Winter 2013

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, 

Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, 

Seems nowhere to alight 

the housemates sit  

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed 

In a tumultuous privacy of storm

Winter in Canada always comes with many surprises each year. This year the surprise is relentless extreme cold with heavy snow across the country. The storm always arrives gentle and quiet; a distinct calm pervades both the earth and the sky. The movements on the streets are muffled. There is no uproar of winds and no trumpets of sounds. The soft, feathery snow flurries fall like exquisite crystals. The pavement glitters with sliver sparks for a while. 
The next day, rude winds mar the beautiful process. The clouds bring heavy snow and freezing rain, the ground turns in to slush. The stillness is replaced by noise, accidents are spiked. Cars clamour as the roads begin to slide. Everything that is poetic turns into a battlefield. The wind bolts, it gets coarser; the flakes increase in number and size and the snow grows steadily. The flakes fall like pellets, whipping, cracking and consuming trees and power lines. The earth throbs with frost. The impulse to travel dulls, and people suspend indoors. There are white curtains above you and white screens about you. The snow houses you and secludes you. You are wrapped in dark obscurity, caught up with power outage, the cold obliterates. 

As I pass the darkened streets, it is exhilarating in the extreme, my world enveloped in mantles of white, death waiting at every corner side. We huddle together, my husband and I, quietly snuggling  at the sight of wild conflagration of wind and snow. Is this what the Syrians must feel in the cold? Is this what war looks like? Frost penetrates like a blast around everything. Ten and thousands of people were without power: heating, water and electricity for a week. Winter 2013 has been dreadful and beautiful - you decide!

 

                    

The National Research Council of the National Academies (NRCNA) has pre-published (available to the public as of Dec. 2013), an extensive 200-pg study: “Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change, Anticipating Surprises.” U.S. intelligence agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academies sponsored the NRCNA report. The National Academies consists of: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. The NRCNA report mentions the risk of abrupt climate change: we have already been witnessed via 100-year floods and severe embedded droughts as well as bouts of extreme cold weather conditions throughout the hemisphere. 

In, Saving the Global Climate from Runaway Arctic Methane Release and Sea Ice Loss, John B. Davies writes: “The warming of the Arctic seems likely to lead to the total melting of the Arctic Sea Ice in late summer no later than the summer of 2018 and to massive release of Methane from the melting of Methane Hydrates beneath the ESAS [Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf] by the same date leading to runaway Global Warming and the end of most life of earth” - Arctic News, Dec. 19, 2013

Muslims already believe in the Day of Judgement so the "end of most life of earth” doesn't seem like a very rambunctious, gutsy forecast. As The Day the Earth Nearly Died, BBC / Horizon, December 2002 explains, The earth did come to an end - almost 250 million years ago. Almost every living thing suddenly died. Geological studies show that 95% of life forms perished. Scientists call it the Permian Mass Extinction, which was far more terrible than the later extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, killing off 60% of all species on the planet. It took 100,000 years for the earth to recover. This possibly may have been the time of Nuh (a.s). Extinctions certainly do happen. Doesn't matter how exactly.  The point is not to take time, health, wealth or family for granted. Sometimes we need a crisis to wake up from our slumber.