The science behind snowflakes

In a study that could enhance weather forecasting, Utah researchers discover that how snowflakes move is astonishingly predictable.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

 

IMAGE: 

GRADUATE STUDENT RYAN SZCZERBINSKI EXAMINES INSTRUMENTATION CALLED A DIFFERENTIAL EMISSIVITY IMAGING DISDROMETER, OR DEID, DEVELOPED BY UNIVERSITY OF UTAH RESEARCHERS AND INSTALLED AT ALTA NEAR THE TOP OF LITTLE COTTONWOOD CANYON. THE EQUIPMENT MEASURES THE HYDROMETEOR MASS, SIZE AND DENSITY OF SNOWFLAKES.

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CREDIT: TIM GARRETT, UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

Tim Garrett has devoted his scientific career to characterizing snowflakes, the protean particles of ice that form in clouds and dramatically change as they fall to Earth.

Now the University of Utah atmospheric scientist is unlocking the mystery of how snowflakes move in response to air turbulence that accompanies snowfall using novel instrumentation developed on campus. And after analyzing more than half a million snowflakes, what his team has discovered has left him astonished.

Rather than something incomprehensibly complicated, predicting how snowflakes move proved to be surprisingly simple, they found.

“How snowflakes fall has attracted a lot of interest for many decades because it is a critical parameter for predicting weather and climate change,” Garrett said. “This is related to the speed of the water cycle. How fast moisture falls out of the sky determines the lifetime of storms.”

'Letters sent from Heaven'

The famed Japanese physicist Ukichiro Nakaya termed snow crystals “letters sent from heaven” because their delicate structures carry information about temperature and humidity fluctuations in the clouds where crystal basal and prism facets competed for water vapor deposition.

While every snowflake is believed to be completely unique, how these frosty particles fall through the air—as the accelerate, drift and swirl—follows patterns, according to new research by Garrett and colleagues in the College of Engineering. Snowflake movement has important implications for weather forecasting and climate change, even in the tropics.

“Most precipitation starts as snow. How question of how fast it falls affects predictions of where on the ground precipitation lands, and how long clouds last to reflect radiation to outer space,” Garrett said. “It can even affect forecasts of a hurricane trajectory.”

Also involved with the research are Dhiraj Singh and Eric Pardyjak of the U’s Department of Mechanical Engineering

To study snowflake movement, the team needed a way to measure individual snowflakes, which has been a challenging puzzle for years.

“They have very low masses. They may only weigh 10 micrograms, a hundredth of a milligram, so they cannot be weighed with very high precision,” Garrett said.

Working with engineering faculty, Garrett developed instrumentation called the Differential Emissivity Imaging Disdrometer, or DEID, which measures snowflakes’ hydrometeor mass, size and density. This device has since been commercialized by a company Garrett co-founded called Particle Flux Analytics. The Utah Department of Transportation has deployed the equipment in Little Cottonwood Canyon to help with avalanche forecasting, he said.

For Garrett’s field experiments, his team set it up at Alta, the famed ski destination and Utah's snowiest place for the winter of 2020-21. The instrumentation was deployed alongside measurements of air temperature, relative humidity and turbulence, and placed directly beneath a particle tracking system consisting of a laser light sheet and a single-lens reflex camera.

“By measuring the turbulence, the mass, density and size of the snowflakes and watching how they meander in the turbulence,” Garrett said, “we are able to create a comprehensive picture that hadn't been able to be obtained before in a natural environment before.”

The findings were not what the team expected.

Despite the intricate shapes of snowflakes and the uneven movement of the air they encounter, the researchers found they could predict how snowflakes would accelerate based on a parameter known as the Stokes number (St), which reflects how quickly the particles respond to changes in the surrounding air movements.

When the team analyzed the acceleration of individual snowflakes, the average increased in a nearly linear fashion with the Stokes number. Moreover, the distribution of these accelerations could be described by a single exponential curve independent of Stokes number.

