Climate change to blame for miserable weather?

Usually when people start to talk about the weather it's because they've got nothing better to say. This so-called spring it's different. These days whenever you meet someone, before you can even say "how's it going, eh?" there's a dark oath uttered about how do we put it? - this incredibly excremental weather, followed by "what have we done to deserve this?"

Everybody has their own set of gripes about the impact of such sputtering, vindictive, depressing, loathsome, foul and detestable weather. As for my own list of grievances to be presented to Mother (insert expletive) Nature, it includes: exactly one afternoon of weather fit for biking; a fleeting glimpse of sunshine suitable for mowing a lawn grown wild on excessive drink; only a few desperate angry minutes for a vain plucking of what is now a hopelessly entrenched jungle of the ever-so-appropriately named goutweed that has taken over each of our garden beds.

We have several vegetable plants waiting in the rain to be transplanted in our soggy soil, including tomatoes that are doomed to freeze in unripened failure on the vine before the summer's done.

In the past few weeks we have fired up the fireplace multiple times, the barbeque once. Our thermostat and furnace are in a dither of confusion about what to do. A stack of shorts remains unworn in a drawer, winter sweaters not yet packed away.

It would be easy and convenient to blame the relentlessly miserable metéo on some natural phenomenon beyond human control, in the style of the Trump White House. For example, there's the "year of no summer," 1816 to be precise, when this part of the world experienced periodic snowfalls from May to August. In Quebec City, for example, there was a 30 cm accumulation of snow between June 6 and 10. Widespread crop failures that season provoked starvation and governments imposed food rationing measures across North America.

Scientists later determined the likely cause of the wintry summer as the stupendous eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April, 1815, one of the most powerful volcanic explosions in recorded human history. Ash from the eruption dispersed around the planet and dropped average temperatures significantly - about in the range of the Paris Climate Agreement reduction targets.

So, what's causing the current grey, wet, cool, fickle funk? A weather oracle, contacted in desperation by your scribe, says such bleak conditions are not exceptional for southern Quebec in May. But this May has been an exceptional exception, if for no other reason than the record rainfall that sparked freak floods around southern Quebec, on Montreal's West Island, of all places.

We made several trips along Autoroute 40 between Quebec and Montreal in early spring and were shocked at the enormity of the Okefenokee-like swampland that formed, as far as the eye could see, in farmers' fields due to persistent rain and run-off from unusually bounteous snowfalls.

Whatever grumblings we may have in this neck of the woods they pale in comparison to what our neighbours on the Lower North Shore of the province are dealing with this spring. Imagine, if you will, that in 2017, our fellow Canadian citizens are at the mercy of the ice pack of the Gulf of St. Lawrence which is preventing the supply ship from delivering essential supplies. There is no road yet, you see, connecting these stubborn human settlements to the rest of the province.

The aforementioned weather sage made the following observation: "It seems to me that one of the most common characteristics of climate change ... is the late arrival of winter and even later arrival of summer."

It seems to me that scientists have led us to believe climate change meant global "warming," the so-called greenhouse effect of a stratosphere so clogged with pollutants we are all trapped in a suffocating layer of glacier-melting heat. Tell that to the icebergs looming off the east coast of Quebec well into June.

As we pen these words, wrapped in a blanket, we consider another observation of our weather sage: The bleak weather pattern "can change in a flash and then we can complain about the heat and humidity." Oh, how we long to complain.