Those crazy crystals

An early classification of snowflakes by Israel Perkins Warren (1814-1892), Congregational minister as well as an editor, author and amateur scientist who lived in Connecticut and then in Maine.

Winters can be an inconvenient bore while also providing some days of glittering beauty and austere clarity and the clearest nights of the year to see the stars. In any case, winters are getting shorter, and along with that, there’s less snow as we continue to cook the world by burning gas, oil and coal.

To people like me who have generally found shoveling snow tedious  (and now, with age and heart disease, dangerous) and  icy streets and sidewalks narrowed by piles of snow frustrating to navigate, the  accelerating shrinkage of snow might seem pleasant (though I’m a former skier). But snow and cold are part of a healthy environment in the North Temperate Zone.

Consider that snow helps store  reliable fresh-water supplies for drinking and crops.  Its blanket protects the plants below it, and cold winters are part of the annual cycle essential for growing many fruits, among other edibles.

There’s an old adage  that “snow is the poor man’s fertilizer,’’  based on  the fact that as snow melts, it slowly releases nitrogen into the ground, while protecting the underlying plants from a killing freeze. Much of the nitrogen in rainfall washes away.

And besides facilitating winter sports, a major industry in such places as northern New England, winter and snow make us enjoy spring all the more. (Snow-making strikes me as an environmentally dubious activity – using lots of energy, causing some erosion and sometimes screwing up local water systems. But, hey, it is exhilarating to bounce down a mountain, even if the land on each side of the “snow”-covered trail is brown.)

Of course, heating bills can be onerous, but so can electricity bills for air conditioning as summery temperatures tend to start earlier and end later.

Meanwhile, of course, even as global warming continues, there will still be cold snaps; one will be coming this week. There’s weather and then there’s climate. Remember when the sci-fi-sounding “polar vortex” deep freeze in the Northeast (apparently caused by warming around the North Pole!) very briefly drove our temperatures below zero last winter? Things quickly warmed up again to above “normal’’, whatever that is these days, but not before killing some plants that had been lured into acting (do plants “act”?) as if spring had arrived. One of  our favorite  flowering shrubs died in this way, though the others seemed unaffected.

All Wet

This 18th Century house in Newport’s frequently flooded Point section was the headquarters of French Vicomte de Noailles 1780-1781, during the Revolutionary War.

Will localities and states have to start taking many thousands of properties along shorelines of rivers and the ocean  by eminent domain as these places repeatedly flood? Just in Rhode Island, you see the same places flooding again and again and again with taxpayers having to absorb some of the cost of repair. People like to live along the water, but this can’t go on.

Things will get particularly interesting if the powers-that-be try  to permanently evacuate such upscale places as Newport’s Point neighborhood, with its gorgeous 18th Century houses. But I suppose that wouldn’t happen for a few decades….Right? Get out those stilts!