Canada and the climate crisis: a state of denial 3

The Yellowknife and Kelowna wildfires are burning at the same time in what is already Canada's worst season on record, just a week after Lahaina on Maui was destroyed with hundreds, if not thousands, dead there. "And yet, this pales in comparison to what we can expect in the years ahead from ongoing global warming arising from greenhouse gas emissions released through the combustion of fossil fuels This year’s fire season record will be broken in the near future as warming continues. ... It appears little has been done to prepare rural Canada for what’s in store as governments deal with immediate, rather than transformational approaches to wildfire management." Let alone I would add, the Trudeau Liberals or provincial governments ending the production of fossil fuels that literally fuel this destruction.  

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The McDougall Creek wildfire burning in West Kelowna early Friday morning.

The devastating wildfire that destroyed the historic Maui town of Lahaina in Hawaii was still making headlines when the Northwest Territories issued an evacuation order for Yellowknifeand British Columbia declared a provincewide state of emergency.

All 22,000 residents of Yellowknife are being evacuated in advance of a wall of flame from out-of-control wildfires converging on the capital city. Yet this isn’t the first time an entire Canadian town has been cleared.

In May 2016, all 90,000 residents of Fort McMurray, Alta., were evacuated shortly before wildfires engulfed 2,400 homes and businesses with a total cost of more than $4 billion. In 2017 in British Columbia, the wildfire season led to the evacuation of more than 65,000 residents across numerous communities, costing $130 million in insured damages and $568 million in firefighting costs. Let’s not forget the June 2021 heat dome resulting in temperature records being broken across British Columbia three days in a row. The heat wave culminated in Lytton, a village in the southern part of the province, recording 49.6 C on June 29, the hottest temperature ever observed anywhere in Canada and breaking the previous record by five degrees. The next day, wildfires engulfed Lytton, destroying more than 90 per cent of the town.

The summer of 2023 is one for the record books. June and July were the warmest months ever recorded, and extreme temperature records were broken around the world By mid-July, Canada had already recorded the worst forest fire season on record. And British Columbia broke its previous 2018 record for worst recorded forest fire season. With several weeks to go in the 2023 forest fire season, more than six times the 10-year average area has already been consumed by wildfires. This year’s fire season record will be broken in the near future as warming continues. And once again, it’s not as if what’s happening is a surprise. ...

It appears little has been done to prepare rural Canada for what’s in store as governments deal with immediate, rather than transformational approaches to wildfire management. ...

Forest management practices including forest fire prevention, monoculture reforestation and the use of glyphosate to actively kill off broadleaf plant species, will all have to be reassessed from a science- and risk-based perspective....

Pressure is certainly mounting on decision-makers to become more proactive in both mitigating and preparing for the impacts of climate change. An Aug. 14 pivotal ruling from the Montana First Judicial District Court sided with a group of youth who claimed that the State of Montana violated their right to a healthy environment.  A similar case brought by seven youth against the Ontario government after the province reduced its greenhouse gas reduction targets has also been heralded as groundbreaking. As the number of such court cases grow, governments and corporations will need to do more to both protect their citizens from the impacts of climate change, and to aggressively decarbonize energy systems.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Alberta government is next to be taken to court by youth after Premier Danielle Smith’s outrageous economic and environmental decision to put a moratorium on renewable energy projects.

Kelowna has just declared a state of emergency as the McDougall Creek fire starts consuming homes in the region. And this, coming on the heels of the 20th anniversary of the Okanagan Mountain Park fire, when more than 27,000 people had to be evacuated and 239 Kelowna homes were lost. ...

Rather than waiting to respond reactively to the next fire season, proactive preparation is the appropriate way forward. For as the old adage states: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

https://theconversation.com/ca/?utm_source=MSN&utm_medium=related-link&u...

Congratulations to Elizabeth May, who I do not usually praise, for summing it up best as the climate crisis devastates the world, and particularly Canada, where the capital of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife as well as six other communities, are under evacuation order, while BC, and especially Kelowna, are in flames, and the first hurricane ever to hit California is rapidly approaching that state because the Pacific Ocean is warming enough to now support hurricanes:

 Welcome to the best summer of the rest of your lives. 

Like Canada, the rest of the world is being devastated by wildfires, as well as drought. 

Severe and several cases of wildfire around the world have left people in grave worry. Not only these have become frequent, but deadly too, due to the unpredictable nature and impact of climate change.

Europe, a continent, that usually sees moderate temperature, is burning – in the sun and through the wildfire. From Greece to Italy, Spain and Portugal, Turkey and Switzerland, European countries have been battling wildfires in the recent times as the continent continues to be gripped by a heatwave.

The continent is experiencing another year of droughts and wildfires. The effects of scorching, dry weather, has led to wildfires in many regions. Earlier, June was recorded as the hottest month in the 174-year history of temperature monitoring. Now, July has been confirmed as the hottest month on record globally after several heatwaves in parts of Europe, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

In July, strong winds and temperatures above 40°C fuelled blazes that ripped through farms and factories and forced more than 20,000 visitors and locals to flee seaside resorts and their homes on the island of Rhodes, Greece. Further, in July, the fire brigade reported 61 wildfires across Greece in just 24 hours.

Similarly, three elderly people died on the Italian island of Sicily as firefighters battled 1,400 fires across southern parts of the country between 23 and 25 July.

Across the Mediterranean in Algeria, at least 34 people died and more than 8,000 firefighters were brought in to bring flames under control, as fires spread to neighbouring Tunisia.

Meanwhile, it took 250 firefighters and nine aircraft to control a wildfire that burnt 400 hectares of woodland on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria. Further, on 10 August 2023, València airport, in Spain recorded 46.8°C (116°F). This beats the previous all-time heat record by over 3°C.

Further, more than 600 firefighters were deployed to tackle blazes in the Portuguese mountainous area of Cascais, not far from the capital Lisbon.

The haunting visuals from Hawaii sheds light on how dangerous wildfires can be as it gulps everything that comes in its path, destroying homes, buildings, and lives. The death toll has jumped to 53 in the Maui fires.

The fires of Amazon rainforest is no different. Scientists have predicted an intense El Niño (unusually warm water in the Pacific leading to disruptions of weather patterns) during the second half of 2023. For the Amazon, this raises concerns about a potentially devastating fire season. The combination of El Niño, record-breaking temperatures for the past eight years, and deforestation creates conditions that are ripe for fires.

In India, the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change said that the Forest Survey of India has reported alarming numbers of forest fires detected over the past five years using the SNPP-VIIRS sensor – 2,10,286, 1,24,473, 3,45,989, 2,23,333, and 2,12,249, respectively. The numbers raise concerns about the escalating threat of forest fires across the nation.

Evacuation is the immediate response to wildfire. Locals and tourists both feel the impact of it. Wildfires disrupts livelihood of people, burns home, and affects the economy of the place. However, it is not limited to just this. The threat of food insecurity also increases with wildfire, as tons of crops get wasted on farms that get caught in these wildfires.

Its environmental impact is also too high. Wildfire smoke is a mixture of hazardous air pollutants, such PM2.5, NO2, ozone, aromatic hydrocarbons, or lead. In addition to contaminating the air with toxic pollutants, wildfires also simultaneously impact the climate by releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The impact can also be felt on temperature that continues to rise. Meanwhile, glaciers continue to melt. Antarctic sea ice has also been at record lows this July, freezing less than in any other winter since satellites began observations in 1979.

With climate change leading to warmer temperatures and drier conditions and the increasing urbanization of rural areas, the fire season is starting earlier and ending later. Wildfire events are getting more extreme in terms of acres burned, duration and intensity, and they can disrupt transportation, communications, water supply, and power and gas services.

https://newsonair.com/2023/08/11/growing-catastrophe-of-unchecked-climat...

