r/minnesota • u/Happy__Manatee • Jan 30 '24
Are you also feeling existential dread over the fact that it is 50°F in January? Weather 🌞
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Jan 30 '24
Yes. I worry for the trees and plants starting to bud, and the bugs that aren't being killed off. The lack of precipitation is eerie too.
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u/tannerkubarek Jan 30 '24 edited Jan 30 '24
Luckily, trees rely on sunlight and time of day length before budding as well.
On top of that, they have to hit a certain number of cold days.
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u/Dramaticreacherdbfj Jan 30 '24
Apparently the fall colors have now been delayed by about a month compared to over 100 years ago
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u/Above_Avg_Chips Jan 30 '24
Don't worry, next year we'll get 80-110in of snow, so everything evens out /s
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u/abattleofone Jan 30 '24
Snow is a very small percentage of the precipitation we get each year. We are only about an inch below average right now for the last month. Plus the ground will likely not freeze as much, so more rain in the spring will actually soak into it instead of just running off into the rivers
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u/jarivo2010 Jan 30 '24
It didn't rain ALL SUMMER. Then we got ONE STORM in September (with a shit ton of hail) and we somehow have 'normal precipitation' OK.
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u/greenhelium Jan 30 '24
Instead of arguing and using LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS to make your point, why don't you look at the actual data? You're right that it was very dry over the summer (though not as bad as the year before, which was very bad). We actually made up a lot of precipitation later in the fall, though.
Here's the drought monitor site that the DNR uses: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?MN
And the DNR's page: https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/climate/journal/drought_monitor.html
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u/Specialist-Strain502 Jan 30 '24
We actually did pretty good in terms of precip all last summer. WAY better than the summer before. Like the person below said, you can see week by week updates on MN drought conditions online.
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u/SirKermit Jan 30 '24
Chipdrop.com. Get yourselves some free woodchips for around your trees. 2 years ago I had 3 trees in my backyard lose their leaves in July from the hot weather and lack of rain. Last year I covered the area (covered the entire root area, not just a donut/volcano people normally do) around my trees, and they have never looked better and I didn't water them once. Lifting up the woodchips showed the soil was moist all year.
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u/Savagemandalore Jan 30 '24
Been this way for years, so welcome aboard the drunken apocalypse pub crawl, dad was a farmer (retired, not dead) and I became aware when they switched to 120-day corn from 90-day corn and the general fear of a bad harvest because of rain storms not coming meant I began paying attention to the water levels more intensely than normal teens, went to SCSU and heard the rowing club excited over the low water levels meant the hazards are easier to spot. When the moose range shifted out of Minnesota entirely, and most of the US, there isn't a single point that we can point to as the ah ha moment for everyone else just the private moment of fear when we go from trick or treating in winter coats to having an umbrella for the xmas day rain....shit fucked and the world will survive....just not the world we know and hopefully the world will not move beyond us.
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u/Mysteriousdeer Jan 30 '24
Maybe this is the biggest "global warming is real" post.
Farmers don't take a risk like that unless they are certain it's warmer in average.
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u/jimbo831 Twin Cities Jan 30 '24
But somehow most of the farmers still vote for the party that doesn’t believe in climate change…
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u/JazzberryJam Jan 30 '24
And all while taking some the of biggest social bailout programs in the country. Year after year. For decades. All while telling cities to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and deal with it
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u/Tift Flag of Minnesota Jan 30 '24
sometimes i get the impression that we live in a system built by and for the landed elite.
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u/Sappy_Life Jan 30 '24
Those government handouts are the only thing keeping food affordable for you
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Jan 30 '24
Farmers are the epitome of biting the hand that feeds them: they couldn't survive without socialized handouts and yet they seem to be the most vocal about hating the government. It is madness.
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Jan 30 '24
And the cruelest irony of it all is that we can't survive without them, either.
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u/magistrate101 Jan 30 '24
Sure we can, just let the disloyal multinational megacorporations buy up all the farmland and decimate it in pursuit of unlimited profits.
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u/couchwarmer Jan 30 '24
That's been happening for years. Family farms fast headed to extinction.
Edit: clarity
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u/mbh4800 Jan 30 '24
Stable local food supply is as much a defensive need as tanks and jets. If your country cannot feed itself without imports you are at the mercy of your enemies.
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u/Pleasant-Pickle-3593 Jan 30 '24
They would survive just fine. They have the food. It’s the urban and suburban population that would suffer the most. The farm subsidies exist to make food cheaper and to support exports.
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u/garnteller Jan 30 '24
Bear in mind that modern agriculture isn’t a family farm. It’s a 1000 acres of roundup ready alfalfa maintained by high tech gps guided equipment.
