Perceptions on climate is a story about efforts to detect and understand how climate change is affecting the different fields of our life. In general there are two main issues, increasing temperature and changing rainfall patterns, leading to more severe heatwaves, droughts and heavy storms. In Hungary temperature rising is causing mild winters with the disappearing of snowfall and frosty days. This is changing species in our environment. So does the loss of rainfall which comes with an uneven distribution, resulting a two month long drought period last summer. The tendencies are similar in many regions.
The story started with documenting the life of the Hungarian Meteorological Service. It has quite a long history and regular data analysis starting from 1870. Long-term data collection is key, however to see the trends behind the numbers and data I had to look further. I started to follow the work of environmental researchers, ecologists, dendrologist and biologists, who’s research or experiment is strongly connected to climate change.
Our warming environment seems to change much faster than we would think. Migrating birds are transporting metic seeds that could not survive before, but under the warming conditions can take the place of indigenous plant species. Warming lakes become home for invasive fish species that change the long existing ecosystem. Changes in rainfall also change plants, the typical Hungarian grassland can loose the indigenous grass species due to drought, they tend to be replaced by invasive ones, more adaptable to future conditions. During the story I followed the scientist meanwhile their actual research, creating a documentary essay about them at work. All the situation are real and all the action that can be seen was part of a measurement, research or experiment.