On August 14th, Montana youth in a first-of-its-kind case won an important lawsuit in which the state violated its own constitution by "failing to provide a clean and healthful environment by state laws promoting fossil fuel extraction and forbidding the consideration of climate impacts during environmental review".

 

The young plaintiffs in Held v. State of Montana, ages 5 to 22, walk to the courthouse with their lawyer.© William Campbell/Getty Images

Sixteen young Montanans who sued their state over climate change emerged victorious on Aug. 14, 2023, from a first-of-its-kind climate trial.

The case, Held v. State of Montana, was based on allegations that state energy policies violate the young plaintiffs’ constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment” – a right that has been enshrined in the Montana Constitution since the 1970s. The plaintiffs claimed that state laws promoting fossil fuel extraction and forbidding the consideration of climate impacts during environmental review violate their constitutional environmental right.

Judge Kathy Seeley’s ruling in the youths’ favor sets a powerful precedent for the role of “green amendments” in climate litigation. 

 

The lawsuit, heard in Montana district court, was the first in the U.S. to rely on a state’s constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment to challenge state policies that fuel climate change. In light of the success in Held, it won’t be the last. ....

Pennsylvania, Montana, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Illinois all amended their state constitutions during the environmental movement of the 1970s to recognize the people’s right to a clean and healthful environment. Because these green amendments are constitutional provisions, they function as limits on what government can do.

Early cases in Pennsylvania and Illinois testing these newly recognized constitutional rights saw little success. By the 1990s, the Illinois Supreme Court had eviscerated Illinois’ green amendment, concluding that the environmental right did not provide a basis upon which a citizen could bring a lawsuit.

In 1999, however, when green amendments were all but forgotten, a single case in Montana quietly vindicated Montanans’ constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment. 

It was brought by local environmental groups over water quality concerns at a proposed gold mine. At that time, Montana’s environmental laws allowed the state to issue permits for projects that would discharge pollutants into Montana waters without conducting any environmental review. The Montana Supreme Court determined that such a law violated Montanans’ fundamental right to a clean and healthful environment and was unconstitutional.

The next green amendment success took 14 years and occurred in Pennsylvania. In the early 2010s, Pennsylvania enacted a state law that gave the oil and gas industry the right to commence hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, anywhere in the state. This law prevented local governments from making land use decisions to restrict or limit fracking in their jurisdictions. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down this state law as violating Pennsylvanians’ constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment.

That Pennsylvania decision ignited an explosion of interest in green amendments.

In Hawaii, public interest groups began challenging the state’s approval of carbon-intensive electricity generation on the ground that it violates Hawaiians’ right to a clean and healthful environment. The state now relies on its green amendment to reject new carbon-intensive electricity sources for powering Hawaii.

In 2022, New York became the first state since the 1970s to adopt a green amendment. Currently, Arizona, Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia are considering adopting green amendments.

Based on the extensive scientific evidence presented at the trial in June, Judge Seeley found that the Montana youth are being harmed by climate change occurring in Montana and that those climate change effects can be attributed to the state law the plaintiffs challenged. 

Seeley also determined that declaring the state law forbidding the consideration of climate impacts during environmental review unconstitutional would alleviate further harm to the youth. On these grounds, she struck down the state law as unconstitutional.

This result sets a groundbreaking precedent for climate litigation and demonstrates a new way in which green amendments can be invoked to elicit environmental change. It suggests that in other states with green amendments, state laws cannot forbid the consideration of greenhouse gas emissions and their climate impact during environmental review.

However, Seeley made it clear long before trial that she does not have the power to order the state to create a remedial plan to address climate change. 

Further, the Montana legislature repealed the state policies promoting fossil fuel extraction just two months before the trial began, and a judge cannot generally rule on the constitutionality of a repealed law. So, whether state policies promoting fossil fuel extraction violate the people’s constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment is a question for another day and another case. 

A spokeswoman for Montana’s attorney general said the state plans to appeal Seeley’s ruling. ...

It is unclear how the Montana youths’ victory will influence federal climate litigation. The federal youth climate case Juliana v. United States, which was recently revived, relies on the Fifth and Ninth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the common law public trust doctrine. Neither the Fifth Amendment nor the Ninth Amendment is considered environmental rights akin to a green amendment. However, the public trust doctrine has been relevant in some states’ green amendment jurisprudence.

In the states that have green amendments, climate advocates will certainly rely on the Montana youth case as they challenge state laws that promote climate change.

In recent years, we have witnessed an erosion of our environmental laws through politicsand the courts. That has fueled new legal claims of environmental rights in the U.S., Canada and other countries.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/montana-kids-win-historic-climate-laws...

A new scientific analysis by  the U.K.-based World Weather Attribution group concluded that the "Climate change has made summers like the kind that led to Quebec's disastrous wildfire season at least seven times more likely to happen again" ... The finding should alert governments to the need to reduce emissions and prepare for what's ahead, said one researcher ... The authors warned the report's conclusions are conservative​" . Neither Trudeau or any provincial premier has shown any greater sense of urgency in tackling emissions reduction. But considering Canadian history with regards to climate change what else did you expect?

Climate change has made summers like the kind that led to Quebec's disastrous wildfire season at least seven times more likely to happen again, says a new scientific analysis. Society of Protection of Forests from Fire prevention agent Melanie Morin walks through an area of burned forest in the area surrounding Lebel-sur-Quevillon, Que., on Wednesday, July 5, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

Climate change has made summers like the kind that led to Quebec's disastrous wildfire season at least seven times more likely to happen again, says a new scientific analysis.

The study by the U.K.-based World Weather Attribution group, released Tuesday, says greenhouse gas emissions made the province's overall fire weather about 50 per cent more conducive to fire between May and June. The very worst days were twice as likely to happen and were about 20 per cent worse than they would have been without current levels of carbon in the air.  

The finding should alert governments to the need to reduce emissions and prepare for what's ahead, said one researcher.

"Fire weather risk is increasing due to climate change," said Dorothy Heinrich, one of the report's 17 co-authors. "Adaptation strategies are going to be required to reduce the drivers of risk and decrease their impacts."

Wildfires have occurred in almost every province and territory this summer and have burned more than 137,000 square kilometres — about twice the previous record set in 1995. Some of the biggest fires happened in Quebec earlier in the season. 

By Aug. 16, the province had lost 53,000 square kilometres of forest, including 12,000 square kilometres in a single blaze. Smoke from the fires spread to give Toronto some of the worst air quality in the world and cancelled major league baseball games in New York. 

Increased wildfires have long been forecast by climate scientists and, about 20 years ago, scientists began looking for ways to measure the contribution of climate change to individual extreme weather-driven events. Since then, hundreds of attribution papers have been peer-reviewed and published. …

Attribution science works by comparing climate models. One set of models uses data drawn from actual records while another, otherwise identical, is constructed with the influence of greenhouse gases removed. Simulations are be run using those two sets and the difference in the results reveals the effects of climate change. It allows scientists to say to what extent the presence of greenhouse gases increased the likelihood of the event in question.

That's what the group did for the Quebec fires, using five different climate models. The study broke down indicators forest experts use to measure wildfire risk. Those include weather-related measures such as temperature, humidity, wind and precipitation, as well as specialized indices such as fuel moisture and buildup.  Almost all of those measures were pointing to extreme fire hazard, the report says. Canada had the warmest June on record, for example, following a winter that left the second-least snow meltwater since 1950. …

"All components of the fire-weather index, when averaged at the national scale, set record values and sometimes by huge margins," says the report.

The hand of climate change was clearly visible in the resulting analysis, the scientists said.

Yan Boulanger, co-author and scientist for the Canadian Forest Service, said it's irrelevant to ask whether the fires were started by fire, accident or arson. "It takes very dry, very warm or windy conditions to have very, very big fires as we did this year regardless of source (of ignition)," he said. "It is because of weather conditions that those fires spread and it's not a case of ignition sources." 

