2.6.2. Climate

As an individual, you cannot change the climate of the place you are in. You may be able to choose the climate you settle in, though this isn’t an option for everybody. Wherever you land, you will need to work within what that climate offers you. Climate change offers additional challenges to this as we don’t have full prediction on where that is going to go. As an example, our farm is located in a wet/dry subtropical climate.

Our summers are hot and humid with most of the rainfall falling over four months. Our fall, winter and spring are drier, with much less rainfall falling per month. We sometimes freeze during winter, but we don’t have snow, and the ground does not freeze (what is called a hard freeze).

Southern California has a Mediterranean climate. Their wet season is in the winter, and their summers are hot and dry. Temperatures are similar, but the rain patterns create a very different set of flora and fauna that grow in these areas. Yet, there are a number of plants that humans are growing in both climates.

There are wet tropical climates that have rainfall most of the year, sometimes 150” or more.

There are warm, cool and cold temperate climates. These have a pretty big list of plants that grow in all 3 climates but some that only grow in one or two of them.

There are alpine climates, very unique ecosystems, and desert or drylands climates, both warm and colder, which have their own unique ecologies.

A man named Koppen attempted to categorize some of these around the world.

Of course, our climate in Florida is very different than the climate of the Tennessee mountains, but are both classified as “humid subtropical climates” in this classification system. This classification is useful to study as it does give some prediction on a variety of factors from a macro pattern viewpoint.