Those who scoff at the idea of global warming need only to look at the situation here in British Columbia to see the reality of the situation. When the temperatures out here on Vancouver Island hit 40 C you know that we and the world face a massive problem that needs addressing right now before it is possibly too late. Only about 75 km from these record breaking temperatures a small town is on flood alert due to all of the usually year round snow cap having melted which has never been experienced before. The biggest problem may occur further east from here when the hot weather moving across the province towards Alberta will create major thunderstorms and possibly tornadoes which will lead to rampant wildfires. Since I arrived in Canada in 1975 all of the glaciers in the Rockies have retreated beyond recognition and many of my early photos show that clearly. Climate is of course cyclical as we all know but the human effect is surely having a devastating toll on our planet but regrettably there are not enough sensible countries around to get out the mop and pail to clean up the mess. The good news is that the high today will only be 28 C so I might have to break out my winter togs. Keep cool one and all but keep warm for the new season.
I did enquire as to your well being on the thread - Get religion out of football earlier today Mike. Hope the temperature continues on a downward trend ! From what I heard on the news this morning, they were saying this is literally a once in a lifetime occurrence and the 'experts' couldn't attribute any more than 10% of it to Global Warming, but who really knows ?
Precisely angelic and yes the temp has abated today and life is much more comfortable for us all. Thanks for the thoughts mate.
Hope you and your family are ok Mike. It’s strange to think of ‘warming’ when it’s June and pissing with rain - but I’m not a denier - I know the weather is ‘damaged’ I remember in the 1970s when it snowed in winter and was hot in August.
Or is it just an anomaly, as it was in 1937 when it got to 45c? Everyone always jumps on the global warming bandwagon. If the average temp for Canada climbing year on year which might point to global warming. Trust me Inver, there is no warming in the UK this last month or so
48 centigrade ...unheard of ! In the 70's I was involved with 3 expeds to the Dachstein, Austria. The post cards available at the time showed a "rhino horn type rock formation" surrounded by the Dachstein Glacier nose by maybe a minimum of 70 m of ice. In 1977 it was surrounded [that's ice to face ] of about 30m, in 1979 we actually measured it rock to edge in month of August, it was 48 foot plus or minus 2 foot. A glacier "cave " at ground level passed the foot of it [ could see about 5 foot into ice ]. In 2015 the ice was 3m past the rock exposed at the point we measured it from in 1979 our "bolt" was 5m approx. above surface level. in 35 years it had retreated by over 45m ! and that is central Europe at 3000m! 45 x 30 x 185 = a qtr million cubic metres of ice.... minimum ….gone
Switzerland have "tourist stops" where they use chainsaws to carve out passages for tourists to "wander" they lose about 10m of face every year... at a hotel we stayed about 20km away the proprietor said as a boy the access point to "the entrances to natural caves" was about 70 -100m from the road, where track to café starts now. to café parking is about 400m, he was in his late 50's ...criminal ….
I was in last year of boarding school on edge of the quantocks … played ice hockey with walking sticks on the pond ice must have been 9" thick?
So So, was this also an effect of global warming? I’m not disputing global warming isn’t a thing, the melting icecaps point that it is, but is not also a catch all for every weather anomaly. These random weather events, both in winter and summer have happened throughout history..
What ? I just stated I remembered 62/63 as a severe winter, never mentioned global warming, put your knickers back on.
I seem to remember the seasons being more, well, 'regular' when I was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s. From November to January it would be cold, with most of the snow usually coming in January. February and March tended to be wet, but the brighter weather and occasional sunny days happening in April and May. In June it started to get much warmer, but the hottest sunniest month was August. In September it was still ok but the weather would start to get wetter and by October the nights had drawn in and it was wet and cold again. Nowadays it hardly ever snows - it just rains. The driest months are April and May, but June-August tend to be hot, humid and cloudy - with the occasional tropical downpour. September gets a bit drier again but in October comes the COLD rain, which stays with us through to the following March!!!!!
Today's wake-up temperature is 18 C and the high will be only 24 C and that's more normal. The village of Lytton that now holds the all time high for Canada is currently ablaze and burning to the ground and sadly possibly more residential areas could be under threat from the maelstrom produced by this heat dome. On the other subject of the late snow in 62/63 I can remember cross country skiers going down the road outside my girlfriend's house in Chiselhurst Kent in what I believe was April? Mind you I have had a golf tournament cancelled in July due to snow but it was up in the Rockies near Jasper - but even so!!!
May was frankly the coldest one I can ever remember, not only in Bristol but over most of the UK. There was somewhere in Scotland that got something like 22 frosts in May. Crazy ! Then in June we had a pretty hot spell early on but that disappeared, and now we're heading for rain over this coming weekend and for most of next week with temperatures down to 17 degrees C (54F) on Monday. Our planet is cyclical and is generally temperate (i.e without polar ice caps) but with thousands of years of warming, we then get an Ice Age that we're coming towards the end of which has lasted for about the last 10,000 years. I'm sure Global Warming is relevant to the accelerated issues with a massively increased population, industry, billons of cars/lorries on the road and aircraft in the sky and the fact we are still using fossil fuels to power a lot of stuff, but some of it is expected.
all the previous interglacial events have never had modern day pollution to deal with. The last interglacial event 12k years ago, covered most of the north of the uk. A cave in ASSYNT, was the final resting place of a few animals at that time, 1 a bear that now lives [ skeletal remains ] in EDINBURGH museum, thought at the time to be from that event, but more likely a few thousand years earlier at the previous interglacial event, maybe 25k years ago. At this time 12k years ago pollution was ???? NO FOSSIL FUELS or manmade attributes … just the result of volcanoes or forest fires, sea was pure compared to today. Records via deposits, ice cores and tree rings, show various violent periods of climate change. Climate leaves tell tale signs throughout history... what will future generations make of the 19th/20th/ 21st century [ maybe encompass as far back as 15th century when enforced migration raised its head!] and beyond when Humanity made massive leaps forward …...