The researchers found that the same mathematical pattern could be connected to how changing snowflake shapes and sizes affect how fast they fall, suggesting a fundamental connection between the way the air moves and how snowflakes change as they fall from the clouds to the ground.

“That, to me, almost seems mystical,” Garrett said. “There is something deeper going on in the atmosphere that leads to mathematical simplicity rather than the extraordinary complexity we would expect from looking at complicated snowflake structures swirling chaotically in turbulent air. We just have to look at it the right way and our new instruments enable us to see that.”

Garrett’s study, titled “A universal scaling law for Lagrangian snowflake accelerations in atmospheric turbulence,” is to be published in the journal Physics of Fluids, published by the American Institute of Physics. Funding came from the National Science Foundation.

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JOURNAL

Physics of Fluids

DOI

10.1063/5.0173359 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

universal scaling law for Lagrangian snowflake accelerations in atmospheric turbulence

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

19-Dec-2023

COI STATEMENT

The DEID technology is protected through patent US20210172855A1 co-authored with D.K.S., E.R.P., and T.J.G. and is commercially available through Particle Flux Analytics, Inc. T.J.G. is a co-owner of Particle Flux Analytics, Inc. which has a license from the University of Utah to commercialize the DEID.

Snowflakes swirling in turbulent air as they fall through a laser light sheet. Credit: Singh et al.

Snowflake accelerations mysteriously follow a predictable pattern.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS

 

VIDEO: 

SNOWFLAKES SWIRLING IN TURBULENT AIR AS THEY FALL THROUGH A LASER LIGHT SHEET.

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CREDIT: SINGH ET AL.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19, 2023 – A winter wonderland calls to mind piles of fluffy, glistening snow. But to reach the ground, snowflakes are swept into the turbulent atmosphere, swirling through the air instead of plummeting directly to the ground.

The path of precipitation is complex but important to more than just skiers assessing the potential powder on their alpine vacation or school children hoping for a snow day. Determining snowflake fall speed is crucial for predicting weather patterns and measuring climate change.

In Physics of Fluids, from AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of Utah report snowflake accelerations in atmospheric turbulence. They found that regardless of turbulence or snowflake type, acceleration follows a universal statistical pattern that can be described as an exponential distribution.

“Even in the tropics, precipitation often starts its lifetime as snow,” said author Timothy Garrett. “How fast precipitation falls greatly affects storm lifetimes and trajectories and the extent of cloud cover that may amplify or diminish climate change. Just small tweaks in model representations of snowflake fall speed can have important impacts on both storm forecasting and how fast climate can be expected to warm for a given level of elevated greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Set up in a ski area near Salt Lake City, the team battled an unprecedented 900 inches of snow. They simultaneously filmed snowfall and measured atmospheric turbulence. Using a device they invented that employs a laser light sheet, they gathered information about snowflake mass, size, and density.   

“Generally, as expected, we find that low-density ‘fluffy’ snowflakes are most responsive to surrounding turbulent eddies,” said Garrett.

Despite the system’s complexity, the team found that snowflake accelerations follow an exponential frequency distribution with an exponent of three halves. In analyzing their data, they also discovered that fluctuations in the terminal velocity frequency distribution followed the same pattern.

“Snowflakes are complicated, and turbulence is irregular. The simplicity of the problem is actually quite mysterious, particularly given there is this correspondence between the variability of terminal velocities – something ostensibly independent of turbulence – and accelerations of the snowflakes as they are locally buffeted by turbulence,” said Garrett.

Because size determines terminal velocity, a possible explanation is that the turbulence in clouds that influences snowflake size is related to the turbulence measured at the ground. Yet the factor of three halves remains a mystery.

The researchers will revisit their experiment this winter, using a mist of oil droplets to obtain a closer look at turbulence and its impact on snowflakes.

Field site near Salt Lake City where researchers battled 900 inches of snow to collect their data.

