4wd

They must have managed pretty well for several generations. I think any reserve of built up fertility would be exhausted with 10 or 20 years. It just got colder and summers got wetter and shorter so they couldn't gather enough hay anymore.

Indeed, there is much evidence of Iron Age peoples practising arable farming in upland parts of Northern Britain - which are now far too cold, bleak and wet to grow anything but grass and heather. It has been much warmer for prolonged periods in (NW Europe at least) than the current climate.

A tornado needs to descend from an unstable airmass and cloud, a dust devil starts off at ground level due to temperature contrasts primarily. They are very common once the sun has some heat, but often as not there is no lose material to be picked up so they are practically invisible. I have watched a very large one lift a couple of acres of cut and almost dry hay (imagine a football pitch) and drop it in woodland half a mile away. Cool air from the forest and hot air from the sunny hayfield were no doubt the trigger for it.

57 here, only one in November and that was the very last day. Only 10 miles from North Sea, so not especially frost prone at least in first part of winter.

At Solstice there won't be much open water at all - the only time there might be more will be late August/September. The minimum is always just before the onset of rapid re-freeze. Someone way back was bemoaning the likelihood of sudden collapse in area and remains being flushed out "this year". And yet also we're being warned about how impossible it must have been for all the ice to have ever been lost before. You can't have it both ways, either the pack is rather difficult to melt and flush or it can happen fairly quickly over a decade or two of reductions - in which case it's highly likely to have happened countless times in this 600,000 year history (not sure where that timespan came from but Hey Ho...)

Some pictures from Scarborough on the same day.

Muddying the difference between loss of sea ice and highly improbable Greenland ice sheet melting is mischievous. Also implying that there would be differences in winter conditions in Europe is rather silly. There will always be a very large area of sea ice through winter. There would only ever be a very short period of the year when ice could be largely absent and that is late in the summer when solar input is rapidly diminishing at high latitudes. I don't think it will make any real difference at all to weather patterns or long term albedo. It's also likely that open water would lose a good deal more heat from the deeper ocean than ice capped water due to convective circulation.

April had decent maximums, but many nights were close to freezing and ground frost most nights in gulleys and at altitude. May has just been plain cold so far.

You proposed it might all melt and/or flush out this summer. That's quite a change from near average extent; how do you know that it hasn't briefly melted/flushed during unusual melt seasons before? No way can brief melt outs be detected centuries later. There's a stupid amount of exaggerated speculation on this subject. Ice area varies due to localised weather effects as much as anything, it's a very poor indicator of global climate. Also the ice free period if it happened would be very few days or weeks in early Autumn - this does not equate to some kind of catastrophe in the unlikely event it did happen.

That's the wildest exaggerating scare post I ever saw. It is not known if most of the ice had largely thawed in summer many times in the past. Most of humanity didn't know it was there at all, let alone have means to record how extensive it was. Sea ice can clearly vary considerably within a few years. And what's all this implying that "we" have done all this supposed melting. There is no evidence of anything much beyond natural variability going on unless you have a heavy warming promotion agenda. I would expect the recent recovery in extent will continue.

-0.5 already, below freezing even earlier than last two evenings.

It was -4.3C overnight, noticing various frost damage to 'hardy' trees and plants, e.g. opening horse chestnut leaves look rather brown 8.8C max but several brief showers dropped the temp to about 4C several times. Like last two evenings, it's falling away very fast at sunset, 4.9C now.

Early June is soon enough here for the really tender stuff. Even then things will often need covering on borderline nights. It's not just the risk of totsl destruction, a lot of the really soft plants like runner beans or french marigolds don't like being checked by temps below about 5C. Others like pelargoniums are tougher and can even cope with ground frosts.

-0.4C here by the east coast, not especially a frost hollow either.