The authors warned the report's conclusions are conservative. "We are reporting what we consider conservative lower bounds," said co-author Clair Barnes. 

https://www.richmond-news.com/quebec-news/climate-change-made-worst-queb...

In fact a new energy study by the Pembina Institute concludes that Alberta's ban on wind and solar energy development could cost the province $33 billion and 24,000 full-time jobs as Smith's UCP government tries to hold back the wave of environmentally friendly technological change, like King Canute. 

Investments in wind farms and other renewable energy options are threatened by the Alberta government’s surprise seven-month moratorium on development, says the Pembina Institute. Photo by Ramon Cliff via Shutterstock.

An estimated 24,000 full-time jobs and $33 billion in investments are at risk because of the Alberta government’s seven-month moratorium on renewable energy development, the Pembina Institute said this morning.  

Courtney Smith, spokesperson for the Calgary-based clean energy think tank, said Pembina researchers reviewed the Alberta Electric System Operator’s list of electricity generation projects in development in relation to their approval status from the Alberta Utility Commission to determine how many projects are impacted by Danielle Smith government’s freeze on renewable energy development. “Public data shows that 118 projects are currently in development and are either waiting for permitting approval or could submit an approval application within the next few months,” the fact sheet by Jason Wang and Will Noel released this morning said. “These projects represent at least $33 billion of investment and more than 24,000 job-years,” it continued.

When the government unexpectedly declared the moratorium on approvals for renewable projects over one megawatt on Aug. 3, the 118 impacted projects were comprised of 12.7 gigawatts of solar, 5.3 gigawatts of wind, and 1.5 gigawatts of battery storage proposed by 64 different development companies or partnerships, the paper says.

In addition to the 24,000 jobs and $33 billion in investments put at risk, the projects would have contributed $263 million a year in tax and land-lease revenue to 27 different municipalities, the report says. 

“On average, a 100 megawatt renewable energy project generates between $125 and $175 million in project development and construction investments, $1.5 million in long-term, annual municipal revenues and up to 300 full-time jobs during construction,” the report says, noting that the impacts would have benefited southern Alberta with its frequently windy conditions and many hours of sunshine in particular.

The fact sheet includes a list of the impacted projects, the companies making the proposal, the planning area where they would take place, and estimates of the investment size, expected number of jobs and tax revenue from each.

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/08/24/Alberta-Renewable-Energy-Pause-Co...

After already being devastated by record-breaking wildfires and flooding and Hurricane Hilary devastates California, something that hasn't happened since 1939, Nova Scotians are being warned to prepare for hurricane season as ocean waters warm that create and sustain hurricanes and Tropical Storm Franklin moves north, something that was an afterthought historically in Nova Scotia and California.

Tropical storm Franklin is expected to pick up strength and become a hurricane on the weekend. It's currently 1,200 kilometres southwest of Bermuda, but Environment Canada meteorologist Bob Robichaud says it is too early to know where exactly the storm is headed. (Tina Simpkin/CBC)

Officials say it's too soon to tell whether tropical storm Franklin will hit Nova Scotia, but they're urging residents to prepare for hurricane season in the wake of other chaotic weather events that have devastated parts of the province this year. 

John Lohr, the minister responsible for the Emergency Management Office (EMO) and Municipal Affairs, said people should discuss what they'd need during an evacuation. "If there's anything we've learned this year, emergencies can happen quickly," he said at a Thursday afternoon press conference in Halifax.  He said households should have several days worth of supplies on hand and he encouraged people to think about how to prepare their properties. That includes trimming branches, emptying spouts and clearing drains.

Bob Robichaud, an Environment and Climate Change Canada meteorologist, said it's expected to be a "busy" season, and Hurricane Fiona, which made landfall in Nova Scotia last September as a post-tropical storm, showed it only takes one storm to cause damage. Franklin is about 1,200 kilometres south of Bermuda. Robichaud said most models predict the storm's centre will stay south of the Maritimes, but its path will become clearer next week.  ...

Robichaud said any storm would be in addition to the "tremendous amount of rain" that has fallen in Nova Scotia since early June — between 700-800 millimetres compared to roughly 250 millimetres during the same period last year. ...

On Thursday, the Insurance Bureau of Canada said claims stemming from the destructive flooding last month in Nova Scotia amount to $170 million.  That number does not capture people who did not have insurance to cover the cost of repairs. Overland flooding or damage caused by storm surges is often not included in insurance packages. ...

Graham Little, interim vice-president Atlantic of the Insurance Bureau of Canada, said property owners need to be familiar with what their policies cover and what they exclude. During Fiona, he said much of the damage was caused by high winds. Typically, home insurance covers repairs when water gets into a home if a roof is damaged. But heavy rains pose different risks.  "You may have seen water intrude a home in other ways, either up through the foundation, which isn't always very typically covered, or in through, you know, windows or doors or things like that — which would only be covered if those were sort of specifically named insured risks," Little said. ...

The province is offering up to $200,000 per household to cover uninsurable losses related to the July flooding. So far, there have been 300 applications for disaster assistance with more coming in, said Heather Fairbairn, an EMO communications advisor.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/hurricane-preparedness-before...

The popularity of the Liberals, both federally and provincially is decreasing across Atlantic Canada as they implement the carbon tax there. "Satisfaction with the overall performance of the Liberal government in Newfoundland and Labrador led by Premier Andrew Furey has remained stable compared with three months ago," the provincial Liberals have dropped from 53% support to 40% support since May while the PCs have increased from 31% to 37% and the NDP from 17% to 23% according to the latest Narrative Research poll (https://narrativeresearch.ca/nl-while-satisfaction-with-the-provincial-g...). In Nova Scotia, voter support for the provincial Liberals has decreased from 31% to 23% while the PCs have increased from 39% to 47% and the NDP remain at 24% (https://narrativeresearch.ca/ns-a-majority-remain-satisfied-with-the-pro...). 

The Nova Scotia NDP has criticized the PC Premier Houston government for not introducing " other measures to help people mitigate the tax — notably, more funding to improve energy efficiency.  Such a measure would address energy poverty, which people experience when they spend a disproportionately high percentage of their income on home energy bills. Atlantic Canada has the highest rate of energy poverty, with 41 per cent of residents in Prince Edward Island dealing with high energy cost burdens, and experts stress making homes more energy efficient is an important move towards lowering energy bills. Another measure would be a windfall tax on oil and gas, said NDP Natural Resources and Renewables spokesperson SusanLeblanc, which is a higher tax rate on companies making large profits."

I suspect that the fall in popularity is related to the federal Liberals implementing a large increase in the carbon tax in Atlantic Canada that has even been criticized by a New Brunswick Liberal MP Wayne Long, who is not seeking re-election, as well as "A chorus of politicians across Atlantic Canada". Although Premier Furey criticized the tax "unfair", the Liberal name, whether federal or provincial, has lost some popularity as a result in Atlantic Canada. (https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/11/24/news/politics-remain-heated-...). 

The carbon tax and Trudeau's climate change policies may well decide who wins the next election. These policies leave large corporations and the wealthy paying relatively little in taxes for their high energy consumption while imposing severe pain on the poor. The unpopularity of carbon taxes in Atlantic Canada could well cost the federal Liberals a substantial number of seats there and possibly cost them the next election, as the Liberals previous strong support in Atlantic Canada was vital to its previous election victories.  

Sadly, the failure of the Conservatives to do anything meaningful on the climate crisis as Canada literally burns down, and flooding and deadly heat waves increase, could help them win the election.

A chorus of politicians across Atlantic Canada is pushing back against a federally imposed fuel charge on gasoline, diesel and home heating set to begin in summer 2023. 

Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island will all see the federal charge, often referred to as a carbon tax, go into effect after failing to propose province-led plans that meet climate standards, Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault announced Tuesday. 

The premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Andrew Furey, called the tax an unfair burden on his province.

