There’s a famous quip — often attributed to Mark Twain, but in fact the product of one Charles Dudley Warner — to the effect that “Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
There has been a lot of talk about the weather lately, in these parts and beyond, specifically about the unseasonably mild temperatures and lack of snow. If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t mind not having to drive in snow and ice, or shovel the driveway. Before moving to Ashcroft in 1997, I spent most of my life in Richmond, so snow-shoveling was not something I did very often. Indeed, on the few occasions when we got snow in the UK while I lived there, neighbours would say cheerily to me “This must make you feel at home!” No, it definitely didn’t.
(On a side note, at least when I did have to shovel snow in Richmond, I had a proper snow shovel, designed specifically for that task. In Britain — at least in the 1990s, when I lived there — snow shovels were highly uncommon, meaning that I was out there shoveling the drive using a garden spade. Try it sometime; in addition to making an already arduous task even more difficult, the sound of a metal spade grinding on an asphalt driveway makes fingernails on a chalkboard sound positively melodious.)
But back to this year’s weather, which — as nice as it is for many drivers — does not bode well for the drought situation in B.C. To be blunt, we need snow, and lots of it, if we don’t want a repeat of last year’s drought conditions. Is this winter (the mildest, least snowy one I’ve seen in 27 years here) an anomaly, an outlier? Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing that. But we do know that we’re seeing more extreme events, more often, than in the past.
This is where we get into the difference between weather (what happens day-to-day) and climate (what the weather is like over a long period of time in a given place). Too many people don’t seem to understand the difference, which is why — when someone posted a picture of flooding in Cache Creek in 1920 — there were any number of people making cracks along the lines of “Did they call it climate change back then, har-har?”
No, they didn’t. But let’s drill down a bit, shall we? Weather is obviously a major contributing factor when it comes to flooding, and we know from the historical record that there was bad flooding (enough to cause severe and widespread property damage) in Cache Creek in 1920, 1948, 1979, and 2015, or once every 24 years.
That would seem to indicate that after the 2015 flooding, Cache Creek could look forward to a couple of decades of flood-free springs, give or take a few years, since these things don’t run to a schedule. But then it happened again in 2017. And again in 2018. And again in 2020 (twice; remember that there was flooding again in July that year?). And then again — the worst flooding of all, in terms of property damage — just a year ago, in 2023.
In case you’re not great with math, that’s a change from once every 24 years or so to once every 21 months, if you start at 2015 and only count 2020 as one flood; it goes down to once every 18 months if you count it twice.
So it’s clear that there’s something going on that we haven’t seen before, and more and more people — actual scientists who study this sort of thing for a living — are increasingly sounding the alarm about the situation, and warning us that we can’t just ignore it and hope it goes away. Moreover, they’re pointing the finger squarely at us, humankind, as being a large part of the cause, meaning we’ll have to be part of the solution, if we want to leave anything behind for those who come after us. In other words (to paraphrase Mr. Warner), we have to stop complaining about the climate, and actually do something about it.
