“Yes. Recently, within the past few years, we’ve had the hottest summers and coldest winters, and that’s when I think we started to notice the biggest climate change. The past five years have been way different than I’ve ever remembered. I’ve been here my whole life, and especially the last three years, the summers have been hot. In PA, it’s never been in the 90s before the last three years. Other than last year that snowed in Christmas, it hasn’t snowed since I was in third grade. So, it’s been like a long time. That’s why I feel like it’s obvious in PA. Temperatures and the weather are extremes.”
“Yes. This is a lot of snow, and I feel like it was very surprising that it got this cold and this much snow when we’re only one month left for spring.”
“Yes. I heard from my friends who were raised here, that it has been such a long time since we had this much snow. It was pretty intense. Malaysia has been colder than before too, but of course not to an extent where it has been snowing.”
“I’m honestly not far enough into the class to have an educated opinion, but I do think it certainly shows climate shift of some kind that’s pretty drastic in this area. I’m from Alaska, and Alaska does have a lot more snow actually because of the humidity up there, it doesn’t pack, and it’s really really light, we don’t get the sludge and ice fluids we have in here, so that’s very different climates.”
“I think we gotta be really careful about reattributing things like this to climate change without doing research in the area. This isn’t a new phenomenon for this area. It’s not a common one, but in 1996, something very similar happened, I remember that. In 1968, the same kind of situation happened, which my dad remembers. This type of storm happens every 20 to 30 years; I’m not saying that climate change doesn’t exist, but I think we gotta be really cautious about what we say about things. Because to someone like my dad, who has seen this cycle two, three, four times, they know this is a part of the cycle in this area. And to attribute that to climate change, that’s not reasonable.”
Voices and photos by Halle Nottage and Saki Kambe