What effects of global warming have you personally noticed where you live?
From northern Belgium:
-Winter as a distinct season seems to be quickly disappearing here. We have always had a moderate climate thanks to the North Sea, but nowadays winter feels like either autumn or spring, with the occasional snow at +1C or rain at -1C. It’s not just ordinary warming, I read on a weather forum that the wind directions in recent decades are increasingly coming from the south or the west, while for sustained winter weather we need humid cold from Scandinavia or dry cold from Eastern Europe.
-Mosquitoes are now active in december/january/february
-There are lizards everywhere now. These lizards are native to the Walloon river valleys where there is a warmer micro-climate and lots of rocky areas. In the northern half of the country, they were first spotted in Brussels in 2004 and since then they’ve spread all over Flanders. On a warm and sunny day I can see/hear dozens of them while riding my bicycle 3km to visit my parents. They’re even active in “winter” (my mom’s neighbor told her that her cat had already captured 2 of them in february). They need an average July temperature of at least 17C to breed, I guess we achieved that some time ago.
-Last summer I went into my parents garden to pick some grapes. I quickly noticed giant wasp-things (hornets) feasting on the grapes so I made a tactical withdrawal and sent my mom into the garden to collect the grapes for me (I have a phobia for bees/wasps/etc). Neither me nor my parents had never seen things before. My uncle, who has a large garden with fruit trees, had also never seen them before and showed off the corpse of one to family members. I hope these hornets are not going to become a yearly phenomenon, lizards are cute and I can deal with mosquitoes, but fuck those things.
I have not noticed any effects I could definitely attribute to ACC. I am writing though to suggest that effects, if present, are likely to show up in viticulture. Different wine grapes varieties do better at different levels of temperature. (This is a gross oversimplification, bear with me.) Temperature over a growing season is often expressed in the number of degree-days the vineyard has per year. http://wine.wsu.edu/extension/weather/growing-degree-days/ As growing seasons can be long, 220 plus days in some climates, each degree rise in temperature on average, if it occured every day, could shift a vineyard’s suitable varieties that could best be grown there. See Winkler Index for more. Winkler index - Wikipedia
Anyway, that’s where I’d expect to first see specific definite changes from climate change.
Changes in the distribution of birds. When I was a kid in the 1960s Mockingbirds and Red-bellied Woodpeckers were nearly unknown in New York City, being mostly found farther south. Now they are very common.
A cloud forest area at about 3000 feet near Panama that I have been visiting since the 1970s has become noticeably drier, and several species of high altitude birds that used to be common there have disappeared or become rare.
When I bought my house 19 years ago, my daffodil plants came out of the ground in mid-March. Every year since, they’ve come up earlier. This year’s crop showed up around Thanksgiving 2018. I’m pretty sure this is due to global warming. It’s possible that the daffs will keep coming up earlier every year and eventually get back to where they started.
Azaleas here used to bloom in June. They are blooming now (early – mid April).
Since I moved here, there has been a huge loss of various birds, frogs, turtles, and bees. However, this is probably due to development and loss of habitat. It’s sad and frightening.
I live in a semi-rural lakeside community. The lake is suffering too.
Strawberries from the same regions are coming in earlier and earlier. OK, so that might be due to agricultural techniques…
I bought a house on the skirts of the Pyrenees in 2007. The town is tiny but, due to a glitch of history, happens to be the equivalent of an American county seat: it’s got services and stores which would correspond to a town ten times its size. It’s also less than half an hour from the region’s capital, Pamplona, with its own stores and services.
A long-standing feud between City Hall and the Regional Government is that we happen to be the lowest village considered to be “over the snow line” (we get some road-clearing services we wouldn’t get if we were considered to be “below the snows”); in fact, on the summer I bought my house I called my mother and said “you know how once or twice a year we’ve seen the weathermen put snowflakes in this particular town in July or August and thought it was some sort of in-joke? It’s not! My car is wearing a snow beret right now and it’s August 3rd!” For many years I’d see my neighbors coming from spending the morning at the public pool (bikini top, cutoff jeans, one kid hanging from each hand) and hear them worry that “it’s so hot! We might break 30!” (85F rounding); meanwhile my mother and brothers, a mere 90km/55m south, were roasting in temperatures that surpassed 40 (105F, again rounding) in the day and might not go below normal body temp at night.
For the last three years we’ve broken 30. And 36. Repeatedly. You tell anybody in that village that global warming doesn’t exist, you might come out having learned a few new words. In fact, anybody who’s bought into the notion that “the Basque language doesn’t have swearwords” is hereby cordially invited to tell any of my Basque-speaking neighbors that global warming does not exist: you’ll learn how to cuss in Basque real quick.
In 1989 I hikes on Mt. Rainier and visited the Paradise Ice Caves – long caves cut trough the Paradise Glacier by water runoff. I had to hike several miles from the trailhead because the glacier had melted so much that a lot of the caves were simply gone, but at least I got to see their beautiful blue interiors
Now the caves are gone altogether.
It’s because of the global retreat of the glaciers due to global warming. Almost all the world’s glaciers are in retreat, and have been for decades. To deny this, in the face of massive photographic and documentary evidence, seems absurd.
We have more frequent violent hurricanes, hotter summers, and more unstable weather patterns.
Wikipedia: “Officially, the decade with the most Category 5 hurricanes is 2000–2009, with eight Category 5 hurricanes having occurred: Isabel (2003), Ivan (2004), Emily (2005), Katrina (2005), Rita (2005), Wilma (2005), Dean (2007), and Felix (2007).” Keep in mind that this is somewhat dated and this decade is not complete.
