Canada's Warm Winter: Does it mean anything?

Yes, it was the warmest winter in 40+ years...but that's nothing when it comes to climate.

According to a recent story in The Globe and Mail, "Canada has experienced its warmest winter since modern record-keeping began." The corner where Alberta, Saskatchewan and the N.W.T. meet experienced the greatest deviation. But before you buy a time-share in Uranium City or Fort Smith, it's worth considering a few facts.

Alert and patient readers who read the entire Globe piece learned that Canada's "modern record-keeping" began in 1948. In other words, the global warming zealots and their media acolytes are trying to compress geological time into little more than half a century.

Not to mention that virtually everywhere except Canada had some of the worst winter weather in news media paleo-terms, i.e., about 60 years. Despite the certainty of stirring Canadian schadenfreude, this went curiously under-reported here at home. Newspapers in Dubai and China were more interested in bizarre blizzards hitting places that are normally green in March.

If you were consigned to wintering in Minsk or Pinsk, things were pretty bad. In Poland, up to 175 cold-related deaths occurred just to the end of January. Temperatures plunged to -25 C in Warsaw and -35 C in southeast Poland, with Krakow suffering disruption of its hot water heating system. In Ukraine, 53 people died on a single cold day. The Baltic States also suffered, with as many as 150 Latvians hospitalized due to the cold. Riga felt a bone-chilling -29 C, the lowest temperature recorded since 1956. Moscow sank to -38 C, a figure not observed since 1978-79.

Massive snowfalls hit Japan -- up to four metres in Niigata Prefecture northwest of Tokyo -- and by mid-February the cold had claimed 118 lives. Central and southern Portugal saw snow for the first time in 50 years. Heavy snow forced the closure of the Acropolis on Jan. 25, while the Danube in northeast Bulgaria was 90% frozen over. New Delhi experienced frost for the first time in 70 years. An estimated 180 people succumbed to cold in India.