Climate Change Porn – 9: Baked Alaska

While all the attention is on places like Atlanta and New York, brought to standstills by abnormal snowfalls – no doubt adding, well, more doubt to the prospect of ‘global warming’ – up in Alaska, it’s a different story, where an unusual and potent heat wave raised temperatures to 40 degrees above average.

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From Atlantic Cities:

One of the most jarring things about this weather has been its effect on the snowpack. Widespread melting triggered a number of January avalanches, with one of the worst flinging a 100-foot-high pile of snow onto the Richardson Highway. The blockage stretched for hundreds of feet and completely sealed off land access to Valdez, a fishing port of about 4,000 people. You can get an idea of the jaw-dropping magnitude of the avalanche in this helicopter footage from late in the month. Paul Bunyan, please report for shoveling duty:

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UPDATE:  In the NY Times’ Sunday Review – “The End of Snow”: 

The facts are straightforward: The planet is getting hotter. Snow melts above 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The Alps are warming two to three times faster than the worldwide average, possibly because of global circulation patterns. Since 1970, the rate of winter warming per decade in the United States has been triple the rate of the previous 75 years, with the strongest trends in the Northern regions of the country.

Nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000, and this winter is already looking to be one of the driest on record — with California at just 12 percent of its average snowpack in January, and the Pacific Northwest at around 50 percent. …

I was floored by how much snow had already disappeared from the planet, not to mention how much was predicted to melt in my lifetime. The ski season in parts of British Columbia is four to five weeks shorter than it was 50 years ago, and in eastern Canada, the season is predicted to drop to less than two months by midcentury. At Lake Tahoe, spring now arrives two and a half weeks earlier, and some computer models predict that the Pacific Northwest will receive 40 to 70 percent less snow by 2050.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise — they grew 41 percent between 1990 and 2008 — then snowfall, winter and skiing will no longer exist as we know them by the end of the century.