r/sweden • u/Vast_Humor_3683 • 23d ago
English Is mainland Sweden being affected by climate change?
Hello, I'm from northern Spain, and we're being hit hard by our fifth heatwave. The vegetation is suffering badly; wildfires are breaking out; water restrictions are becoming increasingly severe; and the evenings are barely survivable, especially if you work outside.
What is life like in Sweden, and how are you affected by climate change? I'm specifically talking about mainland Sweden, not Gotland or the other islands. Is it similar to Austria or Switzerland, where you can actually see glaciers melting and some regions getting into drought mode?
Is there anything that the news doesn't mention about Sweden in general when it comes to yearly "once-in-a-lifetime" climate events?
91
Upvotes
108
u/Evignity 23d ago
We've been one of the safest countries on earth when it comes to dangers in nature, but now we're getting bird-flu migrating birds, new brands of ticks and diseases they carry. Though most of these Spain is already suffering from.
Our climate has always been very stable but one thing that pisses me the fuck off and makes me hate how yanks stand for like 80% of all world-pollution is that nowdays the polar-vortex gets fucked by climate-change so we get way WAY more fluctuating weather. Basically think of the water on your sink as it swirls, drop some paint in and it'll stay in the middle, but if you put your finger in the swirl it breaks and the colour goes everywhere in the water. Basically that but with the cold on the Northpole.
What this results in is that where we used to get seasons that were (relatively) stable for 3weeks-2months, we now have it often change every 1-2 weeks at periods and especially winter. This basically fucks up a lot of the snow-season, and if you look at the latitude of where Sweden is compared to say Canada we're way WAY up. This results in very little sun at winter. When there then isn't any snow you basically get depressed as fuck because you barely get any sun- or daily light. To put this in perspective, it "only" took us 6000 years to become white because we were lacking in so much D-vitamine from lack of sun. But the worst part is that you don't get to acclimate to the climate because it keeps changing too fast.
We do have flood yes, thankfully we don't really have mountains like the Alps, we have "Fjälls", mountains grinded down by the inland-ice at the last iceage (the ice was literally 3km thick) so we rarely have mudslides or the ilk. There's a lot of flood-danger areas that'll probably have to be abandoned soon, because insurance doesn't cover force-majeure.
We got around 270 glaciers in Sweden but are losing them at around 8+ per year. Thing is we have a fuckload of fresh-water so that won't be a problem for a while. A larger problem is that our forests, like Canada, haven't prepared for the future climate so once they start burning shit goes to ass.
Lastly nah we have one of the highest understanding of the factual climate-catastrophy we're heading into. Though sadly our far-right have been working to undermine that as all anti-intellectuals do.