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Leonardo DiCaprio spent last winter in our part of the world shooting The Revenant with director Alejandro G. Inarritu.

It was during that movie shoot that DiCaprio faced a “terrifying” moment. Here’s how he described it, as reported by Variety.com:

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We were in Calgary and the locals were saying, ‘This has never happened in our province ever.’ We would come and there would be eight feet of snow, and then all of a sudden a warm gust of wind would come.

He was speaking to an industry audience at a Q&A for The Revenant. DiCaprio is currently working on a documentary about climate change, with a focus on weather patterns in 2015. He told the Q&A:

…it was scary. I’ve never experienced something so firsthand that was so dramatic. You see the fragility of nature and how easily things can be completely transformed with just a few degrees difference. It’s terrifying, and it’s what people are talking about all over the world. And it’s simply just going to get worse.

While he didn’t mention the specific date when that warm gust of air blew into town, Calgary got some very balmy weather last January. It reached 17 C on Jan. 25, sending Calgarians to patios. In T-shirts.

So Calgary.

January 2014 was relatively warm, too, with averages temperatures through the month nearly four degrees Celsius above normals.

We’re not trying to tell DiCaprio there’s no symptoms of climate change happening around us. But it’s really a shame that he found a glorious Chinook to be horrible.

DiCaprio would have been well-served to read this description of the warm, east-bound winds as written in the Herald 115 years ago (via ed.ted.com):

Those who have not the warm, invigorating Chinook winds of this country, cannot well comprehend what a blessing they are. The icy clutch of winter is lessened, the earth throws off its winding sheet of snow. Humanity ventures forth to inhale the balmy spring like air. Animated nature rejoices. —Calgary Weekly Herald, 1900

This story originally appearedon the Calgary Herald’s new Smartphone App. Download it for yourself foriOS at the App Store, or at the Google Play Store for Android devices.