Ok, I need an expert here at interpreting weather activity that doesn't make sense with regard to Climate Change claims.
Can someone explain why the same air masses sourced from the ice caps that drive cold fronts can be so cold that it makes it snow in spring in the US this year, but that same air isn't cold enough to prevent the ice caps from melting?
Not claiming to be an expert, but this is my take on it.
First, a climate is not weather. Weather can be very local and changes a lot due to wind directions in various stacked layers of air (and the proximity of e.g. lakes or arid areas). A weather prognosis can be made a few days ahead with reasonable precision.
Second, a climate is often averaged over a longer period for a given location, to average out the fluctuations. An 11-year cycle that coincides with Solar activity is not uncommon, but then one has to wait for a long time to (in retrospect) sayy something about the previous period. That's why it takes some time for a trend break to be noticed.
A change in climate can lead to larger fluctuations in local weather, e.g. higher low value and higher high values are an indication of an upward trend.
So, one would have to study the specifics for the weather event you described. It would take a large number of such weather events to detect a trend. When there are few such events, or when the measurement conditions have changed, the scientific community says that the confidence level is low, even if there is a very clear trend. Yet the predictions can be labeled as very likely (or labeled differently, depending on the trend in the sparse data).
Do note that urbanized locations create their own weather, by radiating more heat after the sun heats the infrastructure. If the conditions are right, and moist air with the right amount of condensation cores (often pollution or other aerosols) is rising (several times) into a colder layer of air it can grow into snow, or hail, or sleet, depending on whether the falling ice can reach the ground. Wind speeds higher in the atmosphere, and their directions will determine where it will fall.
Cheers,
Bart
P.S. If urbanization grows faster than areas populated by plants/trees/etc. then the cooling effect of evaporating water at ground level is overtaken by the emission of infrastructure heat. That too will create a trend of rising average temperatures and increased activity in weather systems, but that doesn't mean it will snow less. There are increasing numbers of buildings (newly built or overhauled) with white or light colored roofs, to contribute to a reduced influence on city weather.
