The irony is that it is 33ºC as I type this. But for the second summer in a row temperatures have stayed low enough and we’ve had just enough precipitation to stave off the appearance of those FIRE WARNING signs that appear on the Brunette River trail and at Burnaby Lake.
A few years ago we went an entire calendar month–July–without any official rainfall. Grass was turning yellow in May. I thought, “Well, climate change is slowly turning southern BC into a desert, whaddyagonnado?” But the past two years things have tracked more normal, with no long stretches of nice weather, just days of nice weather punctuated by clouds or some shower, then sun again and back and forth until The Rains of the fall start in earnest.
I’m not complaining, exactly. Some precipitation in the summer also means no out of control forest fires and the sky has not turned a hazy amber that lasts for weeks on end, either. These things are nice and good. I guess we’ll see if extremely dry summers return next year. Based on current events, I don’t think humans are going to do much to stop or even slow climate change.
This concludes my happy thought of the day.
