2023. The Year Without Winter? It's Happening. It's Scary.

“Men argue. Nature acts.”     --Voltaire

It just doesn’t seem right somehow. Just not right.

How my snow shovel hangs forlorn in the garage, just above the plastic buckets of sand and salt that sit untouched. Not far from the closet where my favorite navy-blue heavy jacket resides. I’ve yet to don that coat this winter. I’ve owned that vintage piece of clothing (circa 1941) for almost 25 years, and I’ve never ever failed to put it on as a wooly bulwark against the cold.  Until this year. Until this winter.  

Wait—is it really winter?

It doesn’t seem like it. Walking past the shiny red snowblowers, parked in a neat row out in front of Home Depot, prices slashed because you only need such machines when it actually snows. It’s not right. Not for the kids in my church youth group who stay home for long weekends now because there is no snow up north.  Not for the confused birds who must be wondering who’s coming and who’s going. Or for the dogs that now must deal with ticks all year round, no extended cold temperatures to kill off those tiny biting critters.  It’s downright weird that when I went for a walk in the woods this week, I almost had to doff my coat, as I sweat in the 58-degree weather.

On February 14^th. ON FEBRUARY 14^TH!!   

In 1816 New England and much of the world endured what came to be called the “Year Without a Summer.” Climate change caused temperatures around the globe to plummet. In Massachusetts it was referred to as “Eighteen-Hundred and Froze to Death” and the “Summer of Mittens.”  It snowed in June. Crops withered and died. But that climate disaster was caused by natural forces. In 1815, Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, exploded with volcanic fury. It was the largest eruption in recorded history. Tons and tons of ash was ejected up into the atmosphere and then the stratosphere. The suns rays were blocked. Worldwide temperatures fell.

But that was temporary. The following year, summer returned. Will New England winter return?

I know that sounds “chicken-littlish”, but I think this weirdly warm winter is starting to freak me out a bit. The irony is that normally I don’t much like winter. In past Februarys, I’d start whining right about now. About how sick I was of the cold. I’d gleefully kvetch about how much snow we’ve been buried under or how bone-chilling is the cold every day or how I long for spring and baseball and birds chirping again.  But now that seasonal script has been taken away from me. The birds are already chirping weeks too soon, saying to each other, perhaps, “What the heck on God’s green earth is going on?”   

It just feels like cheating to pine and beg for spring if you haven’t had to survive winter.  It’s like we’ve been given a pass from harsh and chilly weather. An exemption. With only two weeks of meteorological winter left, I wonder if we’ll receive any more appreciable snow. Or if we’ll feel temps in the twenties or thirties. I wonder if pond hockey players will ever get to slap the puck outside this year or if golden retrievers will frolic in joy through piles of fluffy new white snow.   Yes, we had that brutal big chill a few weeks ago but even that stuck around for barely a day. It went up to sixty degrees just 48 hours later.

This week we are right back to “enjoying” a string of upper forties and high fifties days.  In February! I know I already wrote that, but I can’t help but be creeped out by the death of winter in 2023. It reminds me that when it comes to human made climate change, what goes around comes around. We may enjoy the wacky warmth of February but what about next summer? What might that bring?

As a long-distance biker who loves to pedal from early spring to late fall, I worry the warm now, means by mid-summer we will be baking in the sun. Frying. Toasting. Each summer for the past 13 years I’ve done a charity ride, the Pan Mass Challenge, for me a single day 90 mile ride, from Wellesley in MetroWest Boston to Bourne, just at the foot of the bridge to Cape Cod. Most of the last several years have been brutal for heat. For last summer’s August 6^th ride my team left at 5:45 am to try and beat the scorching temps but by 1 pm it was 102 degrees in the shade. I felt like a fried egg on two wheels. Almost had to quit for the very first time because the heat plain wrung me out, made me faint and dizzy. Two bottles of water and thirty minutes in air conditioning helped me to get back on the bike and make it all the way but I wonder and worry just how hot it will be this year.

Hotter even!? God help us, no.

I know what you might be thinking. That we are going to get slammed with one big storm before spring. Seems to happen every March. Or it once did. My gut tells me no to snow for the duration. If that comes true it will be a bummer. Snowless is not natural in New England. At least the New England I used to know.

We’ve taken the world God has given to us and are inexorably changing it by our human activity. Whose fault is that winter is missing in action? Mine. Yours’. Humankind’s.

The year without a winter: 2023.  Fact or fiction?  Only time will tell.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.