By Al Clarke
How cold is it?
It’s colder than a pig’s butt in a sleet storm out there, or so it seems, and a lot of the evidence is pointing to this becoming the new normal.
Winnipeg is having the coldest winter in 35 years, Saskatoon in 18 years, Windsor in 35 years, Toronto and St. John’s in 20 years, and much of the U.S. is also experiencing record lows and record snow falls, with Detroit having the worst winter in 50 years.
Strangely, we haven’t yet set new all-time lows for the coldest places in Canada. Here are the five coldest Canadian records: Snag, Yukon -63; Fort Vermilion, Alberta -60.6; Old Crow, Yukon -59.4; Smith River, B.C. -58.9; and Iroquois Falls, -58.3. These are all old records – the only new one is from Eureka, Nunavut on December 17, 2013: -42 – and who do you know who has ever been there? Well, actually I have, in July in the late 70s, and it felt almost that cold then as last December.
Closer to home, anyone who has been up to Georgian Bay this winter must have noticed that there is no open water – in fact, this winter the Great Lakes reached 91% freeze over, which is the second-greatest ice extension on record. This is quite remarkable considering that 2012 saw only 5% coverage.
Why, might you ask, could this be good news? Last year at this time, the water levels in Lake Huron and Lake Michigan were at historic lows. While there are a number of reasons for this, the leading culprit is lack of winter ice coverage and the resulting evaporation (second is the aggressive dredging of the St. Clair River by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but that’s another article).
So with winter evaporation at a minimum, plenty of rain last year and high moisture-laden snow this winter, the estimate is that we could see Georgian Bay water levels up 14+ inches, and Lake Superior up 13+; that’s a lot of new water. So if you’re a boater, this long cold winter is just the ticket, assuming it eventually thaws so you can launch the boat.
The most interesting question is whether this winter is a foreboding of winters to come, and could long cold snowy winters really become the new normal? To throw light on this question, I suggest we get Mr. Peabody and Sherman to set the “Wayback Machine” to the mid- 1600s . This was when the Earth was entering the worst of a prolonged cool period from 1350 to 1850, which is referred to as “The Mini Ice Age,” with three particularly cold periods around 1650, 1770 and 1850. Cold that decimated crops caused the great famine of 1315 to 17 in Europe. Norse colonies in Greenland starved and vanished in the early 1400s, and Iceland was completely surrounded by miles of ice.
In 1608, Samuel de Champlain encountered ice in Lake Superior in June. In 1683, the River Thames froze for two months to almost a foot thick, and James Bay remained ice clogged for the entire summer of 1686. In the winter of 1780, New York harbour froze and people walked to Staten Island, Swiss villages were destroyed by advancing glaciers, and the Bosphorus Strait in Turkey and the Baltic Sea froze over, allowing invading armies to invade across the ice. During this period, the once-promising vineyards of England were destroyed – and we anxiously await the fate of our local vineyards after this winter.
These events would be confined the pages of history if it were not for some unsettling similarities of recent solar events to the Maunder Period from 1645 to 1715; which was a period of very low sunspot activity that signaled the worst of the Mini Ice Age. Much scientific research points to this present solar quieting as foreshadowing a real possibility that this winter truly is the new normal and is a glimpse of what is in store for us.
“How could this be?” you ask. It’s because, as some Sun scientists (heliophysicists) believe, our Sun is “falling asleep.” Scientists have over 400 years of good solar observations to draw from, and for some unknown reason, the Sun has recently become quite inactive. In fact, there have only been half of the sunspot activities that had been predicted for this year, and these are the lowest levels in over 100 years. Historically, this has correlated to a cooler climate, particularly colder winters.
Normally, I don’t get too excited about correlated events because many times they lack a cause-and-effect relationship, but in this case the evidence is very convincing. We’ve heard this before, in the mid 1950s, when Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer, first wrote that burning fossil fuels might raise the Earth’s temperature via “greenhouse effect.” During the new Ice Age scare in the 1970s, it was seriously suggested that we might deliberately generate electricity with just coal to reverse the Earth’s cooling, giving birth to the science of geoengineering; the science of man screwing with Mother Nature.
The signs of this spring aren’t encouraging – while there are no polar bear sightings in the area, Labrador wolves not seen in Newfoundland since the 1930s have again made the trek across the ice, Wiarton Willie went back underground, local landscapers have put forward the return of seasonal works, snow banks up on the 30th Sideroad are still more than 10 feet high, the ice fishing guys on Lake Simcoe have homesteaded out there, everyone’s out of ice salt, and it’s
-20 C in March.
I am looking forward to spring more than ever, but there can’t be a Creemorite out there who, after this winter, isn’t asking,“Where’s global warming when we need it?”