CREDIT

Singh et al.

The article “A universal scaling law for Lagrangian snowflake accelerations in atmospheric turbulence” is authored by Dhiraj Kumar Singh, Eric R. Pardyjak, and Timothy Garrett. It will appear in Physics of Fluids on Dec. 19, 2023 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0173359). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0173359.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Physics of Fluids is devoted to the publication of original theoretical, computational, and experimental contributions to the dynamics of gases, liquids, and complex fluids. See https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof.

###

---

JOURNAL

Physics of Fluids

DOI

10.1063/5.0173359 

ARTICLE TITLE

A universal scaling law for Lagrangian snowflake accelerations in atmospheric turbulence

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

19-Dec-2023

Scientist mimic nature to make nano particle metallic snowflakes

Scientists in New Zealand and Australia working at the level of atoms created something unexpected: tiny metallic snowflakes.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

 

IMAGE: NANO-SCALE SNOWFLAKE FROM GALLIUM SOLVENT view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE: WAIPAPA TAUMATA RAU, UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

Scientists in New Zealand and Australia working at the level of atoms created something unexpected: tiny metallic snowflakes.
Why’s that significant? Because coaxing individual atoms to cooperate in desired ways is leading to a revolution in engineering and technology via nanomaterials (And creating snowflakes is cool.)
 Nanoscale structures (a nanometre is one billionth of a metre) can aid electronic manufacturing, make materials stronger yet lighter, or aid environmental clean-ups by binding to toxins.

To create metallic nanocrystals, New Zealand and Australian scientists have been experimenting with gallium, a soft, silvery metal which is used in semiconductors and, unusually, liquifies at just above room temperature. Their results were just reported in the journal Science.

Professor Nicola Gaston and research fellow Dr Steph Lambie, both of Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, and Dr Krista Steenbergen of Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, collaborated with colleagues in Australia led by Professor Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh at the University of New South Wales.

The Australian team worked in the lab with nickel, copper, zinc, tin, platinum, bismuth, silver and aluminium, growing metal crystals in a liquid solvent of gallium. Metals were dissolved in gallium at high temperatures. Once cooled, the metallic crystals emerged while the gallium remained liquid. The New Zealand team, part of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, a national Centre of Research Excellence, carried out simulations of molecular dynamics to explain why differently shaped crystals emerge from different metals. (The government’s Marsden Fund supported the research.)

“What we are learning is that the structure of the liquid gallium is very important,” says Gaston. “That’s novel because we usually think of liquids as lacking structure or being only randomly structured.” Interactions between the atomistic structures of the different metals and the liquid gallium cause differently shaped crystals to emerge, the scientists showed.

The crystals included cubes, rods, hexagonal plates and the zinc snowflake shapes. The six-branched symmetry of zinc, with each atom surrounded by six neighbours at equivalent distances, accounts for the snowflake design. “In contrast to top-down approaches to forming nanostructure – by cutting away material – this bottom-up approaches relies on atoms self-assembling,” says Gaston. “This is how nature makes nanoparticles, and is both less wasteful and much more precise than top-down methods.” She says the research has opened up a new, unexplored pathway for metallic nanostructures. “There’s also something very cool in creating a metallic snowflake!”

---

JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.abm2731 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Liquid metal synthesis solvents for metallic crystals

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

8-Dec-2022

NASA explores a winter wonderland on Mars

This image acquired on July 22, 2022 by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows sand dunes moving across the landscape. Winter frost covers the colder, north-facing half of each dune. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Cube-shaped snow, icy landscapes, and frost are all part of the Red Planet's coldest season.

When winter comes to Mars, the surface is transformed into a truly otherworldly holiday scene. Snow, ice, and frost accompany the season's sub-zero temperatures. Some of the coldest of these occur at the planet's poles, where it gets as low as minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius).

Cold as it is, don't expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains. No region of Mars gets more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls over extremely flat areas. And the Red Planet's elliptical orbit means it takes many more months for winter to come around: a single Mars year is around two Earth years.

