When I was growing up in the Peace country in the 1970s, old-timers used to say spring and fall last 10 minutes up there.
It happened again this spring, with a hot wind sweeping across the prairies to bring an abrupt end to winter. A rash of dry grass fires spread into at least one significant forest fire north of Fort St. John.
Many B.C. residents don鈥檛 appreciate that the northeast corner is on the other side of the Rockies. It鈥檚 a different place economically, geologically and climatically.
You see sudden chinooks in winter, like the one that confused actor and climate alarmist Leonardo DiCaprio in Alberta. You see snowfalls in August, dry spells, and temperatures plunging to 鈥�50.
Premier Christy Clark happened to be in Fort St. John to speak at a rally calling for the federal government to approve liquefied natural gas export projects, soon after the fires broke out. She immediately claimed this as proof that forest fire seasons are starting earlier every year, a human-caused disaster that could be eased by selling gas to China to replace coal.
Last year鈥檚 forest fire season started early, and the now-familiar claims were made that it would be the worst, the hottest, etc. It also ended early and was nowhere near the worst, a point mentioned by nobody except me.
This spring鈥檚 early warm spell up north petered out within days. Now the urban media can return to fretting about undetectable earthquakes in the region of the province with the lowest seismic risk, until fires spring up again.
Forests Minister Steve Thomson and the B.C. Wildfire Service are more circumspect. There鈥檚 no way to predict rainfall this summer, and thus no brave forecast about 鈥渁nother鈥� bad forest fire season. Professional staff emphasize that these northeast fires don鈥檛 predict anything.
We鈥檙e coming off an El Nino winter that has been punctuated by claims of ever-rising temperatures. This cyclical warm Pacific Ocean current swings next to La Nina, a cooling trend, but you won鈥檛 hear much about that.
We鈥檝e just seen Prime Minister Justin Trudeau join other national leaders, jetting to New York City to formally sign the meaningless greenhouse gas deal they agreed to in Paris last year. It compels them to keep on flying to meetings, and not much else. It defies parody.
Yes, the climate is changing, as it always has. Yes, we鈥檙e in a period of gradual warming, although the rise is nowhere near what the UN鈥檚 climate models predict.
According to the environment ministry鈥檚 2015 report, B.C.鈥檚 average temperature has increased about 1.5 degrees from 1900 to 2013, slightly more in the north and less in the south. That鈥檚 one one hundredth of a degree per year.
The B.C. report ritually attributes this to human-generated carbon dioxide, the only factor the UN climate bureaucracy recognizes. And here lies a key problem for the global warming industry.
More than 90 per cent of the greenhouse effect in the Earth鈥檚 atmosphere is from water vapour. Antarctic ice core analysis shows that over 400,000 years, increasing carbon dioxide has lagged centuries behind temperature increase. This suggests that rising temperatures lead to increased CO2, not the other way around.
(Scientific American, working hard to debunk this, that shows the CO2 lag is only 200 years, rather than 800 as others calculate. Still, it can't be causing warming.)
Conventional climate wisdom is that B.C. will see more total rainfall as temperatures warm. This is a matter of significance to BC Hydro, which recently released its latest power supply and demand forecast.
I asked BC Hydro CEO Jessica McDonald at a recent briefing, what is the utility鈥檚 climate change factor in this forecast?
There isn鈥檛 one.
Tom Fletcher is B.C. legislature reporter and columnist for Black Press. Email: tfletcher@blackpress.ca Twitter: @tomfletcherbc
