This has to be one of the most recognizable song lyrics out there during every Christmas season. White Christmas was actually written in 1940 by an Irving Berlin for the 1942 movie "Holiday Inn" starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.
Songs often reflect the times. As seen from the graph, the period 1920-45 was a period the globe experienced warming at a scale matching those seen during 1977-2000. In fact the warmest year for USA remains 1934 and then only 1998 according to NASA data. A snow covered Christmas Day was a rarity then and Irving Berlin captured within the lyrics the nostalgia when snow was more common, perhaps explaining the sheer magnetism the song holds.
The planet undergoes a warm-cool oscillation on an average, every 25-30 years, correlating significantly with a climatic phenomenon called Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) as seen in the graph. Living almost in a quarter of a century within the same cycle will tend to prompt almost anybody to forget what it meant living in an opposite cycle.
As was the case of Irving Berlin in the 40s, it was also the same at turn of the millennium, wherein almost two decades of warming made most forget that a global cooling mode is next to come as part of earth’s natural climatic variability. An article in the UK’s Independent newspaper with a dateline 20 March 2000 best illustrated this popular fallacy when it predicted snow will become extinct:
"According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren't going to know what snow is”
