Is the beloved snowman melting away for good in Toronto? We asked experts

Ferguson has, for the past six seasons, spent hours, days and often weeks making a snowman, each year’s besting the one before in size and renown. The first, in December 2017, was only two feet taller than Ferguson’s then-3-year-old daughter Sydney, the inspiration for the effort. Last March, Snowman reached a record 17 feet, towering over Sydney, now 9.

But also with every year, Ferguson has had to push his build season deeper into winter, having to wait longer for optimal conditions and risking the arrival of spring-like temperatures that can turn snowmen into snowmelt. Early this year, “hat topple day,” as the Swansea resident has coined the moment when the thaw just starts to set in, was just five days after completion.

“Where does climate change fit into this?” ponders the self-professed snow nerd who keeps a spreadsheet of data on his annual exploit. “I’m far from an expert. I can only explain when there’s enough snow to make the snowman, and it’s slowly been pushed back every single year by a couple of weeks. It means Snowman is up for a short amount of time.”

John Pomeroy happens to be an expert, and he concurs: the snow season is shorter across Canada, in some places as much as five weeks such as in the mountains of Alberta and B.C. The Canada research chair in water resources and climate change at University of Saskatchewan notes most of the country has experienced 2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming since the late 1950s. Places that used to be just “cold enough” for snow have seen much of their winter precipitation shift to rain, putting an end to reliable snow coverage.

“That has really strongly affected every aspect of Canadian life, from the ability to have outdoor hockey rinks to having water for crops.”

In this scenario, the snowman hardly stands a chance.

Toss in a decline in outdoor play and distractions of the modern age — why go out in the cold when you can design an animated Frosty online — and one can’t help but wonder: Is the beloved symbol of winter at risk of simply melting away?

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Ask any older adult about their childhood winters in Canada, and they’ll likely describe snow being up to the top of their heads.

“There was more snow, and they do have accurate memories,” says Pomeroy. “The 1960s were very snowy compared to the current decades.”

At the first falling flakes, children would stuff themselves into snowsuits and head outside for hours, carefree yet full of ambition. “You often had very deep snow to work with,” says Pomeroy. “If you had a lot of kids, you could build a massive snowman. It would be good (to last) for months.”

But climate change — driven largely by human activity and primarily through the burning of fossil fuels — means the Earth’s temperature is rising. In the past 40 years, the proportion of Canadian land and marine areas covered by snow and ice have decreased and there has been a shift from less snowfall to more rainfall. In southern Ontario, the length of season with snow cover has declined by more than 15 days since 1980.

The consequences are serious: less snowmelt to refill lakes and wetlands, melting glaciers, flooding, droughts, impacts on wildlife and an increased risk of forest fires. Not to mention that snow, by reflecting solar energy from the sun back into space, also helps cool the planet.

When you consider its role in both the water and energy cycles, “snow’s pretty important,” says Chris Derksen, a research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada. “That’s why we spend a great deal of effort trying to understand how and why snow cover is changing.”

The United Nations has declared 2025 as the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. The goal is to preserve snow and ice and help societies adapt to the loss, says Pomeroy, who recently gave a keynote on the topic at the COP28 climate change conference in Dubai. And while not explicitly stated in the list of objectives, “it’s also about our ability to make snowmen.”

Snow is broadly defined as precipitation in solid form, but the type of snow is determined by temperature, humidity and other atmospheric conditions. Colder, drier air brings powdery fluffy stuff, for example. Great for skiing, less so for making a snowball. Ideal packing snow occurs when the temperature is hovering around freezing and there is just enough water content that when you compress the crystals, they stick together.

Toronto — whose average winter temperature has been trending upwards ever closer to zero — has entered a phase, according to Derksen, where the quality of snow to build a snowman is actually better. “But,” he says, “and there is a big but, if you want to admire your snowman for weeks on end, that’s pretty rare now” due to frequent warming events during Toronto’s modern winters.

Ferguson tracks the city’s weather faithfully, looking for a window when there is to be a good fall of fresh packing snow — snow scraped up from a salted street is a snowman killer — followed immediately by below-freezing temperatures at night. He takes that opportunity to build snow bricks, shaping them in laundry bins and stockpiling as many as he can under a tarp to protect them from soggy weather. The bricks are used to form Snowman’s base and are added upwards in stages — each solid level packed in with snow mortar and watered to set the figure safely into a deep freeze. Closer to the top, Snowman is built igloo-style, and filled with snow from the inside out. Last winter, the effort required 157 bricks, 790 litres of water and 96 hours over nearly four weeks.

“It could be faster if the weather was perfect,” says the marketing and sales consultant. “But it’s late nights after work and during the day on weekends.”

And when Snowman is finally done, it doesn’t take long before he starts to thaw, his body collapsing inward and his face contorting until eventually only two Styrofoam-ball eyes and a blue hat remain.

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From Frosty the Snowman to Olaf in Frozen, to appearances on greeting cards and ornaments, the snowman — or the more appropriately gender-neutral snowperson or snowpal — is part of the holiday pop cultural canon.

Such snow figures symbolically herald the start of the season, and the image of them dissolving into a puddle inevitably reminds us of how ephemeral time and relationships can be.

In stories and songs, it is children who usually save the day and the melting snowman. But in reality, outdoor play among kids has generally declined.

Heightened concerns about safety from parents who insist on constant supervision, plus technology not available to previous generations, means today’s children are spending more time playing indoors, says Raktim Mitra, an associate professor of urban planning at Toronto Metropolitan University and a board member of advocacy and research organization Outdoor Play Canada.

When they are outdoors, especially in winter, they tend to be doing organized activities like skating or hockey, says Mitra. But “one of the biggest advantages of play is the unstructured nature of it; it allows children to be imaginative.”

He adds that “being outdoors, doing their own things, is important for children to build and develop their own agency. We have children who are supervised until they’re much older and they are less confident in their ability to navigate their own neighbourhoods.”

It doesn’t help that in Toronto, classic winter conditions tend to be sloppy.

“The thing is, it’s no fun playing in really wet snow,” says Derksen, who is based in the city. “Your clothes get wet, your hands get wet and it’s cold. It’s just miserable.”

And so, he says, the best places to build a snowman in Ontario are the Bruce Peninsula and Muskoka areas.

All of which makes Ferguson’s snowman-on-steroids, in a small Toronto front yard, a bit of miracle. The last two winters, Ferguson had to fashion some protection for Snowman out of plastic drop cloths. “I gave it a raincoat because it was so mild that it was rainy, and I didn’t want to lose it.”

Obviously a big kid at heart, Ferguson says he does this to bring joy to his daughter and smiles to the faces of passersby. One winter, a 90-year-old man got his family to drive him in from Mississauga just to see Snowman, who has attracted a following on his Instagram page Snowman_and_Sammy, named in part for the snow dog that sometimes appears and is named after the family pet.

Looking ahead, unfortunately, Ferguson sees only fairly mild temperatures. He hopes at some point he’ll be able to pull the snowman DNA out of the freezer and bury it in Snowman’s base as he has done each year as a symbol of the spirit of the tradition living on.

“But I am uncertain if it’s going to happen this year,” he says. “The motivation is there…I just need the resource.”