This is the warmest winter in 40 years, 50-60% snowpack, and we’re the headwaters for a good chunk of US agriculture. All of the seasonal cycles are so off that nature thinks it’s 2-3 months ahead or behind what it should be. The weather this month is normal for April. I was sipping my coffee this morning while looking at the drought-parched landscape and thinking about the impending catastrophic fire season. My phone sent me one of those stupid autogenerated photo collages. It’s of how different winters were just a few years ago.
luv2liveinhell
shit is fucked and I’m expected not to bring it up in social situations
It’s worse when you get someone that’s happy winter is warmer now, but you’re the bad guy for saying the words “climate change”
Thats why I say climate apocalypse now.
Climate apocalypse is my go-to term for gravitas, but I like polycrisis. You can’t separate the environmental from the social or financial, so that term lets you link all of the intersectional issues into one collection of feedback loops.
Since 2020 but especially over the past year, I’ve entered this weird twilight zone where most strangers I talk to have a radical but nihilistic acceptance. Haircuts, tattoo sessions, random store clerks and clinicians- it’s like 50/50 whether they’ll preemptively bring up collapse as small talk.
I do that on purpose with most strangers I encounter. Your anecdote is similar to what I experience. Most people respond like this:
I use it as an exercise to point out how politics is in everything when I’ve already been told not to talk about them, fuck em.
Ironically climate change is causing where I live to get slammed with a fucking mega blizzard this weekend. Thankfully I’m in an area where snow isn’t super rare but people to the south of me are gonna get fucked.
winter is getting more and more unpredictable. It used to be that we’d get snow in late october/early november, mid november by the latest, and it would stay frozen until spring in late march. We’d have a couple weeks of deep freeze, think -30 to -40, and the rest of it would be below zero.
The last few years we’ve made it to december without snow that stays around, and while we still get some of the deep freeze events we also get wild temperature swings that leave everything coated in a thick layer of ice or buried in slush. “winter” has been either mild hovering right around freezing or -40.
It makes me feel old but I remember as a kid I never understood movies/tv when the characters would be hoping/wishing for a snowy christmas when that’s all I ever knew. Now the last few years I’ve found myself hoping that we can have a decent snowfall by mid-december.
It’s going to be -4F on monday and I don’t think it’s ever gotten into the negative Fahrenheit here
East of you we had a warm December and then extra cold punctuated by short spans of unseasonably warm.
It’s the consistent winter that is no longer a thing. Instead we have whiplash season.
The Colorado high desert winter typically looks like:
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3-5 snow storms per month, the first arriving between September and early November, each leaving at least 5cm~ or more on the ground for a few days. This peaks in April and traditionally ends in early May though, so there’s still hope the overall snow season could even out.
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Temperatures top out at 0-4C with some sporadic sunny days where it’s 12c at most.
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Plants start coming to life in early March, the first dandelions and leaves appear around mid-late April.
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Birds shift to their breeding season in line with plants, while hatching occurs from May-July
This winter:
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Two local snowstorms, the first being the latest-ever in late November. Neither deposited more than 3cm of snow for more than a day. We were in a rain shadow for all of the big storms that the Midwest was getting over the past few months.
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Temperatures consistently 10-18C with some sporadic cold days that have dipped to -2C at most, the warmest December in almost a century. I’ve biked almost every day in one or two layers.
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Dandelions are starting to bloom, trees have mature buds and are ready to unfurl their leaves by mid-February. I haven’t been up into the mountains to see if the earliest pasqueflowers are similarly off-schedule.
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Birds have been doing their Spring breeding routines as early as mid-January. It seems like they’re poised for a March-May hatching period where the chicks would normally catch a few more life-threatening snow storms
That whiplash is so scary when it’s impacting the most energy-intensive parts of a species’ lifecycle. It’s so unpredictable that I don’t know when to start my seedlings, with swiss chard already healthily growing outside that I would normally start inside in March. Trying to make those predictions as a different species without weather forecasts is an impossible set of conditions.
Fruit walls used to be a trendy option. At some point they might become necessary.
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Hey at least Sasha Bear is cute? We have the snowiest winter since 2019-2020 rn.
That’s the scary thing. It alternates between extremes now. Two years ago it was our wettest spring in half a century, but following a huge drought and fire season so the ground wasn’t capable of retaining that water. All it resulted in was landslides, flooding, and creating a huge overgrowth of plants that are now fire fuel.
The US South is supposed to be hit by a massive snow storm this weekend.
Two years ago in mid January, we had an ice storm. This January, I have poppies blooming in the front yard. Live in an actual “4 season” ecosystem, so the 60°f December we had was pretty concerning.
We were in the low 80s (f, of course) here last week and it’s was so fucking weird. Like I guess I can just grow stuff all winter long but that midsummer heat is gonna be deadly now
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
