Climate change

By Selma Greenberg-Ludmer

It had been raining for days, pretty much non-stop. The fields were soaked with water, the rivers were running so quickly that some of them had overflowed their banks, the roads were covered with slippery mud and huge ruts full of water. Everyone was talking about the weather. When would this rain stop? Would it ever? Farmers who have lived here all their lives were saying that they’d never seen this much rain fall at this time of year. It must be a record. They hadn’t been able to get into the fields to plant anything. It was too wet. The ones who had planted were pretty sure nothing would come up. The seeds had been washed away.

Is the weather changing? We hear people talking about global warming, climate change, greenhouse gases, and sustainable development. What do these terms mean? Is climate change affecting our weather? Was last spring’s rain normal or was it a sign that something is going wrong with our environment? Are we responsible for this problem? Is there something we can do about it?

Louis Veilleux has been running the Sutton weather station under the auspices of the Quebec Ministry of the Environment for the last twenty-eight years. Each day, at eight o’clock in the morning and at six o’clock at night, he walks over to his meteorological instruments that are set up in the field in front of his house and takes down the high and low temperatures, the amount of sunlight, and the amount of precipitation that has fallen that day. M. Veilleux keeps track of all these numbers and every year produces a table that summarizes the data for each month and also gives the average for the year. Has he noticed any changes in the last twenty-eight years? Yes. The temperature is slowly increasing. Over the years, on the average, M. Veilleux has also noted that we have gotten more snow and slightly less rain. But, more importantly, we’re experiencing extreme weather events more and more often. These events are what are slowly convincing him that we are in the midst of a climate change.

But what is climate change? According to the BBC News website, the term refers to “changes in our climate which have been identified since the early part of the 1900’s. The changes we’ve seen over recent years and those which are predicted over the next eighty years are thought to be mainly as a result of human behaviour rather than due to natural changes in the atmosphere.”

And what is it that we are doing that’s causing this change? We’re releasing too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. What are greenhouse gases? According to Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers: How we are changing the climate and what it means for life on earth, greenhouses gases are a class of gases which can trap heat near Earth’s surface. The extra heat they trap leads to global warming. The warming puts pressure on our climate and can lead to climate change. Carbon dioxide is the most abundant of the greenhouse gases. It is produced whenever we burn something or when things like plant or animal material decompose.

Is there anything we can do about this? Is the situation already beyond our control? What can we learn from this disruption in our climate and in our environment? We need to look around us and appreciate the beauty of our surroundings. We need to take care of our forests and our fields. We need to protect the habitats of the animals that live among us. This disruption is a wake-up call for us, to not take the natural environment for granted.