[sprocket]

I dairy farmed for 14 years, and my wife and I got out in the winter of 2023. We've seen ever increasing scarcity of water in our region, because the surrounding mountains don't get enough snow pack whose melt feeds the streams through spring and summer, and we don't see the spring rains nearly as much anymore either. We used to be able to irrigate our hay fields all summer long with no issues, until fall rains returned. Now the rains stop in April, we irrigate until the water runs out (which last year was in June), and then hope for the best. When we need to buy hay for our animals, prices have nearly tripled in the last 10 years.

[troupe]

So you live in a region that has significantly less snowfall than what can be expected based on the normal variation that occurred 25, 50, or 100 years ago?

[ruszki]

I don’t know where parent commenter lives, but in Central Europe, this definitely happened in a radical way. There is basically no snow. A day, or if you’re lucky three days a year maximum. This is going on for the past 20-25 years continuously. This didn’t happen in the past millennia at all. In the mountain village where I lived is totally unimaginable the winter for kids nowadays, how was in the 90s for me. And that was normal for centuries.

Also 40 Celsius is the new 30 in the past 15 years. This didn’t happen since we measure temperature. And 10 degrees are a lot, and the change happened in a decade.

Also summer wind patterns completely changed in the past 5 years, due to the weakening currents in Atlantic Ocean. This is something which is also highly unusual the past millennia. We know this for sure, because all of our towns were built wind from West in mind. We have wind from that direction less and less.

This is way over normal variation.

But looking at other examples, for example Norway. Thawing permafrost bogs are not something which can be explained by normal variation.