“While maintaining a commitment to advance initiatives to address climate change, now is not the time for tax increases on such products as home heating fuel,” he said in a news release.

During his announcement, Guilbeault stressed rebate cheques would be mailed to families before the tax is imposed to offset price increases in gasoline and home heating oil. Eight of 10 households will receive more money back from rebate cheques than they pay, he added.

Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston has long been a vocal opponent of the tax, and P.E.I. Premier Dennis King has also spoken out against the federal government imposing the tax.

Guilbeault noted Nova Scotia has been particularly hard to work with on the carbon tax front.

“Let me be clear — Nova Scotia supports action on climate change but doesn't support a carbon tax of any amount on home heating oil at this time. It's incomprehensible to me that the federal government doesn't agree,” Houston said on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the Nova Scotia NDP said Houston had ample time to work on an alternative with the federal government, noting provinces and territories had until September to submit an alternative plan that met the federal benchmark on reducing carbon emissions.

NDP Leader Claudia Chender called out Houston’s recent attempt to get signatures for a petition against the carbon tax, as well as donations to help the provincial government push back against “Justin Trudeau's punishing carbon tax.” 

“Making this a political wedge issue and using it to fundraise is not what families were asking for,” she said.

“Putting a price on carbon is a reality. What people need is a government that will work with all political parties and levels of government to find a way to protect the environment and make life affordable for families.”

NDP Natural Resources and Renewables spokesperson Susan Leblanc said Houston could introduce other measures to help people mitigate the tax — notably, more funding to improve energy efficiency. Such a measure would address energy poverty, which people experience when they spend a disproportionately high percentage of their income on home energy bills. Atlantic Canada has the highest rate of energy poverty, with 41 per cent of residents in Prince Edward Island dealing with high energy cost burdens, and experts stress making homes more energy efficient is an important move towards lowering energy bills. Another measure would be a windfall tax on oil and gas, said Leblanc, which is a higher tax rate on companies making large profits.  “The premier’s plan was to pressure the federal government to back down, and it failed. We are talking about the future of our environment. The premier argued and delayed when he should have been taking firm, clear action, not playing politics to put money into his party’s bank account,” said Leblanc.  “There are any number of ways Tim Houston could help Nova Scotians with the rising cost of oil and gas… Instead, he picked a fight with Ottawa and left everyday families to pay the price.”

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/11/24/news/politics-remain-heated-...

Wildfires have turned Canada's forests from a carbon sink to an enormous carbon bomb that has exploded releasing an estimated one and a half billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere so far this year. That's "more than the combined emissions from 100 nations", thereby further greatly accelerating the climate crisis in a positive feedback loop that increases the amount of greenhouse gases released with each cycle. 

The Trudeau government has been trying to hide the problem by mixing forest emissions data with other data to hide logging emissions and by claiming that planting two billion trees will solve the problem. It won't. 

This year's coast-to-coast wildfires in Canada have already emitted an estimated one-and-a-half billion tonnes of CO2. That's triple the annual climate pollution from burning fossil fuels in Canada. It's more than the combined emissions from 100 nations. And there are still months of fire season looming ahead.

As extreme as this year's wildfire emissions have been, they are just the latest escalation in a multi-decade flood of CO2 pouring out of Canada's "managed" forests and forestry. (Note: Canada only reports emissions from the parts of the forest it "manages." This is around two-thirds. Some managed forest areas are managed for logging, while others are managed for non-timber uses like recreation, water, wildlife and fire protection. See the endnotes for a map and more details.)

To illustrate the scale and pace of our metastasizing forest carbon crisis, I turned to data in Canada's official national greenhouse gas inventory, plus recent wildfire data from the European Union's Earth Observation Program. The resulting chart below shows the cumulative amount of CO2 that's been added to the atmosphere from Canada's managed forest since 1990.

The falling green line at the start of the chart shows that in the early 1990s, the forest was a valuable carbon sink, helping to slow global warming. Back then, new forest growth absorbed more CO2 from the air than was emitted by logging, wildfire and decay.

That all changed after 2001, the tipping point year for Canada's managed forest.

As the rising red line on the chart shows, since that year, the forest has emitted more CO2 than it has absorbed. A lot more. Logging, wildfires, insects and the many forms of decay are now turning trees into CO2 faster than the forest can grow back.

That pumped billions of tonnes of climate fuel into the atmosphere — even before accounting for this year’s epic wildfires (shown by the dashed line). With those included, the cumulative total since the tipping point year is now around 3,700 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2).

To appreciate just how dramatic the tipping point has been, take a look at this next chart. It uses the same data, but this time breaks it down into individual years.

Years when Canada's managed forest removed CO2 from the air are shown in green. For example, that first green bar in 1990 shows the forest absorbed 100 MtCO2 more than it lost that year.

Red bars show the opposite.

Notice how every year since the tipping point has been a red year. That's 22 straight years in which Canada's managed forest lost carbon to the atmosphere. This clearly isn't a problem caused by a few freak years. It’s an every-year crisis.

And this crisis is escalating. You can see how the decade averages are rising relentlessly (black horizontal bars).

Any guesses on how many Canadian gasoline-burning cars we must take off the road to offset that much CO2? All of them. Plus all our heavy-duty freight trucks and every other form of fossil-fuelled road transport. Oh, and we also must stop burning natural gas in every Canadian home. Even that might not be enough. Because, as the chart shows, average emissions from our managed forest are running even higher so far in the current decade. The first time Canada's forest carbon emissions exceeded 300 MtCO2 in a single year was in 2021. And this year's emissions are already double that record.

There is this feel-good myth in Canada that our massive forest is offsetting some of our massive fossil fuel emissions. That might have been true decades ago under our old, stable climate. But we’ve so weakened our forest — through decades of business-as-usual industrial logging and fossil-fuelled climate shifts — that it has switched to hemorrhaging CO2 instead of absorbing it.

Canada's forest is one of the largest terrestrial carbon storehouses on the planet. It contains billions of trees spread across hundreds of millions of hectares.

Just how much forest carbon are we talking about? One recent study by Natural Resources Canada estimates the above-ground biomass alone contains enough carbon to produce 60,000 MtCO2. A similar amount is currently held in roots and soil. In total, our nation's forest easily holds 100,000 MtCO2 worth of carbon.

So, the roughly 3,700 MtCO2 lost to the atmosphere since 2001 is just the tip of our nation's gigantic forest-carbon iceberg. There is more than enough carbon remaining to fill Canadian summers with raging megafires and toxic smoke for centuries to come. More than enough to overwhelm the climate pollution cuts we make elsewhere as we fight to get to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

Having a gigantic amount of forest carbon was a hugely valuable gift under our old, stable climate. It provided jobs, energy and materials that magically replenished themselves each year from thin air. As a bonus, all that forest carbon also helped cool the planet.

But decades of business-as-usual logging and fossil-fuel burning have transformed this valuable gift into a growing threat. Canada’s managed forest is looking less and less like a carbon bank — and more and more like a carbon bomb.

Defusing this gigantic carbon bomb will require addressing the two main drivers of forest carbon losses — industrial logging and fossil fuel burning.

It's been 35 years since Canada first promised to cut emissions (spoiler alert: we haven't). By now, you'd think our government would at least report how much CO2 a huge industry like logging adds to the atmosphere. But it doesn't.

The government has the data — but they mix critical logging emissions data in with other forest emissions. For example, I asked Environment Canada for something as basic as the emissions from all dead biomass that logging leaves behind in the forest each year (often referred to as "slash"). The department said they track it but declined to provide the number.

Environmental groups have been trying for several years, with little success, to persuade the government to accurately and transparently report logging emissions. Recently, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Nature Canada published their own estimates using the limited government data available.

In their report, "What are the net greenhouse gas emissions from logging in Canada?", they calculate an average over the last decade of 86 MtCO2 per year. As my next chart shows, this rivals the emissions from heavy industry and buildings. Unlike other sectors, however, Canada exempts this logging industry CO2 from emission pricing or climate targets.

