Aside from heat that I am fundamentally not built for, we had an actual tornado near me yesterday. Tornadoes are not completely unheard I guess, but they’re not common or something that we really plan for where I live. Humidity has also been wildly over the top, and pretty consistent instead of occasional. It feels almost tropical, or what I would imagine tropical weather to be. I’m from a traditionally cold-ish, temperate place. We have always gotten all kinds of weird weather but it feels a lot more consistently steamy and intense than it used to. What weird new weather things are happening where you live? How are you adapting to them? (How on earth do you cope when everything feels wet?)
We have a small mixed veg farm and see a lot of changes. Especially recently. The past four years have been wild.
Our winters have gone from snow and cold October through April when I was a kid. To a few weeks of snow and cold in February mostly. We live on a very large salt water lake that used to freeze solid in winter. It doesn’t freeze enough to go ice fishing on now.
Our autumn has extended into December each year. We keep outdoor gardens from April to November now and in the 80’s when I was a kid I covered up every Halloween costume with a snow suit and fought my way to people’s doors.
Our springs have little to no rain when compared historically. We are by the Atlantic ocean and fog and rain are part of life but not so much any more.
Summers are hot now. Very hot with very high humidity. We’ve started having forest fires which were rare before due to the wet environment. Rurally there are water shortages from wells in many areas.
We’ve always had hurricanes but now they are much much more frequent and much more devastating. We are also having flash floods now regularly and power outages from heat which was previously unheard of.
We are seeing more large predator sharks and bluebottle jellyfish from across the Atlantic and our fishing grounds are moving further north as the ocean warms.
The forests are very dry and we are losing species to invasives, temperature extremes and bugs at unprecedented rates. Migratory birds are fewer than ever and we tend to have a lot of summering and breeding grounds here. The bugs don’t coat the car like they used to when we drive to town for groceries and we see this in our gardens and greenhouses as well.
It’s scary stuff. We live in an area where we can watch the changes happen in real time and yet deniers are everywhere.