How many of you are affected by the climate change?

And in "affected", I mean as in:

your household is affected
your works is affected
your lifestyle is affected
your farm is affected
your crops are affected
et cetera.

There has been a lot of climate change talk lately - in favour and against the Climate Change. Some say climate change is going to screw everything up on this planet. Others say that climate change is pure BS.

Now, I want ask the people and not the media: How many of you are affected by the climate change?

Please share.




Peace,
Mulder

reply to post by Spooky Fox Mulder


Well for the first time in all my years in sunny southern calif. I finally had to buy some thermals to wear during the winter and I dont even live in the mountains!!!

House insurance has gone up due to increase in storm and rain damages.

Several places sewers are getting upgrades since the rain patterns have changed into heavy bursts instead of silent all-day rain.

Raccoon dogs has invaded from the south posing problems, as long with several new species of insects. (harlequin ladybug as example).

Good news is that we had a record harvest, due to some farmers being able to have 2 crops for a second year in a row.

I live in Denmark btw.

I live in Iceland and the glaciers are melting and the icebergs...very fast. Also there is now more bugs, especially mosquitoes. And more mice then used to be. The last two summers were very warm, I think this one was the warmest ever. There are also new weeds growing in the lava fields that I never saw before...looks less like tundra. I know some places on earth are colder and even a few days ago here was very cold, but in general there IS something going on....warming.

I can no longer water my garden.

Over the last 10 years Victoria, Australia, has been getting gradually drier, with less water each summer in the catchments.

So we are all restricted in Melbourne to cut down water usage.

The water tastes bad now too. The chlorine level makes a bath smell like a public swimming pool, and has accumulated as green muck inside a shower-hose.

I didn't think we could afford packaged drinking water, but we've had to buy it in cartons for a few years now. Melbourne used to pride itself on having the best tap water in the world. Now I can't drink it.

Climate change within Australia is an established government concern now because of the need to find new ways to supply towns with cities with water, and the increasing trouble farmers are having with extreme weather conditions.

This has also lead to food prices being a much higher proportion of income than they were 10 years back.

Oh, and fires ...
Bushfires are becoming more frequent and more dangerous, as the forest gets drier each summer. Australian eucalypts can produce a fast-moving cloud of volatile oil which explodes like a fuel-air bomb, suddenly wiping out areas that appeared to be still safe.

Much of my suburb was evacuated a few years back, threatened by fire, and this area has never been in danger before in the 70 or so years since it was built up. It was pretty frightening. The sky was orange, the smoke was too thick to see the fire, even when it was only 100 metres away, but you could hear it roaring. If it hadn't been for a few who stayed and patrolled all the houses, the suburb would have gone up. There were burning embers everywhere and the overworked firefighters, many of whom had been fighting fires for three days with no sleep by then, had their hands full at the firefront. Lots of heros that day. All volunteers, and some had to keep fighting after there own homes were burnt down, not knowing if their loved ones were safe.

Later, many people overseas ridiculed those who stayed to protect their home and died in the fire, but they have no idea how many lives are protected each year by those who do what no amount of firefighters can do, protect the neighbourhood houses when the firestorms are spewing burning embers for miles in every direction.

Thank you so much for your contributions so far! Especially you, Kailassa, your story is heartbreaking. I had tears in my eyes when i was reading it.

Thank you for your contributions, everyone - and keep them coming. As many as possible.

We really need to see a view of what's going on with the climate change in the world right now, instead of what's the media is telling us.





Peace,
Mulder


[edit on 30-11-2009 by Spooky Fox Mulder]

reply to post by Spooky Fox Mulder


I'm 42... lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin my whole life.

It seems like temperatures are more moderate now-a-days. In the past we used to get a lot of high-90's in the summer and a lot of really cold winter days - below zero. Now it seems like we don't hit those extremes... I can't recall the last time we hit 100 or have has those really cold streches. We get a lot more warm days in the winter but also cooler days in the summer.

Weather-wise it seems that we used to get rain/snow spread out evenly over the year. Now it seems like we get very little rain in the summer but a ton in the spring and fall.

As a kid, I clearly recall ice skating in early December on the lake. The ice would freeze and stay frozen. Now, the ice doesn't feeze till late December and won't stay frozen (for skating)... We'll get rain and warm days that melt the ice.

[edit on 30-11-2009 by mecheng]

Firstly, everything that Kailassa mentioned, its a similar story so i wont have to repeat it.

