I’m sorry, but you are still making inaccurate claims about what CRU predicted and over what timescales.
The 20 year prediction referred specifically to heavy snow becoming unexpected and causing chaos when it happens. I see no reason at all to believe that will be false, or that it will have only a slim chance of being true.
The vague “few year” claim referred to snow becoming “rare and exciting”. But arguably, that was already true in 2000 at the time of the article (which was indeed kind of the point of the article). So it’s not necessary to argue about whether snow became even rarer later in the 2000s (or is becoming rarer slower than it used to), when there’s really too little data to know over such a short period.
There was a totally undated claim referring to future children not seeing snow first-hand. You are clearly assuming that the “few year” time horizon also attached to that strong claim (and is therefore baloney); however, the article doesn’t actually say that, and I rather doubt if CRU themselves ever said that. It does seem very unlikely to me that a climate scientist would ever make such a claim attached to a timescale of less than decades. (Though if they’d really meant hundreds of years, or billions of years, they’d presumably have said that: these guys really aren’t like creationists).
Finally, the Independent put all of this under a truly lousy and misleading headline, when it is clear from what CRU actually said that snows were not and would not become a thing of the past (just rarer).
The general problem is that much of the newspaper article includes indirect speech, with only a few direct quotes, and the direct quotes aren’t bound to a timescale (except the specific 20-year quote mentioned above). So it’s hard to know exactly what CRU said.
I’m sorry, but you are still making inaccurate claims about what CRU predicted and over what timescales.
The 20 year prediction referred specifically to heavy snow becoming unexpected and causing chaos when it happens. I see no reason at all to believe that will be false, or that it will have only a slim chance of being true.
The vague “few year” claim referred to snow becoming “rare and exciting”. But arguably, that was already true in 2000 at the time of the article (which was indeed kind of the point of the article). So it’s not necessary to argue about whether snow became even rarer later in the 2000s (or is becoming rarer slower than it used to), when there’s really too little data to know over such a short period.
There was a totally undated claim referring to future children not seeing snow first-hand. You are clearly assuming that the “few year” time horizon also attached to that strong claim (and is therefore baloney); however, the article doesn’t actually say that, and I rather doubt if CRU themselves ever said that. It does seem very unlikely to me that a climate scientist would ever make such a claim attached to a timescale of less than decades. (Though if they’d really meant hundreds of years, or billions of years, they’d presumably have said that: these guys really aren’t like creationists).
Finally, the Independent put all of this under a truly lousy and misleading headline, when it is clear from what CRU actually said that snows were not and would not become a thing of the past (just rarer).
The general problem is that much of the newspaper article includes indirect speech, with only a few direct quotes, and the direct quotes aren’t bound to a timescale (except the specific 20-year quote mentioned above). So it’s hard to know exactly what CRU said.