I was cross-country skiing after last weekend’s blizzard when I saw a bewildered boy, no more than four or five years old, standing up to his knees in a snowdrift. He was trying to walk forward, but the drift was too thick. I stopped and pulled him free.
“They usually started at the beginning of December,” I said, “though I can remember some that got going as early as Thanksgiving. We knew winter was here when the ground was covered with this snow stuff you see. It’s like a frozen form of rain. When you had a real winter you never saw squirrels, because they were hibernating. That’s the long sleep that got them through the months when the nuts they like to eat were covered with the snow. All the birds skipped town too, except the pigeons and the crows.
“Well,” I said, “there’s a chance this summer will be hell on earth.”
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But Bob Richards, who runs the Northern Illinois Nordic cross-country ski race, was frustrated. His event, scheduled for January 12, was postponed three times, until early February. Two winters ago it was postponed twice. “Twenty years ago there were eight or nine cross-country ski races in Chicago,” he says. “A lot of the people who started skiing back then started because we had winters with consistent snow. The baby boomers latched on to the sport, but the younger generation–there’s no snow for them. It’s kind of dwindled down to one or two races.”
One baffled 48-year-old who spent his childhood on sleds and skis says, “I feel like I live in a different place than I grew up in.” The order of nature, says Ecclesiastes, is that generations come and go but the world is unchanging. Now the world and its seasons are changing in a single lifetime. In North America the gap between the first and last freeze is three weeks shorter than it was in 1970. In Britain, which is experiencing its earliest spring since it started keeping records in 1659, scientists are talking about the “winter squeeze”–spring and fall crowding winter out of the calendar.
“I don’t believe this is just anecdotal,” says Ramamurthy. “We have to be aware of natural variability, where we can have such fluctuations. [But] the global-warming community says these fluctuations are due to a warmer planet.” If the people in that community are correct, and the buildup of greenhouse gases is warming the planet, “then clearly this will take a long time to reverse,” he says. The winters we knew a generation ago won’t return in our lifetime.
“The water levels are definitely related to temperature,” says Cynthia Sellinger, a hydrologist with the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “The lakes were evaporating during the winter when they should not have been evaporating.”
