It’s Earth Day today. A lot of communities were planning to hold celebratons on the weekend rather than waiting until today, and a lot of those celebrations were focussed on the notion of “global warming”. The idea didn’t attract much of a crowd in Edmonton though. The reason? A near-record cold snap for mid-April. 40 exhibitors all managed to crowd their wares into a single tent in Hawrelak Park. They had room, because there was virtually nobody at the event other than the exhibitors. Lorne Gunter wrote a column about it on the weekend, before the event even happened. “One of the reasons ‘global warming’ morphed into ‘climate change,’” he wrote, “was so any weather extreme could be interpreted as an omen of impending doom. But despite the claims of the likes of Al Gore and David Suzuki, the planet has not warned appreciably since 1998, itself the warmest or second-warmest year on record. Eight of the last 10 years have not been the hottest in history.” The rest of the column is here.
On the west coast, they had snow on the weekend. Up to a foot of it on some parts of Vancouver Island, while the north shore mountains, just north of Vancouver, had close to a foot and a half. Some areas on the coast recorded more snow on Saturday and Sunday than had ever been seen on any day in April since Environment Canada started keeping records.
Public date: April 21st, 2008
