April 2016 in BC

This month has seen some dramatic highs in the province and has been relatively dry.  

We have seen temperatures in mid April in Victoria that would be close to record highs at the end of May.   Record highs that have stood for decades, or in one case more than 100 years, have fallen by up to five degrees.

We have seen a dramatic number of wildfires in BC already.   We are just short of 15,000 hectares burned in BC.    This would be a very high large area burned at the end of June in most years.  It is in fact a larger area than what burned in 13 of the last 96 years.

Globally February and March were dramatically warmer than in the past.

So is this climate change?   Likely but it is also not the only reason for extremes.   We are in an El Nino which leads to warmer temperatures in some parts of the world.

We are experiencing the strongest El Nino on record.   This should mean BC is warmer and drier than normal, which seems to be the case, but the warmer temperatures of this spring are wildly out of the normal range.   El Nino should mean other areas are seeing cooler temperatures but this is not the case that I can see anywhere globally.

The extreme highs we saw in BC last week are well outside of any historical precedence - not only were records set, but those records were up to five degrees higher.   There is no way this can be placed on El Nino, no matter how strong,   This is clearly climate change.   The only significant change in the last century has been the increase in greenhouse gases from humans.