Guest essay by Eric Worrall

You would think after past embarrassments climate scientists would have learned not to trust model predictions that snowfall will soon be a thing of the past.

Global warming melts hopes of a white Christmas in Ireland

A leading climatologist has some bad news for snow-lovers

By Nick Bramhill
14:31, 12 NOV 2017

The prospect of Ireland waking up to a white Christmas is becoming more and more unlikely every year, according to a leading climatologist.

Prof John Sweeney said that Ireland can expect increasingly warmer winters due to global warming, resulting in less snowfall in the traditionally coldest months of the year.

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He said: “The projections are for Ireland to warm by 1C by mid-Century, and we’re looking at both warmer summers and winters.

“We’ll always get snow in the uplands and mountains, but we’ll start to see less snow in the lowland areas in the coming years, and that means we’ll get fewer and fewer white Christmases. Let’s put it this way, if I were a betting man I wouldn’t be putting any money on there being snowfall on Christmas Day. It’s getting less likely each year.”

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Read more: http://ift.tt/2yuU2gK

We no longer seem to have so many of the kind of special moments when scientists and advocates predict snow will end in 10 years, but even the middle of the century is drawing uncomfortably close to being falsifiable on a reasonable timescale.

Of course, climate scientists can trot out predictions that global warming will cause heavier snowfalls when the inevitable blockbuster winter hits, to demonstrate they were right all along.