Climate change presses traditional almanacs

Prognosticators create long-range weather charts for the handful of surviving farmer’s almanacs – an old job, done an old way. They eschew Doppler radar and weather satellites and look for clues in the timeless rhythms of nature.

But now, the world and the weather don’t look as timeless as they used to. Scientists say the planet is warming, threatening to make droughts more widespread, heat waves more punishing and hurricanes more severe.

So one of the country’s most fervently unmodern subcultures has had to confront climate change. Prognosticators are deciding how – or whether – they should factor greenhouse gases into weather-predicting formulas that are two centuries old.

Traditional methods “worked really well for hundreds of years,” said Bill O’Toole, prognosticator for the Washington area’s local almanac, J. Gruber’s Hagers-Town Town and Country Almanack, founded in 1797. “Global warming has kind of messed it up,” said O’Toole, who has started predicting shorter winters and less snow than in the past.

But this week, one of the giants of the almanac world pronounced in the opposite direction. The Old Farmer’s Almanac, based in Dublin, N.H., predicted “global cooling” for the next two decades. The forecast was based on an expected change in sunspots and ocean temperatures, still better-understood factors than climate change, said the almanac’s editor, Janice Stillman.

San Francisco Chronicle