LOSTMANS FIVE BAY, Fla. -- Huddling inside a tent while a supercell thunderstorm raged across Everglades National Park, I had to wonder whether there's a difference between the rainy and dry seasons in South Florida anymore.
Normally, the Gulf Coast of Florida is devoid of precipitation between November and April, except for a handful of severe winter storms that bring the region its only rains of the dry season.
But the storm over my head on the night of Feb. 12 was no ordinary low-pressure system. It was a vortex known as a mesocyclone that rattled around for 12 straight hours, constantly flickering with lightning as it dumped almost 13 centimetres of rain and spawned at least one confirmed tornado.
In Everglades City, 35 kilometres northwest of my campsite, a low-intensity twister damaged boats, flipped over two Cessna aircraft and tore part of the roof off a school. Nobody was injured, but the intensity of the storm sent rattled park rangers into the back-country to ensure no canoest or kayaker was stupid enough to move around in the wind and lightning.
"We never get storms like this, at least not during the dry season," said the ranger who checked on my campsite, echoing a sentiment I heard several times in South Florida -- the weather is getting weirder and weirder.
In 2005, the nastier-than-normal hurricane season that saw Katrina devastate New Orleans also spawned Wilma, which battered Florida's southwestern coast and closed many of the canoe routes and back-country campsites in Everglades National Park.
Though the science is nowhere near conclusive, the frequency of storms outside the hurricane season has the trailer-park residents of Chokoloskee Island talking about a gradual blurring of the lines between the rainy and dry seasons.
Even among climate-change skeptics -- and there are a lot of them living in the affluent, conservative communities of nearby Naples and Marco Island -- the phrase "global warming" is starting to become more than just a bogeyman popularized by that guy Floridians famously did not elect, Al Gore.
Earlier this month, I travelled down to Everglades National Park precisely because I wanted to paddle around the famous wetlands while they still exist.
Although the park itself one of the largest protected places in the continental United States, more than a century of short-sighted land-drainage projects and unchecked urban development have shrunk the famous "river of grass" to a mere fraction of its former size and left its waters overfertilized and a little too salty.
The water-drainage issues are well-documented; what's new is the fear of wacky weather, as well as something that scares almost everyone from Miami to Ft. Myers: the prospect of rising sea levels.
The vast majority of the Everglades stands only one to two metres above sea level. The only actual "dry land" in the park itself is comprised of shell mounds built up over millennia by mollusc-eating First Nations.
If the world's oceans rise as some climatologists predict, the Everglades will completely disappear, along with much of the populated coast of south Florida.
Using a GPS receiver, I tried to find the highest point at every campsite I visited in the Everglades. On Mormon Key, an oval of sand and mangrove trees, one spot behind a terrace of a beach stood a dizzying 2.1 metres above the Gulf of Mexico.
The glistening cities of Marco Island, Naples and Ft. Myers max out between three and five metres, while parts of mainland Miami tower 13 metres above Biscayne Bay.
But much of South Florida is only a lapping wave above the ocean, which is now expected to rise no less than one or two metres by 2100 -- but quite possibly six metres, according to current predictions.
This has politicians across the state actually talking about abandoning low-lying coastal areas in favour of protecting inland ridges, according to reports in the Miami Herald.
"It might be better to buy a boat," University of Miami coastal geologist Harold Wanless told the Herald in December, when he addressed the state legislature.
The doomsday predictions may not come true for decades. But the fear -- and quite possibly, the weird weather -- is already here.
In a trip spanning 6,000 kilometres and 45 degrees of latitude, Free Press reporter Bartley Kives is travelling from Florida through Winnipeg and on to the Arctic to see climate change in action. This is the first of his dispatches.
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