You know
it’s an abnormally warm year when there’s open water on a small Prairie lake in
the middle of December. Even more
abnormal to see hundreds of geese in that water.
I think
they forgot to migrate this year. Now I realize there is a group of geese that
never migrates. They missed a critical
year of learning how to fly south, and now they’re stuck in our city. They even get fed, to basically foster their
ignorance. (Don’t get me wrong, I love geese in the wild, but do you know a
city goose deposits one kilogram of fertilizer in our parks each and every day?!)
I fear there’s a new contingent
of geese that won’t know how to fly to Florida.
This time we can attribute it to El Nino. This is likely the most intense El Nino we
have ever seen.
The
combination of climate change and the natural cyclical warming of the Pacific
Ocean has already broken records and is bound to break more in the years ahead.
Saskatchewan
could become a new winter refuge for geese for years to come.
 |
| Geese enjoying a glorious December day in Saskatchewan |
Like
most others in this wretchedly cold province, I’m celebrating a reprieve from
the past few winters. In the past three
years we’ve experienced record snowfall and some very cold snaps. March of 2013 was exceptionally cold and
miserable. Of course compared to the
1920s, temperatures on average might be considered balmy. But everything is relative…
For
every cold record that’s been broken in the last decade, two warm records were
broken. That’s an indication of a
warming world. How quickly we forget
about the spring of 2012 where we experienced the warmest March on record. Now just three and half years later, records
are being broken in December.
The
climatologists could be right. Imagine
that. This whole climate change thing
could really be occurring.
And it’s not just political, as
a farmer in California claimed after experiencing four years of extreme
drought. Amazingly, climate change
science is viewed as political spin for large segments of the
population.
It’s like when the first
negative claims of smoking were made public.
Few believed it, and even if they did, it wasn’t enough to change
habits. It took decades to change public
perception so that today, smoking is almost frowned upon (smokers are still the
coolest people around, of course).
It may
take decades before the global public feels the effects strong enough to
address climate change. In the fourth
stage of a world-wide cancer, humanity may finally attempt to butt out when it
comes to fossil fuels.
Of
course there are many complicated issues related to abstaining from fossil
fuels, like the economic impacts, potential job losses, and the end of the good
life (i.e. winter trips to Mexico, which might become pointless in 50 years anyway).
It will
all come to a head when the public realizes that the costs simply outweigh the
benefits. When a good portion of
Vancouver is underwater, when hurricanes cause irreparable damage to the east
coast, when geese populations overtake Regina…
That
will be the proverbial tipping point, to borrow a phrase from Al Gore. But it won’t happen by talking about polar bears
or melting ice caps, areas of the globe that very few of us have ever
seen. Only until we experience the impacts at home will we be incented to change our ways.
On the normally
frigid Canadian Prairies, that could be a very long time indeed.
That seems to be our nature--wait till we're in a crisis before we react. It's gotten us this far, and might well do us in.
ReplyDelete