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What if this is the new normal?

As someone who is primarily solar-powered, insomuch as nothing makes me happier than walking for hours in the hot mid-day summer sun, I've had a bad past couple of months.

January, a month normally considered to be "mid summer" in this part of the world, was dismal and dreary.

Much higher than normal levels of rain and aside from the occasional stand-out day, lower temperatures with stronger winds and lots of overcast skies.

Yes, January was more like spring than summer.

Don't worry, I optimistically assured myself, February is when *real* summer starts!

Boy, was I wrong.

When I got up yesterday at just before midnight, I found myself swapping my shorts for jeans and I had to dig through my drawers to find a warm fluffy shirt.

Even with this extra insulation, by 3am I had turned the heater on because outside it was bordering on single-digit temperatures and I was damned cold.

Things didn't improve much as the day went on.

Although there was only an occasional light shower, winds were strong and temperatures remained low with dark skies.

And this, after a weekend of driving rain and flooding.

This has been a bummer summer for sure. One only has to look at the lawns up and down the street to see that we've had a lot more rain than normal. By this time of the year, those lawns are usually brown with little growth. One of the great things about a typical Kiwi summer is that you get six to eight weeks of respite from the need to drag the mower out every weekend -- not this year.

I mowed my lawns late last week and they already need mowing again -- as they have done every week since about early November.

New Zealand isn't the only country experiencing ridiculously high and consistent rain however.

My friends in the UK report that the entire country is sodden, soaked to its core by never-ending rain. Even for the UK, the precipitation has been unprecedented.

In the USA, places like Florida have been experiencing sub-zero temperatures for the first time in a very long time. When I was chatting to a friend there a couple of weeks ago it was 25 deg F (almost -4 deg C) and he was amazed.

Now it would be easy to write this off as "just weather". We know that there are always going to be "once in 100 year" weather events that, if viewed in isolation, could give you the wrong impression about where our climate is headed. However, these "one in 100 year" events are becoming one in 10 or even one in five year events now.

Insurers are increasingly hiking policies to adjust for the losses they're covering as our climate becomes more severe. Some homeowners in particularly hard-hit regions can't even get insurance at any cost, because the risk of such events is now too high.

The worrying thing to me (and others I suspect) is just how quickly this has all happened.

If our weather and climate keeps changing at this pace, we're in for some very difficult times in the not too distant future.

Summer won't be known as a period of consistently warm and settled weather, it'll simply be a few months when the rain is warmer and the precipitation is interrupted only by brief periods of extreme heat.

I really don't think that we're adapting fast enough to keep up with these changes and that will have some pretty significant ramifications. Unfortunately, I doubt that any real attention will be paid until our food production becomes negatively impacted and we find ourselves facing shortages of essential staples.

Perhaps I'm over-reacting though. Maybe I'm a drama-queen.

Yep, that's it -- just an old man shouting at the sky.

Time to throw another tyre on the barbie and enjoy what's left of the summer!

Carpe Diem folks!

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