Goodbye ‘White Christmas’?
Travel Blog • Joanna Kakissis • 12.22.08 | 3:56 PM ET
Photo by Do you want to spend the winter holidays in an idyllic, snow-fringed place just like the one Irving Berlin used to know? Berlin wrote “White Christmas” 68 years ago, when the concept still made sense in the German city of Berlin as well as the rest of the northern hemisphere. In what has become an annual reality check during the increasingly warm winter holidays, climate scientists and meteorologists are again warning that global warming is the Grinch that’s stealing snowy landscapes around the world. Reuters reports that the odds of Berlin seeing snow in 2100 will decrease to 5 percent from 20 percent a century ago. Even frigid Oslo, Norway, will see a precipitous decline in snow days, scientists told Reuters.
Berlin’s song, by the way, has become a global holiday mainstay, covered by Air Supply (Australia), Charlotte Church (the United Kingdom) and Ayumi Hamasaki (Japan.) Bing Crosby made it famous in the U.S. in the 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” along with some indelibly snowy scenes.