My entry for Climate Change / Global Warming Writing Contest by @upmewhale

Hi there my Steemian friends and followers!

I am known to be a keen participant in all kinds of photo contests run here on the Steem blockchain and as far as I remember, I haven´t taken part in a writing contest yet but there is one going on right now that I am excited to join. The writing contest is hosted by @upmewhale and the topic is Climate Change / Global Warming.

As most of my Steemian friends and followers know, I am a dedicated nature lover and environmentalist so the issue of climate change and global warming is something I deal with very often, both theoretically during discussions with other people as well as in practice when being out in nature (which is where I actually spend a lot of my time).

Just as @upmewhale mentioned in their contest announcement post, climate change is a highly controversial and very complex topic that divides the society into many different groups centered around different opinions and arguing with different facts, numbers and studies.

I am not going to fight for any of these groups in this post. I have seen, heard and read way too many different (and sometimes even contradictory) arguments on this topic to make some solid opinion myself so rather than trying to interpret other´s people statements here, I will share my own observations with you.

I come from the Czech Republic, a small landlocked country situated in Central Europe. When I was a little child, I remember having four, very distinctive seasons of the year - spring, summer, autumn and winter. The seasons always came with their own, very specific charms, peculiarities, weather patterns and natural phenomena. I now am going to break them down a bit and illustrate with my own photos that I took in Czech nature in the past years.

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Spring

Beginning in late February, the spring was the season when nature came back to life after the winter sleep. It was the part of the year when plants and trees started to turn green, swell and sprout. The spring used to come with a very changeable weather and it was not unusual to experience everything from snow and rain to sunshine and blue skies within a very short period of time, sometimes even within one day, especially in April. The spring used to be the season when nature got most of its water supply as the snow up in the mountains melted and it also rained a lot.

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Summer

The summer has always been the hottest season of the year in the Czech Republic. It also when local people and nature can enjoy the most daylight hours with the sun rising very early in the morning and setting late in the evening. As far as I remember, Czech summers used to be warm, sometimes very warm, but extreme heatwaves with temperatures exceeding 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) were very rare. Also, summer storms were common, providing the landscape with the much needed water.

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Autumn

In spite of being the most melancholic season of the year, many Czech people consider the autumn their favorite part of the year, usually because of all the colors that Mother Nature conjure up in trees. In my childhood memories, the autumn usually came with strong winds, fogs, grey skies and cold mornings. The first snow typically showed up in November or sometimes even in late October. It used to rain a lot and the days were getting shorter and colder as the winter approached.

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Winter

Traditionally, the last season of the year would turn my country into a real winter wonderland. I loved all the outdoor fun that winter in my homeland brought about - from skiing and ice skating to snowball fights and building snowmen. Obviously, all these activities required snow but Czech winters used to come with heavy snow loads and freezing temperatures that often lasted up to late March or sometimes even early April so it was all perfectly doable and legit.

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So this is how I remember the climate patterns to be in the Czech Republic when I was a little boy some 25-30 years ago. Unfortunately, things have changed a lot over those few decades and it now sometimes feels like living in a different part of the world.

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Spring

The spring appeared to be left out completely in some of the recent years. Some flowers and trees already sprout in winter as they are confused by the warm weather and by the official start of the spring in late March, nature is often fully awaken after a miserable and insufficient winter sleep. The temperatures easily get up to well over 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) in May (sometimes even in April) and the spring rainfall has decreased significantly.

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Summer

The last couples of summers in the Czech Republic came with weather that few people could enjoy. There were long heatwaves of unbearable temperatures attacking the all time Czech record of 40.4 degrees Celsius (104.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and the country was also suffering from severe droughts as the soil wasn´t watered properly in spring and the summer storms have been much rarer than before. Crops that are supposed to get ripe in autumn are now often harvested in summer but they are frequently damaged by the extremely hot and dry weather.

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Autumn

Similarly to the spring, the autumn sometimes feels to be skipped now as nature transforms from the summer mode directly into the winter one. We rarely experience snow in the autumn in the Czech Republic now and the number of warm and sunny days is considerably higher than what I remember from past decades. I know this particular change doesn´t sound that bad but all the plants, trees and living creatures in nature are genetically predetermined to live in the four season cycle in this part of the world and the warm autumn can cause some serious troubles to them.

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Winter

Just like all of the previous seasons, the winter is also much warmer now in my homeland. The number of snowy days has dwindled and there have been many cases of animals having troubles to hibernate. Some migratory birds don´t even migrate to warmer destinations anymore as the Czech Republic seems warm enough for them to survive the winter. I have spent most of the recent winters abroad but I always check the weather in my homeland and I am in a regular touch with my family and friends living there so I know it´s been long years since we had white Christmas there.

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So these are the observations I have made on climate change and global warming in my homeland, the Czech Republic. However, I am sure that some very similar (if not identical) changes have been happening in many other countries in Europe and probably in other parts of the world too.

I don´t really want to speculate about the causes of these changes (but if you asked me, I would say that humans are definitely implicated in it) or to what extent they are a part of some regular natural cycles. I just wanted to share my own experience with how the changes manifest themselves in one particular place.

Thank you so much @upmewhale for coming up with this great challenge. I totally enjoyed working on my entry. It was fun. Also, I hope my post will inspire some of my Steemian fellows to make their own entries. I would really love to find out what the situation looks like in some other parts of the world. So please guys, check out the above mentioned post by @upmewhale for the rules and conditions of the contest and go ahead and make some posts on climate change and global warming yourselves. I am looking forward to reading it :)

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This post was created by me for the Steem blockchain exclusively.

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