Still, the planet offers unique winter phenomena that scientists have been able to study, thanks to NASA's robotic Mars explorers. Here are a few of the things they've discovered:

HiRISE captured these “megadunes,” also called barchans. Carbon dioxide frost and ice have formed over the dunes during the winter; as this starts to sublimate during spring, the darker-colored dune sand is revealed. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Two kinds of snow

Martian snow comes in two varieties: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground.

"Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it," said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena. "If you were looking for skiing, though, you'd have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface."
Snow falls and ice and frost form on Mars, too. NASA’s spacecraft on and orbiting the Red Planet reveal the similarities to and differences from how we experience winter on Earth. Mars scientist Sylvain Piqueux of JPL explains in this video. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

How we know it snows

Snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft can't see through those clouds, and surface missions can't survive in the extreme cold. As a result, no images of falling snow have ever been captured. But scientists know it happens, thanks to a few special science instruments.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can peer through cloud cover using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which detects light in wavelengths imperceptible to the human eye. That ability has allowed scientists to detect carbon dioxide snow falling to the ground. And in 2008, NASA sent the Phoenix lander within 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) of Mars' north pole, where it used a laser instrument to detect water-ice snow falling to the surface.

The HiRISE camera captured this image of the edge of a crater in the middle of winter. The south-facing slope of the crater, which receives less sunlight, has formed patchy, bright frost, seen in blue in this enhanced-color image. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Cubic snowflakes

Because of how water molecules bond together when they freeze, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which atoms arrange themselves determines a crystal's shape. In the case of carbon dioxide, molecules in dry ice always bond in forms of four when frozen.

"Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped," Piqueux said. "Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair."

Jack Frost nipping at your rover

Water and carbon dioxide can each form frost on Mars, and both types of frost appear far more widely across the planet than snow does. The Viking landers saw water frost when they studied Mars in the 1970s, while NASA's Odyssey orbiter has observed frost forming and sublimating away in the morning sun.

HiRISE captured this spring scene, when water ice frozen in the soil had split the ground into polygons. Translucent carbon dioxide ice allows sunlight to shine through and heat gases that escape through vents, releasing fans of darker material onto the surface (shown as blue in this enhanced-color image). 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Perhaps the most fabulous discovery comes at the end of winter, when all the ice that built up begins to "thaw" and sublimate into the atmosphere. As it does so, this ice takes on bizarre and beautiful shapes that have reminded scientists of spiders, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese.

This "thawing" also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.

Provided by NASA

Explore furtherMars shines high in UK skies

NASA Explores a Winter Wonderland on Mars – Otherworldly Holiday Scene With Cube-Shaped Snow

By JET PROPULSION LABORATORY DECEMBER 24, 2022

Cube-shaped snow, icy landscapes, and frost are all part of the Red Planet’s coldest season.

When winter comes to Mars, the surface is transformed into a truly otherworldly holiday scene. Snow, ice, and frost accompany the season’s sub-zero temperatures. Some of the coldest of these occur at the planet’s poles, where it gets as low as minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius).

The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured these images of sand dunes covered by frost just after winter solstice. The frost here is a mixture of carbon dioxide (dry) ice and water ice and will disappear in a few months when spring arrives. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Cold as it is, don’t expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains. No region of Mars gets more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls over extremely flat areas. And the Red Planet’s elliptical orbit means it takes many more months for winter to come around: a single Mars year is around two Earth years

Snow falls and ice and frost form on Mars, too. NASA’s spacecraft on and orbiting the Red Planet reveal the similarities to and differences from how we experience winter on Earth. Mars scientist Sylvain Piqueux of JPL explains in this video. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Still, the planet offers unique winter phenomena that scientists have been able to study, thanks to NASA’s robotic Mars explorers. Here are a few of the things they’ve discovered:

Two Kinds of Snow

Martian snow comes in two varieties: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground.

“Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it,” said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena. “If you were looking for skiing, though, you’d have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface.”

HiRISE captured these “megadunes,” also called barchans. Carbon dioxide frost and ice have formed over the dunes during the winter; as this starts to sublimate during spring, the darker-colored dune sand is revealed. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

How We Know It Snows

Snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft can’t see through those clouds, and surface missions can’t survive in the extreme cold. As a result, no images of falling snow have ever been captured. But scientists know it happens, thanks to a few special science instruments.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can peer through cloud cover using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which detects light in wavelengths imperceptible to the human eye. That ability has allowed scientists to detect carbon dioxide snow falling to the ground. And in 2008, NASA sent the Phoenix lander within 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) of Mars’ north pole, where it used a laser instrument to detect water-ice snow falling to the surface.

NASA scientists can measure the size and shape distribution of snow particles, layer by layer, in a storm. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission is an international satellite project that provides next-generation observations of rain and snow worldwide every three hours. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Ryan Fitzgibbons

Cubic Snowflakes

Because of how water molecules bond together when they freeze, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which atoms arrange themselves determines a crystal’s shape. In the case of carbon dioxide, molecules in dry ice always bond in forms of four when frozen.

“Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped,” Piqueux said. “Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.”

The HiRISE camera captured this image of the edge of a crater in the middle of winter. The south-facing slope of the crater, which receives less sunlight, has formed patchy, bright frost, seen in blue in this enhanced-color image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Jack Frost Nipping at Your Rover

Water and carbon dioxide can each form frost on Mars, and both types of frost appear far more widely across the planet than snow does. The Viking landers saw water frost when they studied Mars in the 1970s, while NASA’s Odyssey orbiter has observed frost forming and sublimating away in the morning Sun.

HiRISE captured this spring scene, when water ice frozen in the soil had split the ground into polygons. Translucent carbon dioxide ice allows sunlight to shine through and heat gases that escape through vents, releasing fans of darker material onto the surface (shown as blue in this enhanced-color image). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Winter’s Wondrous End

Perhaps the most fabulous discovery comes at the end of winter, when all the ice that built up begins to “thaw” and sublimate into the atmosphere. As it does so, this ice takes on bizarre and beautiful shapes that have reminded scientists of spiders, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese.

This “thawing” also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.

 

Alberta’s Childlike Fantasies

Boohoo to laws governing nationhood, nature and reality itself, cry Premier Smith and her base.

Mitchell Anderson

16 Nov 2022

TheTyee.ca
Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The Tyee.

Reality can suck. But magical thinking won’t get it done. 

Image via Shutterstock.

It’s nice to feel special. Everyone enjoys that sense of certainty when you feel seen and loved and important. And while that feeling of primacy is crucial to early childhood development, it can become a dangerous indulgence later in life if large groups of people feel they are exempt from the consequences of their actions, the laws of nature, or even our shared reality.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and her core followers in the United Conservative Party are exactly such snowflakes. Smith declared to her enthusiastic supporters that the first action of her government would be to pass the “Alberta Sovereignty Act,” effectively treating the Canadian Constitution like a buffet. This magical thinking holds that Alberta could somehow select those federal powers deemed palatable and cast aside others such as federal environmental oversight like so much jello salad.

This audacious claim to Alberta exceptionalism was central to her pitch for party leadership. Rivals who dared acknowledge reality were scorned as sellouts by her true believers. Former premier Jason Kenney declared Smith’s proposed Alberta Sovereignty Act a “full-frontal attack on the rule of law” and “catastrophically stupid,” as did almost all of Smith’s leadership competitors. Rational thought however is a hard sell in Alberta these days and Smith swept to power with a majority UCP support.

