a weakening current with more water in the atmosphere (atmospheric rivers) will lead to more or less snowfall? Not being sarcastic, it’s just that if both things are true it would indicate that the prediction in this article is wrong.

Unrelated, what are your thoughts on the carboniferous period with 800ppm CO2 and 0 degrees difference in average temp. (This is according to Wikipedia, I can appreciate if the answer is Wikipedia is not reliable on this matter)

The first graph in the first link exemplifies the problems I have with CC evidence, the data presented goes back a long time but not far enough to when we know CO2 was higher.

While it does not outright lie it tailors the data to create the impression that it hasn’t been higher. It’s like when graphs don’t have the axis at zero to exaggerate the differences.

For such a serious topic I would expect less disengenous presentation of the data.

Overall, not your links, but the totality of what I’ve read over the years, I get the feeling of being asked to make a decision based on reading advocacy pieces rather than a summary of the available information regardless of what conclusion it points to.

edit: upon re checking the first link I see the graph is also not centered on zero, again to exaggerate the differences between pre-industrial Revolution and now.