How has your climate changed in the past sixty years?

General Discussions
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One of my neighbors told me a few days ago what our neighborhood used to be like, climate-wise. I was stunned.

She said that in summer, there used to be a little sprinkle of rain in the afternoon most days. There was even one year in which it happened at 4:07pm precisely every day. She could set her watch by it.

In winter, there was always a solid foot of snow on the ground, usually two. It stayed there, not melting at all, for the entire winter. The first frost date was in late August, and the last frost was consistently right before Mother’s Day.

Nowadays, our last frost is usually in mid-March, and our first frost is usually in mid-November. Summer doesn’t have much rain, and winter offers mostly rain, with very little snow. Snow rarely sticks around for longer than 24 hours. And for the last two years, everything has been off kilter in weird ways.

This year has been bizarre. We got no precipitation at all in the three coldest months of the year (that’s our rainy season! :open_mouth:), March and April basically switched places, and we had 40% humidity and overcast skies and yet still no rain for the two hottest months of the year (when we usually have 0% humidity and ultra-clear skies). I have no idea if this is just a weird year, or if it’s going to be the start of another permanent shift. If so, I’m not a fan. :laughing:

Have any of you guys talked with older people in your climate, and asked them what it used to be like? (Or are you an older person who remembers? :winking_face_with_tongue:) I’m interested to find out how your climate has changed!

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Huhhh I’m wondering if I should be planning for a rainy season and 2-3 dry seasons. It’s a wonder Provo used to get a little sprinkle of rain every day in the summer.

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Our climate has changed a lot in the last sixty years. There was always the occasional strong storm by in spring there used to be long lasting storms every spring, I remember lying in bed listening to it, sometimes all night long. It doesn’t do that anymore. In summer it was common to hit 90 + in summer, mostly in July and August but pretty much any day it got that hot there was an afternoon storm. Now it hit’s 90 + for weeks at a time often with a dry breeze, no rain at all. Now one spot can stay dry while another spot a few miles away gets six inches of rain, in an hour or two. Droughts of two, four or twelve weeks were not common, now they happen every year. Days at 90+ degrees with zero rain and very low humidity didn’t happen back then.

Winters weren’t colder than now, but the cold was much more consistent. People used to go ice fishing and ice skating. Snow covered the ground for a couple of months. Now we have winters with no snow at all. We get freakish things like a 70 degree temperature drop overnight. Then back up 70 degrees in another day or two. Thant’s why it’s hard to grow cold weather crops. Cold tolerant things might not even go totally dormant without freezing temperatures then bam, it hits 15 below for just a night or two.

By the 1990s it was getting hard to ignore but I still thought it would take much longer to be significant, I was wrong.

Climate change is real and it is happening right now, and it is speeding up.

Not sure what you mean by permanent shift. If you mean from one stable condition to another stable condition, no that isn’t going to happen. The stable condition that existed for thousands of years is over. The new condition is one of continuing, unpredictable change with increasing frequency and intensity of extremes.

Here’s a little video of testimony before the US Congress from forty years ago. Current conditions prove what the speaker said. He was wrong about the timeline, (“middle to end of the next century”) but he also said, “based on current levels” (1984 levels). CO2 levels now are more than double 1984 levels and continuing to increase. So, what he thought would happen by 2050 started being noticeable by 2000.

Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 on climate change

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I have a hard time imagining that, too! :open_mouth:

I think she may have lived in Salt Lake sixty years ago, so maybe she was talking about Salt Lake’s climate at the time, not Provo. But that would make it even more shocking, because Salt Lake is hotter and dryer than Provo!

My husband has lived in the Provo/Orem area for almost forty years, and he agrees that the winters were like that when he was a kid. (He doesn’t know about frost dates.) He doesn’t remember summer rain, though. So maybe that was something that vanished between sixty and forty years ago?

