A matter of temperature

Minus 25C- gray and starting to snow. Minus 28C yesterday, bright, sunny and cold. Walking in the ravine, with the the scintillating ice crystals on the snow surface and the sharp clear cold was wonderful. They say it will be plus two by the weekend. The temperature oscillations this winter are beyond my experience….drastic changes over 24 hours, or within two or three days. It makes me wonder how plants, animals, people, can adapt. This face of climate change is emerging as a key pattern… unpredictability of weather, and drastic shifts, spatial heterogeneity in the pattern of temperature and precipitation. Such shifts are stressors: winter thaws followed by hard freezes make it hard for caribou to paw through the snow to uncover the “reindeer moss” lichens they eat below. Moose find it difficult to walk through snowpacks with several crusts buried within them. Warm days in fall followed by sudden hard freezes can interfere with dormancy mechanisms in plants….similarly in the spring, where if plants break dormancy too soon and open their leaves, they may then be hit by frost, or a late season fall of wet snow can break limbs and inflict serious damage on trees. Organisms that can tolerate unpredictable change, that have wide amplitude in their habitat parameters, will survive. Anything that requires exactness and predictability in timing of change will be hard hit. Resilience is key… A Gwich’in friend once said, “Our Elders tell us never to plan. Because you never know what’s going to happen.” She then went on to comment ruefully that it was difficult with jobs to be flexible, and take advantage of opportunities… something I feel myself in a small way when it’s a perfect day to ski, but I have a meeting on the calendar that keeps me inside in a windowless room staring at projected powerpoints glaring on the screen. For travelling on the land, responding to the right combination of snow conditions and temperature is more important. As our structures become ever more bureaucratized and removed from the natural world, I worry about our ability to perceive and respond to change. Inertia is strong. The weather may change quickly, but our institutions change slowly, and are not well coupled to changes outside the socio-economic system.