My Climate Change Story: From The Early Days To The Middle Of Now
My personal experience in Vancouver help me connect with reality and think about how we can all make an impact in various ways
I started living in Vancouver, a beautiful city in the southwest corner of Canada, and its third largest urban area, in 2005.
I had moved from India, and the lack of humidity and cold temperatures made the move uncomfortable.
It was only made weirder with the fact that the sun did not set until 11 pm!!!
Being from India, I was accustomed to sunsets by 7 pm, even in the summers. So that was odd.
However, the biggest change was the type of plant life that grew in Vancouver.
The Past
Evergreen trees were everywhere, punctuated here and there by the common deciduous trees in this area, such as Red Alder and Garry Oak. The sheer amount of greenery was breathtaking. But there seemed to be a lack of life in the woods, and things seemed empty.
Soon I was introduced to the rainy season in Vancouver. You may have also heard it being called “Rain-couver”; for good reason, the city gets more than 2300 mm of rain in a typical year. The majority of it falls in the winter; November to March. However, with hundreds of years of such weather, the ground is more than capable of soaking up all this water.
There was a December, I think of 2006 when it rained almost the entire month…. non-stop. That was kind of cool, and soon I was seeing snowfall!! I didn’t remember what snow was like until then (even though I lived as a child in the mountains). But seeing it in person now…..was amazing. I soon became obsessed with snowfall and checked the forecast weeks in advance to predict when snow would fall.
It was a peculiar thing, but for some reason, for at least a few years, the first snow always fell on November 26.
So winters in Vancouver were exciting!
Now the summers. Well, they were…..normal. It was neither hot nor cold. And there were no fans anywhere in sight. I did not mind it and the weather was perfect.
I started calling it “room temperature” weather. If you went outside in that weather, your skin would not be able to tell you if it was hot or cold, or if there was any wind. You know….exactly how you feel in your comfortable bedroom.
In India, we had a ritual during the change of each season….pack up one season’s clothes and pull out the new season. So in March, we would frantically be stuffing our winter jackets into steel chests while rushing to the market to buy new shorts and t-shirts.
In Vancouver though, it was not so. Even in the summer, the nighttime temperatures could fall to 5–10 degrees. So you couldn’t pack up your winter clothes.
On the contrary, I had to go down south to the US with my family if I wanted to feel any kind of summer.
We once drove to Seattle in 2008, and seeing 37+ °C on the display seemed like such an alien experience. Having not felt that type of heat for a few years now, it was exhilarating. And of course, California was warmer still, which we thoroughly enjoyed.
The Present
In 2022, things are different.
Almost every aspect of the weather is now more pronounced and greater. It's hotter, wetter, drier, and colder!
Gone are the days of “room temperature” summers. Nowadays, the heat and humidity are oppressive enough that not having an AC in your house is essentially like asking for a daily dose of insomnia.
The effects of the warmer climate are even more obvious: banana trees are everywhere! When we moved, I don’t recall ever seeing a banana tree being grown in Vancouver. But now they are all over the place. People have them in their gardens, nurseries use them as signposts waving to their patrons to come for a visit, and hotels love them because of their knack to provide a tropical touch anywhere. Oh and did I mention, we have snakes here too now, giving it that extra tropical vibe.
In the house, the citizens of Vancouver have leap-frogged past living with fans and gone straight to ACs: a recent government law has mandated that starting in 2025, every new construction needs to have an AC built in. This is mind-blowing! No one could foresee such drastic changes even 10 years ago, but alas, the effects of global warming are here.
Oddly enough, the effects are not limited to the summer months.
Since the warming has led to more moisture in the air, the rainy season (Nov — Feb) has been wetter than normal too. Only last November, the Fraser Valley, the fruit and bread basket of the Lower Mainland, was inundated with flood waters. This too is unprecedented.
What’s Next
This article is just about one city. Every other city in the world is experiencing the same dramatic changes. Canadians are lucky to have proper infrastructure, while the less fortunate countries, cannot afford to help their citizens.
In the next set of articles, I will be sharing what we can do as a society to expedite saving our planet. I will also be sharing plans for a Climate Change Dashboard; an online portal for information related to climate change and global warming. One of the best things we can do is educate the globe about what is going on and take collective action.
See you all in the next article.
Remo
