Silly Little Country

I'm Not Complaining

Warmest winter ever in Canada. Yeah!! Hooray! High time!

From the balmy Arctic, to the open water of the St. Lawrence and snowless western fields, this winter has been the warmest and driest in Canadian record books.

I had to shovel my sidewalk twice! Definitely a new record. Only a couple of years ago I was frequently spending several hours on a morning digging my car free and making walking along the sidewalk in front of my house possible.
The combination of El Nino and the negative Arctic Oscillation sent the jetstream south, allowing cold northern air to load up with Gulf moisture and dump it all over the US mid-Atlantic, bypassing Toronto almost completely. I could not have been happier than waking up in snowless Toronto to CNN reports of whole cities shutting down in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York.

The warm, dry winter could spell big trouble this summer. "One of the greatest things about our winter is it kills bugs and diseases and resets the clock for us," says Phillips. Or, it used to. He says many pests are sure to be thriving after this year's warm winter.

We've had two crap summers in a row now, so this is a risk I am game to have run. My main concern is the coyotes that the city won't have shot.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 1:53 PM