Too Much Snow For Rudolf!

By Paul Homewood

 

There’s always some absurd story at Xmas. This year it’s the poor reindeer!

 

 

It’s been a race against time to bring in the reindeer from their mountain summer grazing ground, but today Per-Martin Kuhmunen, a 39-year-old Sami herder is triumphant.

"We brought them in today," he grins as he and two other members of the Gabna herding district sit exhausted, bruised and battered, in a cabin on the outskirts of the village of Abisko in the far-northern corner of Swedish Lapland.

The herders, like those from other districts across Sweden, have this year been forced to bring their 6,500 reindeer in from their mountain pastures a month earlier than normal, after unusually early and heavy snowfall linked to climate change meant their animals could not find food.

"The problem comes when the ground is still warm," explains Tomas Svonni, the district’s chairman. "When you get snow on warm ground, you get ice at the bottom, and the food which the reindeer eat becomes frozen."

Inside the cabin, there’s a fug of sweat, wet clothes and boiled reindeer meat. Parked outside are the snowmobiles, day-glo lassos hanging from the handlebars, on which the men have spent four days ranging over the slopes in search of their animals.

Christer Johansson is busy sawing and screwing planks in darkness, even though it’s only the early afternoon. He is racing to finish the complex arrangement of wooden pens where the deer will be separated by owner over the coming days.

"There’s a little bit of a panic to get the reindeer down," he explains. "They can’t find any food up on the mountain, so they have to come down to the forest."

 

Climate change is leaving reindeer in Swedish lapland hungry.  Credit: Richard Orange

This Arctic corner of Sweden is seeing some of the most dramatic changes to weather patterns on earth. According to the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, temperatures here were on average more than 3C higher between 1991 and 2017 than between 1961 and 1990. That is more than six times as much of a rise as the 0.5C estimated for the world as a whole. 

"The biggest thing is the temperature differences: it can be pretty warm one day and -30C the next day," Mr Svonni explains. "We haven’t seen this before. This is new for us."

Warmer air in the Arctic means there’s more energy in the system, making the weather more changeable. This can push cold Arctic air down over northern Sweden, bringing short cold spells, but also bring periods of unusual midwinter warmth. The overall trend is towards later snowcover and earlier thaws.

Last year a summer drought led to a shortage of food for the reindeer, and then in December, there was not enough snow. 

According to Tim Horstkotte, a postdoctoral researcher at the Swedish Agricultural University (SLU), changing weather patterns are making the livelihood Sami herders have pursued for thousands of years even more precarious. 

"One of the things with climate change is that it gets so unpredictable," he says. "This is one of the other things that reindeer herders are quick to point out: that it becomes unstable and unreliable. It’s impossible almost to plan ahead because things can change so dramatically in a short space of time."

https://web.archive.org/web/20191221151332/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/21/swedens-reindeer-herders-forced-adapt-climate-change/

 

Apparently global warming is leading to more snow!.

 

In fact the temperature data for December in the region shows no sign of any long term changes, although there were some extremely cold months in that 1961 to 90 period, dreamt up by the Telegraph as some sort of norm. (Tromso is slightly to the west of Abisko, where the story is based in; Karasjok is a little north and to the east, so together they give a reasonable representation).

 

https://climexp.knmi.nl/selectstation.cgi?id=someone@somewhere

 

On the whole, there were many years in the 1930s to 1950s period, when Decembers were milder than in recent years.

Neither does there appear to be much change in the distribution of daily temperatures throughout the year, according to KNMI, suggesting that the claims that the weather is becoming more changeable are bunkum:

 

 

https://climexp.knmi.nl/getstations.cgi

 

 

Indeed, the daily data for Tromso suggests daily extremes are becoming much less. (No daily data is available for Karasjok):

 

 

https://climexp.knmi.nl/data/vgdcnNO000001026.dat

 

There has been an absence of extremely cold days. Since 2002, there has only been one day colder than minus 10C. There have however been other periods similar to this, for instance the 1930s, and the early 1970s.

Perhaps more unexpected though is the relative absence of mild days above 4C since 2008. Again we see a pattern of many cold days and few mild ones between 1960 and 1990, in stark contrast to earlier decades.

 

 

Yet another example of shoddy journalism from the Telegraph, who are happy to just regurgitate whatever nonsense they have been told, without doing even the most basic of checks!

 

 

FOOTNOTE

There is an interesting footnote to this story.

According to the Guardian in July, reindeer populations have actually been thriving “because of climate change”:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/30/deaths-of-200-reindeer-in-arctic-caused-by-climate-change-say-researchers

 

It is a sad fact of life that when animal populations increase, there is more competition for limited resources.

But I think we can safely assume that Santa won’t have any trouble recruiting reindeer next Xmas!