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I live in Michigan and it's blatantly obvious here too. Apart from lake effect on the west side of the state, we hardly get snow anymore, because it's barely d
by paulmd 9y ago
I live in Michigan and it's blatantly obvious here too.
Apart from lake effect on the west side of the state, we hardly get snow anymore, because it's barely dropped below freezing. The last few winters have been incredibly mild apart from the "polar vortex" events where dry cold air blows down from the north. Since it's so dry, these don't really generate a lot of snowfall, it just snaps cold. These polar vortexes are a new weather pattern for us.
This fall we've been getting literal monsoon weather from the remains of hurricanes coming up the east coast. Each storm turns into days of warm drizzling and fog, which is much more typical weather for the spring, not October. Another atypical weather pattern.
That's just on a local scale. Then you look at how we're now getting multiple extreme hurricanes per year, one after another, multiple 100-year floods, and it's just insane that people could possibly deny the reality of climate change when it's literally happening over a span of just a few years, right before their very eyes. The weather we had ten years ago is not the weather we have today.
Trump has taken office at a very unfortunate time, because we urgently need to mitigate both carbon emissions and the direct impacts of the weather right now. But instead we're going to spend the next 3-7 years going backwards during one of the most critical junctures. At least he's so utterly incompetent that he's mostly just stalling out his agenda - going nowhere does beat going backwards at least. Just kinda sucks for the people most directly in the line of fire for climate change, because it's very obvious that no relief is going to be forthcoming for the parts of America that have been devastated over the last few months.
- KGIII 9y agoMaine, here. I'm not far from Mt. Washington, as the crow flies. I was first here in the 1970s and the records confirm my recollection of cold snaps where it would go below 0 deg f and not come back above 0 for 5 to 7 days. I've not had any stretch longer than 72 hours where the temperature didn't go above 0, in the past nine years. At the same time, there have been some very, very cold days. My car wasn't in the garage the night we hit -48 and rear view mirror cracked. I can only guess that it was due to the cold. I don't have very accurate wind speeds. However, I have near constant wind and the windy storms seem more frequent. Mother Nature has a fondness for taking my weather stations away from me. (Mt. Washington holds the land wind speed record of 231 MPH, I get some serious wind here but not that bad.) Even when hooked to a pole embedded in concrete, Mother Nature loves taking my stuff. As for the politics, I do what I can as an individual. I offer no opinion on Trump.
- canoebuilder 9y agoI wonder how much these sorts of accounts are attributable to the beat of the Climate Doom drum combined with human recollection which is notoriously unreliable, malleable, and open to suggestion. The US has just exited a period of a record setting "hurricane drought," so maybe the hurricane remnant weather seems unusual because no such storms have made landfall in the US for the past decade plus. That this year had a cluster of large storms isn't really indicative of anything in and of itself. Most things appear to happen in clusters. Things aren't perfectly evenly distributed. https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/major-hurricane-us-landfall-drought-study#/ https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/major-hurricane-us...!
- zipwitch 9y agoOne of the challenges when it comes to assessing the full impact of anthropogenic climate change is that while it does drive extreme weather, it's far from the only input into such events. Combined with the limited number of such events, it makes it easy to dismiss them as ancedotes instead of data. Scientific American has a good overview of this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-some-extreme-weather-can-be-blamed-on-climate-change/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-some-extreme-... You can also do a google search for graphs on the frequency of extreme climate events.
- Boothroid 9y agoI suppose you could rephrase 'Trump has taken office' to 'America elected Trump' to make the responsibility for his election clearer.