As this chart also shows, the total emissions from our managed forest averaged 175 MtCO2 per year during the last decade. That rivals our two worst sectors — transportation and the oil and gas industry. The additional forest CO2 beyond what is caused by logging has primarily been caused by fossil-fuelled climate changes.

So let's look at that next.

Fossil-fuelled death and decay

Fossil fuel burning is rapidly overheating and destabilizing our climate.

Canada's forest is especially vulnerable because temperatures are rising here two to three times faster than the global rate. That's driving rapid changes in wildfires, lightning, drought, snow cover, stream flows, water temperatures, insect outbreaks, disease, melting permafrost and a Pandora's box of other environmental shifts.

Trees don't get to move when fossil fuel pollution turns their climate hostile. Instead, they weaken, grow less and fall prey to turbocharged outbreaks of insects, fungi and disease. More trees die. And many more burn as fossil-fuelled heat and droughts unleash extreme megafires.

Natural Resources Canada is blunt about the threat in its State of Canada's Forests 2020 report: "Scientists predict that increasing temperatures and changes in weather patterns associated with climate change will drastically affect Canada’s forests in the near future. With the rate of projected climate change expected to be 10 to 100 times faster than the ability of forests to adapt naturally."

These climate impacts will grow ever more extreme until we stop burning fossil fuels.

Despite decades of promises, that's something we haven't even started to do in Canada.

You can see how Canada’s doing compared to our peers in the Group of Seven (G7) in this next chart. Collectively, these wealthy, industrialized nations emit one-third of global climate pollution and produce half the world's GDP. If we are going to have any shot at preventing a full-blown climate crisis, this group with much of the world's financial resources, capabilities and talent must lead the way.

As you can see, all of our G7 peers emit less than they did in 1990. And, importantly, all of them were reducing emissions in the years before the pandemic crash (dotted lines on chart).

Not Canada. We are the only one still polluting far more than when we started promising to cut emissions more than three decades ago. And we were the only G7 nation still increasing our emissions before the pandemic hit.

We know it is possible for advanced economies to slash emissions. Just look at our Commonwealth peers, the British. They have the world's sixth-largest economy — one and half times the size of Canada's. They've cut their climate-destabilizingemissions in half. We know what works, we just aren't acting.

Canada's forest is in trouble. And so are we

The dangerous reality is that we've knocked our forest off balance with unrelenting fossil fuel burning and chainsaws. It's now struggling and losing wood at an increasing pace. Forest growth has collapsed past the tipping point, while our logging continues at old-climate levels.

Unlike some ecosystems we've destabilized, however, our forest isn't going quietly. It bleeds climate-destabilizing CO2 by the megatonne. And much of it chokes our cities in apocalyptic shrouds of toxic smoke.

We might be ignoring this rising flood of CO2, but the climate isn’t. It doesn't care about our pencil-pushing tricks and excuses. It just reacts blindly to the amount of CO2 piling up in it. 

My final chart shows the rapidly growing difference between the climate pollution that Canada officially reports (black line) and the amount actually going into the atmosphere (light red line).

That doesn't look to me like we are cutting off the flow of climate fuel and heading toward climate safety. It looks like we are in deep trouble.

Canada's managed forest is a gigantic carbon bomb. Decades of surging emissions from it are a flashing red light, warning that we are at risk of it running away from our control. 

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/08/21/analysis/our-forests-have-re...

Paladin1 wrote:

Canada’s burning because of bad forest policy, not climate change

 

You trust the National Post's article from the Fraser Institute, which is heavily funded by oil companies rather than climate change scientists as the climate crisis devastates the world. You are sounding like King Canute trying to hold back the waves, in this case the waves of evidence.

Quote:

Climate Change Denial[edit]
The Fraser Institue has claimed in 2014 that "There has been no statistically significant weather change for the last 15-20 years."[21] Additionally, in response to a 2019 report published by Environment and Climate Change Canada The Fraser Instute claimed in an article that "Most of what people are noticing, of course, are just natural weather events." The rest of the article goes on to portray the report as hype and misleading. [22] These claims contradict the consensus of experts in the field and are not in line with scientific data regarding Climate change.The institute has received donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars[28] from foundations controlled by Charles and David Koch, with total donations estimated to be approximately $765,000 from 2006 to 2016.[29] It also received US$120,000 from ExxonMobil in the 2003 to 2004 fiscal period.[30] In 2016, it received a $5 million donation from Peter Munk, a Canadian businessman.[31]

In 2012, the Vancouver Observer reported that the Fraser Institute had "received over $4.3 million in the last decade from eight major American foundations including the most powerful players in oil and pharmaceuticals". According to the article, "The Fraser Institute received $1.7 million from 'sources outside Canada' in one year alone, according to the group's 2010 Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) return. Fraser Institute President Niels Veldhuis told The Vancouver Observer that the Fraser Institute does accept foreign funding, but he declined to comment on any specific donors or details about the donations."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraser_Institute#:~:text=The%20institute%2...

The fossil fuel funding of the Fraser Institute to deny climate change is directly related to its desire to deny and delay the changes needed to address climate change, including the demand that "20% of Oil and Gas Fields Must Shut Down as Climate Change Makes Quebec Wildfires 2-7x More Likely". (https://www.theenergymix.com/2023/08/22/quebec-wildfire-conditions-made-...) This is true even though the fossil companies knew about the problem forty years ago. "Exxon Knew about Climate Change 45 years ago. A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation." (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-chan...)

In fact the oil companies created a giant advertising campaign denying climate change. "Since the 1980s, fossil fuel firms have run ads touting climate denial messages – many of which they’d now like us to forget. Here’s our visual guide" showing examples of the ads below. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/18/the-forgotten-oil-ad...)

The “fire-prone conditions” behind the devastating wildfires in Quebec earlier this year, and the stifling smoke they spread across much of North America, were made at least two to seven times more likely by climate change, concludes an analysis published Tuesday by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative.

An international team of 16 climate scientists “also found that climate change, caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, made the fire-prone weather about 20 to 50% more intense,” the UK-based WWA said in a release.

The news landed just as a separate briefing by Oil Change International concluded that 60% of existing coal, oil, and gas extraction will have to shut down to keep a 1.5°C climate stabilization target within reach.

“As of 2023, developed oil and gas reserves alone, if fully extracted, would cause cumulative carbon emissions nearly 25% greater than the world’s remaining 1.5°C carbon budget,” Oil Change wrote. So “a significant portion—almost one-fifth (20%)—of oil and gas fields must be shut down, even if no new fields are developed and coal extraction stops tomorrow.”

At an August 22 media conference hosted by WWA, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) research scientist Yan Boulanger said record high temperatures and extreme drought had led to more than 5,800 fires across Canada and burned 15.3 million hectares up to that day, “making this the most devastating fire season in recent memory, and by far.” After unusually warm and dry conditions in early May, lightning strikes from several isolated thunderstorms in Quebec igniting more than 120 wildfires in a single day.

The province has seen more than 5.2 million hectares burn this year, he said, and the lands consumed in the most intensive zone between June 1 and 25 exceeded cumulative losses for the previous 20 years.

Across Canada, the fires to date have shattered the 12-month record of 7.6 million hectares that was set in 1989, Boulanger added, “and this fire season is far from being over.”

In the first seven months of the year, wildfires added 290 million tonnes of carbon to Canada’s annual output of climate pollution.

“The word ‘unprecedented’ doesn’t do justice to the severity of the wildfires in Canada this year. From a scientific perspective, the doubling of the previous burned area record is shocking,” Boulanger said.

“Climate change is greatly increasing the flammability of the fuel available for wildfires,” he added, so that “a single spark, regardless of its source, can rapidly turn into a blazing inferno.”

