[sdfgdfghj]

For the first time ever I had to cancel my holidays due to climate change. I was planning on skiing in the first week of January, not gonna happen.

It was 14 degrees during the day on 31 Dec. 20 years ago it was unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year.

[boring_twenties]

Meanwhile, western US resorts are having their best November and December in over a decade. Alta has already received 300 inches this year!

[ThePadawan]

> 20 years ago it was unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year.

This is one of those widely spread Mandela effect-style misconceptions.

The chances of a white Christmas in the UK are around 10%, and depending where you are in the US [0], especially if you consider the population density not pictured in that chart, even lower.

Humans generally hugely overestimate how often a white Christmas actually happens due to selection bias.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(weather)#/med...

[kergonath]

> The chances of a white Christmas in the UK are around 10%, and depending where you are in the US [0], especially if you consider the population density not pictured in that chart, even lower.

Why do you assume the OP is in the UK or US? We’re discussing climate and weather in the Alps; there are plenty of places in Europe where a white Christmas really was not unusual.

[ThePadawan]

The probabilities in Germany are around 12.5% and around 40% in Switzerland itself [0].

To live anywhere where to quote OP "it [would be] unusual not to have snow for Christmas and New Year" would basically mean living in a skiable country itself, so I did do a lot of assuming there.

But then I don't ski. I wouldn't know if skiers take vacations around the world to see different snow.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei%C3%9Fe_Weihnachten_(Wetter...

[kneebonian]

I spent a while looking at this trying to figure out why 14 degrees would be a problem before I realized it was Celsius rather than Freedomheit.

[mythhouse]

You can come to USA. Utah and california had great starts to their ski season. One of the best, infact.

[macinjosh]

Weather is not climate.

[syzarian]

What is the purpose of your comment? Do you have a belief that if the global mean temperature were, for instance, raised 3 degrees celsius that this change would not result in noticeable changes in weather? Weather does not affect or result in global warming but global warming does affect and result in weather change.

[vasqw]

Many people maliciously conflate "climate change" with "man-made climate change".

[polotics]

The year 2002 called and wants its denialism back. The effects of added CO2 are so simple to understand, CO2 is so easy to measure...

[kergonath]

For all intents and purposes, at our scale both are the same. You have to go back several decades for baseline natural variation to be larger than the human-caused increase in average temperatures.

[Lev1a]

Weather and weather events are a consequence of a number of factors, a big one of which is climate and change in the latter therefore also drives change in the former.

Example: in my home city the winters have been getting warmer on average pretty drastically. I'm in my mid-twenties, around the time of my birth the average winter weather YoY was still cold enough to freeze the sound (not the audio one) near my home deep and hard enough anyone could walk nearly the whole width from one bank to the other. During my early childhood we had ~0.5m of snow nearly all winter but I can't remember having even a "white christmas" since I was ~14. Even this winter we had like 10-15cm of snow total, most of which melted as soon as hit the ground, a layer of ~5cm stayed for around a week a bit before christmas. The holidays themself were cold (not freezing) and it rained almost the entire time.

[subradios]

Extremely funny, because for the last fifteen years whenever it got bitterly, unseasonably cold (like in the US last week) - climate deniers would quietly chuckle and be shouted down with screams of "weather is not climate".

Which it's true, it was stupid then to take a cold snap as "climate change is fake lol", but it's also stupid now to take a warm spell as "we are doomed climate chaaange".

[adammarples]

Generally I wouldn't characterise the climate change deniers as "quietly chuckling", while the other side was "screaming". But no, neither weird cold snaps or weird heatwaves are climate change. However, increased volatility and unusual variation both ways can indeed be caused by and associated with global warming.

[floor2]

Sure. But this is a pointless thing to complain about.

OP could have given a long, complex nuanced statement to appease pedants like "Due to climate change making warm weather and lack of snow in January far more likely than in the past, there was in fact warm weather and lack of snow during my planned trip, so I had to cancel my plans. The odds of this happening without decades of carbon emissions from fossil fuels would have been very unlikely".

Or, you can skip all that excessive cruft which is understood by almost everyone as being implicit and just say due to climate change.

[Workaccount2]

Even my father, an ardent "global warming is bullshit" supporter, admits that something weird is going on with the weather now.

[r2_pilot]

But climate is composed of weather.