17 on 24

Walked out the door without a coat.  It is December 24th, two days aft the longest night and the days are getting longer.  The high for today is expected to hit 17°C.  Growing up we had the occasional Green Christmas.  Green with white patches.  They were very rare.  Almost as rare as a white christmas in Florida.  Including the past two, they have much more common.  But never this warm.  

It is two factors Climate Change and an El Niño.  The El Niño is a common event, it is a Pacific Ocean current and regularly it warms up and warms up and then it lets off  its warmth by piling up the warm water off the coast of the Philippines.  The warm water evaporates, that air warms, it holds more water, so more water can evapourate.  The current travels north and so does the air, the air is faster and it follows the coast past Japan to North America and it continues into the continent.  The warm water filled air warms the air and the land.  The water precipitates out, that heats the air as the water changes state.  If it changes state again into ice it warms the air again and it snows.  

Back in the eighties Canada had a very powerful El Niño effect and it caused massive ice storms in Quebec.  The rain froze on the trees, the rain that was colder than 0°C froze instantly.  Where I was we god freezing rain as well, there was a layer of ice on top of the snow and the roads, clear of snow were ice covered like an ice rink, only one that went up hills.  Walking to school that day was treacherous.  

This year we have Climate Change in full force.  In the past excluding the Ice Storm an El Niño would have brought lots of snow as the temperature would have been much colder.  Today, we get rain.  It rained yesterday a lot.  It rained all week in fact.  The cycle I described above I have described in more detail other posts.  climate change means that the world will increase an average of 2°C.  That is mostly in the tropics as most of the world is between 30° North and South.  The closer to the poles you travel the greater the temperature increase will be and less in the Summer, but more in the Winter.  The Winters in the high latitudes will be up to three times the average temperature rise.  That was the estimate, however if there is one thing about Climate Scientists that you need to know is that they often low ball their predictions.  In fact what can be said about most of their extremely scary predictions of twenty years ago is that they were wrong, the climate change more and faster.  So maybe not three times the temperature rise, maybe five times.

I rode my bike to Tim Hortons on wet streets, there was a stiff breeze, a wind really, without a coat.  It is currently 14°C outside, warmer than the warmest day in November this year.  I am in Little Smoke, and city people do not pay attention to the climate, just the weather, but even they are talking about the weather with an edge of fear, for what is to come.