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Comment by paulintrognon | Hacker News Reader

I live in France next to the Alpes and climate change is really real here. Next week it's expecting to rain on the ski slopes. In the middle of February! Lots of glaciers are gone. Many of my mountain climbing friends say they can't do the runs they used to because the terrain is getting too unpredictable.

It's quite scary.

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The man in the article commenting that his father could no longer read the weather because the signs were wrong is my personal experience too - I've been tramping and hunting in a particular area of our Southern Alps since I was a child, and everything I learned about predicting the weather there when I was young doesn't work now. It used to be that autumn was the time of year with the most stable weather - lots of clear skies, no rain, so ideal for crossing rivers.

But now there's a lot more northwest winds in autumn, which causes heavy rainfall that floods rivers. And likewise, the spring "monsoon" when continual nor'westers are the defining weather pattern (when I lived in an alpine village, 29 days of continual rain in November was the usual) now extends significantly into Summer. And of course, the rainfall events are getting more extreme, damaging roads and hiking infrastructure - like this: https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/fiordland/routeburn-closed-for...

I spent a couple of years in NZ and Australia a few years ago, and since then I've been hearing about quite a few places I loved that have been severely damaged by water or fire. I have a wonderful memory of a week spent on the Routeburn track in winter, your link is a bit of a shock.

In the centre of the Pyrenees, my local ski resort will not open for skiing holidays, for the first time ever (the resort is just a bit older than I am, and I am nearing 45 years old). Not opening for Christmas is not unusual, snow is often lacking then, but for February, that's a first... There is no snow, most of the time it doesn't even freeze at night. It is also pretty dry. Down in the valley, we didn't have a single strong frost night since the beginning of the autumn and winter, just some 0/-1/-2/-3°C.

It comes after an incredibly hot and dry summer. My place is supposed to be very green and wet: this year it rained only twice in 3 months! And those were not even summer rains, those two rainy days looked like small November rainfalls. When I was a kid we had short summer storms several times a week (in the end of afternoon / early evening), especially in August (less so in July, but still there were a few). The system has completely changed over the last 2 decades.

And then the autumn was dry too, except for 1 month. And now the winter is warm and dry.

And that comes after a similar year the year before, which was just a little bit softer.

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That's not just anecdotal: the long term measurements show huge changes, and acceleration. Short term measurements too: monthly records get beaten all the time those last 5 years.

Wetter and colder places have been impacted more by the warming, apparently.

I live in Sweden. A few days ago, we got the first snow of the season here, and most of it has already melted away. Several ski slopes has decided to not open this season, since there's no chance of making any snow even if it would get cold, because the ground is too warm. It's been approximately 5-10° C warmer than usual, with the warmest January day ever.

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