climate change

old woman yelling at the sky

On Friday, we had the first proper snowstorm of the year. It snowed heavily for hours, switched briefly to rain and ice pellets, and then back to snow through the night, snowing most of Saturday too. Due to kind neighbours coming over to shovel while I was inside working, I didn’t really have to clear off my porch - I did a bit of half-hearted scraping on Saturday afternoon, before turning my eye to the one task I really had best start then, which was knocking the 30cm of snow which accumulated on top of my car. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere, but future me would thank past me for thinking to at least do the bulk of the brushing when there was really no pressure on my time (and she did).

As I prepared to go outside and deal with the snow on top of my car, I had to pull out the boots I use for shovelling or otherwise stomping around in the snow from the closet, for the first time this season, which struck me as very late. Like all good New Brunswickers, I have an extensive winter wardrobe, meant to deal with the extremes we get here, and the sheer amount of snow. I have different hats and mitts and gloves and scarves for different activities, and different boots for different tasks. I always keep a pair of gloves in my bag, even in the summer (though that’s more so that I don’t forget to put them back in once the days get frosty). But I hadn’t needed to use these boots at all this year, and while my other boots, more suited to walking and driving were sitting on the mat by the door, I haven’t worn them more than a handful of times.

The winter after I was born, there was a rather famous storm which dumped 160cm of snow on Moncton, over the course of two or three days. My parents, who had moved there in April of 1991, looked at each other, and wondered where on earth they had moved to, before going out to shovel in shifts while one of them stayed inside with me. Even in recent times, there have been fierce, record-setting winters, with endless snow. A recent winter had me go outside one morning and realized that the slope of the roof from the garage was a straight line all the way down to the snowbank, because the drifts met the eaves of the roof. But even with the endless, weary days of winter still ahead of me, it is striking how different the climate is now, compared to when I was a kid. The season has shifted, with the storms not starting in November and December. A white Christmas is a bit iffy now, as opposed to the certainty it was when I was little.

“You know the world goes through warming and cooling all the time,” my father will say to me (and after checking with a cousin, we realized this was very much a familial position, as her father, brother to my father, had said the exact same thing). And yes, I know this. The problem is not that the world goes through cycles, it’s that we seem to have sped this one up and created a very rigid society which means any deviation equals disaster.

As I tightened my boots and went to go wrangle the big push shovel (like all good denizens of highly snowy areas, I also have several different snow shovels for different shovelling needs), I kept wavering between feeling some relief that the outdoors was finally aligned with how it should be this time of year: white, cold, snowbanks everywhere; and some form of irritation that I had to go out and move some of the snow.

Snow was so magical as a kid - of course, snow days! A wonderful delight, but also it just changed the world into what felt like the best place. And this year, it has crossed my mind that it hadn’t been such a good season so far for kids, with it being so warm and rainy, and what little snow we had kept melting. In my childhood, the weather of this fall and early winter would have been highly unusual.

I was no more than eight or nine years old when I first learned about global warming, which is why it feels so striking and dire to be 31 and staring at significant patterns and changes in the climate I’ve spent my entire living under. Climate anxiety is something I try not to think about too much, and I know my individual choices aren’t going to make much difference, but I’m trying my best to continue to make mindful choices about how I live and consume. I vote according to these increasingly pressing needs, and work to support larger change.

“All generations feel this way about something,” my coworkers will tell me. And maybe we do, but does that make it okay to dismiss those very real concerns? Should we just keep treating everything like a landfill? I have a lot more of my future left ahead of me than my older coworkers do; frankly I’m not counting on being able to live a boring life according to the Standard Life Plan, and retirement does not feel like a safe bet, even though I have a pension.

These thoughts crash together and swirl around as I push some snow aside with my brush from the roof of my car. Yes, I feel genuine concern about how the climate has changed, during my short little life. But I also wouldn’t be too upset if storms stopped being 30cm at a time. A climate change that doesn’t make me fear the future cannot coexist with snowstorms being somehow lesser in the place I live. But what strikes me again and again, as I struggle with the snow is that I ultimately preferred when climate change was an abstract concept I learned about in science class, and not a thing I could measure my life by.