Well we’ve made it to the end of 2023. It’s been a very wild year for weather. We’ve thankfully been spared from the majority of the extreme stuff, but it’s just been calamity after calamity elsewhere on The Globe. In fact, we don’t even have to look very far to see how terrible the extremes have become. Nova Scotia went from extremely dry and terrible wildfires to an unprecedented amount of rain and massive flooding. We’ve seen multiple named Mediterranean cyclones drop hundreds to over a thousand mm of rain in the span of a couple of days. We’ve seen similar rainfall events in South America, Australia, the US. A storm dropped 150+ mm in one hour in China earlier this year. Canada shattered it’s previous record of area of forest burned. The sea surface temperatures in the north Atlantic reached record warm anomalies. All of that happened just this year, and I’m probably forgetting a few things because there was just so many of them. It was the hottest year on record so far, and I think we’re finally getting a glimpse at the problems that a warmer climate will bring for us.
So is it all bleak? Yes and no. It’s bleak if you’re not wanting anything to change. It’s bleak if you care a great deal about your comfort the way we enjoy it now. We live more comfortably than any other period in human existence. Unfortunately, that might be coming with a price, and it might be a bit shocking to some people who’ve never known real hardships. So moving forward, we will definitely have to let go of convenience and comfort for the sake of more practical things.
So I will end on the “and no” part, because I am fairly hopeful looking forward, even if I know it contains a lot of bad things. I am hopeful because humanity is a pretty resilient and adaptable force, and I am confident that we will adapt, because quite frankly we won’t have a choice. I am also hopeful because I recently read that the extremes we have seen this year may just be a particularly coincidental timing of a strong La Nina into a strong El Nino. So while that doesn’t mean the extreme weather will go away, at least it might mean the concentration of events won’t be quite so high every year. Just remember, it takes time to study new data, so nobody has any immediate answers at the moment. Well that’s not true, I do have some answers that will apply regardless of where we are heading. I am going to continue to be watchful for significant weather, I am going to hunker down during the bad, and continue to enjoy the good, and I am going to keep hoping it won’t be as bad as we think, while being as prepared as I can be for the worst. That’s it, it’s pretty much Keep Calm and Carry On I guess. While life won’t necessarily be as comfortable as it is today, we definitely have the technology and resources to make it relatively comfortable even in a wilder and hotter climate. It can be done. Period. The tricky part is remaining united in this endeavor. Which quite frankly folks, as crazy as some people might seem these days, just know that there’s no scenario where everybody goes Lone Ranger and we all magically get through this. The best chance we have is to remember that we’re all on the same team.
So to end this not really planned rant… let’s maybe just zoom in a bit and try and make 2024 a little less extreme than 2023 was. If the weather won’t oblige, maybe at least we can be a little less extreme towards one another. And hey, maybe the weather will also oblige, wouldn’t that be nice? Sometimes you just need a little breather.