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salmonellasangre t1_j2fb67d wrote

I grew up in California but just moved to Maine this year so I thought it was laughable when I heard people talking about Maine being in a drought. "What are you talking about? It rains every week! We get rain like twice a year in Southern California!" But then I went to a blueberry farm and they told us all about how much rain their crops need and how little it rained in comparison to past years and how much of a hit they took and I get it now.

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justlikethewwdove t1_j2fndmg wrote

Southern Maine and SE NH had a wicked bad wildfire outbreak in 1947. The worst of it was in Lyman and Waterboro where a huge percentage of homes were charred to ashes. We're not totally immune to it and that sort of thing becoming more common is definitely not out of the question around here, especially in an extreme 2.5C+ increase scenario. In the Midwest they're already seeing huge dust storms in Iowa and extreme wildfires in western Ontario (which gave us most of our sun-blotting wildfire smoke in summer 2021). The arid zone is slowly inching east and while it won't overtake the continent anytime soon there's definitely a small risk of increasing droughts in the humid zone.

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