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Well, I think I spoke a little too soon about the beauty of the snow and the gentile folk frolicking in the street. Although those things were present, it is hard to deny the damage that a moderate snowfall can do in a place like Barcelona, where people just aren't prepared for it. To start with, in our garden, the lettuce was severely damaged and the broad beans cracked at their stems under the weight of the snow! There goes 3 months of growing... and to think it would have been harvest time in a month. The onions were not affected, but the celery was pretty much gone and the artichokes took a beating.
This winter has been a little strange climate-wise. We have had much more rain than normal. Normally this is great, because we can then fill up the rainwater collection deposit under the house which would be enough to get us through the summer, which is typically pretty dry. We have had so much rain that they ground is water-logged and soggy. This means we can't plant the potatoes just yet, else they go putrid in the ground before sprouting. It also means the recently planted trees won't be duly challenged to thrust their roots into deeper ground in search of moisture, meanwhile supporting their above-ground height and helping prevent soil erosion as well. Anyway, we are hoping that things will start to dry out now and we can have a nice spring.
All this climate variability is ostensibly due to ENSO, or the El Niño Southern Oscillation, better known as just "El Niño", the Spanish word for "The Boy". ENSO is a quasi-periodic climate event which occurs every 3-7 years due to increased concentration of heat in the south-east Pacific ocean resulting in a major redistribution of tropical convective rainfall. The causality of El Niño and how it influences global climate are not well understood. Indeed, the phenomena was only reported a few years ago, so we are still researching and trying to better understand it. In any case, it seems to cause increased droughts, floods and other extreme weather.
Canada this year had much less snow than normal (at least in the areas I visited), Newfoundland, Quebec and Ontario. And, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics were seriously threatened by low snowfalls. Barcelona on the other hand has been stricken with unseasonable cold weather, rain upon rain culminating recently with this large, sudden snowfall. It has collapsed power lines, with many still in the dark, 3 days later.
But, like I say, we should not rush to judge this as evidence for or against "global warming" (more accurately, "climate change"). Weather is not the same as climate. The evidence for climate change is substantial, but it's not found in an informal census of remembered or reported weather. Humans are pattern seekers and we tend to see relationships between things even where they don't exist. For this reason we need to be rational about how we reach conclusions about the nature of things.
Peace,
Grant
Snow brings out the best in people here in Barcelona. Well, at least that's my experience. As I sit here writing this blog I look onto the hordes of people on the street below laughing, baguettes lodged under their arms, throwing snowballs, dogs barking playfully and running about freely in streets now vacant of traffic. Snow in this part of Spain is a once-every-few-years type of thing. Although the roads are now officially treacherous, people don't mind. This amount of snow (50 cm at the higher elevations) is indeed rare, and these days amid the growing rhetoric of "climate change" people must resist the urge to cite an occurrence such as this as evidence for or against it. Granted, it will probably be used as 'proof' that there is no global warming. Some will accept that bland argument, others will reject it outright. It should be rejected outright on its own. It may be that this weather is a symptom of an ever changing planet, but taken alone as an argument for or against the well established theory of climate change, it is rendered meaningless. Taken together within the larger picture of increasing incidents of weather variability and, most especially with the now mounds of relatively long-term data that have been collected globally that show an anthropogenically changing climate, it can be significant. Climate change deniers are generally the non-scientific types, that is, superstitious, supernaturalists and frankly, irrational. I don't want to paint many of them with the same brush, but that is my observation of the frequency of such weak arguments.
Before climate change appeared on the public radar, any given weather event would be considered an 'act of god'. Funnily, you can still probably even insure your car under such a clause. Act of nature? Better. Nature's intentional vengeance for sinful humans? Decidedly no.
Now that I got that off my chest I 'm heading out to make snowman! :)
Peace,
Grant
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