For the sake of argument let's just call it - oh I don't know - global warming. People in most parts of the country enjoyed a dry, mild winter and an astonishingly early and HOT spring. It's the sort of thing that's expected to recur more and more often. It's nice until the bill arrives.
And arrive it has including in the Ottawa valley.
An unusually dry winter and spring has Ottawa-area farmers dipping into their water reserves and concerned about what they say could be a bad growing season.
The Rideau Valley Conservation Authority last week declared a low water advisory after they said the spring flood peak arrived two weeks earlier than normal and was one of the lowest on record.
...Robin Turner, who runs the Roots and Shoots vegetable farm in Manotick, said the dry soil means he has been able to get an early start to working the land.
"It's super dry," said Turner. "The fields are so easy to work right now we've been out there disking and plowing and getting ready for the season, so it's actually been very good."
Turner said he is concerned however, that if things stay dry many of the crops he plants won't survive the season.
More worrisome to Turner, however, is that the local climate has been prone to extremes.
"In the five years I've been farming in the Ottawa area, we've had a record something every year," said Turner. "Every single year there's a new record set. And in terms of stability it's not something we want."
No one in Ottawa cares, so long as the climate doesn't affect their ability to dig up that crud in Alberta.
ReplyDeleteI can't cite a source ( I expect I saw it in Readers'Digest ) , but I recall reading years ago that climate in the first half of the 20th century was stable well past that recorded in history. SoTT would change your perceptions quickly if you decided to dig into it.
ReplyDeleteClimate changes and weather patterns vary from decade to decade in cycles. Even so there is a suspicion that the mid Atlantic conveyor has reset to a new pattern which warms the north at the expense of Europe at a time coinciding with the oiling of the Gulf of Mexico by Deepwater Horizon.
weather variability isn't the issue and climate change spanning centuries is now pretty well documented.
ReplyDeleteBritain's Met or Meteorology Office has assessed the new European Big Chill winters and Britain's winter droughts and has linked that to a new weather phenomenon, the Arctic Oscillation that operates in ways a bit similar to the Southern Ocean Oscillation that triggers El Nino and La Nina events.
To be really simplistic about it, the loss of Arctic ice cover and the resultant warming of the Arctic Ocean is causing atmospheric changes and altering the jet stream. This has led to Europe being swept by masses of winter Arctic air while other places, like most of North America, experienced abnormally dry, mild, even hot seasonal variations.
Opit, the advent of the Arctic Oscillation demonstrates that we're just beginning to see the power and rapid impact of what we're unleashing. Hang onto your hat, there's plenty more coming.
"what we're unleashing"
ReplyDeleteI snort. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change hires scientists to do its bidding : political masters at the United Nations driving a global tax on the use of fire....payable to them. Not that you are alone in alleging we are Masters of the Universe rather than players in "Much Ado About Nothing".
That facilitates ignoring the real devastation of mining and extraction in favour of a hypothetical which can be safely ignored due to availability of fraud in use of carbon credits by real polluters.
Sources missed by those convinced by the framing lies of the 'Denier' Strawman Argument
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2010/03/climate.html
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2012/02/environmental-challenges.html
opit - do you have any credible source for your claim that the IPCC hires scientists to do its bidding? That's a pretty serious charge, one that Big Fossil's minions in the US Congress would have used by now to utterly dismember the IPCC. Except they haven't. Because that's absurd.
ReplyDeleteAGW, to me, isn't a distraction as you suggest. I routinely place it in context as part of a much greater basket of challenges, all of which must be resolved if we're to solve any of them. So that remark is also way off base.