she says a girl needs a gun these days
on account of those rattlesnakes…
Yeah, sadly, that rings true. Fuck.
Yikes…
With apologies for the pedantry here…
“Yes and / or”
My understanding of how climate change has been and is underway involves both the “hotter heat spells, colder winters, longer droughts, more flooding” along with a lot of unpredictability.
Wild unpredictability.
More interesting (and potentially a lot trickier).
So poor ol’ Bart in the cartoon there could easily experience hotter and colder summers, because of excessive CO2 (and CH4: methane, and and and) dumping into the planetary atmosphere, oceans, and weather system.
This drives some of us who grow food really crazy, because not only do we now have issues with all the food plants “that worked before” 
, but… Right now, here, I have fruit trees rated for our USDA growing zone number suddenly not receiving enough chill hours, or getting pests and diseases that were heretofore not a problem, specific pollinators who don’t arrive on time to do their jobs, etc.
And we can’t plan future [food] planting with anything resembling accuracy or foresight either. For some foods like grains, it is easier to go backwards up the genome and sow landrace food plants but those are often lower-yield and have flavors we are currently unaccustomed to.
Of course, there’s genetically-modified plants, if one is into that sort of thing.
Not to be confused with hybrids, which I plant all the time.
Some of us are bracketing: planting for a zone higher, and lower, plus our ostensible zone. If we don’t have 3x the land to plant on, it becomes a crowded 15-puzzle…
… that we only know if we’ve gotten right 5-7 years (the average time it takes a regular fruit tree to become meaningfully productive) after we started. Watering, feeding, pruning, tending and defending. That’s a really long time waiting for a paycheck to come in, for production farmers. I ain’t one of those, thank goodness. Just subsistence-level. It’s clear I would need to find more land though to even keep at subsistence-level, and that means more water, which in this part of Texas is no easy thing. I digress.
All this to say I’ve been tracking climate change in practical terms for about 20 years now. Maybe it’s not quite as awful as the increasingly hotter scenarios illustrate. In my mind, it’s more complex than that, and anyone’s guess from one year–nay, one season–to the next.
/pedant
ETA: punctuation, grammar
This is what is getting us. We have lost all out plum trees to black knot, something we have never had before, usually caused by stress compromising the trees. Something is causing our apples to die back, haven’t figured that one out yet. Not sure how many people have started to figure out that this is not just a case of turning up the AC. There are some scary things starting to happen from this shit!
I love plums and this is hard news.
Dang.
We have lost quite a few ourselves in the past decade.
If there’s a reputable soil lab you can send a few samples to, I’d have them check for cotton root. And get a snapshot of nutrient profiles while they’re at it. NB: some soil “labs” simply send “results” to people based on zip code. It’s cheating. Some soil “labs” in Texas do this. I wish I were kidding.
IIRC when soil temps exceed 80°F the conducive conditions are set up for this super annoying and entire terminal [to Malus spp. among others] pathogen. There is no organic countermeasure, and there’s no friendly inoculant that can outcompete. Changing species sometimes works. YMMV. A lot of horrid things like to destroy apple trees; the list is considerable.
The Israelis came up with an answer, of sorts, but it’s not entirely disease-proof either:
It’s not the tastiest apple I have ever had, but ok for cider, canning, baking, etc.
I had finally found good, fire blight resistant stock that produce pretty well here (Liberty and Jonafree) but this is causing branch tips to turn brown and curl up (not black like fire blight, looks just like drying out, but the next branch over is green and happy.) With as much organic material as I pour into the soil, I cannot imagine that to be an issue, but the temp extremes combined with drought/flood cycles are not making them very happy.
I mean, if you are experiencing an unusually hot summer right now, it is probably a fair bet that you are going to keep experiencing unusually hot summers. It’s true a more energetic system is more variable, but the sharp increase in global temperatures is still a defining aspect of what’s happening here. I mean, you look at the temperature record animations, and they basically seem to be everything turning hot everywhere.
The one case I know of things getting colder has been the winter storms in North America. That is the result of much hotter Arctic air, which is now energetic enough to escape the polar vortex and go wandering south, where of course any Arctic air is cold relative to what is expected. But as far as I can tell that seems to be it. Since it spilled into the western hemisphere, for instance, Eurasia still got warmer winters.
I know the odd place ending up with some cooler summers is possible with global warming, but is there any reason to expect it anywhere?
Agreed.
Averaged out, yes.
Overall, the trend is for higher temperatures, yes.
The scatterplot on the Berkeley Earth graph has some blue annual average points below that red 10-year moving average line.
So in my Bart Simpson thought exercise, my argument is that not every summer would be a hotter summer for The Theoretical Bart (TTB). If one were to chart TTB’s 10-year lookback, his present year, and a 10-year forecast, my guess is that some of the summers TTB would experience might be cooler than a summer immediately preceding or following, year on year. I think I could have worded my previous post more clearly. I was arguing against an unbroken string of ever-hotter summers.
Can confirm from personal experience.
[and now the new higher death totals are arguably adjusted statistically, possibly, depending on how much one can believe Buzzfeed:]
Oh man, this is the $64,000 question, unadjusted to reflect inflation of course.
I’d love to hear from any meteorology nerds on this bbs chime in, because I have a question or three about weather modeling, their own takes on what these models say about the 10-year outlook for thermohaline circulation, their confidence rates for various data sources, and what the current wisdom says about favoring one model over another.
Then I’d love to hear from economic nerds about decarbonization. What’s being done where, successful scalable, replicable projects (and btw I don’t put much trust in feasibility studies so to heck with most of those), etc.
ETA: mild typo
Damn straight!
Eat your heart out, Dubai. You’ve got some legit serious competition now.
Fkn oceans.
How do they work?
→
Fossil fuel companies lied for decades about climate change, and humanity is paying the price. Shouldn’t those lies be central to the public narrative?
I’ve related it on another thread but I heard that directly from a former Exxon scientist who had worked on the warming problem in the 70’s until the early 80’s.
(Ah… a pre-COVID, Pre 1/6, early 2020 thread… it all seems so naive somehow; how little did we know how much worse it would get. 
)
