snow day

When Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas” in 1940 in sunny La Quinta, southern California, he was a world away from the glistening tree tops and “sleigh bells in the snow” of his festive classic. Yet snow would have been a big part of his childhood winters in Talachyn, modern day Belarus, where the composer lived before emigrating to the US aged five. In Britain too, snow is a key component of our collective cultural memory of the festive season, even if we’re long used to being without it. Yet the last Christmas Day the UK enjoyed widespread snow was 12 years ago. Indeed, the Met Office is forecasting mild weather for Christmas 2022 at the time of writing. Go back a century and a half, however, and white Christmases were not such a rarity. Between 1400 and 1850, the UK experienced a “little ice age” that brought about notably harsh winters. White Christmases were common occurrences in the 18th and 19th centuries, according to data shared with the New Statesman by the Met Office. It is not for nothing that A Christmas Carol (1843) portrays Ebenezer Scrooge in a snowy London on Christmas Day. var pymParent = new pym.Parent("nsmg-127-0", "https://nsmg-projects-public.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/live/nsmg-127/index.html", {}); With the little ice age well behind us, and the planet suffering catastrophic climate change, the prospects of a UK winter white-out look ever-more remote. For snow to fall and to stick around, there need to be cold temperatures. But climate change means the world is warming. Globally, the temperature has now risen by around 1.2°C above pre-industrial times, and the last eight years in the UK were the warmest on record. The average UK temperature in December last decade was 4.8°C; in the 1890s, it was 3.1°C. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r