Remember February, 1985 ? It was the tail end of the Ice Age, complete with mittens burned on radiators, wet socks in cold boots, and snowball fights.
Oh sure: you youngsters may have had a taste of such things. But we actually lived through them. Times have changed, kiddies. Take last month, for example. Figures released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration National Climatic Data Center show we’ve just enjoyed the fifth warmest October on the planet since records were kept. Yes, parts of the Canadian West got whacked with snow! Big time regional bragging rights there. But in many parts of the country, not to mention the rest of the world, this would have been an ideal year to go out on Halloween as diving sensation Alexandre Despatjie in a Speedo and a towel.
Taken as a whole, October was a warm one, and that’s getting to be the new normal: the last time the Earth had a below-average October, collectively speaking, was in 1976. (That was about a month after the 1976 Canada Cup, remember that? About 15 million Canadians don’t. They’re too young.)
So much for going out on Halloween in a snowsuit. (In case you’re wondering, the record coldest October on planet Earth was in 1912, when my dad’s dad might have gone out dressed as Sir John Franklin, lost in the Arctic.)
Speaking of record coldest, kids these days just don’t know what cold is, here on Earth. Statistics show no record cold temperatures this year to date, for the whole planet. Okay, but that’s just this year. We must have had a brag-worthy cold snap recently, right? Well, not so much. Locally, yes. But collectively? Get this:
“This is the 332nd consecutive month with an above-average temperature. The last below-average month was February 1985.” For planet EARTH. Thank you, NOAA for that terrifying reminder of what a geezer I’ve become.
A little context, here: in February 1985, a precocious Canadian twenty-something named Bryan Adams was hitting the top of the charts with a little album called Reckless. Another precocious Canadian twenty-something, Michael J. Fox, would soon be raking it in at the box office as the star of the year’s blockbuster, a teen comedy called Back to the Future.
Now that the future is actually here, guess who’s not going to be bragging about tough winters here on planet Earth? Anyone who doesn’t remember ‘Summer of 69’ debuting as a 45 rpm single, or know what a Flux Capacitor is... any whippersnapper under the age of 28, that’s who.
Incidentally, the local picture is no prettier than the global one. Again from NOAA:
“Much of the United States, south central Canada, northern Argentina, part of southern Europe, parts of the northwestern and southern Atlantic Ocean, and parts of the southern Indian Ocean have all experienced record warmth for the year-to-date.”
Now, one thing some of you youngsters will be able to brag about is going out on Halloween in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, assuming you weren’t too busy cleaning up downed trees and dealing with flooding. That was a pretty nasty storm, alright. But you know who really gets bragging rights this year? Farmers of the American Midwest. The drought in the Midwest, not the superstorm, earned the distinction of most expensive natural disaster in the U.S. this year, in monetary terms—enough to knock the U.S. GDP down by a half per cent or more. And we still don’t know the death toll from the accompanying heat wave. Canadian farmers got lucky this time. But they’re worried about next season’s crops already. Precipitation, of course, is the other part of the picture.
You make of all this what you will. Maybe we have a climate problem here or something, that you kids can clean up somehow, with your cell phones and social media and what-have-you. As an older, wiser person, who has lived through the likes of both 1976 and 1985, I’m worried about our national identity.
All this weird weather data has got me thinking it’s time for a recalibration of our sense of ourselves as Canadians. I mean, is this still the Great White North, when vast numbers of us are raking leaves in our t-shirts? Even if it’s a little colder around here than it is in a few other places, it wouldn’t do to walk around wearing a nickname that makes us sound cooler than we really are.
Considering how many of us weren’t even born during the great global cold snap of February 1985, maybe we ought to play it safe and give ourselves a new handle. Judging by these latest figures, (not to mention view out the window in much of the country), I suggest the Great Brown North. If nothing else, our friends in more southerly climes won’t be able to accuse us of boasting just because we get snow.
CHASING ICE
EIS field assistant, Adam LeWinter on NE rim of Birthday Canyon, Greenland Ice Sheet, July 2009 / Photograph by James Balog
For the climate-change skeptics out there, who cling to their God-given right to ignore science and stoke debate with the fossil fuel of old-growth ideology, Chasing Ice should be required viewing. And for those of us who are already sufficiently alarmed, and don’t think we can bear to watch any more inconvenient truths, it’s still required viewing. This is an eye-opening documentary, full of epic beauty and astonishing revelations.
This story did not need “humanizing.” We could care less about Balog’s crumbling knee and its multiple surgeries as he struggles to rappel down an ice face—not when we’re about to see a section of Greenland’s ice sheet the size of Lower Manhattan, and twice as tall, fall into the Arctic Ocean in real time. .
James Balog hangs off cliff by Columbia Glacier, Alaska to install time-lapse camera
The film documents a project that begins in 2007 and stretches over years as Balog’s team install time-lapse cameras to observe shrinking glaciers in remote locations that include Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Montana and the Alps. Along the way, using core samples of glacier ice, which trap bubbles of ancient air, scientists show irrefutable evidence that the global warming has risen in tandem with levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 800,000 years—and that CO2 rates, and temperatures, are increasing at a dramatic rate with greenhouse gases.
While ice serves as a time capsule for man-made climate change, it also provides the most the spectacular evidence of it. The cameras show how, as an Arctic glacier dissolves, torrents of melt-water sink through crevasses and perforations and flow under the glacier’s base into the ocean. As the melt-water creates a feedback loop, we see how this accelerating process will reach an irreversible tipping point regardless of what happens to the weather or global warming.
The exquisite beauty of the vanishing ice, frozen in time-lapse photos, or caught cascading into the sea like a breaching whale may be of sentimental value. But it seems acutely relevant, as if the earth’s future lies in the crystalline depths of a world that is remote, alien and austere, yet serves as mankind’s ultimate biological clock.
Material Borrowed from Maclean's Magazine
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