Yes, there ARE climate changes (not just normal cycles over time), but this is NOT climate: this is all due to development. Many things have been done, most of them illegal, by the eight developers who've tried to develop the hundreds of acres of old-growth spruce east of us, and the additional 22 acres of the lower part of our creek they bought from a single landowner early on. The creek has been channelized (illegal) and our road extended due west, requiring an additional culvert, instead of following the north bank of the creek. Beavers moved in an attempt to "fix" the channelization, creating dozens of dams up and down the length of the creek, plus using the bad seam in the newly-placed used culvert as a base for a dam that created a large pond. The result is that there's now a huge marsh filled with silt, so much silt that frogs can no longer live there, meaning that we don't have a resident great blue heron for the first time in over 60 years: heron's gotta eat, too! I've lost about a half acre of front yard and look out over an ugly mudflat every winter, instead of having the pretty little creek between a row of alders on each side. (Alders like wet but can't live in a place that's always water.) When we have really bad storms, so much water pours off the hill on the back of our acreage that the house itself floods. Even though I now have a pump to use to pump out the pantry before the water reaches the kitchen, I can't keep anything I want in the lowest foot of the pantry. The hill never had water flowing off it during the first 47 years I owned this place, but, as soon as a swath of old growth spruce 650' by a half mile long was sliced down to extend a road and provide for lots (none of which ever sold) water comes off the hill, adding to the driveway mess and sometimes flooding the house. I bought this property because it was such a beautiful place: sparkling little creek, then a sweep of land up towards the spruce forest. I never dreamt that it would be despoiled by would-be developers, all eight of whom have gone bankrupt trying to develop all those acres of forest. Fortunately, none of the forest has yet been cut down, except for that swath 650 wide to allow for a swell new road. The eighth developer did actually build four duplex townhouses on land that drains in the opposite direction, fortunately. (That drainage just adds to annual flooding of the huge lake on the east side of the town, causing hundreds of homeowners to have flooding every winter.) Yes, development is a really wonderful thing--not!