Wrong, Forbes and NBC, Climate Change Isn’t Ending White Christmases
H. Sterling Burnett
By
H. Sterling Burnett
January 2, 2025
Forbes and NBC News were among several media outlets that ran what turned out to be ill timed articles on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day claiming climate change threatened to end snow on Christmas. This is false. Despite repeated claims of the “end of snow,” made repeatedly by myriad mainstream media outlets in the past, data show snowfall amounts overall have remained relatively stable over the past few decades, with, if anything, snow falling earlier while declining late in the season with a slightly earlier arrival of spring. Overall snow trends are virtually unchanged, and white Christmases are as frequent or infrequent as they have been historically going back to the little ice age prior to the late 1800’s when, due to entirely natural factors, winters were more severe.
Forbes’ Christmas Day article, “Will Climate Change End the Dream of a White Christmas?” and NBC’s Christmas Eve story, “How climate change is making white Christmas a rare event,” were both misleading and particularly ill-timed. Misleading because snowfall and snowpack on or around Christmas is not becoming rare, and ill-timed because even as the stories were running, New York and Boston, among other areas on the Eastern Seaboard were experiencing their first White Christmases in years, with more than one inch and four inches of snow on the ground respectively in the two cities. Lest on think that proves the point that snow for Christmas is becoming a rarer occurrence is these locations, it turns out snowfall and snowpack is relatively rare for both cities on Christmas due to their locations on the Atlantic ocean which moderates temperatures across the region.
Misleadingly bemoaning the disappearance of show, Forbes wrote:
https://climaterealism.com/2025/01/wrong-forbes-and-nbc-climate-change-isnt-ending-white-christmases/
