I wish we could have some balance in reporting. I guess humans need the extreme take to react. But even the article, author, admitted that these beauties were beautiful this year, until the rains hit. So, the author goes out after the rain and calls it climate change that the rain melted much of the iced snow. Loses credibility.
We have intense issues here on planet earth. Call it climate change or call it pollution or call it both; developing nations are expanding a unsustainable levels. Over-population is occurring in areas least capable to support them. To deal with these, we're cutting down our forests, damming our rivers, and dumping plastics and sewage in our waterways and oceans. Anyone see this as an issue? We need to address over population, first and foremost. That is the trend that will destroy the planet and it's non-human inhabitants.
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I think part of the problem of climate change is that the effects are not (currently) uniform across the world. The average person thinks of "sea rise" as a certain amount would be like what is seen in a bathtub, equal across the board.
But, no, it doesn't work that way. Norfolk, VA has been dealing with the increase in rising sea levels for a while. Certain parts of the world are having higher average temperatures where other parts aren't (yet). These average American climate-change deniers won't believe it until it slaps them across the face and by then it is too late.
It's kind of like a trashy horror flick where it is obvious to the audience what is going to happen but the idiotic actors keep ignoring signs and symptoms and then they get bumped off.
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The demise of the juhyo is just another example of the effects of climate change to be ignored by the climate change deniers, which include our president. Since there is a cost associated with addressing climate change, there is a tendency to do nothing. Unless or until the values of the world undergo a massive alteration, we will continue to destroy the world for future unborn generations. We have sufficient evidence to act now, but we lack the will.
In the near future, we will program the human mind in the computer based on a "survival" algorithm, which will provide irrefutable proof as to how we trick the mind with our ridiculous beliefs about what is supposed to survive - producing minds programmed de facto for destruction. These minds would see the survival of a particular group of people or a belief as more important than the survival of all. When we understand all this, we will begin the long trek back to reason and sanity.
See RevolutionOfReason.com
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In the early 1990s, when I lived in Tokyo, a friend and I went to Mr. Zao to see the juhyo. They were spectacular - huge snow "monsters" all the way down the mountain. It's very sad to see them so diminished by climate change and insect predation.
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The machine described as a bulldower is not meant to move earth. Rather, its used to move snow, and it called a snowcat, at least at US ski resorts.
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Used to see the same conditions on Mt. Hood, but it's been a rarer sight in my lifetime.
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The comments below were just as informative as the article.
Thank you.
I wish the article - like other travel articles - had told us costs of this excursion. Knowing the way for far the yen goes or does not go - I am expecting this is not quite the walk in the park.
As an aside, I commend folks for not blaming one particular person or dragging his name into it or make a "juhyo" out of him.
That's quite something.
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I lived in Yamagata for 3 years in the early 1990s. I learned to ski at Zao and remember hearing about the Snow Monsters from my students. Although I had seen them many times during my early skiing career it was a single night time trip that was most memorable. It was bitter cold and the sublime landscape radiated in the moon's light.
I showed this article to my wife, a woman that grew up in Yamagata, and she mentioned that her mom who lives at the bottom of Zao has said that there is very little snow in the city. Compared to my memories of long ago it is unimaginable as that city was repeatedly dumped on by frequent storms crossing over the Sea of Japan.
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I believe the kanji for "juhyo" are: 樹氷 (trees that are frozen with ice).
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Well, first off, I checked the avg temps Dec-Mar for Yamagata and at most I'd say the avg temps have risen maybe 1 degree C since 1910 -- and temps have been reasonably constant since 1950. the avg temps 1950 to now are about 1 degree C higher than 1910-1949.
There is a trend up, but who knows why -- it could be that the initial measurement period in the area 1890-1950 -- was cooler and then the period from 1950 until now it warmed some. This could be normal variation, it could be measurement changes, it could be changes in the local environment of some sort, or maybe global warming. But given that temps have been reasonably constant since 1950 (very little trend up) it is doubtful the snow monsters are disappearing because of global warming. Temps vary from year to year and in some years you get better monsters than others depending on temps, but probably a lot of other things. Snowfall varies from year to year, not just based on temps.
The constant attempt by the NYTimes to link every natural event to man caused warming is getting a little boring don't you think? Natural phenomena vary from year to year and are cyclical over both short and long periods. When you see an event or what appears to be a change in some phenomena in a very small area, it is probably unwise to link it to global warming.
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@Ralphie: so reliable in providing misinformation. As to boring, that too. But repetition is the soul of unskeptical "skepticism" since noticing events and folding them in to a view of the world might contain some surprises like this one.
It would be useful if you used your powers of observation to notice the changes all around us, instead of steadfastly denying them. It's no longer a matter of science and theory, but of vast realms of evidence.
For example, today we have a countrywide "bombogenesis" with multiple floods, a blizzard, and a good few tornadoes.
One might say that big storms like Idai, which is hammering Mozambique, happen on a regular basis, but the clusters of worldwide events are quite a thing.
