My wife and sister in law both regularly cross the pond to Europe for their work and no longer know what to carry in their luggages to deal with European weather. ‘Cuz, here, in Montreal, Canada, it’s allready spring time. I see grass in my backyard where there should normally be over a meter of snow. The city’s snow removal crews worked only once this winter and were so bored that two nights ago, they actually spreaded snow in the streets instead of removing it. (must be because they were too close to getting their unemployment benefits!)

In fact, since the begining of this century, I remember only the winter of 07/08 as looking and feeling «Canadian».

Personnally, I prefer to call this «Climate Change» way before «Global Warming» even though the later leads to the former. Though no aging Canadians will cry over their snow shovels becoming another useless thing cluttering their garages.

Few people can rely with mean global temperatures, especially if you’re an European around this time of the year. T’was the same ordeal last year, in France, too. But crazy and unusual weather, most people can relate to and feel for real. Personally, I’m seriously considering selling my snowblower to some distant French cousin.

You can deny you neck-o-tha-world is warming, it’s fair play and may be even true. But it’s way harder to say with the same confidence that more and more regional climates are not changing. One may hope it’s a freak statistical incident and «normal» winters will come back, next winter or in a couple of years, but nowadays, it’s the huge snowfalls, the regular winters of the 70s, that are becoming the freak statistical incident. Unfortunately, when the numbers will confirm this with enough evidence to convince the deniers, it will certainly be too late to do anything about it. Do they make you think about this coyote in the cartoon that only knows for sure he overshot the cliff when he starts accelerating at 3,8 meters per second squared?

Ciao, from the place formerly known as the Great White North.

In fact, the last three or four winters were quite cold in Germany. Before that, winters where I live (Ruhr area) used to be ugly, temperatures around 0°C and rain. Now, we face severe cold periods with -10°C and lower (as this year) and quite a lot of snow (although, this time we didn’t have snow; it has just been cold).

Since this already seems to be a trend (maybe not significant, yet – but still), it could be a forebode of what will come if we don’t act quickly (and not wait until 2020 and later…).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_lYbp2zxVg&list=PL029130BFDC78FA33&index=21&feature=plpp_video

HIRGO~wise for why the northern hemisphere might have been enduring colder than usual winters lately.

With another good article here :

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2039777,00.html

on that. Plus see :

http://www.skepticalscience.com/December-2009-record-cold-spells.htm

for more about that too.

Note as well that more energy + more moisture in the atmosphere means more snow in winter.

I think folks will also find that the climatologists never said global warming overheating means an end to *all* cold winters and snowstorms everywhere immmediately. It was always going to be – and obviously is a lot more complicated than that & different regions are affected in different ways with some (eg.Arctic) warming faster and more dramatically than others.

/end free association