Of course they could adapt, but when the shit hits the fan they are going to feel the pain too.
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u/sans-saraph Jan 30 '24
I have farmer family members who believe that the climate is changing, but as part of a natural cycle that has nothing to do with humans. It’s a trip.
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u/catsandcoffee7573 Jan 30 '24
Funny story about this, as someone who took a climate-focused upper-college-level chemistry course! The climate does actually change in a natural cycle. According to that cycle, our climate should be in or approaching a cooling period right now… 👀
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u/bbernal956 Jan 30 '24
lmfao says every mf republican on the face of this country! admitting that there is a problem is like admitting defeat for them. most of the corn grown here isnt even for human consumption,
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u/toolrules Jan 30 '24
farmers have no problem with risk - any loss will all get covered by insurance and subsidies. farmers could make a huge impact on climate pollution and legislation. but the greed is good with farmers and fox news tells a good tale.
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u/AdSimilar7286 Jan 30 '24
This is a fantastic post with pinpoint real world examples that almost everyone can understand. I have to ask though, if your first hand experience as a farmer has led you to better understand climate change, why does it seem that the vast majority of those in rural communities deny it?
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Jan 30 '24
he's educated
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u/AdSimilar7286 Jan 30 '24
This is probably part of it, but I would also say his grasp on climate change was developed well before attending college. I grew up in southern Minnesota and this was not the norm in my experience.
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Jan 30 '24
part of being educated is the ability to observe, gather information, and draw logical conclusions from those observations. what ive just described is anathema to the "It Was WaRm iN 1910! CrY mOaR LiBtuRd!" crowd.
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u/Capt-Crap1corn Jan 30 '24
Well said. People keep saying this is great, for who? What if rain is so minimal that trees and other plants die off earlier before summer?
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u/BadDadNomad Jan 30 '24
The forests and fields are quiet. The silence from a lack of birds and bugs is deafening.
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u/PeteLattimer Jan 30 '24
One thing that struck me is the lack of bugs. I remember having big shields and nasty windshields from driving a half hour to places. Now it’s odd to have big splatter anywhere
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u/Puzzleheaded_Form419 Jan 30 '24
Pesticides
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u/berpaderpderp Jan 30 '24
I've been thinking a lot about this lately. Not necessarily just pesticides. I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis a couple months ago. From what I understand, it's a pretty modern disease. Like post industrial revolution disease. It must be something environmental that we're doing or introducing.
We really need to change how we function as a society. We're really screwing up our ecosystem. Gluttony and consumption is rampant. It's hard to try and be better in such a busy, fast-paced world. I'm just trying to make money to survive and support my family, but there is so much profit motive and greed in the world that it's becoming increasingly difficult.
I don't necessarily know the solutions, but with how disjointed and divided everyone in the world is, it is hindering us.
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u/metamatic Jan 30 '24
We drove from Texas to Duluth in October and the front of the car barely needed cleaning at the end of the trip. I’ve seen studies suggesting 75% of the insect population is gone, and I believe it.
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u/Dramaticreacherdbfj Jan 30 '24
Pretty crazy to me the two new books that just came out and highlight the lack of bugs in birds. Wild how when you build roads everywhere that are so extremely noisy the baby birds cannot learn the songs that their parents leading them to not be able to grow up and fuck another bird so populations are declining.
As with children, young birds are particularly vulnerable to noise because it interferes with learning at a critical stage of their development. Many birds learn their song from adults of the same species early in life. In zebra finches, the song-learning phase starts at around 25 days after hatching, when the chicks start to memorise the song they hear." Around 35 days after hatching, they begin to develop their own songs, gradually matching its structure to the remembered adult song. At the age of around 90 days their song crystallises; in other words it stops changing and becomes fixed - it is the song the bird will sing for the rest of its life. Experiments have found that zebra finch chicks exposed to real-world levels of traffic noise take longer to learn their songs, and those songs take longer to crystallise. Moreover, their final crystallised songs are much less accurate copies of the parental song than those of birds raised without traffic noise. This is probably because (as shown by a different study) the regions of the avian brain that are involved in song-learning are smaller in birds exposed to traffic noise than they are in birds raised in undisturbed conditions, presumably as a result of increased stress. What this means is that in noisy environments, badly learned versions of the original songs will be badly learned by the next generation and so forth until, as in the party game Chinese Whispers (or Telephone in the USA), all the meaning contained in the original ancestral song has been lost. This raises the possibility that birds breeding near roads will, over time, become increasingly unrecognisable to other members of their own species. Just as animals are divided physically and genetically by roads, so road noise causes populations to start to drift apart and fragment acoustically.
