Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past

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That was the now infamous conclusion of an article in The Independent back in 2000 and repeated as non-fake news around the world, even in the editorial section of the NYT.

Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past – Environment – The Independent

By Charles Onians – Monday 20 March 2000 –

Britain’s weather ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: Snow is starting to disappear form our lives. Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

The first two months of 2000 were virtually free of significant snowfall in much of lowland Britain, and December brought only moderate snowfall in the South-east. It is the continuation of a trend that has been increasingly visible in the past 15 years: in the south of England, for instance, from 1970 to 1995 snow and sleet fell for an average of 3.7 days, while from 1988 to 1995 the average was 0.7 days. London’s last substantial snowfall was in February 1991.

Global warming, the heating of the atmosphere by increased amounts of industrial gases, is now accepted as a reality by the international community. Average temperatures in Britain were nearly 0.6°C higher in the Nineties than in 1960-90, and it is estimated that they will increase by 0.2C every decade over the coming century. Eight of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the Nineties.

However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

Almost immediately, of course, snow reappeared in Britain, The Independent deleted its own article (but the Internet is forever), and global warming hysterics have been trying to explain it away ever since.

Here’s the BBC, back in 2016:

The real answer is rather surprising. Extreme snowfall is actually an expected consequence of a warmer world.

So what to make of our new polar vortex? CBS News reports that “settled science” is struggling to figure out how to fit it into the computer models that say we’re doomed, but they’re working on it:

Dr. Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said:

These questions test the limits of both our available data (the apparent increase in frequency of these events is quite recent and so at best only just starting to emerge from the background noise) and the model simulations.

As we showed in our recent Science article, current generation climate models don't resolve some of the key processes involved in the jet stream dynamics behind many types of weather extremes.

Honest scientists can legitimately differ based on reasonable interpretations of the evidence to date.

Anything’s possible, and it’s possible, suppose, that we’re really undergoing some sort of global warming and that humans are causing it. It’s even possible that that will have bad effects, but before we return the western world to pre-industrial living standards and consign the Third World to perpetual poverty and starvation, we at least know hat we’re talking about. The proponents of a central world government who want to control this new global economy are using “irrefutable” computer models that couldn’t predict the return of blizzards, polar vortexes, or the unexplained 18-year-hiatus in rising temperatures we’re experiencing. Instead, they’re revising historical temperature data to “prove” that we are indeed warming, and claiming that all s going exactly as predicted, if only they’d thought to predict it.

Hogwash.