Rethinking Lifestyle

A few months ago I was sitting at my dining room table in the middle of a power outage writing with the feeble light from two candles. Outside the wind was howling and the rain was lashing against the windows.

At that time we ‘only’ had 70 or 80 km/hr wind so I cannot imagine what it must have been like for people in the Caribbean who had already suffered from a number of terrible hurricanes last season.

Practically everyone must have heard about numerous unusual weather events round the world of late, whether it be monsoons in India, record hurricanes in the Caribbean or droughts in Canada with huge forest fires as a result and more recently record forest fires and now floods in California with thousands of homes destroyed. Can you imagine what it would be like in flat Manitoba if we received 36 inches of rain as they did in Texas? I’m pretty sure the Winnipeg floodway couldn’t take it and the whole city would likely be totally submerged. One often hears of record temperatures for particular days here in Manitoba during the summer and these events seem to be getting more and more frequent. We hear about global warming and climate change as if they are two separate things, but they are not. Global warming causes the climate to change, and some of the change is actually on the cold scale with polar vortexes. For a long time scientists have been predicting that with warmer oceans we will get stronger hurricanes and more rain – and that is exactly what happened last year. However…

At that hurricane time a few months ago I was standing in a field with a group of friends talking about the hurricanes and complaining about the wind, when I mentioned that with the warming of the oceans, as predicted, hurricanes were getting stronger. These good people immediately claimed there was no connection and that it was just normal, though more severe than usual. What I can’t understand is how they, who are ‘ordinary’ people like me, suddenly know more about the effects warming oceans have on hurricanes than the scientists who have studied the subject for years. I even hear that some church ministers in Steinbach are preaching this; so do seminaries now teach atmospheric science? I may be being a bit cynical here, but wake up everyone, global warming is a fact and climate change is the result – including stronger hurricanes and other weather extremes.

There are people that still believe the world is flat in spite of the images of earth from satellites. There are people that still believe vaccinations cause autism in spite of the overwhelming evidence that vaccinations definitely are not connected to autism. In fact you might like to google Roundup and autism. If this article and the terrible hurricanes recently convince a few people to believe the truth, then progress will have been made today.