Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Heh, heh. It's kinda cooold.

There was ice on a pond next to ManNorth’s workplace this morning and frost on the vehicles in our parking lot. Temperatures dropped overnight (despite the 24hours of daylight) to -1C.

This makes me laugh just a wee bit for a few reasons:

1. Because it’s just so ridiculous to be seeing ice in July at the same time one is contemplating going out to pick wild blueberries and ward off hoards of mosquitoes.

2. Because it’s not really that unusual, given that we live 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle

3. Because making headlines in the news over the past few days was how darn warm another arctic community that is 320 kilometres south of the arctic circle has been for the past few days and how much has been made of this temporary warming in that community and how everyone is speculating that it is related to climate change and global warming etc etc..

Now, I certainly don’t deny that our climate is changing but what often gets forgotten is how variable weather can naturally be. For instance, when cold arctic air blows south to chill Northern Town and create sheets of ice on wee duck ponds, the air has to come from somewhere. The thing to remember is that where it came from isn’t suddenly a vacuum, devoid of air, but is being replaced with air from somewhere else, whose air is also being replaced.

So to just speculate a wee bit here, not knowing the actual patterns of air movement that caused this but, as a result of low pressure systems sucking in air from high pressure systems, creating something known as global winds and pressure gradients, could not one tell a simple story of cold air in Northern Town coming from the arctic which sucked up warm air from the south to pass through TemporarilySwelteringOtherArcticTown to replace it?

But one is speculated to be evidence of global warming while the other one just has sucky cold weather? Mmmm?

Yep, this makes me chuckle, just a tiny bit.

3 comments:

Allmycke said...

During the 9 years I lived in Inuvik, I never experienced one single month without snow. I also appreciated the AC more while living there than anywhere else!

naturegirl said...

I like the new photo on your header!

WomanNorth said...

Thanks for the comments.
Yes, northern weather is rather variable to put it mildly!

The header is a new photo from a trip into the mountains that I made last month. I'd intended to blog about it but was rather busy.
I will one day soon!