The end of winter wonderlands

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Good afternoon,

I would like to know: Have you felt the slow but steady loss of winter in your own life? What traditions do you have that feel increasingly out of reach as winters grow shorter and milder? Email me at dylan.scott@vox.com.

Here's the agenda today:

UP FIRST: Mourning winter in our warming world

CATCH UP: The Gaza death toll surpasses 20,000

—Dylan Scott, senior correspondent

UP FIRST

Whither winter?

Yelena Bryksenkova for Vox

The warming planet is slowly robbing humanity of winter — a gradual erosion that threatens cherished traditions and entire ways of life.

We're serving up a different kind of seasonal affective disorder today. Senior correspondent Anna North writes on what we lose as the planet continues to heat up and winters become milder. Less snow means less sledding, less ice skating, less skiing.

Anna begins her story with her oldest son. She recalls the pure exuberance he felt when they went sledding for the first time a few years ago. But it's been nearly two years since Central Park has had more than an inch of snow. A recent burst of flurries in NYC inspired her son and his school friends to try to build a snowman. But there wasn't enough snow to work with. They ended up with a pile of snowflakes instead.

We have some snow on the ground as I type this here in the Cleveland area. The lake effect, in which snow forms as cold air passes over the Great Lakes, remains a shortcut around the warming climate. But it is starting to recede. The other day, my 4-year-old son saw the grass beginning to peek through the snow cover, and suddenly his voice trembled with emotion: "I don't want it to melt! There's supposed to be snow at Christmas!"

I haven't yet had the heart to tell him that our forecast for Christmas Day is 54 degrees.

It's not only young children and winter sports enthusiasts who are losing something: The mountain towns and communities that have built an economy and a culture around the winter season are now under threat.

Winter is warming faster than any other season. Snowfall has been decreasing across the Northeast. Ice cover on the Great Lakes has receded 22 percent since the 1970s.

The warmer winters can lead to a strange sense of ennui. "There's this sort of existential offness," Heather Hansman, a Colorado-based ski journalist and author of the book Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns, and the Future of Chasing Snow, told Anna. "My body knows that this isn't right."

Local economies will suffer as winter slowly shrinks. One study estimated that a majority of America's ski resorts could be unusable by the end of the 21st century. The resulting economic losses and a deteriorating sense of community can lead to mental health problems for the people who live in those places.

We don't have to lose winter without a fight. Humanity will adjust: Anna touches on Indigenous Alaskan communities that are altering their hunting patterns as it becomes harder to reach marine mammals when there is less ice. But our nostalgia for winters past could also mobilize people to take climate change more seriously.

Read the rest of Anna's essay here.

CATCH UP

Gaza's death toll reaches 20,000

A child is seen walking amid destroyed buildings.

Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images

At least 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in the two and a half months since the Israeli military's campaign in Gaza began.

Among the dead are 8,000 children and 6,200 women, according to Palestinian officials, Al Jazeera reports. That number is only expected to grow after the truce between the two sides collapsed earlier this month and the Israeli military intensifies its operations in Gaza.

As ever, there is a lot of news to catch on in this ongoing conflict:

The United Nations delayed a vote on humanitarian aid for Gaza — again. High-level diplomatic talks are underway in Egypt over who will supervise the supplies entering Gaza: Israel (as is the case now) or the UN. Multiple reports indicated that the US was trying to figure out an acceptable plan that would allow it to avoid using its veto on the Security Council to block UN efforts to take over aid delivery, though that now seems increasingly unlikely.

Killed hostages were filmed by an Israeli military dog before the slayings. The Times of Israel reports that an IDF investigation uncovered footage captured by a canine unit that showed three escaped hostages trying to signal for help. The hostages were later killed when they approached Israeli soldiers.

The Israeli military says it has found a major Hamas command center. The IDF portrayed the discovery in Gaza City, which has not been independently verified, as a major blow to its enemy. The underground network was being used to move weapons, people, and supplies out of sight, the IDF told the Associated Press.

VERBATIM

🗣️ "Wool and leather are not byproducts of meat production, they're co-products: producers support their livestock operations by selling meat as well as wool and hides, all of which keeps them afloat."

—Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University [Vox]

AROUND THE WEB

The unfathomable injustices of America's "felony murder" doctrine. The United States stands alone among developed nations for its reliance on this legal concept, which can make a person culpable for murder (and subject to life in prison) even if they were miles away when the death in question occurred. [New Yorker]
Researchers are developing a vaccine to target … bad cholesterol. Preliminary results for a vaccine developed at the University of New Mexico suggest it could be as effective at lowering cholesterol as expensive medications. [KRQE]
Could the Earth survive the death of the sun? Let's go out on a (bizarrely) optimistic note: Astronomers' observations of strange exoplanets — "orphan" planets, in the field's parlance — suggest that it is in fact possible for a planet to survive the implosion of the star it orbits. [New Scientist]