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Comment by 88840-8855 | Hacker News Reader

We are growing watermelons for years in our garden in Germany.

And how does this fit to the fact that Germany has the coldest year for a long time?

edit: wtf are you downvoting? Dumb af, look up the figures.

It isn't cold. The weather just is miserable. But the average temperatures are still pretty high and way higher than in a bad summer in the 80ies. While I didn't especially appreciate the weather here this year, my plants have been growing like hell, they like the wet and not too cold.

just because it's possible does not imply that it's viable at a commercial scale. i guess the point was, that this has changed.

likewise the average temperature over the year does not neccesarily depict climate in the vegetation period.

Yup. Similarly my parents grow 1 grape bush for 3 decades already and make wine out of it each year, but it's a hobby, it wasn't commercially viable till a few years ago.

There were less than 20 wineyards in Poland in 2000 and none in 1990, now there's almost 500.

Correlation does not imply causation.

Poland was a communist country with closed borders until not long ago.

Commercial enterprise was not exactly blooming in the late 90s.

In addition, supply chain and shipping costs hadnt yet grown and fallen in price to the level they have today , making new crops a real export opportunity.

All true, of course, but USSR had wine regions just the same, they just weren't in Poland. This was a surprise for me, but apparently:

> The former Soviet Union (FSU) was the fourth largest wine producer in the world in 1980 behind Italy, France, and Spain.

Farming wasn't forcibly collectivized in Poland unlike in USSR, the split was almost 20% state-owned farming land and 80% small private farms. Both private and state farms grew hops for beer and potatoes/grain for vodka. If wineyards were possible we would have had them.

You have two problems here. The first is "dumb af". If you actually want a discussion, remain civil. The second is that climate change is a much longer and more variable process than 20 years. Although you may not have intended it, this comes across a bit like Trump pointing to the fact that there's still snow despite "global warming". Perhaps this is the coldest year in 20 years, but (a) that doesn't change the fact that average temperatures are going up and (b) that the predictions of climate change are a less predictable climate, not just steady year-on-year rises in a single place.

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