Dry, and dry again

 It's hot and dry at the Croft:

All burnt and brown

The grasses have all died as have most of the flowering plants. The trees are holding out but the ground-water level is dropping, so they too will start to suffer. At 3pm today the thermometer read 35ºC and it has been like that for days. The forecast says it will stay like this for at least the next ten days, maybe longer.

For days, and for years, because this is the second summer in a row with low, low rainfall. So far this year we have had 211mm of rain (211 litres per square metre). By the end of July last year we had had 249mm, but both are more than 33% below the average for the first seven months of the year, 377mm.

 

 

 

 

We have started looking into getting water delivered, because our well is showing signs of distress. So far it's holding out, but for how long?

All of this is - of course - a precursor of the life we are going to have to lead as the climate emergency hits. Extreme temperatures - and the associated risks of forest fire - and resource shortages, starting with water.

 

Places like Montseny will be the canaries in our climate coal mine - crying out as the climate crisis strikes, warning us about the limits of growth, of consumption and of greenhouse gas emissions. 

 

Will our leaders listen? Will we, humanity, listen?

Klimate Kalendar Kaos

Climate change is causing chaos here at the Croft.

It's too warm for a normal October (we've had temperatures over 30º Centigrade) and the plants are reacting by producing flowers in what is officially the Autumn.

First, the plum tree came into flower - this picture was taken just a few days ago:

Plum tree, stoned

 Then the pear tree did the same - this picture was taken yesterday:

An ice pear?

The cycle is broken, and there will be obvious effects; my bees will be confused, and so will other pollinators that might try to hatch another brood when their predators have left for warmer climes - for example the Bee Eater, Meriops apiaster, left for Africa a few weeks ago. But there may be other, less obvious effects. As Dr. Josep Peñuelas at CREAF, Catalonia, showed in 2009, the volatile gasses emitted by the plants could feed back into a climate change loop, potentially accelerating the climate crisis.

The ants are our annual clock. The winged alates (the ants would probably say "wingèd"...) emerge each year to mate and form new colonies. As the Natural History Museum points out in its excellent website, ants do not always swarm on the same day each year, but rather across a season.

 
October is late for ant swarms...and I spotted no swallows or swifts in the sky catching the alates. The swallows and swifts have gone south, too early.

The climate emergency creates collateral damage all over Nature. We, Homo "sapiens", could stop that. Will we?





Source:

Peñuelas, Josep, This Rutishauser, and Iolanda Filella. ‘Phenology Feedbacks on Climate Change’. Science 324, no. 5929 (15 May 2009): 887–88. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1173004.

The Beginning

 

This is how it will begin.

Hello, world

A single flower forcing its way through the cracking concrete of an empty building.

The building had been a busy place, full of human life. There is still lots of life - bacteria, moulds, lichens, ants and now, plants. But it is silent life, a truly silent spring. The noise of humanity has gone and the earth can get back to its buzzing, humming and rustling. Peace on earth, at last.

This is the extinction of Extinction Rebellion. The time, possibly not far from now, when humans burn their way through the earth. Gaia reasserts herself and forces a new order on the planet, one without the carbonized remains of humanity. It's an outrageous idea, but one that is getting easier to imagine. A time when our failure to stop the burning releases just enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to tip the balance of a major ecosystem. The Arctic melts and the North Atlantic Current breaks down. Or Bangladesh floods as Southern Europe becomes a desert. It does not take much.

The rich will save themselves from the initial shock by moving away from the burn. But justice will prevail and a democratic virus, or a bloody resource war, will wipe them out too.

And then the flowers will spout through the concrete deserts that we have built, and, over time that is no longer recorded and thus is not time, the natural world will eradicate all of our remains. Just a few nuclear dumps – the rotting hulks of the submarines at Faslane - will continue to glow out the message that once, a slightly intelligent ape lived here. Slightly intelligent, but not clever enough.

Wetter winters, drier summers

I am a typical Scot, totally obsessed by the weather. But just in case you share my interest, here is a trend:

April Showers

 
This graph compares 2006-2008 (three years, inclusive) with 2013-15. It shows how much wetter or drier it was in the later period by comparing the same six month periods in each three year group, ending in the month shown on the graph. I hope you are following at the back of the class because there will be a test later.

In simpler language: in the three six months periods from July to January 2006, 2007 and 2008 we had an average total 404mm of rain over those six month periods. But in the three six month periods from July to January 2013, 2014 and 2015 we had just 338 mm. In other words the late summer and autumn 2013-15 was a bit drier than the late summer and autumn 2006-8. The difference was that the later period was 16% drier, so the first point on the graph is below the zero line. But the six month periods ending in April (i.e. November-April) were much wetter in the later (2013-15) period. In fact the later period was 42% wetter than the earlier. Geddit? 

This data does not include the very dry winter we had this year.

There could be many explanations for this shift in the weather (which is consistent, by the way, whichever pair of three year periods you use). Whatever the cause, winters and springs have been much wetter at the Croft during 2013-15 than they were 2006-8, and summers and autumns are much drier. Overall rainfall in the two periods has not varied much; total rainfall 2013-15 is only 3% lower than 2006-8.

There you are. The weather is a wonderful topic for conversations, a subject for hours of debate...

Whither the weather?

Writing about the weather is one step more Scottish than our infamous tendency to talk, endlessly, about it. So I'll keep this short:

It is dry. Very, very dry.
Since 1st December 2015 we have had a total of 4mm of rain. Average rainfall over that period is 74mm, so we are 95% down.

It is too warm, for January.
Here at the Croft - we are 300m above sea level - we have barely had frost all winter; just a handful of sub-zero nights. In normal winters we get many frozen nights and a few pipe-bursters that drop below -8ºC.

As a consequence we have mosquitoes active in January (the frost would normally kill most of them off), and bees that are awake and about but can't find nectar.

And now there are concerns over forest fires - something we worry about in July, but not (normally) in January. Here is the February rain forecast from the European Forest Fire Information System: the beige areas mean lower than average rainfall is forecast, and thus higher than average fire risk.

You still not sure about global climate change? Really?

Make hay while the sun shines...

...and it has been shining. Rather too much in fact - today we hit 30ºC at mid day. The Croft is 330m (1,000 ft) above sea level, and even here it's roasting.

Hot spot

 We cropped a record 63 small bales from our two main fields:

Baling hay, the old way...

The sheep have been sheared:

Cool sheep

 It's summer, but it's early, so everyone here in Montseny is starting to worry about forest fires...