Canada and the climate crisis: a state of denial 3

The prolonged drought and 92 overwintering wildfires combined with the early start to spring conditions signal that the combination of the climate crisis and El Nino are going to produce another record-setting combination of drought and wildfires following directly on that of 2023. This has forced the NDP provincial government to intoduce major expenditures on alleviating some of the wildfire and drought conditions for this year. Already, 92 wildfires over-wintered underground in BC and two new ones are burning in the Okanagan Valley this weekend. 

Courtesy: BC Wildfire Service.

The B.C. government is bracing for an early start to the 2024 wildfire season, with El Niño conditions expected to bring a warmer and drier spring than usual. Crews responded to two new wildfires(opens in a new tab) in the Okanagan over the weekend, and there are many other "holdover fires" from last season that have continued since the fall. 

On Monday, with days left in winter, the Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness urged British Columbians to begin preparing evacuation plans for a worst-case scenario. "We all have busy lives but nothing is more important than you and your family's safety," Minister Bowinn Ma said at a news conference.

The B.C. government is bracing for an early start to the 2024 wildfire season, with El Niño conditions expected to bring a warmer and drier spring than usual.

Crews responded to two new wildfires(opens in a new tab) in the Okanagan over the weekend, and there are many other "holdover fires" from last season that have continued since the fall. 

On Monday, with days left in winter, the Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness urged British Columbians to begin preparing evacuation plans for a worst-case scenario. "We all have busy lives but nothing is more important than you and your family's safety," Minister Bowinn Ma said at a news conference. ...

"The climate crisis is here and we are feeling the impacts of climate change. It is no secret that we did not accumulate the snowpack that we were hoping for in many parts of the province," Ma said.

"And while we all hope to get more rain in the months ahead, we are taking action now to prepare for what could be a very challenging season."

Officials noted the lack of snowpack brings a decreased flood risk in some communities, but cautioned there is also the potential for prolonged drought, as many areas experienced last summer.

In a statement, Nathan Cullen, the province's minister of water, land and resource stewardship, said the government has been taking steps to avoid the worst consequences of extended drought conditions. "We have boosted community emergency grants, water infrastructure and supports for farmers and ranchers, and we will keep finding ways to support people, communities, businesses and wildlife in the face of drought," Cullen said.

Last year's wildfire season was the most destructive on record, burning more than 2.84-million hectares of land, along with hundreds of homes and other structures. The fires also prompted evacuations that temporarily displaced tens of thousands of residents.

To prepare for this year, Premier David Eby ordered an Expert Task Force on Emergencies in October, and Ma said the team has been delivering recommendations in "real time" so they can be implemented before the 2024 season is underway.

Earlier on Monday, officials confirmed B.C. will be expanding the use of "enhanced technology" for predicting wildfire behaviour after testing it out in two regions in 2023. The software uses weather models, topographical data and fuel maps along with real-time information from the field to forecast wildfire growth and movement. The province is testing additional tools to bolster firefighting efforts, including "drones for aerial ignitions, infrared scanning for hazard assessments, and 5G technology for more sensor networks to monitor forest conditions," according to the Ministry of Forests.

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/b-c-providing-update-on-wildfire-drought-preparati...

Once again Australia's Great Barrier Reef is being threatened with mass bleaching death, this time along 1,100 miles of the reef as the climate crisis's warming of the ocean threatens the viability of coral. "Mass coral bleaching events have occurred on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and now 2024. Coral bleaching occurs when the organisms are under severe stress due to abnormally high water temperatures. Recovery is possible if sea surface temperatures return to normal quickly enough". The problem is the global ocean temperature is at its highest point in recorded history. 

Bles causing bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef at the Keppels. Picture: TropWATER/JCU

Heat stress is causing bleaching along 1,100km of the Great Barrier Reef  including at the Keppel Islands. Picture: TropWATER/JCU

Heat stress is causing widespread bleaching across the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland. Surveys by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the Australian Institute of Marine Science showed the beaching was “extensive and fairly uniform across all surveyed reefs”. Corals are a colony of marine invertebrates and they have a symbiotic relationship with algae. They can turn completely white when water warms or cools dramatically, and they react by expelling the algae.  It doesn’t mean the corals will certainly die, but rather the bleaching makes them more susceptible to disease and hampers reproduction.  However, severely bleached corals are likely to die if the water temperature remains too high for too long. They can recover if the temperature stabilises. 

Bleaching had been seen across a 1100km stretch of the Great Barrier Reef from the Keppels in the south to Lizard Island in the north.

