At exercise this morning, a discussion of weather came up. Someone claimed that the weather was worse now than when he was a kid. With the numbers of storms and tornados and such. I said that the weather wasn't any different now than it was back in the 1950's or so. Back then you didn't have 24 hour news stations, 24 hour weather broadcasts. You had news in the morning and evening. You had mostly local news and very little national or international news. The weather was just as bad, you just heard what directly involved you. If there was a hurricane in New Orleans, you heard about it 4 or 5 dys later after you may have read about it in the paper. Anything outside of your 50 mile radius just didn't affect you back then!
You are so right Capt. With world wide news coverage almost the instant it happens it does make it seem that not just the weather but the things that happen are getting worse. Our weather down here this winter is just about perfectly average for us. Sometimes we have a warmer winter, sometimes colder but when added together and divided you get the same average over the years. With a much larger population in tornado alley, there will be more damage and injuries and reports of tornados because people are there, whereas in the 50's the majority of that land was empty farmland and a tornado raking across a couple of farms was not newsworthy.
I don't know if the weather is different really, but I do notice that the seasons seem to merge more now. We don't have what I would call 'proper' winters. We get a few days where it is nippy, a dusting of snow, a couple of frosts, then it is spring. This is wet and dreary, with occassional bright days, and the odd morning frost which nips all the runnner beans off at the ground, and then the wet days roll into summer. Here we get varied weather, a few weeks of good sunshine, lovely to get the toms ripening, but still overcast and dreary days. Autumn, well we don't seem to really get an autumn. The trees in my garden were still in leaf at Christmas time. To be honest, I really can't remember what the weather was doing 10 years ago, let alone 10 minutes ago.
I think that we get more "extremes" these days. Instead of many storms, we seem to get fewer that are more severe. We get weeks with no rain and then so much rain we get flooding. And we are more aware of what is going on in other areas because of the media. But I do think that we got way more snow in the winter when I was younger. I remember frequent heavy snowfall as a child and the snow stayed around for the whole winter.
So do I Netty - much, much more snow. I remember having to wear fishermans thigh boots to trudge to work through the snow when I was in my early twenties. The guy living above us went to work on skies!!! Kids used to sledge down hills on compacted snow almost all winter long. We didn't see spring until nearly the end of February.