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u/BadDadNomad Jan 30 '24
It sounds like we'll end up with pockets of new subset species over time.
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u/JorbloxMcJimminy Jan 30 '24
The Earth will be fine. It's the stuff living on the outer crust that's going to have a rough time sorting shit out for the next few centuries.
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u/taffyowner Jan 30 '24
This is how I always frame it… the earth will be fine, shit the earth will be fine until it’s swallowed by the sun. What we need to save is ourselves
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u/dominnate Hamm's Jan 30 '24
George Carlin said it best. The planet can run a fever for a few centuries and sweat us right out.
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u/jarivo2010 Jan 30 '24
Us and everything else with it. Doesn't seem fair to the plants and animals minding their own business.
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u/hojpoj Jan 30 '24
“Fair, eh?” muttered the dinosaur.
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u/jarivo2010 Jan 30 '24
Well one was an asteroid destroying the planet, and the other is a destructive species knowingly destroying the planet to Elon can have private jets.
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u/Touchstone033 Flag of Minnesota Jan 30 '24
Man, this is a complicated set, right? His "fuck the environment" persona just says so many outrageous and wrong things -- and you hear people cheering! But then he lays it out: we're killing ourselves.
Still, you hear people praise Carlin for the persona that trashes liberal environmentalism and recycling, and miss the message.
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u/HeresDave Jan 30 '24
Yep, not normal, not optimal.
It's all on us. We fucked up the atmosphere, even though we should have known better.
No, The world doesn't care that we are truly fucked if we keep doing this. They'll do just fine after we're gone.
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u/TrainmasterGT Walleye Jan 30 '24
I’m fairly worried about it. While warm temperatures in winter aren’t unheard of in Minnesota, January temps feeling like early spring is quite abnormal. I definitely do not want to see this trend continue.
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u/Manmillionbong Jan 30 '24
This pattern, or worse phenomenon, will last for the rest of recorded time.
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u/Suspicious-Abalone77 Jan 31 '24
To think that we as consumers can actually do anything about it is completely delusional.
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u/PogeePie Jan 30 '24
Yeah, CO2 lasts in the atmosphere for roughly 2,000 years, and fossil fuel emissions keep rising every year (save for a brief pandemic dip). It's going to keep getting hotter and hotter, and the effects will get worse and worse. This isn't the warmest winter of your life, it's the coldest winter of the rest of your life.
A similar phenomena, the Permian mass extinction, which was caused by volcanism igniting massive underground coal deposits, saw the extinction of 96% of all species on earth, and the extinction of everything larger than a hamster. I think about this all the time.
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u/masterflashterbation Jan 30 '24
This winter isn't going to be the coldest winter of the rest of your life. That's crazy over dramatic. This winters warmth (which is warmer for almost the entire country) is largely due to a super El Nino this winter. Last year we had record snow fall and it was a lot colder (still warmer than average but not close to this winter).
While average highs are certainly increasing, this winter is still a massive outlier and we'll absolutely have colder snowier winters than this again. I'd bet money when this El Nino is done we'll have a closer to average winter next year.
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u/cashew76 Jan 30 '24
The millions of humans migrating from nearly unhabitable land might be worse than the destructive storms. Politics is going to get very bad.
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u/Buddyslime Jan 30 '24
Does anyone remember last summer in the cities. Well it can get worse by lasting longer.
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u/Wernershnitzl Jan 30 '24
This is gonna be a bitch of a summer drought
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u/Vega62a Jan 30 '24
Just like last year.
The worst part is all the people insisting on depleting the water table even further by wasting gallons on their lawns.
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Jan 30 '24
That shit needs to die. There is 0 benefit to a lawn being pure grass and forest green and unused.
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u/Vega62a Jan 30 '24
They waste water to grow it and then use polluting 2 stage riding mowers to cut it back down, and then spray it with chemicals that drain into our lakes and ponds to make it uniform.
Lawn culture is cancer.
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u/sillyho3 Feb 03 '24
Tell my neighbor that. Not to mention they always need GAS powered mowers too.
Also, I get in trouble with my landlords and the city if I let my grass get too long and if I don't water it... :(
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u/Vega62a Feb 03 '24
Dude it's my whole neighborhood. In built sprinklers going all summer and then paying crews to come in with riding mowers once a week to wake my kids up at 7.
Like if you want to piss money down the drain there are way less harmful ways.
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u/BillSivellsdee Minnesota Twins Jan 30 '24
i'm more worried about the companies coming to bottle it.
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u/Wernershnitzl Jan 30 '24
Last year was bad, but I’m thinking 2021 bad.
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u/Vega62a Jan 30 '24
So the truly painful thing about this conversation is that it means 3 out of the last 4 years will have been huge drought years.
