By Jim Steele

The chickadee in the snowbank: A ‘canary in the coal mine’ for climate change in the Sierra Nevada mountains by Benjamin Sonnenberg was printed January 4th, 2024, in the Conversation and other internet media platforms. Knowing I had researched bird life nearby in the Sierra Nevada for over 25 years, prompted several people to seek my opinion regards the article bizarre claims.

As an ecologist studying ecosystem resilience, I quickly knew I must understand how ocean circulation altered weather patterns affecting California snowfall, floods, and droughts. Large weather variations are driven by yearly variations in natural El Ninos and La Ninas and 20–30-year variations in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Furthermore, natural seasonal variations in the tropical Madden-Julian Oscillation affects atmospheric rivers that deliver over 50% of the Sierra Nevada precipitation, most of which fell as snow.

Yet the Chickadee in the Coal Mine article never once mentioned these natural dynamics. Although most everyone knows the variable effects of El Nino and La Nina, Sonnenberg argues our “teeter-totter pattern has been identified as one of the unexpected symptoms of climate change, and its impact on the chickadees is providing an early warning of the disruptions ahead”.

Although Sierra Nevada ecosystems have evolved resilience to El Ninos natural variability, Sonnenberg, is ignorantly regurgitating alarmist Daniel Swain’s propaganda, suggesting climate change causes “whiplash and its cascading effects can destabilize ecosystems.”

Sonnenberg pulls out that standard alarmist’s canard to gaslight the public’s understanding of snowfall stating, “Extreme snow linked to global warming might seem counterintuitive, but it’s basic physics. Warmer air can hold more moisture – about 7% more for every degree Celsius (every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) that temperatures rise. This can result in heavier snowfall when storms strike.”

Alarmist typically promote such misinformation using the word counterintuitive, really meaning “contrary to well established science”. Whatever the cause of warming, snow always requires temperatures around 32F (0C) at the surface or it melts. Global warming does not change that basic scientific fact.

To blame CO2 for extreme weather, Sonnenberg shows a graph (A) of sharp variations in snow depth since 1950. In contrast, Christy (2010) shows greater variations in snowfall (B) between the 1940s and 1980s. Likewise California’s chief hydrologist shows (C & D) insignificant trends and expected high variability in snow water content in the northern and southern Sierra Nevada.

Climate alarmists do not educate the public about the causes of precipitation variations, choosing to always blame CO2 global warming. That is bad, bad science. On the west coast of America, heavy snowfall is associated with “atmospheric rivers”, a term first used by climate scientists in 1994 to describe a relatively narrow band of dense water vapor exiting the warm tropics and traveling northeastward.

Hatchet’s (2018) Illustration shows the evolution of an atmospheric river in blue (E) that brought heavy snows to the Sierra Nevada in 2018. In a matter of just 7 days, far too short a time to blame global warming, an atmospheric river emanated from the tropics, gets steered into the eastern Pacific where atmospheric water was extremely low 7 days before, and delivers heavy precipitation into the Sierra Nevada. Hatchet’s research determined that moisture was largely due to the remnants of typhoon Jelawat. The typhoon was initiated by the low-pressure system caused by the seasonal Madden-Julian oscillation (F).

When the convective phase of the Madden-Julian Oscillation migrates into the western Pacific, its convection phase more frequently triggers typhoons as it pulls abundant tropical moisture up to altitudes of 5000 to 10,000 feet, affecting the upper-level winds, that then carry that moisture eastward, (aka the atmospheric river) eventually delivering heavy snowfall to the Sierra Nevada.

When any scientist or internet alarmist tells you heavy snow fall is “counterintuitively due to global warming”, they are just scientific grifters who don’t know what they are talking about and denying well established science. The public really needs to demand better science.