2016 will mark the 10-year anniversary of a very important film that put a lot of teenagers to sleep.

That film was An Inconvenient Truth. Ten years ago, at the age of 16, I, like thousands of high-school students across the country, was forced to watch former U.S. vice-president Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning documentary — a mashup of PowerPoint data and melting ice caps — in a class of overwhelmingly bored peers.

On screen, Gore was kind and intelligent, but he wasn’t exactly rabble-rousing, especially to a group of young Canadians who had never seen or, in some cases, even heard of him. But what made the American politician’s passion project doubly dull at the time was the fact that despite boatloads of research pointing to a warming climate, it was cold outside.

For a lot of people (especially hormonal adolescents) seeing — not thinking — is believing; and when all you see is snow and slush, animated evidence pointing to a future absent those things might alarm you, but not enough to prod you into activist mode.

In fact, the only popular misconception as globally resistant to reason and proof in certain places as our blithe indifference to climate change may be the certainty that Canada is still a “cold country.”

Talk to anyone who doesn’t live here, and Canada remains a synonym for cold (cleanly cold, politely cold, social-welfare-net cold — but cold). Yet anyone who’s been walking outside in shorts this past week in the GTA knows better. Baby, it isn’t cold outside. In fact, it’s balmy, especially by Canadian standards.

In other words, it’s the kind of 1 degree C weather that Americans can’t handle, but that inspires teenage boys in Toronto to play pond hockey in shorts and a T-shirt. I haven’t turned on my heat yet — and Christmas is over.

But ironically, the reason for this weird weather isn’t Al Gore-ian; it’s El Nino — a weather phenomenon that arises from a band of warm ocean water that develops in the equatorial Pacific west of South America every five years or so, often reaching its highest temperatures around Christmas time (hence the “El Nino” appellation — it’s Spanish for the Christ child).

And though scientists argue that the phenomenon may be more extreme this time around because of climate change, few have said the warm temperatures are a direct and singular result of global warming.

Yet it feels as though for the first time, in light of this particularly, weirdly balmy, El-Nino weather, normal Canadians (not just activists or climatologists) are talking about climate change — and talking about it not as a theory whose effects we won’t know for many years, but as a living, breathing fact.

El Nino has managed to do in less than a month what Al Gore has been trying to do for a decade: alarm us.

The irony is almost too good to be true: an extreme weather event not directly attributed to global warming has made believers out of people who previously doubted Gore’s message and their own senses when it came to the warming of the winters around them.

I cannot count the amount of times I have heard in passing conversation or seen on social media fearful laments about the warm temperatures from people who were either indifferent to the plight of the planet or who denied that the planet was in trouble at all.

You know something strange is happening in Canada if small talk about unusually good weather is rife with dread. The question is: Will that fear and attention paid to climate change translate into action or will it erode in February when temperatures are likely to drop?

I suspect the latter will hold. Just as I suspect that when David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada, tells us, as he did recently, that Canada is losing its “reputation as the winter people,” he is whistling in the wind of winters past.

In fact, scientists predict the latter half of winter will be brutal this year as usual, but even without that validation our brand would be safe.

I don’t think we could shed our “reputation as the winter people” if global warming erased all the snow from every peak in the nation.

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Our ski hills could be dripping hot lava, and I can still see Americans trooping to them as December wanes, skis in hand, blowing phantom cold vapour, feeling phantom shivers. What global warming? What warm Canadian winters? The truth is inconvenient; what we want to believe is painless.

Emma Teitel is a National columnist. Her column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

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