I recently approached Mark Nelson, the Environmental Science and Zoology teacher here at IHS, to try to find answers to the “crazy weather” everyone has been talking about. When asked why he thought the weather was fluctuating so much in the past few months, Mr. Nelson said, “Because winter is over. And we’re approaching summer, AKA spring.” The class giggled at his dryness. “Nailed it!” he shouted after a moment. No, but really, what is up with this weather?
Ithaca is known to fluctuate in temperature. Just in the month of June, our record high was 92 degrees Fahrenheit in 1952 and our record low 33 in 1980. IHS has had many snow days deep into spring before—some in April, and even in May.
However, this transition from winter to summer has been noted by students to be particularly strange. This April, we went from 18 degrees to 77 in less than two weeks, and in March, we went from -9 degrees to 52 in less than two weeks. Current graphs of our May forecast show that we are 10 degrees off normal temperatures.
“My qualitative, anecdotal experience of it is: it’s spring. I don’t know what’s ‘normal.’ There’s always fluctuations. Was it the same as last year? No, but last year wasn’t the same as the year before,” Mr. Nelson explained. Nelson’s insight is often forgotten by students—normal is constantly being redefined. To determine if our weather is becoming the new normal, one must look at climate.
The most likely candidate for the cause of weather alterations, climate change, show several symptoms of appearing in Ithaca. For one, the winters and summers would be harsher under the influence of climate change. These past winters have not been so rough; only two of the past five years have had more snowfall and colder average temperatures than the Cornell-deemed “normal.” The summers have been hotter, but this could be a result of natural fluctuations, as Cornell has observed in the past. Mr. Nelson noted that one can really only judge climate change in hindsight. “Are we experiencing global warming right now? I don’t know. Ask me in a hundred years.” If climate change were the verdict, then these 40-degree switchbacks from frosting to summerlike mornings would be another symptom.
These times of brutal weather also damaged the environment. Cayuga Bird Club President Paul Anderson said, “This year, as the open areas of water shrank, the birds’ options for foraging shrank too. I imagine the bottom of the lake was vacuumed clean of all edibles below those open areas.” He went on to describe watching a Canada goose give up living on the ice of Cayuga Lake. The cold snaps have killed many crops to boot, and the salt sprinkled on roads to melt snow could have salinized already-dying roadside forests.
Fred Cowett, a postdoctoral associate at Cornell Horticulture Lab, had more radical opinions about Ithaca’s weather which he voiced at a lecture about the Natural Systems and Landscape of Cayuga Heights at the Cayuga Heights Town Hall. Using specialized software, Cowett was able to illustrate his views on the future of Tompkins County. Climate change was estimated to increase the maximum temperature about eight degrees for all months of the year in the county.
Cowett made a special note to focus on the future storms. Rainfall events, such as storms, will become more intense but have a greater interval of time between them. Due to the impervious surfaces that Ithaca offers, such as roofs, roads, and parking lots, a lot of this rainwater will run off and be channelled into storm drains to be washed into the lake. An environmentally superior alternative would absorb the rainfall into the soil to become slowly moving groundwater. One might see this phenomenon if they were to look at a neighboring road during a hard rain and watch a river develop out of it. With the emergence of bigger, rarer storms and infrastructure designed to flush these surges away from the plants that need it, dry periods may soon accompany the flashing beat of storms and cold snaps. All of this is scientifically sound, and although computer models will change predictions, there is little reason to doubt Cowett’s.
Freak weather, and more fluctuations in present weather, is predicted to increase in occurrence if climate change exists and is changing Ithacan weather. Much like how economists cannot tell if the nation is in a recession until they look back, scientists cannot judge climate change until years afterward. These short fluctuations that students are experiencing are most likely just particularly weird spring weather that should fit with the dozens of particularly weird people and things Ithaca has to offer. We can only cross our fingers that the next year doesn’t pose the same set of climatic battles as these past months have.