“Increasing temperatures are creating tinderbox-like conditions in forests in Canada and around the world,” agreed WWA co-founder Dr. Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London. “Until we stop burning fossil fuels, the number of wildfires will continue to increase, burning larger areas for longer periods of time.”

While it’s too soon to complete attribution studies for the devastating wildfires now sweeping the Northwest Territoriesand British Columbia, Canadian scientists are connecting the same dots. “At a broad scale, it’s really the interactions between the climate and the fuels that are driving these changes,” Jen Baron, a PhD candidate in forest and conservation sciences at the University of British Columbia, told CBC. But “the impacts of climate are really felt in the sense that, before, it would have been very rare to have large fire seasons that are as severe as they are today.”

“Our forest management practices, they’ve been like this since about the ’80s. So why is it we’re seeing the bad fire seasons now?” added veteran wildfire researcher Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. “It’s because the weather has gotten more extreme.”

Boulanger said earlier research found that a severe wildfire season in B.C. in 2017 was 90% attributable to climate change. This year’s fires already cover 50% more territory across the province.

The WWA study assessed an exceptional period of wildfires across the boreal forest region of western and northwestern Quebec in May through July using NRCan’s Fire Weather Index, a tool that estimates wildfire risk based on factors like temperature, humidity, wind speeds, and forest moisture. Lead author Clair Barnes, research associate at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, explained that the findings were based on two measures: the seven-day period of peak intensity within the fire season, and the total severity of the whole season.

Using a series of climate models with high enough resolution to compute a region’s fire weather index, the research team concluded that climate change made the current peak intensity of the season at least 20% more intense, and twice as likely to occur. The total severity of the region’s fire season was 50% higher, and seven times more likely to occur.

Those numbers were almost certainly low estimates, Otto told media.

The various factors that contribute to fire weather are all affected by climate change in different ways, she explained. But temperature has a significant enough impact that WWA was confident with the devastating but still relatively modest conclusions—twice the likelihood of peak intensity, seven times the likelihood for the severity of the entire fire season—in Tuesday’s release.

“The real numbers will be higher, but it’s hard to say how much higher,” Otto said. “Our confidence on the lower bound is very high, because we know that temperature plays an important role.”

Those impacts are also on track to become more commonplace, the WWA team found.

“Although the fire-prone weather conditions were unprecedented, they are no longer extremely unusual,” the release states. “In today’s climate, similar weather conditions can be expected to occur once every 25 years, meaning that they have about a 4% chance of occurring each year,” and the risk will rise if the planet continues to warm.

In western and northwestern Quebec, the impacts of the wildfires “were disproportionately experienced by remote communities, especially Indigenous peoples, who were particularly vulnerable due to the lack of services and difficulty of evacuations due the paucity or a lack of road access and airlifting facilities,” WWA says. Dorothy Heinrich, technical advisor at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre in The Hague, said Indigenous peoples are 30% more likely than other populations to be displaced by or experience the impacts of wildfires. In July, 75% of the people under evacuation orders in Canada were members of Indigenous communities, many of them in fly-in communities.

Meanwhile, as plumes of wildfire smoke blanketed large parts of Canada and the United States, “the most vulnerable people to the dangerous fine particles… were those with underlying health conditions, reduced access to health services, and living in low-quality housing,” the WWA release states.

Canadian Red Cross President and CEO Conrad Sauvé said the rise in extreme weather has already shifted his organization’s priorities in times of disaster.

“A decade ago, the work of the Canadian Red Cross responding to large-scale disasters and emergencies was largely overseas,” he said in the WWA release. “Now, the vast majority of the Canadian Red Cross response efforts are domestically focused, supporting Canadians impacted by destructive events. This year’s fire season has been the most destructive on record.”

West Coast Environmental Law said the WWA analysis bolsters the Sue Big Oil campaign, in which B.C. municipalities are trying to mount a class action suit against global fossil fuel companies for their fair share of the climate damages the communities face.

“Scientists keep telling us that our communities are paying the price for oil, gas, and coal-fuelled climate change, while Shell, Chevron, Exxon, and other fossil fuel giants pocket record profits,” said WCEL staff lawyer Andrew Gage. “Earlier this year, Shell and BP reneged on their promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because they were just making too much money from oil and gas—and now Kelowna and Yellowknife are having to evacuate as a result of wildfires. Until fossil fuel companies are forced to pay for the damage they cause, they’re going to keep making decisions that harm the planet.”

https://www.theenergymix.com/2023/08/22/quebec-wildfire-conditions-made-...

 John Vaillant, who wrote Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast and has been watching and studying fires ever since 2016 when wildfires ripped through the city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, discusses the connections between Canada's willdfires and the climate crisis below and warns that what we see now is the new normal. 

The 2016 Fort McMurray fire led to the evacuation of about 90,000 people. (user@ccccrystal/Twitter)

It has been a fire season like no other. However, according to author John Vaillant, who wrote Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast and has been watching and studying fires ever since 2016 when wildfires ripped through the city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, this is most likely what we should expect going forward. As of August 25th, there have been 415 wildfires in the province, matching the 10-year average. The highest number of fires in Saskatchewan were recorded in 2015 with a total of 720.

In Vaillant’s observations and research into the behaviour of wildfires since the turn of the century, fires like what we have seen this year in northern Saskatchewan, Alberta, Quebec, the maritime provinces, the North-West Territories, and British Columbia represent a new normal of fires which burn longer and with greater intensity than at any other time this planet has ever known. It is not that the chemistry and physics of wildfires have changed, but climate change has created conditions that give fire exponentially more opportunity to burn. The accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere facilitates heat retention and the evaporation of moisture from the landscape which leaves a ready fuel to propel fire more quickly and easily through forests and grasslands. The combination of drought, low humidity, and high temperatures are in Vaillant’s words, “like gasoline to fire”.

The Fort McMurray Fire grew from four acres to 150 in two hours and while most wildfires settle down overnight, as the air cools and the dew falls, by noon the following day this fire had impacted nearly 2,000 acres. The fire which melted vehicles where they were left and turned entire neighbourhoods into infernos was not a freak event says Valliant, but rather a bellwether, and the past six years have borne this out. There is no disputing that since 2016, in all areas of the globe, countries have experienced many of the worst fires, and fire seasons, in human history. The release of Vaillant’s book this year as Canada experiences the worst fire season on record seems almost prophetic. Apocalyptic images of mountainsides engulfed in flames, smoke obscuring the sun half a continent away, and people evacuating through walls of flames on either side of the road are more than convincing enough of the reality of a new kind of fire that has introduced itself into our world.

Andrew Weaver, a professor at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, and his colleague warned twenty years ago that there was already a detectable human influence on the observed increasing area burned from Canadian wildfires. The wildfires of 2023 have already burned an area equivalent to the size of Greece. While Canadians will take solace as summer turns into fall and then winter and the immediacy of our 2023 wildfire situation wanes, unfortunately, it will be Australia’s turn next to experience the burning wrath of nature in global warming and the 2023 El Niño.

https://www.thespec.com/news/canada/climate-change-and-wildfires-the-new...

 

A refreshing change from the usual climate change denialism of right wing governments: "Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis blamed both the wildfires and storms on climate change, while conceding that his center-right government "clearly didn't manage things as well as we would have liked" on the wildfire front." The wildfire in northern Greece near the city of Alexandroupolis is" the largest single blaze to hit an EU country since records began". 

 

Floodwaters rushing past a submerged car in Milina village in the Pilion region.(AP: Thanasis 

Storm Daniel has battered parts of Greece, Türkiye and Bulgaria, triggering flooding that caused at least seven deaths. It comes just days after a deadly wildfire was brought under control in the north of Greece. 

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis blamed both the wildfires and storms on climate change, while conceding that his center-right government "clearly didn't manage things as well as we would have liked" on the wildfire front.

