Norway Newspaper dumping snow at sea
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It looks more like an Ice Age than global warming.

There is so much snow in Oslo, where I live, that the city authorities are resorting to dumping truckloads of it in the sea because the usual storage sites on land are full.

That is angering environmentalists who say the snow is far too dirty - scraped up from polluted roads - to be added to the fjord. The story even made it to the front page of the local paper ('Dumpes i sjøen': 'Dumped in the sea').

In many places around the capital there's about a metre of snow, the most since 2006 when it was last dumped in the sea. Extra snow usually gets trucked to sites on land, where most of the polluted dirt is left after the thaw. Those stores are now full - in some the snow isn't expected to melt before September.

But are these mountains of snow a sign that global warming isn't happening?

Unfortunately, more snow might fit projections by the U.N. Climate Panel, which says that northern Europe is likely to get wetter and the south drier as temperatures rise this century.

"By the 2070s, hydropower potential for the whole of Europe is expected to decline by 6 percent, with strong regional variations from a 20 to 50 percent decrease in the Mediterranean region to a 15 to 30 increase in northern and eastern Europe." it said in a 2007 report (page 60 of this link).

So people in northern Europe may have to buy more snow shovels than parasols to cope with global warming?

How about where you live?