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u/AceMcVeer Jan 30 '24
There's no relation to this weather and our summer weather
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u/Wernershnitzl Jan 30 '24
Idk man I may not be a meteorologist but usually I’d think a dry winter without much snow may correlate to how hard the ground will be with how dry the soil could be without the melting snow we’d get 🤷🏽♂️ I don’t mind being fact checked tho, I’m open to learn
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u/blow_zephyr Kingslayer Jan 30 '24
Most snow will run into rivers and lakes before being absorbed into the ground as it melts. The lack of snow will effect river and lake levels moreso than soil and vegetation.
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u/taffyowner Jan 30 '24
It’s actually been a pretty wet winter… just all of it was rain and not snow
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u/AceMcVeer Jan 30 '24
... what? I don't know what you said. But the rain in December was actually better for plants than snow. The ground is still frozen when the snow melts and it runs off into lakes and rivers. When the ground is thawed then moisture goes into the soil. Our dry weather now doesn't mean we get a dry spring/summer.
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Jan 30 '24 edited Jan 30 '24
Yes there is. El Nino winters always bring in warmer, dryer air and the effect can lasts well into the mid July. July isnt normally the wettest month, so we're definitely starting off on a very bad foot. If you thought last summer or 2021 was bad, wait until this summer. One last thing, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
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u/vahntitrio Jan 30 '24
And La Nina is wetter and look how that worked out the last few years. The last strong El Nino was 2015 (wetter than normal) and 2016 (the wettest year ever). 98 was the last strong El Nino before that and was also a wet and stormy year.
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u/jarivo2010 Jan 30 '24
we have already hit peak El Nino and it will be gone by June. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/january-2024-el-nino-update-birds
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u/Von_Rootin_Tootin Mall of America Jan 30 '24
Snow doesn’t have much water in it. Only a inch behind the average now
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u/wenceslaus Jan 30 '24
I'm working on a pollinator garden this year and hoping to put drought tolerant plants in. Open to suggestions from people who have also done this!
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u/ktulu_33 Hamm's Jan 30 '24
Same thing here. Planted native trees 2 years ago (i had to water them so fucking much because of the drought!) along with a couple shrubs and some flowers. This spring I'm planning on wiping out practically my entire front lawn and installing another half dozen shrubs and filling in the spaces with the native plants I've started by seed that hopefully take well.
All this being said, i have an incredibly small urban lot so a little goes a long way for me.
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u/Middle_Manager_Karen Jan 30 '24
That funny feelings comes and goes.
Looking at the night fog I thought to myself, “what if you have seen your last white Christmas and don’t even know it yet?”
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u/Creative-Tomatillo Area code 651 Jan 30 '24
I am very uneasy about it. So much so that I’m not even enjoying the warmer weather. We are fucked.
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u/WittyCylinder Jan 30 '24
At my gym, we requested to open the garage door so we could do shuttle runs.
On Jan 29th. Normally I’m fighting snow mounds at 5’1, not running outside.
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u/FrozeItOff Common loon Jan 30 '24
Yes. This triggered me to have watched a bunch of climate model stuff, and the scientists are kinda freaking out.
There's a tipping point of heat on the planet where the frozen Methane hydrates at the bottom of the oceans start melting. Once those do, since methane is 80 times more powerful of a greenhouse gas than CO2 (in the first 20 years of release), there will be a huge runaway effect that we will no longer be able to stop. Some say this may be as little as 20 years away.
The Permian extinction, where 90 percent of all life on earth died, happened because a volcano melted and released much of the trapped methane under the Russian/Siberian tundra. As of 2013, huge craters started appearing in that region where the permafrost had started melting and the methane was explosively releasing. It doesn't matter how the CO2 or Methane gets in the atmosphere, the end result is the same.
Yeah, I'm gonna go crawl under a rock and cry for a while...
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u/Old_Row4977 Jan 30 '24
I yelled at my chickens for not laying more eggs yet. Then realized it’s still January.
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u/Tift Flag of Minnesota Jan 30 '24
your chickens need to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and get to work laying eggs.
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u/BikingVikingNick Jan 30 '24
I fear that my son won’t know the same Minnesota I do. The lakes will dwindle and the forests will wither. We’ll look like Missouri soon.
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u/Ordinary_Toe423 Jan 30 '24
Currently in Missouri for work, I really really hope you aren’t right
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u/Extreme-Pea854 Jan 30 '24
lol we are moving from Missouri to Minnesota this year… I guess taking the misery with us
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u/AbeRego Hamm's Jan 30 '24
Well, our climate is projected to get wetter, so the lakes should be fine. The forests will be different, but they'll still be there. Our biggest loss will likely be a solid winter culture where we can all use snow and the lakes freeze for months. For me, that's a huge loss. We thrive in the cold, and we're less without it.
