“So, hot enough for ya?”
This glib greeting was fine for July or August, but here we are in late November and still no snow or deep frost. Mind you, we managed to complete all the fall preparations around the yard this year but have fallen behind in a lot of indoor work, because who wants to be inside when it’s 10 degrees Celsius in late November?
Global warming! Climate change! El Niño! Great Lakes effect! You have a range of excuses to draw from, but this autumn season has broken a pile of records for heat and lack of precipitation (e.g., New York State just proclaimed itself to be in an official drought).
By now, we’ve all heard the bits and pieces about the shifting of many factors within our natural environment: less rain and more wildfires; more flash floods and tornados in Ontario; and almost zero opportunity for snowmobiling or ice fishing. Yes, things just aren’t the way they used to be. It’s getting harder to convince the grandkids that we walked through waist-deep snow to get to school (and had to shovel out the laneway after school).
Admittedly, I am a bit hyper-aware these days of this weather phenomena as I am currently enrolled in a climate change and forestry class, an eight-module course that looks at how trees affect the weather, and how weather affects the trees. It is being offered by the Ontario Woodlot Association and the Climate Risk Institute, and so far contains some mighty interesting stuff.
The goal of this course is for a landowner to come up with a forest-management plan that goes way beyond the traditional “how many board feet can the woodlot produce” to “what can I do now to ensure a healthy forest is thriving here 50 or more years in the future.”
A benefit and curse of this course is that they provide a great many references to read — a great many. And they are all interesting, and are often hundreds of pages in length; many an evening has been spent going down the climate change rabbit hole. But, wow, the information that is presented about climate change is the stuff of shock and awe.
One of the common characteristics of all these reports is the use of the terms “might,” “could,” “models indicate,” “possibly result in,” and “has been predicted.” Admittedly, it is this perceived lack of confidence that many climate change deniers cling to. But if five major scientists all say the same situation is dire and doomsday-ish, I tend to believe them.
Before you get all depressed and flip to another article, pause for a moment and realize climate change is not a new thing — not at all. This planet has gone through several climate events and always managed to sustain life in some shape or form. The only difference this time is that Homo sapiens is aware that ‘something’s going down’ and can share thoughts and feelings about their environmental anxieties.
To get your head wrapped around the many nuances of climate change, you have to have a simultaneous understanding of our planet’s environmental past, present, and future. Easy-breezy, right?
By example, here, in what is currently labelled southern Ontario, was once a huge ice field, a massive structure we have since called the Wisconsin glacier. It was here for at least 100,000 years. That’s actually quite a while, even longer than a typical Donald Trump speech, which drags on ‘forever.’
There were animals and plants living here prior to that ice age, and they were displaced to the south as that long period of cold and ice slid into place. But then climate change happened and the ice melted, slowly but steadily over a few thousand years. For a great while, southern Ontario was very much like the Arctic we know today.
Here in Simcoe County have been found remains of mammoth, mastodon, giant elk, sabre-toothed tiger and other mammals that like temperate climes. An unexpected and severe cold front returned for several hundred years and wiped out these creatures.
Then a warming trend swung back in place, attracting roaming Paleo hunting parties about 8,000 years ago to the shores of what were becoming the Great Lakes. These first immigrants liked what they found and decided to stay here. It has been calculated that from the year 950 to 1250, the climate around here was much hotter than today. Let that sink in.
Then another mini-ice age happened, and for 600 years (until 1850), this area had extreme winters. But for the past 150 years or so, the temperature gradient has been on the rise again. However, the current rate of change is the most accelerated when compared to all the other climate shifts of the past.
When the climate changes, life has to adapt to survive. Adaptation requires hundreds of generations for natural selection to result in the new survivors. This is time we do not have for such a process to evolve successfully.
The other side of adaptation is mitigation. Mitigation is also a kind of change, but the result is premeditated and involves actions taken to stop or delay some of the now-known accelerants of climate change, like the overproduction of greenhouse gases. Cue the politicians and big business to provide inspiration and direction. Hello? Anybody there?
It has been said that “climate is what you expect, while weather is what you get.” Right now, we are experiencing very warm weather, yet there may well be a nasty winter or two heading our way. It’s when these temperatures are gathered over many years and summarized on a graph that the hidden concern reveals itself: The local climate is undeniably getting warmer.
Mitigation must never be ignored, as every little bit helps in the slowing of the pace of change. In a future column, I will share with you my concept of a plan to ensure our trees will be healthy and abundant in the many years yet to come.
