Climate for change is needed today.

• Author: Michels, Bob
• Position: The Way It Is - More research on climate change needed

How does it go? "Spring is sprung..." Regardless, one of the sacred rituals of spring is the first visit to the cottage. Like thousands of other optimists, I recently made my pilgrimage, ready to muse fondly about the upcoming hazy, lazy days of summer.

Imagine my shock as I gazed out over the lake and discovered dry land running out 30 feet beyond the end of my dock! Now, to put the record straight, my cottage is not located on one of the minor Great Lakes - it is on Lake Superior - 175 miles wide and 350 miles long. A water level that is a good four feet below high water on Lake Superior represents a lot of missing water, to say the least.

A short while later, as I sat out on the deck listening to the news on the radio, I heard that during the week just ended, the United States experienced the terror, power and fury of 421 tornadoes -- in one week! Since the United States usually averages only 229 tornadoes per-year, this was truly an unusual week of extreme weather.

This led to more musing - something I excel at. In my musings, I recalled the torrential rains that flooded and washed out whole networks of roads in northwestern Ontario-last year. According to some, this was known as a 300-year flood. And this followed at least two 100-year floods in the preceding five years.

And, as I connected the dots, I remembered that the number of "smog days and the number of 34-degree-plus heat days in Ontario has been steadily on the rise over the past 10 years.

"Aha!" I said to myself (I often talk to myself, if only to have an attentive listener) "This is what must be meant by global warming."

Those of us who inhabit Northern Ontario often fall into the trap of thinking that climate change, including a rise in the average temperature, means that we can look forward to earlier, warmer spring weather and balmy, prolonged. autumns. More important, we dream of fewer minus thirty degree-plus winter freezes. But, we may be missing the point.

If we dig into the issue of climate change and go beyond what we read in the popular media, the climatologists are not painting such a rosy scenario. In fact, they are forecasting a three- to five-degree Celsius increase in average temperature within the next 50 years and a dramatic increase in the frequency of extreme weather events.

If so, it seems probable that we can look forward to a stressed Boreal forest that will be more vulnerable to drought, disease, pests and wildfire. The pace of climate change may well...