The storms of a globally warming summer have passed and hopefully we can settle into a more relaxed autumn of stable weather patterns, blue skies and gentle breezes.
It’s been a crazy weather year. It was an early spring with little runoff, then a long dry spell that could have qualified as a drought. Garden soil was powder dry and there was much anxiety about forest fires.
Then came the rain, 16 days of it in June In Haliburton County, another 16 in July and an almost daily shower in August. Interspersed in the rain were days of high heat and suffocating humidity.
We got off easy. Other parts of the world, the United States in particular, suffered unprecedented damaging events caused by extreme weather - wildfires, storms that caused massive flooding and winds that tore apart communities.
Damaging weather events no longer are few and far between. In 2020 in the U.S. there were 22 billion dollar extreme weather events.
From 1980 to 2020 the annual average of extreme weather events totalled 7.1. The average for the past five years (2016-2020) was 16.2 extreme weather events per year.
A Washington Post analysis of federal disaster declarations shows that almost one-third of Americans live in a county hit by a weather disaster just in the past three months. And, almost 400 Americans have died in hurricanes, floods, heat waves and wildfires just since June.
Weather analysts say this is only the beginning of changing weather patterns and extreme weather events as global warming intensifies.
Canada has not been as severely affected, yet. However, global warming is heating the north and bringing new risks. Black-legged ticks, which carry serious Lyme disease, have been reported just north of Orillia and are continuing their northward march as our climate becomes warmer.
In 2009 only 144 cases of Lyme disease were reported across Canada. In 2019, the number of confirmed and suspected cases totalled 2,636.
A warming climate also is making new homes for a variety of mosquitoes. The Asian tiger mosquito is believed to be established now in the Windsor area. That mosquito is known to carry chikungunya and dengue and other viruses that we have never had to worry about before.
Some research indicates that climate change will bring the risk of malaria to millions of people, including Canadians, who seldom had to be concerned about it.
“The one thing we do know is slowly the distribution of mosquitoes is changing,” Robbin Lindsay, a research scientist with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) told Global News two years ago. “And we do see events and we see species here that we haven’t seen before.”
At the same time, the environmental magazine Yale Environment 360 reported that by 2050 climate change will expose one-half of the world’s population to disease spreading mosquitoes.
Climate change brings warmer weather that brings earlier springs that allow mosquito eggs to mature faster. It also brings more flooding which means more water in which the bugs can multiply.
Many experts say, however, that the main focus now should not be mosquitoes, but controlling global warming itself. Slowing climate change will slow mosquito population growth, and transmission of the viruses they carry.
Some people are finding advantages in our warming climate. Some companies are considering introducing afternoon siestas into their workplaces because climate change is increasing summer temperatures.
The National Trust, a British charity, is giving workers and volunteers Mediterranean-type working hours in southern England because of increasingly hot summers.
“It’s fair to say that as we experience more extreme temperatures, we will be looking to offer Mediterranean working hours, especially in the east which is likely to experience more frequent higher temperatures to ensure the health and safety of our staff and volunteers,” said a spokesman for the charity.
Mediterranean hours already are being offered at one National Trust property south of London, where the afternoon temperature went above 40 Celsius for the first time ever.
Meanwhile, more mosquito-borne disease and more Mediterranean working hours are serious signs that we all have to get together, believe that climate change is seriously real and do our part to help control it.
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