Is It Usually This Hot in February?

Tony Mongeluzi Contributing Writer

Climate change isn’t anything new. We’ve seen events happening all over the world like the polar ice caps melting, water levels rising, and the thing that all of us notice the most, temperature changes. That could not be more apparent now with the dramatic change in weather we had in the last two weeks of February.

It is February and we are still supposed to be in winter. Why was it in the 70s in the last week of February? Punxsutawney Phil even saw his shadow, so that should add six more weeks to winter, right?

Based on data from the National Centers for Environmental Information, since 1939 besides a few years between the mid-1940s and mid-1970s, the global average surface temperature has steadily been increasing every year. The temperature increase has led to an overall 2-degree Fahrenheit (1-degree Celsius) increase since the pre-industrial era.

People may think this is a small temperature change, but many do not realize how much heat energy it takes to raise the Earth’s average temperature even in minuscule amounts. To put this in perspective, in an article on global warming by Michael Kelberer of Mother Earth News, he says that “to raise the temperature of the planet one degree Celsius requires about 5 exajoules (5 with 18 zeros after it) of energy. That is equivalent to the entire energy consumption of the US for 4 million years.”

The amount of energy used is extremely hard to comprehend on such a ginormous scale. With the amount of energy needed to warm the earth put into perspective, how dire is global warming really?

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2022 was the sixth warmest year on record.” It is not only 2022 but the warmest years ever recorded have all occurred in the 2010s. Ashlynn, a college sophomore who lives in the area, said that “during 2017 or 2018” is the last time she remembered a winter with an abundance of snow.

Think back to your own experiences: When was the last time we had an actual winter with multiple snows that have accumulated to anything?

The extra heat is doing things like reducing snow and sea ice, intensifying heavy rainfall, making temperatures reach extremes in both heat and cold, and shrinking and expanding the habitats of certain species of plants and animals.

An example of this increase in heat is through the melting of snowpacks. Snowpack is the water stored in the snow on the mountains. Traditionally, the season that snowpacks melt is during the spring and summer. Global warming puts snowpacks around the country at risk of melting too early. That may not sound like a huge deal, but the results of snowpack melting early can have detrimental consequences for places that go through droughts like California for example.

In an article by David Schechter, Haley Rush, and Chance Horner of CBS News called “Climate change is making winter weather warmer and “weirder”,” they say that “If (snowpack) melts too early, it can cause floods in the spring, and by summer there may not be enough water when it’s so critical.”

Looking at a chart from Chris Hacker of CBS News and data from Climate Base, there has been a noticeable trend of the temperature rising during the winter in 25 different cities. The average temperature in these cities has risen by over 50% since 1970. This average temperature per city is slowly rising toward 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Many regions that have snowpacks will begin to melt too early because they will not be able to stay cold enough anymore. This has made states like California use technology that measures the precise depth of the snowpack to manage water usage as best as possible. Many things are affected by this melting of snowpack like winter sports tourism and agriculture as well. This means as time goes on, jobs in certain regions will be obsolete. An example of this is grape vineyards in California becoming much more difficult to grow with the volatility of winters across the United States. The main culprit for global warming is the pollution we create. In an article by Rebecca Lindsey and Luann Dahlman of Climate.gov called “Climate Change: Global Change,” they spoke about how the amount the Earth warms up in the future depends on the carbon emissions we emit. In the article, they also talked about “our activities—burning fossil fuels and clearing forests—add about 11 billion metric tons of carbon (equivalent to a little over 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide) to the atmosphere each year.” This is more carbon than what can be filtered out naturally. The excess carbon then sits in our atmosphere, slowly heating it more and more.

Lindsey and Dahlman also said that “According to the 2017 U.S. Climate Science Special Report, if yearly emissions continue to increase