Of the 27 sites inspected at the Keppels, “most sites showing signs of bleaching”, with only corals in deeper waters unimpacted by the heat stress. Scientist Dr Maya Srinivasan, from JCU’s Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystem Research (TropWATER), said the water temperatures around the Keppels were well above average, hitting 29C on multiple days. “I have been working on these reefs for nearly 20 years and I have never felt the water as warm as this,” she said. “Once we were in the water, we could instantly see parts of the reef that were completely white from severe bleaching. Some corals were already dying.” The current bleaching could be the seventh mass bleaching event to hit the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef in recent history. ...

Associate Professor Scott Heron from James Cook University warned in 2022 that global warming would have catastrophic consequences from almost all coral reefs.  Last year was the hottest year on record, according to United Nations World Meteorological Organization chief Petteri Taalas, with greenhouse gas levels at a record high and Antarctic sea ice at a record low.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/fears-of-m...

A review of 46 studies found "microplastics and nanoplastics led to inflammation, which is known to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke". Yet another example of the impact of the fossil fuel industry not only impacting the environment and people's health directly through greenhouse gas emissions, but also impacting people's health through the products fossil fuels are used to create. 

Plastic pollution is ubiquitous, reaching across the entire planet. Photograph: Maxshoto/Alamy

Quote:

The idea that tiny plastic particles, so small that they mostly cannot be seen by the human eye, can enter the human body from the air, food and water is not new, with many studies on microplastics and human health showing this is the case.  Past studies on human cells and animals in the lab have also suggested that these plastic particles could have a negative impact on the heart and circulatory system.  But until now scientists did not know how they actually affected blood vessels.  So, when new research on the topic emerged, many media outlets were quick to run stories on its finding that these tiny plastic particles may increase the risk of having a heart attack or stroke.    

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, followed a group of people who’d had a procedure to remove fatty material that had built up in the main blood vessels (atherosclerosis) in their necks called a carotid endarterectomy.  After the procedure, the researchers examined the fatty material, called plaques, that had been removed from the neck blood vessels of 257 people.  They discovered more than half (58 per cent) of them had tiny plastic particles in their plaques. Using a special high-powered microscope, the researchers could see the jagged edges of the particles known as microplastics and nanoplastics (the smallest particles). They found two types of plastic – polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride – out of 11 they looked for.  These could have entered the body from eating or drinking contaminated products, breathing the particles in, or by absorbing them through the skin, the researchers said. 

They also discovered that participants with plastic in their plaques had high levels of some types of inflammatory markers in their plaques too.  These markers are known to play a role in the build-up of these fatty plaques in the blood vessels, which raises the risk of a blood clot developing that can cause a heart attack or stroke. 

The more plastic a person had the higher their blood levels of inflammatory markers, reported the research team who followed the study’s participants for almost three years after they’d had the plaques removed.  During those three years, they found those who had plastic in the plaques in their blood vessels were 4.5 times more likely to have a heart attack, stroke, or die, than those whose plaques were plastic free. 

The researchers stressed their findings did not prove that tiny plastic particles in the environment cause a heart attack or stroke. But that it showed there was a link between the two. The researchers looked at the number of heart attacks and strokes happening in people with few known risk factors. They say their findings do not prove that microplastics and nanoplastics cause hearts attacks and strokes but suggest they may be a previously unknown risk factor. Previous studies carried out in mice and human cells in the laboratory have also suggested these plastics could negatively impact the heart and circulatory system.   

An analysis in the journal of Environment International of this earlier research shows that certain microplastics and nanoplastics can harm the cells of the heart and blood vessels causing abnormal heart rate, damage to the heart muscle, and preventing the heart working properly. 

This new study adds to this knowledge by showing for the first time that microplastics and nanoplastics are present in the fatty plaques of some people with atherosclerosis. Interestingly, the particles the researchers found were mainly nanoplastics, the tiniest of particles. The researchers say this supports the idea that nanoplastics are potentially the most dangerous to human health because they can spread more easily around the body than larger particles. However, they are unable to say why just two plastics – polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride – were detected in the study’s participants.  More research is needed, they say, to find out whether these two plastics are better able to lodge in fatty plaques in blood vessels, and if this means they’re more harmful to the heart than other plastics. 

