A former Fort Frances Times editor, Harry Vandetti, used to say on the first day of March; “March will come in either as a lion or a lamb and then leave either as a lamb or a lion.” He was often right, but when the weather did not follow the old adage, his other argument was that you can never trust the weather in the month of March.
I was reminded by Noreen Stinson that the biggest snowfall recorded in Fort Frances was 27 inches back in 1967. Our next door neighbour Bill Spuzak actually dug a tunnel beneath the snow drift from his roof to the street. It was novel.
This past Saturday when one of the bridge players wondered aloud when would spring begin, Dave Kircher reminded us that we have to wait for the seagulls to arrive and following their arrival we would have three more snows. It is an old First Nation fable, although in the past few years it has been perfectly accurate. The first seagulls were seen on Sunday.
Weather plays a big role in our lives from determining what we will wear to how much gas and electricity we will use through the winter months. The use of fossil fuels is dramatically changing weather patterns and the earth continues to rise in temperature and is expected to reach a critical temperature by 2030.
But already we are experiencing massive weather disasters. One only needs to look back to 2022 when our region experienced unprecedented flooding. California has gone from disastrous snow blizzards to being engulfed by a river of rain. We have witnessed fires that have wiped out communities in both the United States and Canada.
Cyclone Freddy, now the longest-lived cyclone, has hit landfall twice on Madagascar and east Africa this year. The tropical storm has remained active for over a month.
On Monday, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that the world is on the brink of an environmental catastrophe. The report found that the world is likely to miss its target of a temperature rise of 1.5 C by 2040. Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme people cannot adapt. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases will claim millions of additional lives. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Countries had counted on not reaching that rise in temperatures until 2050, and now have to accelerate their plans to meet the goal 10 years earlier.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Age, the world’s temperature has already risen by 1.1 degrees C. Temperatures are now accelerating and even knowing we have the knowledge to reduce carbon emissions and reducing green house gases and working to cool the world, it appears that governments lack the will to take action on their climate change promises.
All the warnings are meaningless if we fail to act. Higher temperatures bring more severe storms higher seas and greater flooding and drought. That in turn impacts every part of the world. The IPCC report lets everyone know that it is still possible to limit global warming to relatively safe levels, but doing so will require global cooperation, billions of dollars and big changes.
Former Publisher Fort Frances Times
