second winter, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse

[dancinglights]

I had a lot to write here about climate change, rapid-cycling weather patterns and agricultural impacts, flooding, local insfrastructure collapse, the sinking of Venice, and my own slow-building realisation that so many of the coastal historic landmarks that I love, abandoned or thriving, may well have less time ahead of them than behind

Comments

[kiarrith]

..indeed. It's getting ...beyond glaring

[elenbarathi]

Nice pics! Love the green water under the white trees.

In Columbus, Ohio on April 7, 1987, everything was budding and blooming, the sun was shining warm enough for barefoot, the sky was flawlessly clear, except for one black line of cloud on the far horizon - dark black, like a heavy pencil line. Within an hour, that thin black line grew to cover the whole sky in black, and then the snow dumped out of it - with lightning and thunder! - ten inches of snow, just like that; everywhere looked like your photo of the snow-crusted branches.

We had snow here on the Olympic Peninsula a couple of days ago, though not at my house. Snow in late March isn't unusual here, though; all our seasons start 'late' compared to the calendar. Our climate is growing warmer and dryer, which does not bode so well for water usage.

Our historic coastal landmarks here will be doomed if and when a tsunami comes, which may well be before the sea-level rises enough to threaten them.

[dancinglights]

We haven't had significant snow here in March since 1993. We also haven't had significant snow here this entire winter; every normally-expected winter storm (and a few extras) warmed up and petered out into rain somewhere along the descent from the Appalachians, making panicked meteorologists look like fools. No part of this is Right.

I spent a while fussing with projected government survey maps yesterday before writing this; while much of what I care about has a questionable impending fate, it looks like my mother's easily off-grid cabin in Maine and the nearest town are too far up-cliff to flood within my own lifetime. That was a more comforting discovery than I expected.

[teaotter]

I've been hanging out on icon communities and giving feedback there so much lately -- so my first response to these is OMG the coloring, how do you get that desaturation on the upper half of #4 to meld with the green and blue of the water, and the sky on #2 looks beautifully unreal next to the neutrals in the foreground...

... which may not be as complimentary to a photographer as to an icon maker. But I do think that the contrast in the color palettes is beautiful.

[dancinglights]

Hah! Well, #2 basically just looked like that, and thus was a very intentional selection of adventure-timing, exposure, and framing for a site I knew well, so I will take it as a compliment as a photographer. #4 is about 75% just looking like that and about 25% Instagram's "Hudson" filter, spoofing instructions for which can be found for various photo editing programs with a little bit of Googling. I've been doing this photo thing for most of a decade and I'm only just now starting to think in colour.

[teaotter]

The "hot thing" right now in icon making is coloring that mimics older film cameras -- the color shifts common in Polaroids, cross-processing, light bleeds, etc. I should go look up a tutorial for that Hudson filter, thank you!

[dancinglights]

That seems to be the hot thing in a lot of photographically-related media lately, and co-incident with the rise of Instagram as a service. Meanwhile, I've been collecting actual older film cameras and playing with that. Quite possibly because I like to make things harder for myself :P

[quen_elf]

Nice pictures.

There's a snowdrift against the wall of my flat - a really small snowdrift, admittedly, and only barely enough to cover up the daffodils which were JUST about to come out. Maybe they'll still make it, who knows. This is apparently going to be the coldest March for 50 years in the UK; they had the government scientific adviser on the radio this morning making the point that, yes, 'climate change' does not mean it'll be all tropical all the time.

[dancinglights]

Our local winter changes haven't been nearly as scary as England's certainly, as much as I'm grousing about them. The rather rapid changes there based on Gulf Stream currents are one of the major global shifts that has really sunk in on an emotional level just how messed up things really are.

Here, we had an unseasonably warm winter, with more and larger storm systems than we've seen in decades coming across the continent and through the Appalachian mountains and then... petering out into rain at just about the level of Eastern seaboard cities while the weathermen panicked and looked like fools. This, quite unseasonably into the second day of Spring, was the only significant snowfall we ever got. I haven't seen significant snow in March in (exactly) 20 years. In that regard, I'm even a little grateful for it.

[quen_elf]

Current weather here (and last summer, which wasn't really a summer so much as a monsoon season, only without the 'warm' part and just the rain) is apparently caused by moves in the jetstream, rather than the Gulf Stream. Different stream, significantly higher up. :) The Gulf Stream is still roughly where it's supposed to be, give or take - I think. Leastwise I haven't heard about it recently.

Last I heard, there isn't a conclusive answer for why the northern hemisphere jetstream is frequently further away from the pole than usual, but it could well be caused by the Arctic being significantly warmer. I think RealClimate did a piece about this based on some paper last year, but I can't find it so maybe I imagined it...

In general, the UK is going to be one of the very best places in the world to live as climate shifts over the next fifty years and beyond, but there's one prediction on which I can give a higher degree of certainty than any computer model: we will still be complaining about the weather. :)