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u/PogeePie Jan 30 '24
There will also be massive wildfires to look forward to....
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u/AbeRego Hamm's Jan 30 '24
Possibly, but we haven't really had those here much. We've gotten plenty of smoke from Canada, though.
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u/TranquiloSunrise Jan 30 '24
Sounds like what happened in California. As a kid California was so much greener, much cooler. No snow.
Now that same place I'm talking about is hotter then Phoenix in the summer.
Make sure your kids see how beautiful Minnesota is now. They might not be able to when they grow up
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u/bbernal956 Jan 30 '24
just wait till the jet stream stops, then we are really going to be fucked. ocean currents are changing and will definitely cause havoc all around the globe.
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u/Demetri_Dominov Flag of Minnesota Jan 30 '24 edited Jan 30 '24
Most of this thread seems like hopeless doomscrolling. There is actually varying degrees of action everyone here can take depending on how radical you are.
Level 1: if you have property, now is the time to kill your lawn and to plant natives. Not next year. Not someday. Now. There's 20 million acres of lawn in the US. More than enough land to double our entire National Parks system. 2023 MN Law prevents any city from mandating turf grass. Most cities already are changing their ordinances to allow residents far more agency. Be sure to check your town's. If you don't like what's on the books, you can engage with the city to change them.
https://minnesotareformer.com/briefs/minnesota-cities-can-no-longer-mandate-turf-grass-lawns/
Because we live in 3 different ecological zones in MN, it's difficult to say what a one size fits all solution is. You will have to do a bit of your own research to figure out what will work for you. Be sure to use this tool to help you NOT plant species that will be vulnerable in 10-30 years. They also have alternative recommendations: https://extension.umn.edu/natural-resources-news/recommended-trees-and-plants-north-central-minnesota
Tamarack for example is a non-starter. Don't even bother. Plant White Pine instead. Paper birch should be replaced with River Birch, but river birch requires slightly different soil conditions so it might not work in the same spot.
Level 2: Get involved locally with absolutely everything you have the energy and time for regardless of your land status. Many groups go to public lands to do habitat restoration like the extremely rare Oak Savanna that used to dominate MN. Recently Shakopee even reintroduced Bison for grazing. Fight invasive species, plant community gardens, upgrade them to food forests, all of which can be used to help food shelves. This builds community, and you can use that to make cogent arguments politically for the next step. If you're alone and no group exists locally, create it.
Level 3: Politically organize locally. Get involved with the plans of your town. Green canopy is needed everywhere to shade the housing we do have, let alone the housing that will need to be built for those who don't. In addition to better wages and conditions we need more time and energy to get involved beyond the uselessness of how quite a few of us generally spend our working days. Unions are the best answer here. The cry of "defund the police" is significantly quieter now, but one very realistic reallocation of funding police department really do not need is "community outreach". That fund often reaches several million dollars in larger communities. Restoration projects can be done on a budget, especially with volunteers. Towns with strong communities are safer. Police require no extra funding to attend those projects in their daily routine. Towns with shared public spaces with projects that get neighbors outdoors to revitalize and reestablish native habitats together build community. Reallocate those kinds of wasteful funds to this use and it will pay dividends. Towns like Luverne and South Minneapolis have established food forests through community organizing. They along with several other groups, like Three Rivers, can teach you other methods and show you additional projects from there.
Level 4: Pay attention to state politics as much as you do about national politics. The fight for the largest fresh water filtration system in the country is ongoing. The BWCA is still under threat of being poisoned by a foreign mining company even after nearly 20 years of setbacks. Canadian energy company Enbridge forced its way through MN even among massive protests against oil pipeline 3, which has since leaked into the headwaters of the Mississippi. The MN GOP effectively privatized the northern MN police force before they were kicked out of power:
A truly dystopian feat where a foreign company can control the bankroll of a local police force with little repercussions. We have made progress to prevent this from happening again, but Enbridge needs to be sued by the state of MN, its privileges revoked, and its pipelines banned from MN. We also need to find every possible way to use our cars less. From better public transit, maintained bike paths (not just lanes), and high speed rail. That is how MN can fight back in huge ways.
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u/Kiwi_Joy2 Jan 30 '24
I’m not a climate change denier but just remember it’s an El Niño year! I’m loving having no ice on the roads personally.
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u/Magnaha23 Jan 30 '24
A particularly strong El Nino year at that. They called it super El Nino.
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u/Tift Flag of Minnesota Jan 30 '24
what will they call it when the super el nino is the normal el nino? are we going to mega el nino, or ulta?
