One telling data point in this article: Yamaha is getting out of the snowmobile business. No future in it. Unsustainable.
Ice fishing, snowmobiling, skating, snowshoeing – you’re still going to be able to do it from time to time, but it’s going to get more and more rare to have the good weather to bust out the equipment.
I grew up in Michigan, on the water in the summer, on the snow in the Winter.
For decades, I kept my cross country skis at the ready as my go-to daily exercise routine from around Christmas till mid-March.
That ended some time in the 90s. Still have some skis gathering dust in the basement, and we do get snow from time to time, but it just doesn’t stay, or quickly ices over so badly that it’s not worth the trouble, or the heartbreak, to go out and remind myself, again, of what we’re losing.
“Everybody always says, ‘Oh, there’s next year,’” said Jacob Piper, 23, of East China. But after the latest in a string of miserable ice fishing seasons, he has drawn a different conclusion: “Climate change is here. It’s happening. And it sucks.”
As Michigan closes out the warmest winter on record for much of the state, experts say the past few months are a prelude to the future. Winter, as generations of Michiganders have known it, is disappearing. And it’s taking with it a shared heritage that helps define what it means to be a Michigander — one marked by proudly embracing the cold, wearing fur coats in Detroit, playing pond hockey in Rochester Hills and mushing in Marquette.
The sense of loss will accelerate with each lost winter, predicted Nancy Langston, an environmental historian at Michigan Technological University.
“We don’t realize how much it defines us until it suddenly vanishes,” she said.
Earlier this month, as Piper searched for good ice, Darlene Walch found herself announcing for the second straight year that Michigan’s longest sled dog race, the UP200, was canceled due to warm weather. Even in the famously wintry Upper Peninsula, daytime highs had been at or above freezing for nine straight days and would stay that way for eight more.
“I am not a meteorologist. I’m just looking out the window and looking at the thermometer and going, ‘Wow, this doesn’t feel like February,” said Walch, president of the Upper Peninsula Sled Dog Association, which hosts the UP200.
The next day, the sun beat down on bare asphalt while a man in shorts lingered near the starting line of the canceled Michigan Snowmobile Festival in Gaylord. The city in the middle of Michigan’s snowbelt historically has averaged 12 feet of snow per winter. This year, it’s received half that.
Michigan’s winters have warmed for decades now, while scientists warned of more dramatic changes ahead if society continues burning fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The difference this year?
“It’s crossing the freezing line,” said Richard Rood, a professor emeritus of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan.
“And it’s all of a sudden very obvious, to very many people.”
Video: Tell me you don’t have snow in February in Michigan’s UP while not telling me.
Across the Great Lakes, daily maximum temperatures this winter have averaged 5 degrees to 10 degrees above average. Snowfall has been paltry and quick to melt.
It is tempting to blame El Niño, a cyclical phenomenon in which weak Pacific trade winds cause warmer and dryer weather in parts of the northern U.S. and Canada — and many have.
But multiple experts who spoke to Bridge said El Niño’s effects are minimal in this part of the country. And this year’s cycle isn’t particularly severe.
“This is not what an El Niño winter is typical of,” said Sapna Sharma, a climate expert and professor in the biology department at York University in Ontario. “We’ve had El Niño winters in the past…we also know that year after year, we’re breaking records for the warmest global air temperatures in recorded history.”
Winters are heating especially fast, and are expected to warm several degrees more by mid-century. As those changes escalate, experts say Michigan’s average winter will look a lot like the winter of 2024.
By the 2050s, most of Michigan will be “muddy and sodden” in the winter, with less snow, more rain and crocuses and daffodils blooming in February, Rood said.
“Snow in Detroit will be more like snow in North Carolina — a very rare event,” he said.
Michigan’s erratic day-to-day weather (“If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes”) can mask those long-term trends.
Indeed, slight warming may lead to more snow in parts of the state, said James Kessler, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor.
That’s because when the Great Lakes fail to freeze over, Michigan gets lake-effect storms caused by cold winds whipping across the water, picking up moisture and dumping it on land. Increasingly, that moisture is coming down as rain or melting within days.
Lake ice is getting thinner, too. This year, the Great Lakes maxed out at just 16 percent ice cover — less than a third of normal. By mid-century, many inland lakes will fail to consistently freeze over at all, said Sharma, who has extensively studied the topic.
That means ice fishing season will become shorter and more dangerous — if it arrives. And across much of the state, skating and skiing will be activities confined to resorts and arenas capable of making artificial snow and ice.
“There will be loss,” Rood said.
Disappearing winters threaten Michiganders’ collective identity, said Langston, the Michigan Tech historian.
“We’re northern people, who have chosen to live in a cold, remote place at the edge of the universe,” Langston said. “And people who live here are really proud of that.”
For generations, that pride has inspired public celebrations across the state — from Heikinpäivä and Heikki Lunta, mid-winter celebrations in the U.P. honoring Finnish snow gods, to polar plunges in Houghton Lake, ski contests in Traverse City, snowmobile races on Lake St. Clair and snurfing — a precursor to modern snowboarding — in Muskegon.
Like sweating in a backyard sauna, mushing is a revered part of the U.P.’s heritage. Newspaper archives document Yoopers racing dog sleds for sport as early as the 1800s. In a region often buried under several feet of snow, they also served a practical purpose, transporting mail carriers, trappers and surveyors before the era of salt trucks and snowplows.
“It’s an amazing sport, so we want to continue it,” said Walch of the sled dog association.
But warm spells have repeatedly challenged the UP200. The race formerly traveled north-to-south between Marquette and Escanaba, but unreliable weather in the southern U.P. forced organizers to move the route north to the Lake Superior snow belt, between Marquette and Grand Marais.
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Motorsports giant Yamaha will stop making snowmobiles next year, saying it’s no longer a sustainable business.
Craig Carruthers, a lifelong snowmobiler in the U.P. community of Raco, can understand why. This winter, his sleds have barely left storage.
In 1968, Yamaha released its first snowmobile, the SL350, by applying small engine technology which it developed in the motorcycle business. Over the past 55 years, Yamaha developed snowmobiles for sports, leisure, and business use as a means of transportation mainly in snowy areas found in North America and Europe. Yamaha also aimed to grow the business through the early introduction of environmentally-friendly 4-stroke models and alliances with other companies. However, Yamaha has concluded it will be difficult to continue a sustainable business in the snowmobile market. Going forward, Yamaha will concentrate management resources on current business activities and new growth markets.
“skating and skiing will be activities confined to resorts and arenas capable of making artificial snow and ice.”
Call it the privatization of snow.
Just another example of disaster capitalism capitalizing on climate catastrophe.
What’s the carbon footprint of venue skiing compared to other sports or leisure activities? I suppose competitions in all sports entail traveling a lot.
I saw the writing on the wall years back when they started having to re-route the Iditarod.
Whole new perspective on “mushing”, aeh?