shifts are small for a while but then, past a certain threshold, escalate quickly.
In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, two Dartmouth researchers report finding a distinctly nonlinear relationship between increasing winter temperatures and declining snowpacks.
And they identify a “snow loss cliff”—an average winter-temperature threshold below which snowpack is largely unaffected, but above which things begin to change fast.
That threshold is 17 degrees Fahrenheit.
Remarkably, 80 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s snowpack exists in far-northern, high-altitude places that, for now, on average, stay colder than that.
There, the snowpack seems to be healthy and stable, or even increasing.
But as a general rule, when the average winter temperature exceeds 17 degrees (–8 degrees Celsius), snowpack loss begins, and accelerates dramatically with each additional degree of warming.
Already, millions of people who rely on the snowpack for water live in places that have crossed that threshold and will only get hotter.
“A degree beyond that might take away 5 to 10 percent of the snowpack, then the next degree might cut away 10 to 15 percent, then 15 to 20 percent,” Alexander Gottlieb, the first author on the paper, told me over the phone as I looked out my window in New York City, where it has rained several times over the past few days.
“Once you get around the freezing point”—32 degrees Fahrenheit—“you can lose almost half of your snow from just an additional degree of warming,” he said.
New York City, which was recently reclassified as a “humid subtropical” climate, has clocked nearly 700 consecutive days with less than an inch of snowfall.
It’s definitely over the snow-loss cliff, and as global temperatures increase, more places will follow.
I heard like 10 yr ago from different progressive persons #thomhartmann and the #bbc#climatechange shows that when the #oceancurrents STOP or CHANGE, maybe 1 or 2 billion people will die (lack of food, fishing, war, drought)
This science article (above posts) says, an estimated result will be a 5C degree drop in areas. This happened 12k years ago
"By carefully measuring the height of the sea surface and using our knowledge of the Coriolis force, oceanographers will be able to use data from NASA's #satellite to reveal #OceanCurrents in greater detail than ever before. But to make sense of that data, researchers need to compare satellite measurements with observations made down here on Earth. "