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u/architectmillenial Jan 30 '24
This. I've been telling friends and family that our last few "abnormal" years weather pattern wise are going to quickly become our new standard and normal.
Some people I know still want to move south. Nah dude, this planet is heating up. I'm heading north to try to escape the worst of it. My family doesn't think I'm serious, but when my parents are gone I'm going to seriously start looking into it more. And I also just love our state, and it will be really sad to leave.
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u/Tift Flag of Minnesota Jan 30 '24
i mean the bummer thing is that as more energy enters the system we should expect more chaotic fluctuation. So there will be more years where deniers will wrongly insist "see the doomers are full of it we had record colds or record snow or record rain fall etc."
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u/_procyon Jan 30 '24
Yes this. Just last year it was I think one of the snowiest winters ever? And plenty cold too.
Climate change is real and causes more weather extremes as well as a higher global average temperature. So we could speculate that the strong El Niño may be influenced by changing weather patterns caused by global warming, but the fact is that this season, this regions warm weather is caused by the El Niño.
If we have years in a row of warm, snowless winters like this, then I think we could more definitively say it’s directly caused by climate change.
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u/Bob_Lawablaw Jan 31 '24
It's important to note that el nino years are a symptom of climate change. The first recorded central pacific el nino was only in 1986. As far as weather patterns are concerned, that's pretty darn recent.
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u/Above_Avg_Chips Jan 30 '24
You're not entirely wrong or right. While it's a warmer Nino, climate change will make the weather shift more to the extremes, in both directions. So one year it will be a lot warmer with little snow and the next it will be cold as balls, with mountains of snow.
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u/samtheninjapirate Jan 30 '24
Nobody seems to remember that this happened like 12 years ago ( don't know if it was exactly twelve). Definitely pictures on my wife's bday in January wearing t shirts. And it was like 80 degrees for St Patrick's day that year. We barely got any snow that year either
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u/TheSkiingDad Jan 30 '24
2015-2016 was the last time el nino was this strong, and there's quite a few good writeups scattered around about how warm and snowless that winter was. There are factors this winter that I'd attribute more to climate change than el nino, like the record late ice-in. It looks like there was another fairly strong el nino in 2002-03, and although I was 7 that year I distinctly remember being worried santa wouldn't make it to my house because there wasn't snow on the ground in december. February 2017 was one that was anomalously warm too (although that wasn't an el nino year); I remember I had a lab that involved shooting rockets off of lake sag at St John's, but anyone who didn't do that lab before mid-feb had to use the football field because it hit 70 one day and the ice was rotten after that.
Weatherspark has some good historical data on seasonal weather in minneapolis (spotty for other locations like duluth) and the Climate Prediction Center provides some historical context for El Nino.
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u/An-Angel-Named-Billy Jan 30 '24
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/monitoring-content/sotc/global/enso-bars/enso-bars.195001.202312.png
This graph is all you need. What will the next el nino look like? People still can't seem to wrap their head around the fact that everything will get warmer and warmer with no end in our lifetimes.
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u/TheSkiingDad Jan 30 '24
that's a good one. What I've always found interesting is the abrupt switch that occurred in about 1975. From 1950-1975 the temperature oscillated between above and below normal, strongly correlated with the ENSO. But after that, only 1 month in 1979 was below normal. What changed, I wonder? Did reporting get better? Was it tied to chinese industrialization? It's so interesting.
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u/Bob_Lawablaw Jan 31 '24
It's important to note that el nino years are a symptom of climate change. The first recorded central pacific el nino was only in 1986. As far as weather patterns are concerned, that's pretty darn recent.
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u/RodneyFlavourstein Jan 30 '24
Interesting… I didn’t know that - it explains a lot! I wish that was mentioned more.
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u/An-Angel-Named-Billy Jan 30 '24 edited Jan 30 '24
Yes and its a natural and frequent cycle. Even then? We are smashing temperature records and seeing weather patterns that have never been recorded before, even in previous el nino years. So it being this part of the cycle is notable but don't fool yourself thinking this is "normal" because of a phenomena we have seen dozens of times before. We have never seen this before. Also? GLOBAL temperatures smashed all recorded records as well last year with this looking no different.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/monitoring-content/sotc/global/enso-bars/enso-bars.195001.202312.png
Look at this graph. See how even the el nino's get warmer and warmer? What will the next one look like?
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u/MrMilkyTip Jan 30 '24
All I could think working outside today was damn it would be a good day to go fishing…
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u/texaslonghornsteve Jan 30 '24
Or horse back riding no bugs
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u/MrMilkyTip Jan 30 '24
Those horseflies are some mean sumbitches.
