Climate change????

There it is again, colder than ever before. Winter, I mean. I don't recall any other year that the winter has come this hard and this early. The temperature has been below -15'c for the whole weekend now and there's been people ice fishing already, and it's not even December yet!!

Last winter was very cold as I have stated here before. Ice cover was thick and it took ages to even start melting as the spring came so late. It felt like the nature was a bit upset after the winter and the fishing wasn't so good anymore.

Now we are possibly having something worse. The climate sure has changed for these few years but do we have enough data to do any reliable statistics? Could this be just normal variation in weather?

Another well documented period of time in finnish history with similar weather conditions was between 1939 and 1941. Summer 1939 was known to have been very hot and long. The following winter 1939-1940 was one of the coldest and hardest of the century for the finns, not just for the weather. Summer 1940 was hot and dry, so dry that all the farming suffered and the harvest was bad. Winter 1940-1941 was dry and very cold and the following summer 1941 was very hot and dry. The dryness continued until the summer/autumn of 1942 and caused severe problems with the nation's food supplies as the stocks had been depleted during the winter war in 1939-1940. Short time of peace from April 1940 to June 1941 still couldn't solve the problem and during the first winter of continuation war in 1941-1942,  starvation seemed to be imminent.

The winter 1941-1942 was rather warm and rainy, so was summer 1942. Water and temperature levels normalized. So why all this blabber about old stuff? Just an example that these weather anomalies have been around forever. Some summers are hot and some winters are cold and vice versa. With this geographic location, the weather could change a lot depending on where the wind blows from etc..

There could be a few cold winters but nothing to really worry about at this point. Just keeping my fingers crossed that I can go fishing early in the spring....