So far as weather goes, Vancouver in the past month could easily be mistaken for Twillingate - an outcome, I should think, equally pleasing to both those glorious conurbations. A couple of December snowfalls, even a kindly blizzard or two, is nothing new or strange for the grand jewel of Newfoundland's northeast coast. But below zero temperatures and snowfall after snowfall blanketing the great pathways of Stanley Park, shrouding the busy streets of downtown Vancouver, is, as we say back home, "something else altogether."
I remember my first visit to Vancouver. It was in February, and I'd come straight from Newfoundland. My initial thought was that the Air Canada flight had taken a seriously wrong turn in Halifax. I was sure I was in Florida. Mere benign ignorance on my part. I have since learned, what thousands upon thousands of Canadians already knew, that if you want to escape the more marrow-freezing rigours of the Canadian winter, there is no need to go south. Fly west, young man. Vancouver - Honolulu without the itchy skirts.
In any given winter, by the time the conscientious citizen of Barrie, say, is negotiating a loan to buy his second snowblower and going for a more powerful model (the first having expired from overuse), the typical Vancouverite is prancing around in a T-shirt and slathering himself in sunscreen lotion. (Unless it's raining. Sometimes, it rains there.)
Not this year. Vancouver, and the West Coast in general, is in the grip of what the wonderful ode to Newfoundland has so rightly described as "winter's stern command." It's a frightful consideration, I know, but if you go to the West Coast this season, there'll be no escaping the impression you're still in Canada.
By the way, it's the same or worse on the Prairies: minus 40 in Saskatoon the other day, minus 50 with the wind chill. That's cold. And it's the same or worse all over, even in places unaccustomed to snow and cold. Hell has frozen over.
Now I introduce this spotty survey not in any spirit of contention or with intent to counter what so many people hilariously refer to as the "science" of global warming. One season's weather is not a guide to another, an insight captured more poetically by the proverb "one swallow does not make a spring." I am, most certainly, not going to make the error of our global warming hierophants who leap with troubling eagerness on any "extreme weather event" and pilot it with ferocity to the conclusion that we are all doomed. They are rhetoricians of less scruple than I.
Nor will I take the data of Vancouver's snow-clearing budget this winter to plot a graph for food shortages in, say, Marrakesh in 2040 or the fate of some beloved Pacific atoll 50 years from now. I leave these type of gymnastic projections to less tethered minds. And lest you think I'm crowding only one side of the canvas, may I call attention to a headline that recently appeared on that bulletin of enlightenment, The Huffington Post, and which was shared with another unimpeachable source and slave to the scientific method, treehugger.com - World War IV: Will Global Warming Cause It?
Or to another story that ran in a legion of newspapers this week that "warned" of "massive and simultaneous crop failures" and a "perpetual food crisis" that climate researchers are "confident will become a global phenomenon between 2080 and 2100." This apocalyptic scenario will be entirely due to "unprecedented heat." Tell me about it.
Perpetual? I haven't seen that word, outside of a prayer book, for 30 years. And as to being "confident" of what's going to be going on in this busy world in 2080 or 2100, well, let's not call that science. Let's call it hubris on steroids. Has the global warming movement given up all pretense of rigour entirely? Because they're now not only telling us what the weather will be like 30 or 50 years from now, they've tied their fanciful projections and ever more intricate modelling to lining up the causes for World War IV. They're giving us the causes for events that haven't happened yet. I think Newton would have frowned on that approach.
I tie it all to Vancouver. So much of what the alarmists promised was supposed to be happening now isn't happening. So many events are running counter to their near-term projections, they've decided to go all Armageddon with their long-term ones, projections for a future that none of us will be around to check. So here's the test: The colder it gets in Vancouver, the hotter the dubious scenarios for the globe a hundred years from now will be.