Rethinking Lifestyle

On Saturday, I found myself thinking about Noah. According to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, God was unhappy with humanity’s misdeeds and planned to return the Earth to its pre-Creation state by flooding it. He planned to remake it using the ark, and Noah and his family. Noah was sent forth to be fruitful, multiply, and to replenish the earth. After the flood, Noah made offerings to God and God promised to never curse the ground for man’s sake again.

So if the rain, hail and strong winds that struck the province over the weekend can’t be blamed on God, perhaps we should be looking to ourselves as the cause.

Since Noah’s time, we have certainly gone forth and multiplied, and we have been fruitful, but what about the replenishment? Are we being good care-takers as some have interpreted this to mean? The climate change we are now subject to suggests otherwise.

Here in the Prairies, our weather system has typically been considered to be dry in summer, with the majority of precipitation falling as snow in Winter. But that picture is changing. Precipitation has shifted from 90% snow to 10% rainfall to something closer to 50% snow and 50% rain each year, even though the total amounts have hardly changed. The snow that didn’t fall this past winter has come as rain this summer. But our infrastructure is based on models from 50 years ago – models that assumed lower summer rainfall that would mostly evaporate, and which could be quickly transported away from where it causes problems. However, you only have to look at the wet fields and dead crops to see that the old models are wrong, and it should come as no surprise to hear that our flood forecasters are changing their models to predict floods better.

With all that rain this summer, we might not think about how warm it is, but long-term datasets from NASA show that the warmest 15 years since 1880 all occurred since 1998. It’s getting warmer – in winter, spring, summer and fall.

Well, there’s not much we can do I hear you cry.

There are many that believe the ‘tipping point’, the point beyond which we cannot reverse the trends has been passed already. This means that there is little that can be done. It’s likely, we will never have a ‘normal’ year again.

With little to be done to reverse the trends, we have to be thinking about how to adapt.

What does this mean?

Well, to start with, we need to shift our expectations. Our weather is likely to be less predictable – snow before Christmas is less likely, ice and rain days in winter could become more common. Rainfall and high humidity with more storms are more likely in summer.

Our expectations for fruit, vegetables and nuts from drought stricken California have to change. California may not be able to meet our demands, and we can’t just assume we’ll find new supplies somewhere else. We may have to eat something different.

I could go on…

In my house, we are thinking about the skills we need to be adaptable, and how we should structure and maintain our home and garden to cope with unpredictable weather. These skills and our adaptability are our Ark…