Across the world, winter is shrinking. A new analysis from Climate Central found that dozens of countries and hundreds of cities have lost entire weeks and more of days below freezing, throwing everything from winter sports to seasonal allergies into upheaval.
“The coldest time of the year sustains snow and ice for winter recreation and other activities, and it replenishes the snowpack that supplies freshwater,” the non-profit’s researchers wrote. “Winter chill also plays a critical role in plant, animal, and insect life cycles, influencing ecosystems throughout the rest of the year.”
As a general concept, of course, this isn’t all that surprising: the world has warmed by more than 1.2 degrees Celsius at this point (the past year crossed the 1.5-degree Paris Agreement target, but we will need a bunch of years in a row at that level for scientists to consider that threshold fully behind us), and a warmer baseline means the cold days will start to diminish. But it is stark to see some of the numbers on this pinned down.
Climate Central analyzed the December-February daily minimum temperatures across 123 countries. They found that a third of them — 44 countries — saw at least one extra week with days above freezing per year during the 2014 to 2023 decade than previously, thanks to human-caused warming.
And some places had it worse than that. Twenty-five countries saw between one and two weeks of lost freezing days; those included European ski destinations like France and Italy, as well as Norway, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Europe in general is faring worse than other parts of the world here; Germany, Poland, and Belgium, among other countries, saw at least two more weeks of warmer weather per year. Denmark and the three Baltic countries are losing winter fastest of all, with at least three full weeks of lost freezing days due to climate change.
Drilling down to the city level, almost half (44 percent) of the 901 cities they studied lost at least a week of freezing weather. Some did far worse than that: the biggest losers include Fuji, Japan (35 days above freezing added annually); Khujand, Tajikistan (30 days); Turin, Italy (30 days); and Bergen, Norway (29 days). U.S. cities aren’t doing any better, with 39 out of 62 analyzed adding at least a week of non-winter to the winter months.
The effects of this evaporated winter are far-reaching. The ski and snowboard industry is of course looking down the barrel here, already terrified and trying to figure out how to survive a future with far less snow and far fewer days to enjoy it. Reduced snowpack on mountains will cut water supplies as well, and less time below freezing will probably worsen health risks related to mosquitoes, ticks, and other disease carriers. The timing of agriculture will also suffer, with various crops relying on certain amounts of winter chill to survive.
Northern hemisphere summer may be the part of the year where many of climate change’s worst and most visible impacts rear their heads — the devastating heat waves in some of the world’s most populous places, the juiced hurricanes, the catastrophic wildfires — but on the other side of the calendar we see impacts in the form of loss. Winter as we know it, just dropping away, day by day.