Above, I chatted with Jennifer Francis of Rutgers back in the spring of 2013, and the topic turned briefly to  snowcover in a warming world, and some interesting paradoxes.

To kick this off, here are some graphs from the Rutgers Snow Lab. Can you spot the global warming effects?

Listen to Francis, above, read this excerpt from Kevin Trenberth’s recent piece on this topic – and look again.

Kevin Trenberth in The Conversation:

There is a saying that it can be “too cold to snow”! Of course, this is a myth but it has a basis in fact because the atmosphere gets freeze dried when it is very cold. That’s because the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold depends very strongly on temperature. Under cold conditions, the snow is likely to consist of very small crystals and sometimes is very light and fluffy and like “diamond dust”.