Canadian Winters

By Jack Heppner

So what are we to make of our Canadian winters, eh? Last winter was by all accounts the coldest winter we have had in a long time. It brought back memories of winters on the prairies when I was growing up in the 1950s.

Of course there were plenty of people last year saying that the cold winter of 2014 proved that our climate is not really changing. The irony, however, was that while the Canadian prairies and much of Central and Eastern USA were caught in the grip of unusually cold temperatures, the American West was experiencing an unusual heat wave. And Alaska and most of the Canadian Arctic actually had above average temperatures.

We heard much about the fact that the unusually cold temperatures here and further south came with the polar vortex pulling cold air further south than usual. Curt Hull, of Manitoba Eco-network explains how this works:

“Polar vortices are large air masses about both the north and south poles. These large-scale rotating wind systems strengthen and expand in winter. At the outer edges of these vortices are the jet streams, where the winds in the upper atmosphere are especially fast. These vortices and their jet streams are driven by temperature differences between the equator and the poles. With a large temperature difference, the vortex rotates faster and tends to be quite circular. This keeps the cold air near the poles and the warm air in the mid-latitudes.”

As the temperature difference between the Arctic and the Equator declines, the jet stream slows and begins to meander like a river on a flat prairie. So what happened last winter was a slower jet stream meandering southward, drawing and holding cold Arctic air in places farther south than usual. These kinds of blockages of normal weather patterns are capable of producing all kinds of unusual weather as we also saw in many other places around the world last year.

In spite of our cold winter last year, the global statistics have just come out which show that 2014 sets a mark for the earth’s hottest year on record. In fact, according to a Globe and Mail report, the ten warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997. One of the anecdotal observations supporting such a claim is the fact that ice fields around the world are in rapid decline.  In Tanzania, for example, the Mount Kilimanjaro ice field is expected to disappear entirely within a decade. With our ice fields vanishing around the world, major water shortages are facing millions of people.

So what do we make of our cold winter of 2014? I concur with those who believe that, in fact, it was an anomaly that illustrates how the earth is quickly warming up. Climate change can no longer be refuted with integrity.  What is left for us to do is to slow that trend by living responsibly and prepare for life on a planet that will be less hospitable than it once was.