Weather: Out of our hands?
To go along with the recession, I’ve read that Alberta has experienced the wettest July in nearly 90 years. It’s a season I’m betting that many Albertans will wish to get behind them as fire, drought, storms and floods wrecked havoc in the province. I’ve also read that El Niño is not the culprit this time, simply a weather system that didn’t want to go away.
Now that the kids are back to school no doubt the sun will shine and it will dry up. That’s also the expectation from the Old Farmer’s Almanac too, which also called the wet summer. Going further forward winter may be a colder one. What will be will be. We’ll just have to adapt and hope the nastier stuff passes on by.
Just so that we know the world is saved from temperature rising beyond the naughty 2C the U.S. and China have ratified the Paris climate agreement. How much actual difference those two signatures will make and how long before measures can make any difference I’m somewhat sceptical about. I know I’ve said it before but I truly believe that what will happen will happen and all the meetings in the world will not stop it. For the first six months of 2016 average global temperatures were up by 1.3C that’s over half way there to temperature limit that for some was already set too high; 2016 is already a record temperature setting year.
El Niño, the strongest for years is over and will not be a factor for 2017. We might get a better handle on it. I am interested and more than a little concerned about what’s going on up in the Arctic with vast, virtually unmeasured and right now unmodelable amounts of methane gas that are being released from the Arctic Sea bed and from the tundra. Reading are usually only taken in the summer months and I have read that the methane or at least not all of it may not enter our atmosphere but with the gas being 25 times more environmentally that CO2 I would suggest it’s something we need to know more about. Not that I think we can stop the process.
Climate models are great and doubtless accurate but only if one has all the criteria and figures to put into them, which we don’t and I would argue that we may never have because something is always either not known or missed.
If the Arctic continues to melt and let’s face it the region did hold vast forests in other times and may yet again there could be vast opportunity for Canada and Canadians. Change is everywhere one looks, some for the good, some not so good. We cannot live in a preserved bubble
Try to do no further harm and work smart for I believe we’re on the brink of a very different type of economy. Robots will, no doubt, be trained to mess up the hash brown order.