What’s normal weather? “There isn’t a normal anymore”

“I think they have to get used to the fact there isn’t a ‘normal’ (anymore).”

The speaker, D. Harford, head of the Adaption to Climate Change Team in Vancouver, was referring to governments and citizens as ‘they’ consider Canadian weather patterns and preparedness levels for volatile conditions (as reported in the Sept. 10 issue of The London Free Press).

The statement was made as a national research group headed by Gordon McBean, a London Nobel Prize-winner, was reporting that “Canada should establish a national climate action centre to help plan for, and respond to, increasingly volatile weather” - and the words ‘there isn’t a normal’ caught my attention.


[Photo GAH]

The national research group’s report presents enough hurdles to governments and citizens to last a lifetime.

I.E., “the report calls for closer collaboration among governments and individuals to design communities better able to withstand weather calamities. It also calls for a national system that can alert people to weather hazards.”

Collaboration? A national system?

It could happen, over time, much time.

But it might take us longer still to accept a new normal related to weather, one that includes increased weather volatility, an unravelling of predictable weather patterns, a climate that seems to be in conflict with our ideas concerning how it should behave.

Too long have we lived with the belief we can do as we wish to the environment, often for the sake of a booming economy and a larger-than-needed lifestyle.

Normal is now out the window and gone. Change is now the new normal.

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No time like the present to make the transition to The Small Economy.

Live small and prosper.

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