Global Warming?

For the past two weeks Vancouver has been treated to some of the most extreme weather the city has seen in years. First it was the November winds and rains that at their peak turned much of the North Shore mountains into muck.

Newton was right in that muck tends to travel downhill.

A gravitationally unfortunate scenario for 900,000 Vancouverites - myself included. What was 'downhill' in this case was our main water shed. What was normally crystal clear and sparkling mountain fed tap water turned into a brown murky soup that came bundled with a boil water advisory that lasted a week and a half. To be honest I've used bottled water since the day I moved into the West-End but the cats prefer the tap water (cats, go figure) and forget having a warm comforting bath when the water looks like someone decided to .... well, you get the idea. Yellow - mellow. Brown - flush it down. Shudder.

Last Sunday, the day before the boil water advisory was finally lifted (Woot! Welcome back to the first world!), the south west coast of British Columbia experienced a "Perfect Storm". Frozen air from the Arctic that had been creeping down the valleys of the BC interior for several days met up with what we affectionately call the Pineapple Express. The two systems had a nice meteorological group hug and blanketed 2,5 million in snow. The Pineapple Express is this torrent of moist, warm southerly air that roars in off the Pacific and gives Vancouver and Seattle much of our winter rain. By itself the Pineapple is a weather phenomena that's all well and good. In particular it's the source of the majority of our drinking water. ... Which is a good thing. ... All that it asks is that you get used to 4 months or so of a near constant drizzle.

When the Pineapple Express bumps into an air mass that's 10' C below zero however ....

Always the optimist I've naturally found the photo opportunities the past few days many and varied.

The first photo in this post is one taken of nearly the identical spot used in the second photo included in my last blog entry. The only difference between then and now being the radical shift from a hazy and lazy fall climate to one that I travelled far and long to get away from.

To the right is one of my favorite apartment window angles and was one that created a shot I took just under two years ago that I've since used for one of my Christmas cards this year. This recent image was a 25 second exposure of the same angle with the orange lights of the city at night giving the composition a nice warm/cold "what the hell's wrong with this picture?" dichotomy.

Brrrr .... Making things even more exciting for us wet coast - winter wimps has been the arrival of sub-zero temperatures and enough of a wind to create a -15'C to -20'C wind chill, ... during the day.

Undaunted by suddenly finding myself flashing back to living in an Ontario winter I ventured out to the Burrard St. bridge this morning to capture some down-town Vancouver images. Here's a post card view of Sunset Beach, the West-End skyline and the North Shore mountains snuggled in the frozen water particulate that most Canadians refer to as snow. We however usually, and laughingly to be honest, refer to it as someone else's problem. :)

As always if you'd like to see a larger view of the image just click on it.

From the forecast ahead it sounds like I'll have at least another week of winter photo ops which, as ironic as it might sound, is actually a very good thing for British Columbia.

A critical problem that global warming has caused for us here in BC is that for the past decade our winters have been mild enough to let the indigenous pine beetle survive the winter chill. Normally the freezing cold winters would kill enough of the beetle larvae (over-wintering in the skin of pine trees) to keep them in check. However, the warm winters of the past decade have let these pests run rampant and as a result an area the size of Prince Edward Island has been decimated. It's a monumental tragedy made all the more apocalyptic if you fly across the coastal mountains. Seeing large swaths of dead forest from 25,000 feet up makes hordes of locusts almost seem like a good idea. Hopefully this Arctic freeze will kill enough of the pests to make a difference in their advance next spring.