The Winter of Our Discontent

Unless you count 10 days in mid-January, there was no winter in Wisconsin this year.

Up where Dianne and I have a place near Watersmeet, the snowmobile trails never opened. Not once. Not for a day. That, as far as I know, is unprecedented.

I love to cross country ski and I did cram in a handful of trips to Blue Mound down here in western Dane County in that brief 10 day winter, but that was pretty much it. I got out for all of one day up north and if there were a half dozen sloppy days available on the trails in the U.P. that was a lot.

I don’t snowmobile, being a silent sports guy, but I appreciate what the sport does for the north woods economy. In virtually every winter aside from this one, sleds far outnumber cars in restaurant parking lots this time of year. Yes, there is way too much heavy drinking and hard riding, as Barry Adams illustrated in another of his excellent Sunday pieces last weekend, but most people are responsible. And they spend money, which is a good thing in a place where there’s tourism and not much else. I worry about the survival of these businesses after the Great Brown Winter of 23-24. It has to be as bad or worse than the pandemic seasons.

I am somewhat comforted by the thought that this was a strong El Nino year. The years when there is this warming in the Pacific always produce warm, dry winters in the Upper Midwest. But the recent evidence is that, while this certainly was a big El Nino year, it wasn’t as strong as the last event in 2015. This is El Nino bolstered by a big dose of climate change.

I’ve long ago given up on trying to convince anybody about climate change. Either you accept the fact that it’s here, it’s bad and getting worse, and it’s human caused or you reject that because you’re an idiot or, more likely, because you know better but you just don’t want to give the preachy liberal know-it-alls the satisfaction. If it’s the latter, I feel the same way about the liberals, but facts are facts. The messenger may be annoying, but the message isn’t wrong.

We’re actually making some good progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Those are down in the U.S. by 20% since 2007. But you wouldn’t know that from listening to climate activists. This is a flaw in the DNA of environmentalists, a movement I was once in the thick of. My old colleagues are simply incapable of talking about the successes of their own movement. Every day is spent on the eve of destruction. I think it would be a lot better if enviros were cheerleaders. We can do it, people! Look at what we’ve already done! Instead, activists look at progress and invariably say that it’s too little, too late. Why wouldn’t normal people just throw up their hands at that? Isn’t the enviros’ subliminal message something like, ‘what’s the point?’

Liberal climate activists underestimate the backlash to them. People just don’t like to be preached at. Better to shut up about climate change and talk about saving money through energy efficiency and creating jobs building good stuff (don’t even say “green jobs”, just “jobs” works fine). Gets you to the same place with less resistance, and thus also faster.

Still, in the long run, I’m an optimist. Between the good progress we’re making on greenhouse gas reduction and advances in carbon sequestration technology, I think we’ll get ahead of the problem at some point. This won’t destroy human life on the planet. We’ll use nuclear weapons for that. (Still got some enviro left in me, I guess.)

But things will continue to get worse in my lifetime and probably for the lifetimes of everybody alive today. So, I’ll have several more of these brown, unskiable winters to slog through. And somehow people who make a good chunk of their living off of snow will have to figure out a way to adapt.

In any event, no winter this year. Maybe next year will be better. There’s one theory out there that we’ll actually get more snow up in the U.P. because Lake Superior will remain open longer, creating more lake effect snows. Didn’t happen this year. We’ll see.

But it’s a good thing I like golf.