Admittedly, I’m in Charleston, South Carolina so it’s damn hot no matter what.
However,
Our downtown sees more flooding these days. The downtown and the Battery is pretty much RIGHT at sea level so a high tide or heavy rain can cause flooding sufficient to shut things down. But such events are increasing in frequency.
That and my roses. They now bloom year-round. Less in Dec/Jan but there’s always something blooming.
We used to have snow in winter. 5-8 feet on the ground.
My parents told me that there was a winter back in the 1960s when very little snow fell and the grass was visible on Christmas eve. Normally, around the start of April, we’ve had 6 feet of snow on the ground. For the last 4-5 years, pretty much nothing. We do get snow falling, but the balance between melting and accumulation have tilted towards melting, so it doesn’t stay. Stuff on the roads and pavements get compressed into ice, and rained on. The ice on the roads then gets worn away by spiked tyres, after which they gnaw up the tarmac, filling the air with a massive amounts of dust. The ice on the sidewalks stay for the winter, fed by the occasional snowfall and freeze. We’ve actually had a reasonable amount of snow this year, maybe 2-3 feet. first time in several years. I thought winters like that were gone. It is much less than last decade, but it is actually snow rather than ice and rain.
We have new insects and animals showing up. Ticks, ants, Raccon Dogs. Giant mutant radioactive arthropods. Although that last is the Soviets fault not the climate.
Evergreens like pine are showing up. It used to be, they would thrive if planted, but not quite manage to reproduce well. Areas that used to be treless and tundra-like now have trees growing. All of the trees in these areas look about the same age. The green line is going higher up on the mountains. The bare stone bits are smaller.
Glaciers are shrinking and retreating. Or vanishing. Areas that tended to keep snow cover through the summer don’t any more. Archaeologists are swarming these days, picking over areas that were last exposed to light around 6000 BC and finding all sorts of stuff.
Summers are warmer, which is pleasant.
Avalanches seem to be more frequent, and may happen in places where they previously didn’t which can be lethal.
I haven’t seen it myself, but one of the more obvious manifestations is the flooding in Miami:
A similar thing that HAS affected me is the incredible reach of flooding during superstorm Sandy a few years back. It effectively wiped out my in-law’s beachfront property down at Seaside Heights, NJ, but it also send unprecedented levels of flooding in my home town much farther north (and the neighboring town). Water had NEVER been recorded this far uphill, reaching well into the downtown region and devastating businesses that everyone would have thought safe. One bank had its vaults flooded and rusted into uselessness. A great many homes and businesses had to be torn down (including what had been my aunt and uncle’s business, although they had moved from there many years before).
You could argue, I suppose, that this was a mere statistical anomaly, but if so, it’s an incredibly outlier – water levels rose MUCH higher than they had in the entire recorded history of the town, flooding things thought to be safely above any conceivable reach of the water (like those bank vaults).
I don’t know if it’s directly attributable to AGW, or even if my observations are backed up by actual data. BUT, it seems to me that, here in my part of the Midwestern US, the seasons are shifting later. That is, winter begins and ends later, as do spring, summer, and autumn.
Winters also seem considerably milder and more forgiving than the punishing ones of my youth. Similarly, summers seem longer and more brutal. Again, could just be faulty memory though.
Smoke. Every summer and fall: Smoke. I used to love backpacking season. You could get to the top of a mountain and see for miles through clear skies. Now you better go while there is still snow on the ground if you want to get those views.
It wasn’t one of these was it? Asian hornet? If so, that’s not a global warming thing, as it happens, it’s an accidental introduction to Europe from China, that’s just got no effective natural predators.
Round here, I’ve certainly noticed an increase in weather unpredictability; crazy warm spells in February, then snow (which often means things start getting active for spring then get blasted by the cold). Plants flower out of season more, and we seem to get more extremes of weather, though our extremes are still a lot milder than most places, having over a month with not a drop of rain is not normal for such a wet climate, but we managed it last year. It’s a big problem if you’re not geared up for it, as well as the effects on nature.
This, but a bit further south, so it’s not evergreens showing up, but evergreens claiming higher ground. Given more time they might be pushed out of lower elevations, but established evergreen forest takes more time to undergo succession than just a couple decades.
The range of the European hornet, the largest one endemic to Europe, is expanding due to global warming. There were no confirmed observations between 1911 and 2007 in Norway, and now it is believed to have established itself permanently in multiple areas.
It’s possible that is what yellow sausage bandit saw, and although I expect this hornet has been present in Belgium all along, it’s plausible it’s becoming more numerous. But I’m not an entomologist, and definitely not one well versed in Belgian hornet distribution.
I believe in the science, but I have not noticed anything different here in Ottawa: winters are cold, summers are hot, and we have rainy springs and cool autumns. It snowed again two days ago. It’s easy to be skeptical when you don’t see the effects. I do believe in the underlying science however.
I’ve noticed a change in the quantity and quality of snow on natural (non-snowmaking) trails at ski areas. What used to be normal conditions in MA, one typically now finds in VT and the northern New England ski areas which used to get mostly snow, now get more snow and rain. There used to be a ski area on long Island and in the Bronx, and one or two in Putnam County which used natural snow. While some skiing or sledding would happen here during the winter after a random storm, it’s no where near enough to make a ski area viable like it once was.