So why not take those math/statistical skills you are so proud of and use them to measure real stuff. You might learn something.
Yes, I suspect your maths helped you earn a good living, but going against reality won't last forever. Being even a superb statistician doesn't change one data point.
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@Susan Anderson Please. No misinformation here. I actually downloaded the data for the weather station in Yamagata. I also looked at the trends for all the long lived (1000+ months) weather stations in Japan. None show the warming suggested in this article. But, don't believe me. Go do the work yourself.
You are making the same mistake all alarmists do. You take individual weather events and if they are bad you attribute them to warming. Tornadoes? Those happen in March. In fact, they happen in every month of the year. There isn't an uptrend though in tornadoes -- in fact -- we haven't had an F-5 in the US for several years. There are also snow storms in the spring. One of the biggest in NY history occurred in March -- back in the nineteenth century. Evidence for climate change?
Attributing individual weather events to some larger change in the climate is wrong headed. You need long term trends. And unfortunately, our historical record is wanting. We simply haven't been looking at weather events over a long period with the same precision we have now. We don't have a good historical record of hurricanes as we didn't have satellites prior to the 1960's. Even so, there isn't evidence in our existing records of an increase in Atlantic hurricanes.
And let's be clear. Climate does change. There are climate cycles. Sometimes temps trend up, sometimes down. So? That doesn't mean the apocalypse is nigh.
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@Ralphie
How many published scientific articles have you written in the field of climate analysis? Everybody who studies and Publishers in this field has said the same thing. When you get your PhD in climate science come talk to me. It's not for no reason that they are sounding the alarm. Go smoke some cigarettes, there where doctors denying that they were harmful
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what was the carbon footprint of all the tourists?
11
Juhyo apparently translates to soft rime. The sub-heading (?) made it sound like juhyo translates to ice monsters, which is a marketing term.
1
One question based on the following sentence: "Dating back to the early 20th century, scientists identified juhyo stretching from as far north as Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, to as far south as Nagano, which was host to the 1998 Winter Olympics and is about 150 miles northwest of Tokyo."
Did scientists first learn about this phenomenon last century, or did it just start happening in the early 20th century? With observational sciences, the scientists are usually coming late to the party and documenting something locals have been deeply familiar with. And in too many situations, the researchers are looking at things that are ending, like studying the last white rhino, or this amazing thing.
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If anyone wants to hold Japan up as an example of environmentalism and green practices all we have to do is remember the debris from the tsunami that was washed into the Pacific Ocean, all still there.
Or the thousands of tons of highly contaminated water spilling into the Pacific Ocean each and every month.
So any story that has to do with the environment, the Earth, pollution etc should not ever mention Japan. They have made very little headway in stopping the Fukisima mess and no effort on cleaning up the debris from the tsunami.
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@Junkman
This story has to do with climate change. It is more than appropriate to talk about climate change wherever it occurs on the earth. Furthermore, because a society has failed in one particular aspect of conservation, or environmental management, doesn't mean we can't point out when they get something right.
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@Tom ,Retired Florida Junkman - they've made constant progress, first installing freezers to create an underground ice barrier to prevent outflow of the trapped water on site, and recently for the first time they were actually able to have a robot enter under one reactor and grab a bit of the fuel debris. They are making a great deal of effort, but cleaning up three destroyed nuclear reactors is a long-term effort - they're figuring forty years.
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@b fagan - link attached about the recent robot operation
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/japanese-utility-makes-first-contact-with-melted-fukushima-fuel/
There's been a huge amount of R&D put into developing robots that can survive conditions in there, surviving radiation while navigating rubble, and still being able to send data back.
Just figuring out how to look into the site to find the fuel took some real innovation - as in using muon detectors to see where muons in cosmic rays were passing through the site or were obstructed.
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4808210
This shaved time off the project, and note in the link above that it took ten years just to assess damage in the Three Mile Island reactor, with a simpler accident scenario.
Nuclear generators are usually safe, but when there's a catastrophic failure, you can't just walk in with work gloves and start picking up the debris. The rare failures result in extremely long cleanups to be done correctly.
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“I am very worried about greenhouse effects,” Dr. Yanagisawa said. “By the end of the century, the juhyo will disappear from earth.”
That could be the epitaph for humankind as well as the snow monsters.
21
Reminds me of the rime covered trees on the west shore of Lake Michigan.
8
Climate change deniers often sneer at a FOX-inspired lie wherein NYC goes underwater, or some dramatic claim.
In reality, it will be the moths (and here in Oregon, pine beetles) that will kill the forests. 3 degrees warmer is enough for formerly rare insects to survive and thrive, at the expense of existing life. You might not care about faraway Antarctic ice, or invisible greenhouse gas, but when you start to see your pretty forests dying, it's too late. It won't necessarily be a wasteland, but it won't be what it was. Here in the NW, we are getting Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, beetles that have decimated spruce stands from California to Alaska. I thought America would care.
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