Enough about Trump and I.C.E. In my next few blogs I discuss a different type of ice.
Climate change is melting the Earth’s ice caps, defrosting Siberia, leading to more deadly forest fires and hurricanes, and making flooding more severe. These may seem like distant events, but climate change is also having more local impacts on the New York metropolitan area.
The destabilization of the atmospheric Jet Stream is allowing frigid arctic air from the polar vortex that is normally trapped around the North Pole to plunge much of the United States into a deep freeze. Paradoxically, the mounds of greying snow piled on New York City streets is a result of global warming.
Long Island, which includes two of the five New York boroughs and two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, east of the city is especially vulnerable. During the past three decades, Suffolk County had the most severe weather events in New York State. Overall, residents of Nassau and Suffolk Counties have filed and received over $3 billion in flood insurance claims since the mid-1970s. Many Long Island south shore communities were devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but thirteen years later the destruction and displacement have largely been forgotten.
On Long Island meteorological winters, December through February, are warming faster than the national average; there are fewer days and nights with temperatures below freezing. In Suffolk County winter temperatures are 4.9°F warmer than they were in 1970. Nassau County winters are 5.1°F warmer. Although there will continue to be cold snaps with Arctic air blowing in from the north, Fall weather is leaving the area later and Spring weather arrives earlier. This might seem like a good thing, unless you operate a snow removal company, the warming trend is expected to have major consequences for local agriculture, wildlife, forest ecology and human health.
With shorter and milder winters, animal species that depend on snow cover for insulation and camouflage will be more vulnerable. Less snowmelt means there is less water to replenish aquifers depended upon by communities on Long Island and less water feeding into small streams and ponds that support wildlife. Farming is impacted and wildfires become more likely. Warmer winters also means invasive species, especially troublesome insects, can migrate further north. Some insects carry diseases that infect humans; others devastate plants. The Southern Pine Beetle has destroyed thousands of acres of the region’s pine barrens.
2024 was the warmest year on Earth since accurate records were first kept on 1850. We don’t yet have reports for 2025 but tentatively it will be the third warmest after 2023 and 2024. President Trump dismisses climate change science as a hoax and his administration’s policies, promoting the use of fossil fuels and defunding alternative energy sources will make the situation worse. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, a former Congressional representative from Suffolk County, has been actively eliminating climate and pollution regulations, claiming he wants to overturn the “climate change religion.”
Nassau and Suffolk Counties helped propel Donald Trump into office in the 2016 and 2024 elections and provided him with a Republican majority in the House of Representative. That majority is at risk in 2026 when two Republican Party Congression Representatives from Suffolk County are up for reelection. Long Island voters definitely have choices to make about the future.
