I live up in the Alps in Switzerland. There is barely any snow this year. The rivers don't have as much water as usual but the real effects will only be visible later this year.
The water is missing in other places, Italy's north heavily depends on mountain water for their farming. This is going to be a very dry year. Either forcing them to lower the quality of real Italian pasta or again increasing the prices. Also wine from the whole region will not do well this year.
In french the fragil botanical environment is changing so much that their cheese doesn't reach the usual quality anymore.
This sounds like little things maybe, but those are huge traditional markets dying in front of our eyes.
Things are changing very rapidly. I don't know how or why there would be any optimism about this.
Similar thing happened where I live in Brisbane, Australia. A couple of weeks ago the Bureau of Meteorology (our government weather service) predicted 20mm of rain the next day. Instead we got 200mm. They are normally pretty good.
They explained the moisture in the air was at record levels this year because the sea surface temperature was 1.5 C above normal. We all knew the moisture was at record levels because Brisbane (in a temperate zone) was getting sustained levels of humidity that exceeded the levels experiences in the far northern tropics, 3000 km away. Even on a relatively mild day at say 30C, you could not walk up a hill without being drenched in your own sweat. Since their weather models had never see humidity like this sustained for weeks and weeks (it was an all-time record yesterday), they were wrong. It's doubly surprising because were in a El Nino, which should bring dry spells.
The result of all that rain was continuous storms lasting for week, at the peak bring category 3 cyclone winds (exceeding 130 km/hr), concrete power pylons being blown over (never happened before), power outages for weeks in some areas, flooding and deaths in metropolitan areas. Most of came without much warning because the aforementioned models were wrong. It's been a wild ride.
What blows me away is in West Asia the sea surface temperature was 5 C above normal this year, over three times what we are experiencing. I can't imagine what that is like.
The water is missing in other places, Italy's north heavily depends on mountain water for their farming. This is going to be a very dry year. Either forcing them to lower the quality of real Italian pasta or again increasing the prices. Also wine from the whole region will not do well this year.
In french the fragil botanical environment is changing so much that their cheese doesn't reach the usual quality anymore.
This sounds like little things maybe, but those are huge traditional markets dying in front of our eyes.
Things are changing very rapidly. I don't know how or why there would be any optimism about this.