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Yeah, you’re right, a “permanent” shift isn’t really the right word . . . maybe a better way of putting it would be, “I hope this kind of unpredictable, bizarre, destructive-to-even-our-wild-plants weather isn’t going to be the norm every year from here on out”? :sweat_smile:

Seriously, I was seeing plants withering from drought in February. And I’m not even talking about my crops here (although they were suffering, too). I’m even talking about the weeds. I was shocked when I realized even our neighborhood’s weeds were dying from drought in February.

Yeah, “by 2000” sounds about right. I moved to Utah in 2001, and people were complaining about it being hotter and dryer than normal. Ten years later, people had been telling me we were in a terrible drought for ten years. I didn’t get it, because to me, Utah had always been like that, so what were they talking about? But my husband, who was here in the 80s and 90s, remembers the climate being veeeeeery different.

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I’m old enough to remember how it was here long ago. The snow was on the ground from December to March at least, currently we are lucky if it stays for a week without melting. There was over 1 meter of snow, now not even a foot. River was flooding regularily, at certain dates, at least 3 times a year, currently it is no flooding at all. The stream going through oxbows dried out and no longer flows.
Last frost was exactly between 13th and 15th May, now it is anywhere between 10th May and 10th June. First autumn frost was around 10th October, now it comes between 10th September and 20th October.
Ground water average level dropped 4 feet. Rainfall is one third what it was, rainwater tanks that wa previously filled full 2-3 times per year no do not fill even once, we are lucky if they are half full. But a bit north and a bit south of us people suffer from huge storms and excessive rainfall.
The land that was flooded every spring and where I was observing pike spawning on a flooded meadow is no too dry for wild plants to thrive and it slowly changes into steppe. Direct sowing of almost anything does not work, seeds do not find enough moisture in a soil to germinate. Heat waves reach over 40 degrees Celsius in end of spring already. All veggies need to be grown in my place from seedlings.
Climate changes slowly to warmer, but the weather is getting unpredictable, heading towards extremes, both in heat and cold, in deluges and droughts. This trend will continue unavoidably in my opinion, due to deforestation, soil erosion and environment pollution. CO2 is not a reason, is an outcome of overconsumption beyond planet threshold and ability to regenerate used resources.
From gardener’s perspective, switching to perennial agriculture, food forestry and tree crops would be wise move. I am mostly planting shade now, our temperate climate changes to desert one, slowly and surely.

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(Nods.) That sounds very smart. I’m also assuming my climate is going to aridify further, and I’m trying to select my crops heavily for drought tolerance, in part because that’s really helpful right now, but mainly because I think it may be crucial for the future.

On top of that, I’ve now had two years in a row in which a super late snow has killed off all the blossoms on my fruit trees, which is rather heartbreaking . . . and deeply concerning, from a food security perspective. If that becomes the norm in my climate, those drought tolerant, pest tolerant, otherwise-well-suited-for-my climate fruit trees that I was planting to count on to provide a lot of calories for my family . . . won’t.

Separate thread to talk about that!

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As the climate warms 1°C, the capacity of the atmosphere to hold water vapor increases by approximately 7% and this is compounding. Thus:

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This leads to the phenomenon of hydroclimate whiplash. Very dry warm air can rapidly suck moisture out of the ground, causing flash drought. Conversely, warm, moisture laden air can result in torrential rains and flooding. We are currently at a global mean temperature of about 1.5°C above pre industrial level. That means that on average the atmosphere can now hold more than 10% more moisture than in pre industrial times.

However, no one lives an average life. Unfortunately, most of the public discussion of climate change has focused on global mean temperatures. But at any given locality at a given time, temperatures can be substantially higher or lower than the global mean. The heat dome phenomenon that has been gripping the American West and also Western Europe this summer is an example of localized extremes.

Therefore, most of us can expect to experience increasing extremes of weather over time. We can probably expect that crop failures will become a regular thing. Plan accordingly.

