By Dr. Robert Thorson
Snow. Snow. Snow. Snow. Snow. Snow. Snow. That’s how many times Connecticut received at least 6 inches of the cursed white stuff in January. As I write this, I’m watching new snow accumulate, with no end in sight. The grand sum on my deck rises toward its source.
Beyond aesthetic beauty, I have reason to feel quite positive about what’s otherwise been a grueling presence in our lives – roof collapses, traffic delays, school cancellations, lost job productivity, injuries from falls and the excavated white canyons of our driveways. I’ve had to cut igloo blocks from my roof, cut channels in my ice dams, shovel endlessly, re-excavate the mailbox, drive whiteknuckled on slippery roads and, ironically, cancel a three-hour mini-course on glaciology because there was too much ice.
The main outcome for those on the street I’ve talked to is exhaustion from stress, especially for those who drive to daily jobs, have kids in school or who are physically limited. A routine example from my life is the woman who runs the day program my autistic adult son attends. She’s had to cancel on six occasions, meaning her clients went unserved and her staff went unpaid. And the administrative work she had to do from home was compromised by multiple school cancellations for her own children, the last being indefinite for fear of roof collapse.
Discrete weather catastrophes – such as the 1955 floods or the famous 1938 hurricane – were acute events full of alarm, tragedy, heroism and financial ruin. This winter’s endless pile-up, partial melting to slush and re-freezing into ice has been a chronic condition that resonates with weariness more than anything else. Aside from the blizzard of Jan. 12, we’ve been dealing with mostly mediocre snowfalls with just enough liquid precipitation to case-harden the fluff to a sharp crust, and with insufficient time between storms to recover. The digging out and scraping away has not been exciting. Morale has eroded. Municipal cleanup budgets have zeroed.
The silver lining to this white cloud of winter tribulation is based on my anecdotal experience of the past few weeks: We the people seem have awakened to the visceral difference between weather and climate.
Weather, of course, is a real-time experience that anyone can appreciate, but which few people understand because the continuum physics is too daunting. Climate, in contrast, is something people can easily understand because it’s an arbitrary interpretation based on average conditions in a particular place. It’s the retrospective work of historians, geographers and geologists, not the future-looking work of forecast meteorologists. By definition, weather is short-term and climate long-term.
This year’s wintry-everything is mostly the work of a strong El Nino. This means it’s about the weather, not the climate. But this year’s weather can also be part of a long-term trend. Last year, Hartford recorded its warmest year ever. This year, January’s snowfall reached 54.9 inches at Bradley International Airport, the highest monthly total ever. Are these isolated and highly unlikely facts about weather? Or is something steadier going on? We don’t know because climate, by definition, is retrospective.
I also am pleased with the shift in public dialogue away from the political script called “global warming” to the more scientific script called “climate change.” The former phrase has never worked for me because it refers to a Euclidean shape, carries no time constraint, concerns a single atmospheric parameter moving in one direction and involves a word – warm – with a positive connotation. The latter phrase deals with the environment of a planet, and allows the possibility that alarming details such as snowier winters and droughtier summers could be part of something larger.
More subtly, I’m also getting the feeling that we the people are realizing that nature holds greater power over their comfortable lives than they assumed before. I refer to the pervasive power of something steady relative to the dramatic power of something discrete.