Weather

Spring has come, even to Smallville, early.  I hear in Big Smoke the tempature is going to reach the high teens this week.  Smallville might get double digits.  It is just Women's Day, the very start of March.  When you talk climate change you have to talk about long memory and one cannot just compare year to year.

Last year in Big Smoke the ice did not come out of the ground until mid April, but this year I don't think the ground froze at all, there.  In Smallville the ground froze, but there is precious little of that, so it is not a big obstacle.  Smallville is in a region called the Canadian Shield.  It covers roughly three million square kilometers of Canada and its main feature is a lack of soil.  Where the solid should be is rock.  

The company that I worked for last year will probably start earlier this year.  I remember starting the last week in March and planting stuff in frozen ground and moving snow.  

March 11.

The snow is quickly vanishing.  The last big dump in Big Smoke is gone, except in the piles on the edge of parking lots.  The weather in Big Smoke is warm, two days in the high teens in one week and Smallville the night temperatures are above freezing most of the time and the day temperatures are much warmer.  The seasonal coat is being shed from the landscape except where the piles have been laid.  Even the piles are shrinking.  The road edges are covered in heaps of sand that was piled with salt on the roads every snowfall.  

Often in the years past, the snow would stay on the ground through April and snow in May was rare but not unheard of.  The snow this year will be gone before the end of March.  The ice on the Bay used to stay until May, twenty years ago and late May fifty years ago.  The Ice on the Bay will be gone from the sheltered inlets by April.  In the past there was variation in the melt periods, but it was tighter.  These days the variation in the weather is more spread out, cold as twenty years ago to warmest Winter ever.  

Do you see it?  The People in the cities, don't see it.  The People in the Country see it everywhere.  No one looks at the stars anymore.  Or the moon.