ALBERTA FLOODING

POST # 76


In recent years, it seems that hardly any time at all goes by before there is news of some place somewhere being inundated by floodwaters. Yesterday it was my hometown of Calgary that was in the crosshairs along with the surrounding area of Canmore and Banff. I had thought that I was going to write about the first day of summer on this June 21st blog entry, but after reading and seeing some of the footage yesterday about the floods it seemed more appropriate to get this on the record.

As I write these words, I have yet to be connected to the internet so I don’t know the latest, however from some of the video clips I saw yesterday, I can only imagine what certain areas in and around Calgary are like today as well as the town of Canmore, where friends have a home very close to Cougar Creek which was running wild only 24 hours ago.

Just recently the flooding in Germany was in the news, and before that I have images in my mind of other places in Europe and elsewhere where flooding has become an issue. The floods are becoming more widespread, more frequent and certainly more intense.

Of course this begins to make sense when it is tied to the knowledge of the changes taking place on the planet due to climate change. The melting of the ice cap in the Arctic, which could in fact be ice free as early as this September, has caused the temperature difference between the pole and the mid latitudes to decrease. One major side effect of this decrease is the effect it has on the polar jet stream. The wave of the jet stream has not only become more amplified in a north/south axis, but it has also slowed as well. This change allows a particular weather pattern to persist longer than it might have in the past. So in the case of what is going on in Alberta at the moment, the wet warm air mass can be stationary for quite some time and this increases the volume of precipitation resulting in the current flooding. In addition to that, if the air mass is warm, along with the rain, the spring ice melt can exacerbate the situation, and the combination of the two appears to be getting the upper hand on the infrastructure which is in place and which was probably not designed to handle such conditions.

So this week it’s Alberta, but who knows where the next flood zone will occur? One thing appears fairly certain at this point. There will be more flood events like this and one of the primary causes appears to be this jet stream condition which only continues to show signs of change due to Arctic ice loss. Once the ice is completely gone, which looks now to be a certainty, if not this year, then very soon after, the extreme weather events which caused this flooding and other flooding around the world will become even more unpredictable as time passes.

And just this past week I read an article which was suggesting that, and I quote, “It’s time to put an end to this global warming hoax”. The article was from a Canadian news service. Of course there was no mention at all about Arctic ice melting. It would be difficult to write an article about the global warming hoax and mention the ice melting in the Arctic in the same breath. I find it almost laughable that this disinformation continues to be printed, but I guess as long as there are people to read it, or cannot make the connection between the two, the propaganda will no doubt continue. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the day when all the ice is completely gone and still there will be someone somewhere writing about “the global warming hoax”.

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And something totally unrelated. Savanna the dog died a couple of days ago. She was a wonderful old dog, and I am grateful to have known her and spent some time with her recently. Her immediate human family will be sad because she is gone however they will have had almost 17 years of memories to carry with them from now on.


Happy trails,

Paul
The Thoughtful Wanderer