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Changing Weather
By Keith Elliott
Sorry I'm a bit late on this one, but during Green Week I was trying to get an article up about some observations I had made over the past several years. They were concerning our changing weather patterns. Living, as we do, on a small island, we are perhaps more attuned to the weather than previously when we were city dwellers. Everyone has heard of the slowly rising oceans, but I wonder how many of us have actually seen the effects of that. When we first came here to Ruxton island, I made a permanent mark of where the highest tide reached. Over the ensuing 12 years, we have noticed that this has increased by an astonishing 4". Now, that may sound insignificant to you, but it really is quite a lot. I was chatting to John Nayler, a lifelong resident of this area, and he mentioned that a small boatyard over on Gabriola island, about 4 miles from us, actually had some water creeping into the yard itself. This was the first time in recorded history that this had happened. During the winter of 2005, the immediate area experienced an extremely unusual snowfall. It was a combination of a large snowfall, followed by warm temperatures. This made the snow wet and heavy. The result was that on this small island over 3,000 trees were knocked down by the weight of the snow. Not just little saplings...some of the trees were Douglas firs and big Arbutus over 100' tall. They simply snapped off and came crashing down. Possibly one of the more interesting aspects of this event is that all the actual damage happened within a two hour window. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was shining in a clear blue sky. Not a trace of wind. When the first trees and big branches started to come down, I was up on the roof trying to clear the worst of the snow off. Don't worry, I was on the flat part and I was tied off to the roof. Just before I was finished, a 90' Douglas fir came down from the neighbor's property and landed on our lot. Unfortunately, it chose to fall on a cedarstrip two person kayak belonging to my wife. It was instantly turned into firewood. Yes, I mean the kayak. The word was put out to all who we could reach and summer visitors started arriving to survey the damage. I personally saw 19 cabins that suffered in the carnage. The worst one was where the top of a huge Arbutus had come down and gone right through the roof of one cabin! We spent the next two months cleaning up the island. Then just this last winter we experienced a very long, very cold spell. There was 48" of snow all together, something never seen here before. At least not in anyone's memory.
It seemed that spring would never get here. This was not just on the island here, but rather extended throughout western Canada and the entire Pacific northwest of the U.S. The gardens are all several weeks behind, which has caused many of the crops and flowers to under produce this year. So, as you can see, the changing weather patterns are manifesting themselves in a variety of ways. We cannot undo what has already happened, but it would be nice to think that if we were all to reduce our carbon footprint just a small amount, things may improve in the long term. Keith |
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This intel was contributed by Keith
Keith
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May, 2012
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