It’s felt cold in parts of eastern Australia in recent weeks and with heavy snow falling over ski resorts, it has to mean this whole global heating thing is a dud, right?
Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph said an early start to the snow season had come “despite dire global warming predictions of vanishing snow” with a headline declaring “Alarmists given big chill”.
The news story juxtaposed the conditions in a snowbound Thredbo Village with segments from reports from CSIRO from 2003 and 2008 and past quotes about snowfall.
Let’s look at what the story said, and what it didn’t say, about the trends in snowfall.
The story included a subheading which read: “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is – East Anglia university experts in 2020.”
The quote referred to was actually from the year 2000 (the main text of the story got the year right) and repeated the line about kids and their experience with snow.
The origin of this quote is a 2000 news story in the UK’s the Independent newspaper, when Dr David Viner, a scientist at the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit, was talking about future winters in Britain (which apparently we have to point out is on the other side of the world and has no relevance to Australia).
But putting this aside, the Daily Telegraph only ran part of the quote. In the story, Viner also said that winter snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event” in the future. The Daily Telegraph certainly appeared to be excited.
So what has happened to snowfall in the UK? The most recent UK climate assessment found the year 2020 was “one of the least snowy years on record” and the number of heavy snow events have been dropping since the 1960s.
The Daily Telegraph said CSIRO had warned Australia should “prepare for shorter ski seasons” with “snow coverage reduced by as much as 54% by 2020.”
In fact, the report included a range and referenced the area of Australia’s alpine region that would have at least 30 days of snow cover, and that this area would fall by as little as 14% and as much 54%.
The Daily Telegraph report didn’t include any response from CSIRO, but Temperature Check approached Kevin Hennessey, who was a co-author of the reports the newspaper referenced.
Hennessey, with current CSIRO climate scientist Dr Michael Grose, compiled a summary report of climate change impacts on Australian snowfall for Temperature Check.
The summary said the projections were based on an average over a 20-year period (2011 to 2030) with 2020 as the middle year. So to make a fair comparison between the projections and the actual snow conditions, we’ll need to wait until all the data is in after 2030.
But as a 2012 CSIRO paper pointed out – and not mentioned by the Daily Telegraph: “These projected trends will be superimposed on large natural year-to-year variability. The number of good snow seasons is expected to decline while the number of poor seasons is likely to increase.”
But that doesn’t mean there’s been no more research done since 2012 or there isn’t anything we can say about trends in snowfall.
A UN climate report earlier this year, also not mentioned in the Daily Telegraph, said annual maximum snow depth at Spencers Creek had fallen by 10% and the length of the snow season had shortened 5% between 2000 and 2013, relative to 1954-1999. Snow depth had also been falling at Rocky Valley Dam, Mt Hotham, Mt Buller and Falls Creek.
The Australian government’s official State of the Climate Report, compiled by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, said maximum snow depth had been falling in Australia’s alpine regions since the 1950s.
Sky Climate News
The Guardian earlier this week covered a UK report that identified Sky News Australia as a central global hub for video content attacking climate science, climate policies and renewable energy.
As if to prove the point, Sky News Australia has been pumping out segments on to YouTube juxtaposing the snowfalls with those CSIRO reports. Many have gained more than 10,000 views.
They’ve also been keen to blame “greenies” for Australia’s current energy crisis rather than, say, Russia’s war on Ukraine, the rising cost of coal and gas, outages in coal plants, or the cold weather snap.
Sky presenter Andrew Bolt delivered a diatribe under the headline “Global warming ‘isn’t the great threat we were told’ that gained more than 190,000 views on YouTube.
“If the global warming scaremongers and carpetbaggers were right, none of this would be happening,” said Bolt, pointing to the cold snap and the heavy snow.
What is it about the weather?
Bouts of cold weather are often used by climate change “sceptics” to attack climate scientists, or to claim the risks from global heating are being overblown.
Dr John Cook, at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, was a co-author of a study last year that used special software to track climate contrarian arguments from 33 blogs and 20 thinktanks.
He told Temperature Check there was “a transition away from science denial arguments” but, he said, “the cold weather argument is a keeper.”
“It’s a persistent argument and it’s not going away,” he said, and the argument’s stickiness was down to its simplicity.
He said: “The simple myths like ‘cold weather disproves global warming’ are easier to understand than talking about the second law of thermodynamics.”
