Trying to stop a snowball
Divertin'
Hoping this doesn't happen
Often
Turned into a ball
And started to roll
Watching the ball fall
... roll... out-of-control
Vacate the downside
Or it's curtains
The biggest balls fall
And you'll be hurtin'
Turned into a ball
And started to roll
Watching the ball fall
... roll... out-of-control
Can't concede to gaining speed
I pray we're not askin'
For divine intervention
... is that your intention?
Chords: Em CM7 / C E A / A slide up one octave Em side down one octave; Part II 100 to 115 Beats Per Minute
Instrumentation: Vocals, Ibanez Acoustic Guitar, Fender Electric Guitar, Fender Jazz Bass, Keyboards (Korg PS60, Casio WK-3500, Yamaha PSR-740, MiniNova, MicroKorg)
Could a White Christmas be a thing of the past?
Global warming is causing warmer and shorter winters. Not only are White Christmases less frequent, so are icebergs, sea ice, and glaciers. An analysis and maps from NOAA found snowfall is declining globally as temperatures warm due to anthropological climate change.
As the atmosphere's heat and humidity increase, precipitation is more likely to fall as violent rain or hail than snow. "Eventually the laws of thermodynamics mean that as you keep warming you're just going to transition more and more of that snow over to rain. You can get away with things for a little bit, and it can hide some trends, but overall the laws of thermodynamics will win out," said Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist with the National Weather Service in Alaska.
Justin Mankin, a climate scientist and associate professor of geography at Dartmouth College, said with rising temperatures snowfall will not decline linearly (at a 1-to-1 rate.) Rather, there is a tipping point. Once a certain temperature threshold is reached, "we should expect the losses to accelerate. It means we can expect a lot of the places that haven't exhibited massive snowfall declines to maybe start to exhibit them with just a little bit more warming."
Albedo is the reflective nature of snow and measures how much light is reflected without being absorbed when hitting an object (e.g. the fraction of incoming solar radiation that gets reflected back into space). Snow has a very high albedo that reflects most of the light and absorbs very little heat. The snow-albedo feedback loop occurs when the atmosphere gets warmer due to human induced climate change resulting in less snowfall. The less snow reflecting heat back into space, the warmer the earth becomes. The warmer the earth, the less snowfall. The less snowfall, the warmer the earth.
Tipping Points and Feedback Loops
Push a glass toward the edge of a table and eventually it will fall off on its own. No matter how slowly or meticulously you push... no matter how you weight or fill the glass, it will reach a tipping point and fall off before being pushed completely off the table. No matter whether you believe the glass is half-empty or half-full, when the tipping point is reached it will plummet out-of-control to its end. This is science not fate, faith, nor belief. Human induced climate change has resulted in environmental tipping points being breached.
Tipping points, when crossed, trigger self-sustaining feedback loops that are no longer dependent on human activity. Similar to when a domino topples over hitting two more dominoes that in turn fall hitting more dominoes. Thus, the name The Domino Effect. It can also be visualized as The Snowball Effect. A tipping point is like a snowball rolling down a hill growing in mass and velocity (momentum). When a tipping point is crossed, it results in cumulative and reinforced global warming.
Tipping points are Critical Milestones that directly impact the rate of acceleration in climate change by multiplying the number and intensity of feedback loops (chaos theory).
We've been snowballed.
-- from Toppled Tipping Points: The Domino Effect / Brouse and Mukherjee (2023)