I admit it, I too have been complaining about the weather the last few weeks, because we’re more than a week into May and the nice weather we were promised has not yet materialized.
I get it. We were supposed to be done with winter a few weeks ago.
And yet, here I am writing this on Monday, and it’s still snowing.
This is one of the joys and terrors about living in Tumbler Ridge. Every year is completely different than the last. A few years ago, it was so dry that we had forest fires in March. Another year, there were floods. Still another, winter never got below -10.
There’s been smoke from forest fires, clouds and clear skies. One year it didn’t snow until February.
Each year is an adventure here in Tumbler Ridge, and while snow on May 9 is not exactly the adventure I signed up for, I’ll accept it.
Why? Because comparatively, we have it easy.
Let’s not forget that last year, the entire town of Lytton burned to the ground after an unprecedented heat wave. Here, the heat was uncomfortably hot. There, it was the end of the town.
And while we might look at people who live on islands in the Caribbean as having an idyllic life, that life is prone to being shattered by hurricanes and other weather events that can destroy buildings and leave sometimes hundreds or even thousands dead. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch killed an estimated 11,374 people.
But you don’t have to look back to see extreme weather events causing havok. While we sit here and moan that temperatures have yet to hit double digits, Southeast Asia is suffering under some of the worst conditions ever.
According to Indian Meteorological Department, the average maximum temperature for northwest and central India in April was the highest since records began 122 years ago, reaching 35.9 and 37.78 degrees Celsius (96.62 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit) respectively. In April, New Delhi say seven days in a row with temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), which is three degrees above the average temperature for the month of April.
This caused schools to close, crops to fail, and a spike in energy demands.
And it’s not just India. In nearby Pakistan, temperatures hit 47 degrees in the cities of Jacobabad and Sibi in the country’s southeastern Sindh province recorded highs of 47 degrees Celsius (116.6 Fahrenheit). People are literally cooking food on their cars.
While we are complaining that we haven’t had spring yet, because winter just keeps dragging on, people in Pakistan are calling this year a “spring-less year” too, because they skipped spring and went straight into summer.
That sounds great, some of you might say, except that at least 25 people have died in Maharashtra in India since March.
The number of people who have died in BC because it’s unseasonably cold? Zero.
And it’s not just the heat. When humidity goes up, the human body’s natural cooling mechanism—sweating—becomes useless, as the air is too damp for the sweat to evaporate. This is called a wet bulb event.
If you take a thermometer and wrap it in a wet piece of cloth, the temperature will measure lower than a thermometer that is not, due to the cooling effect of evaporation. As the relative humidity of the air increases, that cooling effect decreases. The wet bulb temperature is basically where that cooling effect is no longer present.
For humans, this is the temperature where our sweat no longer cools us off. While our body temperature is about 37 Celsius, we are able to survive in places where the temperature is warmer, because we can still lose body heat by sweating. But if we are unable to cool down, we no longer shed heat, we gain it. This can be fatal, even for relatively healthy young people. That’s why on average, more people die from heat in tropical areas, where the humidity is higher, than you might see in the desert, where the heat is higher.
In 2015, more than 3700 people died in India and Pakistan due to a heat wave.
While we are probably a long way off from wet bulb events here in Tumbler Ridge, we have to stop assuming that if it is snowing here, it must be cold everywhere else, too.
And these unseasonably late snows? Lest we forget, last year we spent most of the summer watching a forest fire creep closer to the town, wondering if BC Wildfire would be able to control the flames and praying for rain, for cooler temperatures as some days it became difficult to breathe for all the smoke in town.
Sure, not every year is going to be as hot and as dry as last year. And that’s my point. We need to stop confusing weather with climate. The weather? Keeps changing. We look outside and see snow in May this year. Next year it could be rain. Or forest fires.
Heck, last year saw record temperatures in June and record rainfalls in November in places just a few hundred kilometres apart.
We look outside and wonder how scientists can be so stupid as to say there’s such a thing as global warming, but all we see is what’s right outside our window. And if it’s snowing, it’s easy to scoff.
And meanwhile, the climate? Keeps on changing. And we don’t really notice the changes because, well, the weather here has always been weird. I mean, do you remember the year it snowed Grizfest weekend?
And once again, we confuse weather with climate.
We are the proverbial frogs in a pot, enjoying the warmth, not realizing that another few degrees? Could spell the end of us.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