And secondly how it has affected me, well its affecting my Dad more at the moment. He lives on a housebout on the Murray River in South Australia, and the droughts here (amongst other things) have decemated the great Murray river for many years with rising salinity and low water levels. My Dad is moored in a marina along the river and for the first time in the marinas history it has nearly no water. Any body inside the marina is now stuck, their homes are not floating just, stuck in the mud destroying the hull. There is no phone, electricity is hard to get to and all the other many problems that causes. I can tell you my Dad is not too impressed.
And i will add, Its a shame one of the best rivers in the world is dying.

I live in SoCal and commented to friends and family this last year that our local climate was undergoing dramatic changes in subtle ways. I know that sounds oxymoronic, but bear with me a moment.

The average temperatures have changed slightly, but on any given day they can be anomalous. August here is usually blazing hot with frequent Santa Anas, this year was milder than any I can recall. We had BB-size hail in the spring and again a few days ago, extremely rare occurences around here. We had several weeks, a week or so at a time, when it felt like an out-of-season season: fall weathr in mid-summer, summery week in spring, spring-like in the fall. But in each case the off-kilter week or days could pass without much notice if you weren't watching patterns.

I garden each year, so I pay attention to bugs and wildlife. The massive fires of a few years back changed our local wildlife patterns considerably for a few years: the loss of cover exposed the snakes to the hawsk and owls, which dropped their numbers considerably, allowing an explosion of rabbits, gophers, ground squirrels, and hawks. So I've been watching the ecosystem restore the balance with a pretty close eye to protect my gardens. Which leads into the next item: this past year I've noticed two new bird species moving into the neighborhood, a kind of woodpeckery -looking little bird I've never seen before and a new kind of finch or similar little bird. Bluebirds are moving down the mountains with more frequency. Predators are moving down the mountains, too: bobcats and something else I haven't id'd yet. I hike the hills behind my house with some frequency and check the tracks every now and then just to keep an eye on who's in the locality. The wildlife is moving: something's going on in the high regions that is causing them to migrate.

This year about three new bugs have shown up in my gardens, an orange little guy is one type in the late spring/early summer, they were all over my plants but did't seem to do much damage. Not a clue what they were. Bugs I normally have to deal with weren't there in high numbers this year.

A lot of little, subtle things that add up to dramatic changes if you're paying attention.

North Alabama:

Not a lot of change. I have noticed that instead of the occasional (every two or three years) 6"+ snows like we used to get thirty years ago, we get less snows less frequently (a good thing!), but we have been getting more ice during the winter (a bad thing).

We did have an extremely dry year two summers ago that hurt the farmers pretty bad, but this last summer was wet and seems to have made up for it.

No notice of new species moving in, except for a few surges of massive ladybug populations. That wasn't climate change, though, it was some idiot at Auburn U deciding to release a few million genetically modified ladybugs.

Everybody, keep those reports coming in! I am also interested in knowing first-hand what is actually happening; I trust ATS members more than the IPCC.

TheRedneck

reply to post by TheRedneck


We had loads of ladybugs here as well this summer - i closed my windows in panic, since i thought it was bee's buzzing, but turned out it was ladybugs. They normally seek westward, and then dehydrate from the salt-water - which makes it no fun to be at the beach, they are everywhere, and they bite when thirsty

I watch the wildlife and fauna around here, and not much have changed, other than the Raccoon dogs moving up from Germany. Next after climate change, invasive species is on of the things i look out for the most - Those two things are not always connected, but often they are.

There are some great documentaries on goggle vid about invasive species btw.

Southcentral Alaska

A few things come to mind . . . .

When I moved here in 1984, there was a really cool iceberg (okay, pun not i ntended but left in!) just south of Anchorage called Portage Glacier. It was close to a road where one could park and walk on the frozen lake about 100 yards to the iceberg, which was around 20' above ground and maybe 30' across. I climbed it and have a picture of me sitting in a pocket of the iceberg. At that time, we didn't realize how stupid it was to do that, because it could have shifted at any moment.

Anyway, it was such a popular tourist attraction that the State built a visitor's center there (still in the 80s, I think). When I next went back to see the iceberg in 1994, it had receded along with the glacier to the point where one had to catch the boat to see it on the other side of the mountain.

There are stories coming from the North Slope oil workers and Native villages about how the tundra is thawing and releasing methane, and coastal villages keep having to move back from the coasts.

