It’s been an interesting week. That’s interesting as in the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times”. If you have been watching the news lately, there was a devastating series of storms in the southern USA that spawned dozens of tornados and left over 300 dead, the second worst occurrence in US tornado history. One of those tornados supposedly touched down and walked the earth for tens of miles, something so rare as to be almost unheard of.
We in Canada have not been untouched. A late April storm here in Manitoba has dumped freezing rain and lots of snow, and in combination with high winds are contributing factors in two highway accidents with multiple fatalities. I personally cannot remember a storm this intense so late in the year. And that extra precipitation just adds to the flooding concerns as well.
What’s going on, you ask? Is it the end times? Is HARP destroying us all? Why the extreme weather?
The short answer is climate change. You might not believe in the concept, you might not believe we are contributing to it, but that doesn’t matter. Whether you choose to believe the avalanche of data and the consensus of most of the climate scientists, or you prefer to cling to silly crud like ‘Climate-gate’ or believe fabricated lists of thousands of ‘scientists’ (some are even TV weathermen!), it again does not matter.
The FACT is that the average temperature of the earth has risen almost a degree Celsius. While that doesn’t sound like much, that’s just an average over the entire world, and some places like the Arctic are warming much faster. And the FACT is that even if we stop contributing to global warming right now, it will still get warmer before it stabilizes. Further, that one degree represents an enormous amount of energy that did not used to be present in our global climate system.
The implications for us are this: When you add energy into a stable system, the system tends to present more extremes before it settles into a higher energy steady state. This means extremes like blizzards in May, EF-5 tornadoes that stay on the ground for miles, and changes in the climate that affect rainfall, growing seasons, plant diseases and insect pests, to name just a few.
Make adjustments in your plans accordingly. Maybe you should stock seeds that are drought hardy in addition to your favourites. Make a tornado plan. Get going on some alternatives to the weather being what you expect it to be.
The sun don’t shine every day…….