we might get one or two or three snows, we've had none this year.

But the last week or so has been above freezing most days. So it is strange. I remember in February 2016 that my then-one-year-old was splashing in puddles in a light jacket. In North Dakota.

The fact that it is cold and snowy in a particular location does not mean climate change resulting in higher average temperatures around the world is not occurring. Here in Minnesota we had a week of subzero temperatures and a fair amount of snow. However, that's just weather. The change in the climate here, snow and cold notwithstanding, is evidenced by the changes in the USDA's hardiness zones. What was Zone 4 in my area only a few years ago is now listed as Zone 5. Climate isn't weather; it's weather patterns over time. It's getting warmer and the weather is getting weirder and more severe.

I used both as most people now seem to use either term. NASA below is copyright exempt.



Whats in a Name? Global Warming vs. Climate Change: https://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-warming-vs-climate-change

Summary: Whether referred to as "global warming" or "climate change," the consequences of the widescale changes currently being observed in Earth's climate system could be considerable.
The Internet is full of references to global warming. The Union of Concerned Scientists website on climate change is titled "Global Warming," just one of many examples. But we don't use global warming much on this website. We use the less appealing "climate change." Why?

To a scientist, global warming describes the average global surface temperature increase from human emissions of greenhouse gases. Its first use was in a 1975 Science article by geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory: "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?"1

Broecker's term was a break with tradition. Earlier studies of human impact on climate had called it "inadvertent climate modification."2 This was because while many scientists accepted that human activities could cause climate change, they did not know what the direction of change might be. Industrial emissions of tiny airborne particles called aerosols might cause cooling, while greenhouse gas emissions would cause warming. Which effect would dominate?

For most of the 1970s, nobody knew. So "inadvertent climate modification," while clunky and dull, was an accurate reflection of the state of knowledge.

The first decisive National Academy of Science study of carbon dioxide's impact on climate, published in 1979, abandoned "inadvertent climate modification." Often called the Charney Report for its chairman, Jule Charney of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, declared: "if carbon dioxide continues to increase, [we find] no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible."3

In place of inadvertent climate modification, Charney adopted Broecker's usage. When referring to surface temperature change, Charney used "global warming." When discussing the many other changes that would be induced by increasing carbon dioxide, Charney used "climate change."
Definitions

Global warming: the increase in Earth’s average surface temperature due to rising levels of greenhouse gases.

Climate change: a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on Earth.

Within scientific journals, this is still how the two terms are used. Global warming refers to surface temperature increases, while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas amounts will affect.

During the late 1980s one more term entered the lexicon, “global change.” This term encompassed many other kinds of change in addition to climate change. When it was approved in 1989, the U.S. climate research program was embedded as a theme area within the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

But global warming became the dominant popular term in June 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen had testified to Congress about climate, specifically referring to global warming. He said: "global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming."4 Hansen's testimony was very widely reported in popular and business media, and after that popular use of the term global warming exploded. Global change never gained traction in either the scientific literature or the popular media.

But temperature change itself isn't the most severe effect of changing climate. Changes to precipitation patterns and sea level are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone. For this reason, scientific research on climate change encompasses far more than surface temperature change. So "global climate change" is the more scientifically accurate term. Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we've chosen to emphasize global climate change on this website, and not global warming.

1 Wallace Broecker, "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" Science, vol. 189 (8 August 1975), 460-463.

2 For example, see: MIT, Inadvertent Climate Modification: Report of the Study of Man's Impact on Climate (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971).

3National Academy of Science, Carbon Dioxide and Climate, Washington, D.C., 1979, p. vii.

4U.S. Senate, Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, "Greenhouse Effect and Global Climate Change, part 2" 100th Cong., 1st sess., 23 June 1988, p. 44.

Source:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_other_name.html

Author:
NASA

snow events since late November but the wind has blown most of it away due to the lack of moisture which was leached out by prolonged subzero temps.

We're getting our first normal snow, heavy and wet, right now. It started early this morning and is expected to continue to fall through Wednesday. Maybe we'll get a foot but that's not much for around here.

He's got his squeeze, his dog, electricity, firewood, cable internet, and food. He hasn't seen this much snow in years, and as a California native, he has a propensity to avoid snowblowers and shovels.

The wingnuts were claiming large snowfall meant no climate change 2 years ago.

It just doesn't work like that.

But, we had an inordinate amount of RAIN in January that normally would have been snow. We actually had a weekend where the low overnight temperature over 60 hours was only 47 degrees.

Now had that been normal January snow, it might have been a foot to a foot and a half, but while December seemed about normal, January has been abnormally warm.

I don't understand why you lump snow blowers and shoveling together.

In fact, your poll seems to be about the weather more than anything else.

There's a secondary carbon-footprint there somewhere.

When I use the snowblower, I clear four drives, as I have neighbors with health/age issues. When I use the shovel, I do a half-assed job on my walk and then grab the ibuprofen.

Several good replies in this thread. Feel free to add to it.

Higher temps somewhere else lead to more evaporation, which then falls on you as snow. The issue of climate change is so much more complicated than the local weather.

That's exactly what can happen.

We had one cold streak that was short lived. The concept of having to run a snoblower doesn't really measure up to if it was as cols as it should be because often times it is TOO cold to snow here for parts of winter. However... It has been incredibly warm here. Many days above 30 and 40 degrees!

Nuff said.

I went and did some babysitting of a sick grandchild on short notice. Came home and went to sleep. Woke up a 3 my time and started checking in. I'll be back later this morning.

OS

Instead of shoveling snow for the first 10-12 years we were here, we'd wait until 10 am and it would melt.

Not so the last three years we've had horrible snow/ice storms where it stays cold (and even had single digit low temps for several days)
and doesn't melt. This year the snow/ice storm arrived Friday night, January 6, and we weren't able to get out of our driveway (iced)
until the next Wednesday, Jan 11th.

We are seeing more of these episodes of more extreme weather and I've read it is due to climate change.

about a 6" snowfall back in the middle of Dec. Since then a few dustings, that's it.