"I am afraid that the careless summers, as we knew them … will cease to exist and from now on the coming summers are likely to be ever more difficult," he said Tuesday.

Greece's Minister of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection, Vassilis Kikilias, said the heavy rain was expected to ease up after midday on Wednesday. ...

Greece's weather service said a Pilion region village received 75.4 centimetres of rain late Tuesday, by far the highest level recorded since at least 2006. It noted that the average annual rainfall in the Athens region is around 40 centimetres....

The storm comes on the heels of major summer wildfires that hit Greece over the past few weeks, with some burning for more than two weeks and destroying vast tracts of forest and farmland.

Firefighters said a blaze in country's north-east was in abeyance on Monday, although hundreds of firefighters were still tackling pockets that continued to burn.

Over the weekend, reinforcements were to battle the wildfire burning in the Evros region — which is near the border with Turkey.

That brought the total number of firefighters on Monday to 741, backed by 124 vehicles and two aircraft.

The blaze has been blamed for the deaths of 20 people, all believed to have been migrants who had recently crossed the border.

The fire broke out on August 19 — nearly three weeks ago — near the north-eastern city of Alexandroupolis 

It joined with other blazes and formed one massive wildfire.

By Sunday, it had burned through more than 93,000 hectares, according to the European Union's Copernicus Emergency Management Service.

That made it the largest single blaze to hit an EU country since records began in 2000.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-06/greece-floods-fires-map-torm-dani...

 

Federal government forecasters are predicting that from eastern Alberta, across Saskatchewan and Manitoba and into northwestern Ontario, some climate crisis induced wildfires are expected to last into the winter. They also note the wide area of devastation covering the vast majority of the Northwest Territories and northern BC that has already been hit hard by wildfires. "Canada's record-setting wildfire season is spurring the federal government to consider how to tackle future fires, floods and earthquakes." Unfortunately, it is a little late to start considering that, but that seems to the method of operation for the Trudeau Liberal government whether its inflation, housing or the climate crisis and the amount of money offered, $65 million across the country, is piddling compared to the climate crisis problem, especially considering BC alone has spent $585 million to fight wildfires just until August 28th. (https://biv.com/article/2023/08/province-bc-says-its-spent-585m-so-far-y....) 

An aerial view of the wildfire threatening the Yellowknife area from Aug. 17. (N.W.T. Fire) Canada's record-setting wildfire season is spurring the federal government to consider how to tackle future fires, floods and earthquakes. Minister for Emergency Preparedness Harjit Sajjan said Thursday that could mean a more national approach to disaster response. The government has announced $65 million in federal funding for wildfire response in six provinces and territories. "We're looking at all different types of disasters, doing the lessons-learned, and we'll come out with the appropriate response," Sajjan said at a news conference that included several other federal cabinet ministers and MPs. ...

The latest federal government forecast says Canada's already unprecedented 2023 wildfire season could continue late into the fall or winter. Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said there is potential for increased wildland fire activity from eastern Alberta through to central Ontario at least until the end of this month, while fires in B.C. and the Northwest Territories will continue to smoulder. Although fall brings cooler nights and fewer lightning storms, a government statement said ongoing warm and dry weather could contribute to new fire starts, and could mean some existing large fires will remain active for months.

The temperature of the waters of Canada's three oceans are rising much faster than predicted due to the climate crisis with some predictable and some as yet uncharted consequences for ocean species and life in Canada. However, we do know the only way of arresting the rapid temperature rise in Canada's oceans is to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Oceans have absorbed 90% of the increased heat produced by greenhouse gas emissions. Now all the signs are that they have absorbed as much heat as possible and are releasing new heat into the atmosphere increasing the warming of the land. In the Arctic temperature rises of 4C to 5C are already having devastating effects on animal and plant sepcies, as well as human communities. 

The Atlantic Ocean has been locked in a severe marine heat wave for more than two weeks. Newfoundland coast by Michel Rathwell / Wikipedia

Home to the longest coastline in the world, Canada is seeing a patchwork of superheating in all three oceans as global sea surface temperatures reached unprecedented heights in July. 

There are entrenched hot spots of water in Canada’s Atlantic and Arctic oceans and temperatures are trending upwards in an alarming manner in the Pacific, months before seas typically reach peak warming at the end of August or September.

Increased marine warming due to human-caused climate change has been expected and documented for decades. But this summer’s extremes are bewildering, more severe and occurring faster than predicted, causing alarm in the scientific community, said Susanna Fuller, a vice-president at Oceans North. “It’s absolutely pushing into uncharted territory,” Fuller said. “We have predicted trends from a lot of modelling and long-term observations, but these new record highs kind of set a new baseline,” she said, noting a significant measure of uncertainty already exists when making climate predictions. “When scientists say they are shocked and things are off the chart, it results in much more uncertainty ... how to manage and adapt [to climate impacts],” Fuller added.

Identifying the specific factors driving the most recent localized superheating in each of Canada’s oceans will require more investigation, but generalized impacts on ocean ecosystems are pretty well understood and the solution to mitigate or prevent them is crystal clear, she added. 

“It all just underscores the incredible urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That's the most important thing we can possibly do,” says Susanna Fuller @Oceans_North on the superheating occurring in all three of Canada's oceans this summer. ...

Sea surface temperatures across the entire North Atlantic had smashed records by June, with temperatures starting to climb on Canada’s East Coast in mid-July — regularly reaching 5 C above normal in the waters of Nova Scotia, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and especially west of Newfoundland — which has been in the clutches of a severe marine heat wave for more than two weeks. 

Temperature increases in Canada’s Atlantic are likely tied to atmospheric heat wavesthat are shattering heat records in Europe and elsewhere in the world and making it more difficult for the ocean to continue buffering the lion’s share of climate impacts, said Anya Waite, CEO of the Ocean Frontier Institute at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. “It’s just evidence of extreme global warming, which is a concern at any point,” Waite said.  “This is just showing us that the heat has nowhere to go anymore.”

The ocean has absorbed nearly 90 per cent of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gas emissions in the past 50 years, more than half of which is stored in the top 700 metres of the ocean.  But current spikes in sea and air temperatures speed the melting of Arctic ice, increasing the flood of freshwater into the ocean that might be slow or even stop critical ocean currents in the North Atlantic, Waite said.

The exceptional water temperatures coincide with scientific debate over how fast a system of currents, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (or AMOC), might be weakening as a result of climate change, with a recent study suggesting the possibility of its collapse as early as mid-century, she said.  The AMOC transports warm, salty water from the South Atlantic and tropics via the Gulf Stream to the colder North Atlantic. Typically, as freshwater is converted to ice, denser salty water sinks to the deep ocean to gather nutrients and is cycled, often over centuries, south again to rise and replenish oceans in warmer regions.  But research suggests that cycle has slowed over the course of the last half-century, Waite said. The increased amount of buoyant freshwater in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans may be disrupting this vital cycling of incoming warm water to cooler depths.“It can potentially interfere with that sinking [process] that's carrying all the heat into the deep ocean and saving us, in a way, from climate change,” she said. 

The situation is also being aggravated by El Niño, Waite said. The cyclical climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean taking place this year is predicted to cause more intense and disruptive weather worldwide. The climate pattern usually causes warmer and drier conditions in the northern United States and Canada and increased rainfall and storms in the southern states and South America. 

El Niño, which typically reaches peak effect in late winter and early spring, will likely amplify the climate extremes of drought, fire and flood experienced across Canada. The Maritime provinces, especially Nova Scotia, were ravaged this year, she said. “The warming ocean has huge impacts on our weather and it really can trigger both these torrential rains and drought that lead to more wildfires,” Waite said....

Marine heat waves involve sea surface temperatures that are higher than normal for at least five days. 

The U.S. agency is forecasting up to half the ocean will reach the same state by September and likely stay that way until the end of the year. 

