``Summer, when most biological productivity occurs, is the most important season for humanity and thus the season when climate change may have its biggest impact. Global warming causes spring warmth to come earlier and it causes cooler conditions that initiate fall to be delayed. Thus global warming not only increases summer warmth, it also protracts summer-like conditions, stealing from both spring and fall. Our study therefore places emphasis on study of how summer temperature anomalies have been changing...''
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2012/20120105_PerceptionsAndDice.pdf
When I got to Berkeley in 1966 fall, winter, and long relatively cool springs dominated---a thankful change from LA. `Good' weather only started around May and shifted summer went on till probably late October. It rained often after November when it first started.
Now and pretty much since 1990s there is rarely a frost in winter mornings. Rains start later and later, are shorter, and more often somewhat violent with hale, thunder and lightening.
Today is in the high 60s F, and most of last week was mild. There has been very little rain. Ski resorts finally opened in late January. The storm blew over most of the SF Bay and went to get stuck against the Sierra and drop its load, hence snow. The snow pack is the source of most of the water in California, hence the dams on most of the rivers which run down the western slopes into the San Joaquin, Kern, and King rivers to the main agricultural areas in the central valley.
The general effect of climate change has increased the climbing season and nearly erased the glacier pack in the Sierra. The general effects on agriculture are faster run offs and earlier temperature changes plus longer dry seasons.
The weather has a strong political effect because corporate agriculture and it demands on the water supply clash with suburban and ex-urban development which also demands bigger and bigger water supplies. The combination makes for a stalled, blocked, and vicious political climate.(See the movie, Chinatown.)
Other effects are drought conditions in the northern mexican range lands hence great pressures to immigrate north into the southwestern US as smaller towns and cities in Mexico are effected by longer drier seasons. And hence the switch to the drug trade as an income source through out the geographical region, where the stupid straight lines of the southwestern US drew its borders. And hence, the nearly constant social-political-economic strife.
Now we come to the utter stupidity of public education funding. I think I started on California geography and history sometime in about the 3rd grade when the school took us on field trips to the Natural History Museum near the LA Coliseum and to the place near the La Brea tar pits with the bone reconstructions of mammoths, saber tooth tigers...
I went over this geography and history again and again, learning more and more detail, while my picture and understanding of the world around me grew and grew. Early on, the schools had units on where food comes from and so forth. Learning about agriculture was considered important, so in middle school years we always to could take a class like gardening where we could grow anything from flowers to radishes. Much of LA was built over good agricultural land...
All of the above is tied together into a world view where fewer and fewer of the masses get the early view that I just outlined, and hence they can not quite `see' their world and its interconnections. And that results in the near impossibility of doing anything to change society, which has to change and adapt to survive.
CG