Pirate's Cove

Climate cultists love them some “end of winter!” prognostications, eh? Of course, when snow and winter weather keeps happening, and sometimes you get massive winter storms, they also blame that on you driving a fossil fueled vehicle to get a nice burger

Michigan winters, as generations have known them, may be coming to an end

Karl Schwartz wishes he was simply chasing glory on the snowmobile racing track. Instead, in recent years, he has been forced to chase increasingly elusive cold weather.

Schwartz, of Freeland, is president of the Midwest International Racing Association, a snowmobile racing circuit operating primarily in Michigan for more than 40 years. Their weekend races draw about 100 teams, hundreds of racers and crew members, and thousands more fans, usually as part of a local community’s winter festival.

But each year, as Michigan’s climate changes, it’s getting harder to do.

“We race on ice, not snow,” he said. “We don’t need snow — we need cold temperatures.”

The racers often compete on fairground horse tracks, flooded with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to try to build a base of frozen ground that the racers’ machines will chew up over a weekend of competition. They need about two weeks of temperatures in the teens to create the proper conditions. With increasing frequency, that’s becoming near-impossible to find, Schwartz said.

First off, the climate changes, as it has done multiple times throughout the Holocene (not too mention the previous 4.5 billion years). The climate is not stable. There’s not reason to assign witchcraft, er, Other People’s carbon footprint, to causation. Of course, the ironic part here is that these folks are whining about anthropogenic climate change while driving lots and lots of fossil fueled vehicles to these race tracks to race….fossil fueled snowmobiles. With lots of people driving fossil fueled vehicles to the track to watch them race.

Michigan’s cold, snowy winters, and a way of life built around them, are being disrupted by climate change. And for winter festivals reliant on cold, snow and ice — and communities reliant on the economic boost at a slow time that those festivals bring — it’s causing some scrambling to adapt, and even to survive.

The Great Lakes region has seen a larger increase in annual average temperatures than the rest of the continental U.S. And “winters are getting warmer more quickly than the summers are,” said Richard Rood, a professor in climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan.

Have you ever noticed that everywhere seems to have a larger increase in annual average temperatures than the rest of nation/world?