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In central France, when I was 8 years old, one summer I wrote down the weather and temperatures for each day in a notebook. Almost 40 years later, my mom found that notebook, and I read through it…
and OMG :face_with_crossed_out_eyes: , human memory isn’t very reliable when it comes to this kind of information. I had the impression that the weather was milder, but I was far from remembering a “normal” summer.

In July and August, there were about 5 isolated days with temperatures above 30°C, reaching highs of 32, 33, and 34°C! And at the end of each of those hot days, a thunderstorm would cool things down and bring a light shower.
On the other days, temperatures ranged between 22 and 26°C 95% of the time.
There were often cloudy spells… and starting on August 15, temperatures dropped to around 18°C–20°C with more rain.
Summer was the wettest season of the year, with the fewest rainy days per month but with heavy thunderstorms that brought plenty of rain (about 60 to 80 mm per month).

I remember sledding every winter when there was 15–20 cm of snow for a week. The ponds were covered with ice, so we could walk on them, often with temperatures between -8°C and -15°C.

Spring and fall were cool…we were looking forward to the pleasant summer weather!

So far in 2026, we’ve had four non-consecutive nights of frost, with the coldest night reaching -4°C, and one morning with 2 cm of snow that lasted 2 hours.

But where the weather has changed the most is in the summer. Since late May, we’ve had nonstop temperatures above 30°C, with only five days below 25°C. Many days ranged between 35°C and 42°C. There’s been only 14 mm of rain this month, falling in amounts ranging from 0.5 to 4 mm each time—not enough to even wet the ground.

The natural meadows are dead; not a single plant is green anymore. The trees are brown… the huge, century-old oaks are dying, and the ash and hornbeam trees are all dying… many rivers have dried up.
Animals are suffering and dying… the birds have left, the insects have vanished… it feels like the end of the world, with fires raging in every region, whereas before they were only in the south of the country.

Gardening is becoming impossible; even with plenty of water, it yields almost nothing. Farmers’ crops are also being destroyed. I’m starting to worry about food security this winter.

In my work as a landscape designer, I’m also concerned that it’s becoming very difficult to get a tree to recover… and that once it has recovered, it doesn’t really grow the way it used to.
So for the past 20 years, I’ve been importing seeds from the dry regions of the Mediterranean (Greece, Morocco, Syria…) as well as from the American deserts (Texas, Arizona, California) and northern Mexico. The good news is that these plants thrive in our new climate. However, this summer, I started seeing some of the young seedlings die off, so I moved them all into the shade under a tree and watered my desert plants every day… they should have died from a fungal infection… but they thrived and started growing again…

Basically, we’re living in hell! I hear my coworkers eagerly saying they can’t wait for summer to end… that’s how we’ve gone from the most beautiful season of the year to the worst.:sleepy_face:

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Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry to hear that!

Because I lose about a third of all trees I plant in their first year, I have come to the conclusion that I STRONGLY prefer to have trees on their own roots, not grafted. Most of the time when a tree dies for me, it’s just the top of the tree; the roots survive and regrow. When that happens, I want the new growth to be the cultivar I chose, not whatever rootstock it happened to have been put on.

Since it’s hard to get a lot of fruit trees on their own roots, I often have to buy them grafted. I’ve started planting those grafted trees about a foot below the graft line, and it seems to help: when the top of a tree dies off, most of what’s below the soil survives, which means there are several buds of the scion below the soil line, and it becomes likely to resprout.

I’m told that burying the graft comes with the terrible risk of the scion maybe rooting for itself and the rootstock dying off completely, and . . . GOOD! I don’t mind using a rootstock as a nurse to help a slowpoke scion root, and I’d be happy to have that nurse rootstock die off once it’s no longer needed.

In my opinion, whatever drought tolerance advantages a rootstock might offer are offset by the major disadvantage of the rootstock often being the only thing the tree decides to let survive, as well as by the moderate disadvantage of keeping an incompatible-with-my-climate scion on life support and using that for breeding. If it really can’t possibly survive on its own roots, maybe I don’t want its seedlings in my garden.

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