The average doesn’t tell the whole story. F’burg weather is strange, it never seems to line up with Richmond nor DC. We’ve gotten these sorts of snowfalls every 5–10 years since the 80s, give or take: https://fredericksburg.com/lifestyles/johnston-a-look-back-a...
I'm firmly on the side of science with regards to climate change, and I don't think this type of commentary helps convince anyone. When there's a heatwave, it's climate change. A cold snap, also climate change. Tornado? Climate change. We would rightly ridicule a climate change denier if they equated weather events with climate, we shouldn't do it either.
Then I'll give you the sciencey answer. Global warming was so called not because of higher expected temperatures, but rather because there is more energy in the atmosphere. For scientists, broadly, when talking about a system energy is almost equivalent to temperature.
The excess energy is manifested is more extreme weather - including more extreme cold. This is especially true for the US, as the changes in weather patterns move the Gulfstream further north. This pushes the colder, polar air right onto Canada and then the US. For the past decade there has been a trend when the US has these cold snaps, the polar regions are a few tens of degrees (pick your scale, doesn't matter) hotter than what is generally expected historically for that time of year.
UN: "In the period 2000 to 2019, there were 7,348 major recorded disaster events claiming 1.23 million lives, affecting 4.2 billion people (many on more than one occasion) resulting in approximately US$2.97 trillion in global economic losses.
This is a sharp increase over the previous twenty years. Between 1980 and 1999, 4,212 disasters were linked to natural hazards worldwide claiming approximately 1.19 million lives and affecting 3.25 billion people resulting in approximately US$1.63 trillion in economic losses.
Much of the difference is explained by a rise in climate-related disasters including extreme weather events: from 3,656 climate-related events (1980-1999) to 6,681 climate-related disasters in the period 2000-2019.
The last twenty years have seen the number of major floods more than double, from 1,389 to 3,254, while the incidence of storms grew from 1,457 to 2,034. Floods and storms were the most prevalent events."
If you look a bit deeper at the statistics, this database "records disasters which have killed ten or more people; affected 100 or more people; resulted in a declared state of emergency, or a call for international assistance."
What factors besides frequency and severity of weather events could affect these statistics?
Most obvious are population growth (doubled over that period) and increased urbanization (reversed from 60:40 primarily rural, to 60:40 primarily urban). This means that an event with the same severity is greatly more likely to be reported and included in this database. Similarly for economic effects - because of the growth in assets, infrastructure, and GDP, that doubling of economic losses, even if in constant dollars, represents a decrease in losses relative to total assets. So this data doesn't really represent a measure of change in the weather as much as change in human society (and the page is titled, "The human cost...")
The IPCC report is somewhat equivocal about change in the actual heavy precipitation events, stating "the frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation have likely increased...with increases in more regions than there are decreases". (with "likely" meaning > 2/3 probability)
I believe in climate change, but hate when people trot out these poor arguments every time a weather event occurs.
Not every storm is or can be caused by climate change, and average weather occurs in a minuscule amount of the time. even without climate change, 50% of the times it will be more than the average, or 50% it will be less.
Similarly, your data shows a doubling of events in 20 years, which is completely outside the range of predictions and models from actual climate scientists. I get that the intention is good, but poor arguments only pollute discourse.
>Jan. 16-18, 1857: The Great Blizzard’s foot of snow and wind wrecked ships at sea and almost buried Norfolk under 20-foot snowdrifts. Virginia’s rivers froze. At the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, one could walk from the lighthouse 100 yards on the frozen Atlantic.
Amazing... It really puts a 14 inch snowstorm into perspective.
This seems to be an unexpected consequence of climate change. Slower moving storms, with huge amounts of rain or snow in a short period.