Weather expert predicts York Region will be warmer and stormier in 50 years

yorkregion.com
By Simon Martin
March 16, 2017

According to Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips, the problem with climate change at the moment is it's best seen in places where few people live. “It’s about skinny polar bears, and who gives a rat's ass about skinny polar bears?” Phillips said.

That might change in the next 50 years.

The bizarre winters in which February is balmy and March is frigid don’t appear like they are ending anytime soon, Phillips said. The weather models are predicting more extreme weather events in the next 50 years.

“Everything will be warmer. Heat waves will be more torrid. The bigger storms will be stormier. There will be longer dry periods,” he said.

It makes sense that as the world gets warmer there will be more energy to drive extreme weather, Phillips said. “It’s not all doom and gloom. There are going to be winners and losers. Grape growers can hardly wait for climate change.”

While there is a lot of uncertainty that comes with future weather modelling, Phillips points out that he was around 25 years ago when models for what the weather would be like in 2020, and the models have proven to be very accurate.

Models can’t account for technological advances or mass changes in human behaviour, Phillips added. People need to accept that we are witnessing the warming of our planet. For the most part, people have accepted that as fact. “There are a few charlatans out there that say things aren’t warming up, but nobody talks to them. They are phoneys,” Phillips said.

Few people are more at the mercy of the “weather gods” than farmers. Stouffville’s Richard Reesor helped start one of Canada’s biggest sweet corn operations, Rouge River Farms. For Reesor, a far bigger concern than higher temperatures in the future is extreme weather.

“What is really harmful is damaging storms,” he said. “I have heard from climate predictors that storms might be more violent.”

The warmer temperatures predicted could be beneficial for corn in York Region. Reesor said corn planted in Tillsonburg, Ont., has a higher yield potential than corn in York Region. But if those higher temperatures are accompanied by extreme drought, it makes things more complicated.

“Last year was a very serious drought that hurt. If that was from climate change, I don’t know,” he said.

Holland Marsh farmer Bill Eek said it would be ignorant to say the climate hasn’t changed.

“Thirty years ago, everything had to be out of the ground by the 5th of November. Now we are just getting into the carrot harvest then,” he said. “We just had a February with an average temperature of 3.4 C. That ain’t normal.”

The marsh is in the enviable position of having irrigation at the ready from Lake Simcoe, but what has Eek concerned for the future is extreme storms. “It causes soil erosion and off it goes to the nearest river or lake,” he said. “There’s nothing as a good as a light rain.”