Another Climate Snow Job

A federal bureaucrat is telling us that due to human activity, global snowfall is in decline. There’s no reason to be worried, though. We’ve seen the climate doomsday predictions before, and somehow they always turn out to be wrong.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, we were assured by the British Independent that “​​Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” (Don’t bother to try to find the story in the Independent’s archives – that page doesn’t exist or has been moved, presumably because it’s an embarrassment to the newspaper.) In that article, reporter Charles Onians appealed to the correct authorities, citing David Viner, then a senior scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, who declared that “within a few years winter snowfall will become ‘a very rare and exciting event.’”

He told Onians that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Onians also cited David Parker of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, who, in the reporter’s words, said that “ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes – or eventually ‘feel’ virtual cold.”

The Independent’s story was published in March 2000. Northern Hemisphere snow cover that year was 7.14 million square miles. So far in 2023, snow is covering 7.23 million square miles of the Northern Hemisphere. In between, there was a low of 6.26 million square miles (2007) and a high of 8.97 million square miles (2002). As recently as 2019, the coverage was as wide as 8.59 million square miles.

If we add the snow in Greenland, the trend is not identical but nevertheless similar to that of North America alone. Both measurements show a growing decadal trend in snow coverage going back to 1967, as does snow coverage in Eurasia.

These data were gathered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and are from its October 2023 installment of its monthly report.

Now comes Brian Brettschneider of the same National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who, according to CNN, swears that “snowfall is declining globally as temperatures warm because of human-caused climate change.”

“It’s possible in the near term that climate change will cause more extreme winter storms and some years of increased snowfall – like the data shows for the Northeast U.S. – but as global temperature warms, there will be fewer of those years, and eventually we could see snowfall amounts fall off a cliff,” writes CNN’s Eric Zerkel, who is “an extreme weather editor” on the network’s “climate team,” which means he was hired to advance the narrative that man is only a few SUV trips from turning Earth into a fireball.

We’ll go ahead and file this one in the ever-growing catalog of man-caused climate disaster guarantees that never happened. We won’t wait around, though, for admissions of error and apologies. The climate cabal is a swarm of fanatics fully sold out to an authoritarian cause. Candor and honesty have no place in their world.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board