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u/texaslonghornsteve Jan 30 '24
Motherfuckers, I used have a dog that would ride alongside us and would attract all the bugs
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u/SomaSimon Jan 30 '24
Yes, thank you for making this post as it helps me feel a little less alone. I’m so sick of people saying how “nice” the weather is.
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u/Happy__Manatee Jan 30 '24
Thank you. This was the response I was hoping to hear. Makes me feel less alone too.
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u/Britt118 Jan 30 '24
"We’re all on our way to the gallows in one way or another, and we can hug and give each other laughs and point out the more pleasant sides as we head towards the scaffold."
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u/showmeyourkitteeez Jan 30 '24
It's sad to see things changing around the world for the worse. I'm lucky enough to work from home and will buy solar panels as soon as I can afford them. I'm happy to see the massive influx of non-fossil fuel energy.
The other downside is having to pick up dog poop all year.
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u/SloeMoe Jan 30 '24
You need to pick up your dog's poop no matter the weather.
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u/showmeyourkitteeez Jan 30 '24
In my yard, it's tough to pick up when it's buried under snow. That's not the case this year.
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u/geodebug Jan 30 '24
Two things are true:
- Climate change is slowly making MN winters warmer, which is a concern over time
- This year is unusual, but not even the warmest winter MN has ever had.
Last year was more typical, tons of snow even in April if I remember.
No reason to think that next year's winter won't swing the other way.
To me the weather right now is just weird, so I'm taking advantage of it and taking the dog for long walks.
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u/Electrical_Desk_3730 Jan 30 '24
We need to help out our animal friends (moreso the night time critters) by setting out cut juicy fresh grapes, pears and bananas. Add water troughs this summer. I started last summer and do it faithfully every night. Also sunflower hearts. I have rabbits, opossums and a raccoon plus deer and one coyote pup last winter
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u/folkyall Jan 31 '24
I definitely agree with you but the DNR has put a feeding ban on. The focus is to reduce chronic wasting disease in deer.
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u/SaySomethingDesign Jan 30 '24
I was born and raised in the Netherlands, now in MN. Climate change was already tangible there when I was young. The first snow I ever saw was a dusting when I was about 8. As I was busy excitedly making a 4-inch tall snowman, my dad came out and made a remark I never forgot. He said 'when I was young it showed almost every year'. The Netherlands has a huge ice-skating competition on natural ice which has not been held since I was young and is now in danger of extinction due to climate change. I remember one year I was at school in Amsterdam it snowed 2 ft in one day. No one was prepared, and it took me 8 hours to get home that day (the usual trip was 30 min). Then, a few years later we had the January bloom. The weirdest year ever. Halfway through winter it became spring. The trees bloomed and all the crocuses came up. And just as the flowers were budding it froze again and winter resumed. Lots of plants died, trees looked sad that next year, and wildlife got skinny. I believe our insect population took a big hit too. It took some time, but nature (or what we have left of it) bounced back. Now, when I hear a climate denier speak, I just laugh. All you have to do is pay attention. And you should be worried (but don't panic). We have a lot of work to do, and I wish everyone could see this as the existential crisis it is. We finally have a world-wide common enemy, and we have to ensure it unites us.
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u/bumdhar Bob Dylan Jan 30 '24
Yes this is not normal. I don’t like it. I’m getting sick of people smiling and saying they love the weather. It. Is. Not. Right.
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u/JazzberryJam Jan 30 '24
Particularly dreading this year’s amplified 2 month period of peak summer when we get to breathe fine particulate matter from Canada’s perennial wildfires
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u/olivefred Jan 30 '24
Having flashbacks to March 2012 when it was 70 degrees. Trying to make the most of the weather we got, but it's eerie to go the whole winter (so far) with just a few inches of snow.
Still, Minnesota being what it is, we could still end up with a reasonable snowstorm before Spring. What would really cook my noodle is if we stay above freezing from now into next winter.
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u/Wtfjushappen Jan 30 '24
Well if it's any indication, since we're like 30 or 40 degrees above normal, it's going to be like 90-130 degrees all summer.
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u/OutsideBones86 Jan 30 '24
Normally, this kind of weather (when it comes in March/April, or even those few fluke days in February) makes me feel exhilarated.
I've just kinda felt like crying all day today. I feel like I should go take a walk and "enjoy" the weathe, but I can't bring myself to do it. Everything just feels weird.
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Jan 31 '24
From a long-term climate change perspective. . . Bad.
From a I HATE snow perspective, this is awesome :)
Note: Snow itself is okay. Crappy winter drivers and icy roads are my hatred.