Next up were the laws of nature. The COVID pandemic has so far killed 47,000 Canadians — more than were lost in the Second World War — and over 40 are added to that toll every day. Over 5,000 Albertans so far are dead due to this largely preventable disease. Yet Smith remains a hardcore vaccine skeptic despite almost three continuous years of teachable moments.

Smith and other so-called populists seem to believe the best way to combat a rapidly evolving virus is with political bluster targeted towards their partisan base. As our health-care system teeters towards collapse, Smith has pledged to forever end any public effort to control COVID with proven tools like mask and vaccine mandates. The provincial chief medical officer would be replaced with a handpicked team of advisors reporting to the premier. And who might that team include? Smith shocked even members of her own party by inviting discredited quack Dr. Paul Alexander to advise her government on COVID policy.

Alexander previously provided COVID policy advice to disgraced ex-president Donald Trump and advocated a “let ’er rip” strategy to accelerate widespread infection of a virus that has ended over one million American lives. In a leaked email from 2020, Alexander opined, “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk… so we use them to develop herd… we want them infected.”

Alexander recently characterized safe and proven COVID vaccines as a “bioweapon.” He also chose to appear on a September episode of Infowars hosted by Alex Jones — recently ordered to pay over $1.4 billion in damages for spreading heinous lies about the Sandy Hook massacre. If Smith succeeds in implementing her pet theories on epidemiology and public health, it will be beleaguered health-care workers who will be picking up the pieces as usual.

Politics is another area where western snowflakes feel an aggrieved sense of entitlement. Last year the so-called “freedom convoy” held the nation’s capital hostage in a month-long occupation. Not content to merely protest public policy — a core Canadian value protected by the Constitution — many had signed onto a “memorandum of understanding” demanding that the Governor General dissolve the duly elected Parliament and install a junta of disgruntled truck drivers to run the country instead.

While this was often called a trucker protest, most actual truckers in the country — 90 per cent of whom were vaccinated — wanted nothing to do with it. This was instead an insurrection borne of ill-informed entitlement, its members apparently unaware that the rest of the country was just as fed up with the pandemic as they were.


Danielle Smith Isn’t Nuts, Says Kenney. Just Her Policies

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Seeking to achieve political power in Canada is of course every citizen’s right — it just involves time and effort that the Ottawa occupiers didn’t want to bother with. Any politician knows well the endless hours involved in getting nominated, door knocking, trying to address the often-conflicting concerns of constituents, and of course becoming elected.

Addled by the ethers within their social media silos, convoy leaders seemed incredulous that an elected prime minister refused to negotiate with them as equals, even as many of them called on Justin Trudeau to be tried for treason.

The sad fact is that this unelected mob did in fact achieve a semblance of political power. The Ottawa occupation and border blockades cost the Canadian economy up to $5.2 billion per week and did not end until the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act. Result: all levels of government are now so reticent to redeploy pandemic restrictions that proven tools like mask and vaccination mandates are effectively off the table.

And what did the mob achieve? More Canadians have died from COVID so far in 2022 than all of 2021 or 2020. We’re seeing almost 160,000 new infections each day, 7,900 of which will result in long COVID — a debilitating condition that will cost governments around the world billions of dollars each year.


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Hospital wait times in Ontario for most patients now reach up to 45 hours. Demand for intensive care beds in children’s hospitals are now beyond capacity in many parts of Canada. Harrassed by anti-science snowflakes, and burnt out by preventable hospital overflows, registered nurses are fleeing their profession at double the rate of five years ago. The pandemic might be officially considered over but the virus has not got the memo. All of these consequences can be itemized under the towering costs of misinformation and the peculiar petulant politics that have taken root in many parts of our country.

COVID is certainly not the only crisis we will collectively need to grapple with. The climate emergency, threats to democracy, and an uncertain economic future all demand our disciplined, rational focus. A rapidly changing world demands that we not waste vital time indulging the whims of any favoured political cohort, no matter how special they feel.

Enough with the toddler tantrums in Alberta. The time has come to set aside childish things and act like grown-ups.