Whether it’s fewer snow days or disconcertingly hot temperatures, people across the US are experiencing an increasingly common phenomenon: a winter that doesn’t feel wintry.
That’s the result of warmer conditions in many places driven both by climate change and a particularly strong El Nino phenomenon this year. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the 2023-2024 winter is the warmest one it’s seen in the 130 years it’s been tracking. And per the University of Arizona’s National Phenology Network, signs of spring in certain parts of the country — like the budding of the first lilac and honeysuckle leaves — have emerged the earliest they have since the organization began keeping records in 1981.
These developments are part and parcel with the Earth getting hotter overall: per the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, 2023 was the hottest year on record and the first time the globe surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius of average planetary warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
All this has led to winters getting shorter and appearing decidedly different than they have in years past. As Vox’s Anna North has explained, such changes are jarring emotionally, deeply consequential for the environment, and economically taxing for places that rely on cold-weather activities such as skiing and snowboarding. Shorter, warmer winters are poised to have a host of impacts including throwing off animals’ schedules for hibernation and reducing the size of snowpacks in different places, curbing their water supply.
The factors behind this year’s abridged winter
“As the planet warms up and temperatures increase, the seasonal window for cold weather gets shorter and shorter. That means the onset of what we think of as ‘spring’ … gets earlier and earlier,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann tells Vox. Plant-flowering, tree-leafing, and egg-hatching are all markers…
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