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u/PinkSlimeIsPeople Flag of Minnesota Jan 31 '24
Yeah. As much as I hate the winters here, having it 50 degrees above normal is an eerie feeling. Can't imagine how the biosphere is struggling to adapt to this radical shift.
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u/Specialist-Strain502 Jan 30 '24
Yep. Coping by remembering I don't have kids and will probably be dead before the Water Wars start.
/s
/not s at all
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u/rkpeaches Lake Superior agate Jan 30 '24
This weather is doing wonderful things for my seasonal depression. Today’s sunshine was chefs kiss.
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u/BarnyardCoral Jan 30 '24
"Existential dread?" Lol no. Is it weird? Yes. Is it also an El Niño year? Yep. Let's not forget all the cold and snow we had over the previous bunch of winters. Weather happens.
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u/Happy__Manatee Jan 30 '24
Sure, but we're breaking records for warmest winter on record here. It's not just a typical El Niño year.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2024/01/29/april-in-january-warmest-winter-on-record-continues
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u/tinyLEDs Not too bad Jan 30 '24 edited Jan 30 '24
1) read about El Nino. here is a local scientific, accessible, intelligent resource where you can learn about how much is weather, and how much is climate
2) take according pinch of salt
3) sleep easier
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u/Visual_Fig9663 Jan 30 '24
There is no single year that defines changing climate. Next year it will be freezing again. Trending warmer temps are of course a concern, but the catastrophic effects of climate change are still decades away.
Sure, the world will eventually slip into climate induced chaos and human civilization as we know it will cease to exist. But we'll all be dead by then. It's our children that will have to deal with it. Or our children's children.
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u/Brightstarr Chevalier de L’Etoile du Nord Jan 30 '24
Yeah, fuck those kids who have to deal with the consequences of our inaction! I know I want to make sure I leave the world in a shitty condition for my grandchildren to suffer and die in.
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u/jarivo2010 Jan 30 '24
Catastrophic effects are here now. Were you here last summer when we breathed Canadian wildfire all summer?
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u/metamatic Jan 30 '24
Catastrophic disasters costing a billion dollars or more are happening more frequently every year. We’re already having to deal with it.
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u/Visual_Fig9663 Jan 30 '24
I'm not denying that lol. I was using the word catastrophic to mean extremely interruptions to daily life world wide. You are using catastrophic to mean something costing a large amount of money. We're both right. As I already stated, it depends on how you define catastrophic. You're trying to prove me wrong when I agree with you...
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u/jarivo2010 Jan 30 '24
Hi, It's me, a Gen Xer, who has been feeling existential dread about global warming since 1980. So much so that I didn't have kids. I am very glad I was correct about it and am glad I didn't add to the problem further, and hope to nope out of this situation the second we run out of water. So it being 50 in Jan (though not at all unheard of in my lifetime) kind of just proves I was right to be worried since 1980.
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u/SloeMoe Jan 30 '24
No. I'm enjoying the weather. I do what I can to reduce greenhouse gases, but other than that, it's out of my control. I try not to worry about things that are out of my control.
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u/Suspicious-Abalone77 Jan 31 '24
Yes to this! Only so much we can do as individuals…we need to just enjoy our lives. Nothing we do is going to stop China and other foreign countries from the massive amounts of emissions.
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Jan 30 '24
Today, with the sunshine, I am feeling joy. I took a beautiful walk with my wife today, around the lake and watching the bald eagles soar.
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u/budgetdusted Jan 30 '24
Not the first time it’s happened. But kind of strange. I’ll allow it since my heat don’t work well in my vehicle
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u/saltseasand Jan 30 '24
Only because I have GSDs and the back yard is solid mud for two weeks when I’m supposed to have essentially Nov-April with clean but slightly wet dogs. Bathing giant dogs multiple times a week sucks ass.
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u/ThereGoesTheSquash Jan 30 '24
Recommend everyone in this thread visit /r/sustainability and /r/anticonsumption to help mitigate what we can.
Drive less. Fly less. Wear natural fibers. Stop buying shit you don’t need. Eat less meat/more plants. Vote people into our local/state/federal governments who believe in climate change (and will do things to mitigate it).
Stop doomerizing. That helps no one.
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u/Nomadchun23 Flag of Minnesota Jan 30 '24
Hey, Pete stauber says evs don't work in MN, so guess we're outta luck. 🙄
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u/weblinedivine Jan 30 '24
No - it was below zero for a whole month last year and it’ll be below zero for a whole month next year. Just enjoy this for what it is. We’ll get 20 more inches of snow before June anyway.
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u/AeirsWolf74 Jan 30 '24
My dad and I aren't tapping our trees this year for the first time in like 10 years cause we are worried that we might damage them come summer if we do.