doomer

It's worse when you get someone that's happy winter is warmer now, but you're the bad guy for saying the words "climate change"

Since 2020 but especially over the past year, I've entered this weird twilight zone where most strangers I talk to have a radical but nihilistic acceptance. Haircuts, tattoo sessions, random store clerks and clinicians- it's like 50/50 whether they'll preemptively bring up collapse as small talk.

I use it as an exercise to point out how politics is in everything when I've already been told not to talk about them, fuck em.

The Colorado high desert winter typically looks like:

• 3-5 snow storms per month, the first arriving between September and early November, each leaving at least 5cm~ or more on the ground for a few days. This peaks in April and traditionally ends in early May though, so there's still hope the overall snow season could even out.

• Temperatures top out at 0-4C with some sporadic sunny days where it's 12c at most.

• Plants start coming to life in early March, the first dandelions and leaves appear around mid-late April.

• Birds shift to their breeding season in line with plants, while hatching occurs from May-July

This winter:

• Two local snowstorms, the first being the latest-ever in late November. Neither deposited more than 3cm of snow for more than a day. We were in a rain shadow for all of the big storms that the Midwest was getting over the past few months.

• Temperatures consistently 10-18C with some sporadic cold days that have dipped to -2C at most, the warmest December in almost a century. I've biked almost every day in one or two layers.

• Dandelions are starting to bloom, trees have mature buds and are ready to unfurl their leaves by mid-February. I haven't been up into the mountains to see if the earliest pasqueflowers are similarly off-schedule.

• Birds have been doing their Spring breeding routines as early as mid-January. It seems like they're poised for a March-May hatching period where the chicks would normally catch a few more life-threatening snow storms

That whiplash is so scary when it's impacting the most energy-intensive parts of a species' lifecycle. It's so unpredictable that I don't know when to start my seedlings, with swiss chard already healthily growing outside that I would normally start inside in March. Trying to make those predictions as a different species without weather forecasts is an impossible set of conditions.

That's the scary thing. It alternates between extremes now. Two years ago it was our wettest spring in half a century, but following a huge drought and fire season so the ground wasn't capable of retaining that water. All it resulted in was landslides, flooding, and creating a huge overgrowth of plants that are now fire fuel.