Pirate's Cove

I warned you about using hair dryers and ice makers, about refusing to grow your own veggies and give up eating meat

‘Hotter hot spells and colder cold spells’: climate change already making mark on Manitoba

If you think Manitoba will be sheltered from the dire consequences of global warming, or that a few extra degrees might actually be good for this frozen province, think again, say climate change experts.

We may even be feeling them now in the form of the dreary, cold fall the province has been experiencing, says one scientist.

The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a gloomy report last week, saying that the world is only a couple decades away from facing significant food shortages, extreme weather, and mass migration if we can’t prevent global temperatures from reaching a critical threshold.

For Manitoba, that means more extreme weather patterns, like this summer’s scorching hot temperatures — but also colder, more extreme winters, said David Barber, a University of Manitoba scientist and Canada research chair in arctic system science.

“The probability is that we’re going to get hotter hot spells, and colder cold spells, wetter wet spells and dryer dry spells because we’re changing the probability distribution of those types of climate systems,” he said.

See? It does everything. Which is exactly what a member of a cult would espouse.

“That’s a problem for us, because we evolved on this planet because of the stable climate system that we’re in right now.”

By “stable” does he mean the warm periods and ice ages over the last few million years? Or about the flipping back and forth between warm and cold periods over the last 20,000 years as the ice age ended?

This latest report highlights the urgency for governments to act quickly, Hull said.

“This problem is so big now, that it really is requiring concerted policy effort to enable us to shift away from this fossil fuel dependence — and profound shift is what we’re talking about here.”

Funny how it comes down to government force, wouldn’t you say?