As a landscaper in the Chicago area, I can say that we’ve had shorter dig windows as it warms up faster and trees break bud and can’t be safely dug any longer. Also more winter droughts with little snowfall to insulate the soil (having 8" fall in a day then it’s pushing 60F a week later doesn’t really count).
For the first time in 141 years, Los Angeles did have one day in February that reached 70 degrees. Just south of L A in Orange County where I live, we had the coldest winter in 60 years!
I know that you will say this is meaningless, its only weather, not “climate”. Its an anomaly that proves the climate is actually warming and other BS.
As I get older, heat effects me more and I am telling you, its not hotter now during the summers than it was 30 years ago. Millions of tons of asphalt and concrete have been poured around where I live during this period and this has created a giant heat sink, but observed temperatures have not risen hardly at all.
Have they or haven’t they?
I think you might’ve missed this link Kimstu posted:
https://oehha.ca.gov/epic/changes-climate/overview-changes-climate
Maybe 2.3 degrees F per century is “not risen hardly at all” to you?
Hmm. Who to believe? Decades of years of data collected by meteorologists, meticulously analysed, or a guy who prefers to ignore that because it contradicts his interpretation of personal experience?
Ah. Well, that explains a good deal: Orange County has had a strong climate-science-denial culture, particularly under the leadership of former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.
Do you mean “giant heat source” instead of “heat sink”? Because urban areas are often described as “heat islands” precisely because their built environment, especially modification of land surfaces via asphalt/concrete etc., causes them to radiate more heat than the surrounding countryside.
A “heat sink”, on the other hand, would be a cooling structure of some kind, either natural or built, that takes heat away from an environment. I don’t think that’s what you meant.
Um, more volatile and severe weather as a consequence of human-caused global warming is quite well supported scientifically: it’s not “BS”.
Like I said, I’m not disputing your subjective assessment of your own experience: you haven’t felt that average temperatures have been rising, okay, I believe you that that’s what you felt. But when you try to extrapolate from your own experience to contradict observed climate data, that’s when I :dubious:.
Excuse me for answering the OP’s question about “personal experience”.
That was the pattern here in the Seattle area, as well, but we’ve been getting snow much more often now. However, more notable for me, anyway, is that we’ve had terrible air quality the last two summers due to forest fires in this state and BC. It happened once or twice that I remember in the last 30 or so years, and now we’ve had two summers in a row. I guess we’ll see this summer if it’s our new normal.
When we moved here about 18 years ago there were great tule fog banks during winter. Some towns in the foothills to the east liked to say they are “above the fog, below the snow”, but in recent years there has been nearly no fog. The fog would hang around for days. This past winter was wetter than normal, but still no fog. I don’t know if it’s directly related to climate change, tho.
From Alaska — I was at the Iditarod race last month. In Nome, on the Bering Sea, the shelf ice is disappearing, so much so that the Iditarod mushers cannot drive their sled dog teams on it. It’s too narrow, not wide enough to be safe to race on — at night or in overcast or blizzard conditions it wouldn’t take much for a musher and his/her sled dogs to inadvertently drift left and end up in the Bering Sea. Not good. So this year they came down on Front Street in Nome AK instead of behind Subway on the shelf ice.
I took a picture of the broken, receding shelf ice from inside the Subway Sandwich store there in Nome last month. The store has large plate glass windows and gives a good vantage point… The usual Iditarod race route is on the shelf ice until the Subway Sandwich shop (coming from the viewer’s left in the picture), and then the mushers turn onto Front Street right after Subway. Instead, this year they did not drive on the shelf ice.
The Nome locals I talked to said the shelf ice has been steadily disappearing over recent years.
Picture — Imgur: The magic of the Internet. From this view the finish line is about ¼ mile to the right. That ice is about 30’ wide. Narrow.
Your first post conveyed your personal experience. Your second conveyed a pseudo-scientific attack on climate science based on said experience. Excuse me for contributing to this derail of the thread.
Well, here’s one that’s hard not to notice. In eastern Canada where the weather is usually benign, some areas in Quebec including parts of Montreak, parts of eastern Ontario, parts of the Maritimes, and now cottage country in northern Ontario (the cited article), are experiencing flooding that in many cases is historically unprecedented. The recurring story in much of the world is that weather is getting wilder and more unusual in one way or another, whether it’s droughts, floods, or the severity of storms.
I am from southern Ontario. In the 1990s (and probably before) we had huge snow falls every winter. Going to school was sometimes difficult. My high school was north of a large hill that the road went over, and sometimes the buses literally could not drive up the hill due to the slipperiness of the road. We had to walk on the sidewalk, uphill, with snow at least four feet high around us (probably because it had been piled up there). In early 1999 we had a really big snowstorm, and the mayor had to call in the Army. We were mocked as snow wimps since.
That was the last year we had a major snowfall like that. Usually we get no more than a foot of snow, maybe two feet right after a blizzard. The snow doesn’t melt until winter is almost over, but it doesn’t build up because there’s virtually no snow.
The weather does seem to get as cold, but only for a day or two. The rest of the winter is miserable, and you need a decent coat, but it’s not actively dangerous.
Nearby farmers complain that the layer of snow that acted as free irrigation when it melted has become pathetic.
Conditions are far worse up north (where few people live). Permafrost (permanent frost) isn’t in some places. Ice roads melt. I talked to someone from a town who said the bulldozer used to “pave” the ice road fell through the road into the water… twice.
Where I live, the effects aren’t that significant yet. Climate change will not exceed typical shifts in daily temperature for a long time, and memories aren’t long anyway, so people won’t notice based on the temperature. Furthermore humans are resilient and adaptable in a way most other species aren’t, so we’ll grin and bear it for a long time. The biggest worry (when it comes to directly impacting humans) is the food supply. We’ll have to emulate China and have gigantic greenhouses all over the place, irrigated with treated lake water or desalinated seawater.
I went to the supermarket today and when I checked out,the seafood section I saw a paper saying sardines were unavailable due to “climatological circumstances”. Gotta eat more seafood before it becomes unavailable.
I’m in California and it feels like the summers are just so much hotter than they used to be. There doesn’t seem to be much of a spring either.
And I don’t remember needing my heavier jacket this last winter or two.