I'm an avid gardener and have noticed that in these past 25 years, the gardening season is longer than it used to be by a month. Sprouts appear in April instead of May, and Zone 4 plants survive through the light frosts through October. In contrast, 15 years ago kids would go trick-or-treating all bundled up trudging through a foot of snow.

To add: Kailassa, I've been through what you experienced - being evacuated, seeing the orange sky the roar, thick smoke. We lived in the woods, left sprinklers on and soaker hoses on the roof. Here, instead of the eucalyptus trees, it was black spruce trees with thick resin that went up like bottle rockets. The "rockets" skipped some homes and landed on others and destroyed them. Thankfully, the wind shifted at the last minute and my home and sanctuary was spared.

I seldom hop on bandwagons, but I'll admit I was duped by the whole human-caused global warming cause. Now, I believe it's a climate change that has little to do with us and sure as (stuff) isn't going to be fixed by Cap & Trade policies!

S&F, OP, for an interesting question.

Ten-year long drought here that just broke this fall but appears to be back on the drought pattern. We're still on partial water restriction though (complicated by some ridiculous management of water in this state and region). When we went to total restriction three years ago many nurseries closed, and garden section closed or severely scaled down. Also, many people who provided services like pressure cleaning went out of business. Heating and cooling bills are going through the roof. It use to be that we could get away with neither for at least two months in the spring and two months in the fall and that the summer and winter were more tolerable. Not so much anymore...we're lucky if we get a month on either side of summer. It also seems that I burn a lot faster out in the sun...no matter what time of year (no not drug-related) when I've never burned in my life, but I guess that's anecdotal.

Adding to the list of mild temperatures throughout the year. I live in Missouri and we had a mild summer.. only one week or two that was rather hot (90+ degrees F) and tomorrow is hopefully our last warm day since we are getting closer and closer to winter. We have had days where it was near 40 as a high.. and others that were as high as 70 degrees.
60 degrees tomorrow for a high and then it dips down to the low 40's the next day for a high.

A lot of rain fall this year, farmers are just about now done harvesting but they were delayed almost a month due to the wet soil.

But as stated before - we had a rather mild summer, cold at the beginning fall but warmed up to spring temperatures.. and we are still getting close to the normal winter temperatures... though it is most cold here in late december/january.

When I was a kid in the 60's and 70's New Jersey was much colder - lots more snow and lots of ice skating. That's when the climate guru's were talking about the coming ice-age ... and everyone believed them.

Now it's a bit more warmer...but the last few years we've seen our share of snow...just not as cold...but certainly not as hot as it was in '98...but as for the weather affecting me personally, it doesn't happen....but I prefer the warmth over the cold...never liked the cold.

Thank you so much, everyone, for your contributions! They are very important - and at the same time heartbreaking. Please keep them coming. We need to see what's going on in the world - instead of what the mass media is telling us.



Peace,
Mulder

I live in S. Texas. Last Summer was probably the driest on record here. Almost no rain for two months and hotter than Hades.

Recently I was watching a documentary about the Hoover damn and Lake Mead. Lake Mead is drying up as a direct result of the decreased amount of snow fall/melt.

If you are familiar with Lake Mead these photos may shock you!

Google Images of Lake Mead

Some are predicting that Lake Mead will be completely dry by 2021.

Nat Geo Article

Originally posted by Anamnesis

If you are familiar with Lake Mead these photos may shock you!

Google Images of Lake Mead

Some are predicting that Lake Mead will be completely dry by 2021.

Nat Geo Article

Oh Dear! That's what's left of the lake? It's heartbraking!


Peace,
Mulder

Southern Arkansas here - our summers are much more mild now with about only one week above 100 degrees Farenheit. Our rains seem to come now in more monsoon type bursts causing severe flooding throughout the state. With the exception of the flooding, the climate change for my little corner of the world has been comfortable. Our summers used to be scorching and dry - now they're wet and mild. Our growing season is extended and our winters, while a bit cooler, bring us snow - a rare treat prior to recent years.

[edit on 12/7/09 by WickedStar]

All I know is that I seem to be buying more winter type clothes than any other. I live opposite a big green park and have trees lining the roads. Last few years the leaves go orange quicker and then theyre falling off. I know thats normal tree behaviour but they are doing things early for sure.

I spend more time with the central heating on even in the supposed warmer months.

I feel it is getting colder in which case more energy will be used i guess.