Great post Raul! I think we do have to take note of these events. They may not happen frequently, but we do need to be able to deal with them. These are the times when we need to look at needs around us and make every effort to shift our focus off of ourselves. We need to put in the effort to dig out our driveways and sidewalks. We need to make sure we take care of the shoveling for our elderly neighbours and help push peoples’ cars out of the road rather than take an ‘every man for himself’ attitude. I’ve noticed so many people seem angrier than usual since the snow started falling and it makes me sad – I’ve been a victim of myself too and displayed some less-than-respectable behaviour, especially while driving. If we could all reconsider what is really important at times like these, I think we’d see more communities coming together to benefit the whole.

Preparing for extreme weather events costs money – and our approach has always been to save on initial costs in the hope that it won’t happen. SkyTrain was designed to have anti-snow measures but they were discarded here. Most tire stores did not have anything like adequate stocks of snow tires, so they were just not available when people wanted them. Snow shovels and rock salt too became a rarities in stores.

But the biggest thing missing here is the community spirit that gets other Canadian communities out shovelling and clearing their sidewalks. Something we just don’t do here at all.

Vancouver is a mess because we only have 18 snow ploughs for the entire city.

[...] Raul points out what should be obvious by now: We have no emergency response to extreme climatic event changes. [...]

“in the hope that it won’t happen”

That’s called a delusional way of dealing with reality. If your contingency is hoping something won’t happen, well then why wear seatbelts? Why wear life belts? Let’s just hope the car won’t crash. It usually doesn’t.

The city has failed, and in the process exposed the depth of failure to which it provides lip service on how prepared it is for climate change. If climate change is anthropogenic and the effects of which have yet to be truly understood, all this has shown is that despite all the popular culture babbling about going “green” and carbon taxes that are supposed to prepare us for dealing with environmental disasters, we really still have a total buppkiss contingency plan.

How great to find out the hard way.

Great post as always. Global warming still exist… temp rise in the equator region and all the moistures go up north, resulting a higher amount of snow in northern and southern hemispheres.

Climate change is happening, but I’m not sure Vancouver snowfall is a good indicator.

As I’ve pointed out before, the myth is that it never snows here. The fact is that it always snows here — or, more accurately, we get at least one substantial dump of snow every winter, usually more. I think I recall one year (1991-92, I believe), where we got a little but in October (!) and then little or none afterwards, but that is freakishly rare.

And regular snow not a new thing. Our family has legendary stories of the huge snowstorm during my aunt and uncle’s wedding in 1964. My parents trudged up the hill to our house with their car stuck below in the early ’70s. Between Christmas and New Year’s in 1996-97 we received tremendous amounts of snow, even though we were at the edge of a system that brought so much to Victoria that they broke the one-day snowfall record not only for themselves but for Ottawa and Montreal too, and the army had to be called in. February of the previous year, my wife was nearly trapped in a snowstorm near Valentine’s day, but got home.

Last winter it snowed substantially in December, January, and February. The winter before was the one where the roof of B.C. Place Stadium collapsed after a snowfall.

I’ll also point out that while it is at some altitude, the ski slopes at Mount Baker hold the world record for snowiest place on earth, set in 1999.

The difference is that the snow tends to melt in between falls, which it has not done so much this year (at least not at my house near Metrotown). The cities and municipalities of Greater Vancouver should be prepared for it, every year. And I have to say that Burnaby has done a decent if not spectacular job this time round.

[...] Raul posted about the fact that Vancouver is just not prepared for a ‘climatic event’ su… [...]

Chaos is a tough concept. A more subtle and less clear-cut example of Climate Change is the effect of greater variation, of extreme swings of weather.

As far as I understand it, if you add energy to a complex system with many chaotic variables (here the system being the Earth’s weather, and energy being heat), then the chaotic behavior in that system becomes more pronounced. A simple example is a pot on the stove.

Rapid, wide changes in temperature, wind speed, air pressure and larger scale shifts in ocean currents and upper atmosphere mean that all weather becomes more unpredictable. Freakish, weird weather becomes the norm. This is what we have to now be prepared for.

There’s an even more troubling effect of greater variation in weather, which is lower crop yields. I found an abstract from an article in Science Magazine from May of 1975 that says:

Weather variability is a much more important consideration in grain production than a cooling trend. Our highest yields are made when weather is near normal or slightly cooler than normal. It is when weather variables deviate greatly from normal that yields are lowest. Even if the weather does trend toward the coolness of a century ago yields will not be reduced significantly unless the weather becomes more variable.

I guess we also have to be prepared for that as well…