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New Yorkers wonder when the snow will fall

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Published on Sunday, January 29th, 2023 at 07:32 pm

New York winter conjures up traditional images of Central Park and Times Square draped in white blankets. But not this year.

Despite a recent blizzard that violently hit the north of the state, the metropolis is still waiting for its first snow. A delay that will reach a record 50 years on Sunday!

An unusual situation that upsets the residents who already have a very complicated love/hate relationship with snow.

“It’s really sad,” Anne Hansen, a retired teacher, told AFP. “Normally, we don’t like to see snow coming. But now we are beginning to regret it.”

Nicknamed “The Big Apple”, the metropolis receives its first snowfall on average in mid-December. Last year, it went on till Christmas Eve.

School children and staff then appreciate the “snow days” that are often generously allotted, which allows them to stay home. The kids get out their sleds and the adults get on their cross-country skis, heading to Central Park.

“We stay at home, we drink hot chocolate, the dog loves it,” director Renata Romain told AFP.

But, he quickly adds, “snow is beautiful to look at the first day, but after that it gets dirty, it melts and it gets dirty”.

Meteorologists count snow beginning at 0.1 inch (a quarter of a centimeter) in height in Central Park. So a few isolated flakes are not enough.

In 1973, New Yorkers waited until January 29 for snow, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

If this period were to exceed a Sunday, the expectation would be unequaled since the introduction of depositions in 1869.

New York is also inching closer to its longest streak of consecutive days without snow: a record-breaking 332 days. On Sunday we’ll reach day 326.

“It’s very unusual,” meteorologist Nelson Vaz confirmed to AFP, recalling the recent paradoxical cold spell. In December, a meter of snow fell in Buffalo, in which 39 people died.

But in New York, 600 kilometers to the south, this historic storm froze much of the United States around Christmas, resulting in a lot of rain and unusually high temperatures.

According to Weather.com, you have to go back to 1932 to find a warmer start than January this year.

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“The climate benefits of ‘carbon offsetting’ are exaggerated at best, imaginary at worst”.

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RRest assured: everything is compensated. Whether you’re enjoying Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, taking an EasyJet or British Airways flight, treating yourself to Gucci clothing, or watching a Netflix series, you’re exposed to a reassuring charge ( or could have been) “carbon neutral”, Greenhouse gas emissions resulting from your product or service have no effect on the climate.

Behind each of these guilt-free messages is hidden a complex technical, accounting and financial mechanism: the construction of forestry projects in the countries of the South (forest protection, afforestation, afforestation), the certification and calculation of carbon credits generated by these projects, The sale of these credits to companies wishing to offset their emissions and thus finance initiatives by local players.

Climate drift, or an economically rational solution to a giant mystery? published these days, a careful and explosive investigation conducted by the daily Guardian and weekly die zeitSourceMaterial, in collaboration with investigative journalists, leans towards the second option.

Our British and German colleagues analyzed a sample of around thirty projects certified by VERA, the main standards organization based in Washington. By our partners’ calculations, these projects have generated over a hundred million carbon credits – enough to offset the annual emissions of about twenty coal-fired power plants.

Read also: Articles reserved for our customers Global warming: how the gas industry is lobbying to protect its existence

The result: only 5.5% of these credits were genuine, neutralizing the greenhouse gas emissions they should have. The rest, i.e. about 95% are “Phantom Credit” Which are traded in the market without any climate benefit. Over the past 15 years, Vera says it has issued a total of one billion carbon credits, which represents three years of UK emissions.

“The Market Is Broken”

To arrive at these figures, the authors relied on interviews with former auditors, on analysis of technical documents from the certification body, but also and above all on analysis of satellite images conducted by researchers and published in the scientific literature.

The analysis led to other estimates: Of a set of thirty-two projects certified by VERA and believed to contain a forest area the size of Italy, it is in fact an area comparable to the municipality of Venice that would have been effectively protected. … Unsurprisingly, Vera strongly opposes the method of study that served as the basis for the investigation by our colleagues.

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