Most of Canada’s southern Arctic waters and hot spots around Hudson Bay and Baffin Island have ranged between 4 C and 5 C above normal for much of the past month, according to Environment Canada’s sea and ice monitoring data.

Warm ocean temperatures speed up the melting of ice, which further compounds the warming, Fuller said. This contributes to the “Arctic amplification effect,” which means the polar region is heating up to four times faster than the rest of the globe, recent research shows.  “When there is no ice, the water is darker and absorbs sunlight more, which means it gets even warmer,” she said.  “So you get this feedback effect where the warmer the water gets, the faster the ice melts.” 

The Arctic marine heat wave season has extended by nearly a month in the last two decades, research shows. These events increase over time and are more intense than other areas of the ocean and have powerful impacts on the Arctic ecosystem. 

Arctic communities are particularly vulnerable because warming waters and loss of sea ice can harm the entire food web from plankton to whales and shift the range of animals and marine creatures that people hunt and rely on for food, such as Arctic char, belugas or seals, Fuller said.  Changes in weather from climate change also damage important infrastructure, like transportation networks, buildings and roads. Storm surge is a big problem for communities on the shores of the western Arctic, she noted. 

The federal government recently allocated $54 million to prevent the shoreline of the Inuvialuit hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk from disappearing. Coastal erosion, flooding and permafrost thaw have caused a metre of shoreline to disappear annually, threatening homes and key community buildings like health centres and its college near the Mackenzie River delta in the Northwest Territories.

Communities in the Arctic also rely on ice and frozen permafrost to travel, hunt and ship supplies and their disappearance isolates and threatens people physically and culturally, Fuller said.  “Imagine if the 401 [highway] just disappeared and people couldn't get from community to community,” she said.

“We have Arctic communities that are facing almost catastrophic changes.”

 

A large marine heat wave lurking offshore for most of the spring arrived in early August on Canada’s West Coast and in Washington state and Oregon south of the border. 

Temperatures at the ocean’s surface are as much as 4 C above normal, but still haven’t broken last year’s records, said Andrew Leising, a NOAA research oceanographer. 

Marine heat waves in the Pacific Northwest are no longer uncommon in the summer and often have negative impacts on marine ecosystems, such as causing harmful algae blooms that can kill shellfish. Warm water can also push fish like salmon north in search of cold water and diminish the amount and quality of plankton, a key food for many marine species. 

However, despite the current record-breaking global water temperatures and atmospheric heat waves, and the pending El Niño effect, it’s too early to tell if the infamous Blob will resurface in the Pacific, Leising said. 

The Blob was a massive, prolonged and severe marine heat event that began in 2014 and lasted two years. It had cascading impacts on the ecosystem and food web, causing massive die-offs of salmon, seabirds, sea lions, kelp forests and sea stars. The resulting toxic algae blooms decimated shellfish along the Pacific and may have caused a spike in humpback whale fatalities.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/08/14/news/boiling-point-canada-wa...

A new study in the scientific journal Nature concludes  that, while the drought induced by the climate crisis, clear cut logging, and the pine beetle infestation that have survived over winter in much greater numbers due to the warming climate are drying out the forests and making them more susceptible to wildfires, are less talked about than the wildfires in BC in 2023 they are major contributors to massive area devastated by wildfires. So once again several problems created by the climate crisis, along with human behaviour that has continued producing fossil fuels and practicing clear cut logging, are acting as positive feedback mechanisms to further accelerate the damage from the climate crisis. 

Photo: BCWS The 2023 Donnie Creek wildfire in B.C.'s northwest region is the largest in the province's recorded history.

Climate change has dried out British Columbia’s forests, making them more flammable and driving a spike in wildfire activity since 2005 — a trend that is expected to worsen in coming years, a new study has found.

The research — published in the journal Nature this week in a collaboration between experts at the Canadian Forest Service, the private sector, and several universities in B.C. and California — analyzed maps of wildfire perimeters and annual climate data between 1919 and 2021. Over 100 years, wildfire activity saw declines alongside an increasingly wet climate. But in 2005, those trends reversed.

A collaboration of wildfire experts from the Canadian Forest Service, multiple universities in BC (including UBC) and California, and the private sector have pinpointed climate drivers of the increased wildfires in BC

While overall rainfall remained steady, it increasingly fell in seasonal bursts outside of the fire season. A rapid rise in warming due to human-caused climate change, meanwhile, drove high rates of evaporation in B.C.'s forests, leaving them primed to burn in the spring and summer months, the study found.

“We’re finding that drought is not letting up,” said Lori Daniels, a professor in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry and a co-author on the study.

“We've had these prolonged droughts and these very hot dry springs and summers that are coinciding with these extreme fire seasons.”

Some regions of the B.C. saw slight deviations from the provincial trend. The province’s coastal zone saw the largest temperature increase at 1.25 C, but higher levels of forest moisture, a lack of lightning strikes and extensive land clearing buffered some of the potential rise in wildfires, according to the study. But authors warned that “fire winds” — warm and dry outflow winds from the Interior — should put people living in the area on “heightened alert.”

In B.C.’s central region, where summer lightning is abundant, the study found a 0.98 degree Celsius increase between 1970 and 2021 alongside an abrupt decline in summer precipitation and forest moisture. That all translated into increased wildfire activity, the researchers found.

“Given the current and projected climate trajectory, it is likely that the potential for wildfire will continue to increase in the upcoming century, even under the most optimistic climate scenario,” wrote the authors.

Infestation, firefighting and logging has made fires worse 

The wildfire risk that comes from drying out of B.C.’s forests has only been made worse by pine beetle infestations and land-use practices, which for decades have favoured extinguishing fires at any cost.

When fire is allowed to burn regularly during shoulder seasons, Daniels says it opens up the may for a mixed species forest, rich in biodiversity. It also creates breaks in the landscape that can stop bigger fires once they have started and gives firefighters anchor points to fight fires once they become more aggressive.

“We’ve unintentionally made ourselves more vulnerable,” she said.

At the same time, Daniels said clear-cut logging practices also leave large openings in the forest, making them prone to drought. In those openings, slash piles only add to the buildup of wood fuel. 

“There's so much wood left behind that they're continuing, fires are spreading right through them and not slowing down,” she said.

Where trees are replanted, industry has favoured stands of single conifer species, which are more fire prone than the deciduous trees kept at bay through thinning and herbicides, said the researcher.

The drying effect of higher temperatures driven by climate change and the historical footprint of firefighting and logging on the ground, has led to an uptick in large, high severity wildfires over the past 20 years, the study found.

The authors said they were unsurprised by the surge in fire activity over the past two decades.

“What is surprising, however, is the early onset of the increase in wildfire activity around the year 2000 — decades earlier than anticipated — and the sheer magnitude of fire-season severity,” they wrote.

A record rise in area burned

In B.C., where fires tend to burn later into the fall, the province continues to set its own grim record this year, with the 2023 wildfire season so far having burned an area equal to about 60 per cent of Vancouver Island.

On Wednesday, provincial Emergency Management Minister Bowinn Ma said that although “the end is near” for B.C.’s fire season, the "sleeping giant" in the season of natural disasters is drought. About 80 per cent of B.C. is currently under level four or five drought conditions, the two highest designations. 

B.C. has seen four of its most destructive wildfire seasons since 2017. Three of those saw more than a million hectares of forest burn across the province. By comparison, between 1919 and 2016, only three wildfires seasons burned more than half a million hectares, according to the study. 

That's left researchers to conclude that B.C. will join a shortlist of global hot spots for wildfire over the coming decades. 

“British Columbia is alongside California, Australia and the Mediterranean countries in southern Europe where catastrophic fire driven by climate change superimposed on decades of land-use practices has made our ecosystems more vulnerable,” said Daniels. “They burn through our ecosystems and into our communities with tremendous devastating losses. So this is it. This is our new reality.”

https://www.castanet.net/news/BC/445841/B-C-s-forests-are-becoming-more-...