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A few years back my area got hit with a pretty bad storm, beat the previous flood record here by about a foot, that previous record was set about 85 years prior. Bad flood, but statistically not totally unprecedented, you often hear talk about 100 year floodplains, and so that was almost a textbook perfect illustration of that, if you normally only get a flood that bad about once a century we were just about due.

Then the next year hurricane Ida hit, totally smashed that fresh new record by about 5 ft. It took them like a week to figure out exactly how bad the flooding actually was because it totally swamped all of the river gauges.

NOAA's website has a list of 42 historic crests of that creek going back to at least 1933. 29 of those crests have been since 2000, and 7 have been in just the last 5 years.

Once upon a time in my area, ice was an industry, big blocks of ice would be cut out of nearby lakes in the winter, shipped out around the area, and stored to last through the year. There may even be a handful of older residents in our area who were alive when it was happening, and certainly a few who are old enough that their parents would have remembered it. We're only about a century removed from that time.

My friends' dad used to tell stories about being able to ice state down the local Creek in the winter and being able to skate all the way from our town to one about 6 miles downstream.

I have rarely seen any of the waterways in my area freeze over with even an inch of ice, certainly none of them freeze over thick enough that I'd be comfortable ice skating on them (I keep an eye on all of the ice conditions because I want to try ice fishing, been keeping an eye on it for a decade, haven't had a chance yet. A lot of the local parks have posted regulations for ice fishing because it used to be a thing you could do around here) and absolutely not thick enough that you could cut a block of ice out of it.

We also set a record last year for the longest recorded stretch without an inch of snow. Snow totals have been overall trending downwards for a while, over the last couple decades a lot of the local school districts have cut down on the amount of snow days they build into their calendars because they just weren't using them. A small local ski slope near me has had to invest in new snow making equipment because they absolutely couldn't count on getting real snow anymore, or necessarily even the temperatures being cold enough for their old equipment to work reliably

Climate change should be pretty damn obvious to anyone in my area, and yet a whole lot of people around me refuse to see it.

My family lost power Friday night (and are still without power) in Ohio from this. Severe hurricane damage is getting deeper and deeper into the continent every year.

There are other countries to move to, but with America's current anti-immigration stance I'm not sure who's still got their welcome mats out.