Environment Canada statistics confirmed that the last winter was unbelievably brutal, indicating the season’s increased chill factor and heavier snowfalls all over the country. The cold turned quite icy and heating systems in Edmonton households were taxed to the limit that some systems couldn’t keep up with the capacity required to heat any given space.

The last winter, according to Matt MacDonald, a meteorologist from Environment Canada, was so unusually harsh that Quebec and Ontario experienced the coldest February in 115 years. This extreme of temperature is a phenomenon that is also being observed in different forms all over the globe.

In 2014, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), confirmed that Britain had its wettest winter in 250 years, while Vietnam experienced snowfall—for the first time.  Russia was also reported to have experienced a ten-degree sharp rise in temperature at the start of the year, while Australia and Slovenia experienced heatwaves. It seems that unusual weather patterns have been occurring more frequently all over the globe in the last decade alone.

WMO explains that the equatorial and polar regions have experienced extremes, bringing in unusual amounts of snowfall, or drastic increases in temperature, and the manifestations of these shifts are being observed in 2015, as well. Could this mean that colder winters and warmer summers are soon to become the normal trend? Some people naturally believe that climate change is solely to blame for much of the world’s weather-related disasters, but scientists are being cautious about where to put the blame.

More research studies are needed, they say, and other contributing factors must be explored. This is not to say that climate change plays no part in the drastic shifts, because it certainly does. To conclude that climate change is the sole reason for the unusual weather patterns, would only make for a hasty conclusion.

What is certain, however, is that the normal weather patterns as we know them are becoming more irregular. Everyone must do his or her part to prepare for extreme conditions. Before the dead cold of winter, it’s no small act to make sure to have your local Stony Plain heating contractor like Capital Plumbing and Heating upgrade your heating system so that no one in your family will have to suffer the micro effects of the harsh winter due to the larger phenomenon of climate change.