Professor Bryan Williams, British Heart Foundation’s Chief Scientific and Medical Officer, says the study’s findings are “concerning”. Finding tiny plastic particles lodged in the fatty plaques of human arteries is important, he says, as it suggests plastic pollution in the environment may be harming our hearts. “This is the first study to show microplastics and nanoplastic particles are present in the fatty plaques in human arteries, and that they may pose a potential risk to our heart health. “This is worrying and should be considered when talking about the impact environment can have on our health.”  

Plastic pollution is ubiquitous, reaching across the entire planet. Photograph: Maxshoto/Alamy

While the following article deals with a new study examining the threat of sea level rise to US coastal cities where sea level rise is a major problem for 24 of 32 American coastal cities, the same is true for coastal cities around the world, including Vancouver, Victoria, and Halifax in Canada. 

Coastal cities in the US and around the world are under growing threat from sea level rise 

FIGHTING OFF RISING seas without reducing humanity’s carbon emissions is like trying to drain a bathtub without turning off the tap. But increasingly, scientists are sounding the alarm on yet another problem compounding the crisis for coastal cities: Their land is also sinking, a phenomenon known as subsidence. The metaphorical tap is still on—as rapid warming turns more and more polar ice into ocean water—and at the same time the tub is sinking into the floor.

An alarming new study in the journal Nature shows how bad the problem could get in 32 coastal cities in the United States. Previous projections have studied geocentric sea level rise, or how much the ocean is coming up along a given coastline. This new research considers relative sea level rise, which also includes the vertical motion of the land. That’s possible thanks to new data from satellites that can measure elevation changes on very fine scales along coastlines.

With that subsidence in mind, the study finds that those coastal areas in the US could see 500 to 700 square miles of additional land flooded by 2050, impacting an additional 176,000 to 518,000 people and causing up to $100 billion of further property damage. That’s on top of baseline estimates of the damage so far up to 2020, which has affected 530 to 790 square miles and 525,000 to 634,000 people, and cost between $100 billion and $123 billion.
 

Overall, the study finds that 24 of the 32 coastal cities studied are subsiding by more than 2 millimeters a year. (One millimeter equals 0.04 inches.) “The combination of both the land sinking and the sea rising leads to this compounding effect of exposure for people,” says the study’s lead author, Leonard Ohenhen, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech. “When you combine both, you have an even greater hazard.”

The issue is that cities have been preparing for projections of geocentric sea level rise, for instance with sea walls. Through no fault of their own—given the infancy of satellite subsidence monitoring—they’ve been missing half the problem. “All the adaptation strategies at the moment that we have in place are based on rising sea levels,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech and a coauthor of the paper. “It means that the majority—if not all—of those adaptation strategies are overestimating the time that we have for those extreme consequences of sea level rise. Instead of having 40 years to prepare, in some cases we have only 10.”

 
 

Subsidence can happen naturally, for instance when loose sediments settle over time, or because of human activity, such as when cities extract too much groundwater and their aquifers collapse like empty water bottles. In extreme cases, this can result in dozens of feet of subsidence. The sheer weight of coastal cities like New York is also pushing down on the ground, leading to further sinking.

In the map above, warmer colors show areas with higher rates of this vertical land motion, or VLM, per year. Ohenhen and Shirzaei previously found that the East Coast is particularly prone to sinking: up to 74,000 square kilometers (28,600 square miles) are exposed to subsidence of up to 2 millimeters annually, impacting up to 14 million people and 6 million properties. Worse still, over 3,700 square kilometers (1,400 square miles) are sinking more than 5 millimeters each year.

 

But also check out the deep reds of the Gulf Coast, which has high rates of subsidence but also lower coastal elevations that already make it vulnerable to sea level rise. The Pacific Coast, by contrast, is much greener, meaning it has lower rates of subsidence.

A few millimeters a year might sound tame, but it adds up if it’s happening year after year: If you’ve got 4 millimeters of sea level rise along a coastline, and the land is also sinking by 4 millimeters annually, you’ve essentially doubled the problem. That’s a challenge on longer timescales as seas gradually rise, but also ephemerally when hurricanes push storm surges of water onto land.

The sinking is especially dangerous where it’s happening at different rates in adjacent points, known as differential subsidence. If a road, airport, or levee is sinking at 5 millimeters a year along its whole stretch, that might not be a huge deal—its elevation is just dropping. But if the sinking is happening at 5 millimeters at one end and 1 millimeter at the other, that difference can destabilize the infrastructure.

 

Extent of Flooding in US Atlantic cities COURTESY OF LEONARD OHENHEN, VIRGINIA TECH
Overall, you can see how varied the inundation is within these coastal cities. That’s due both to elevation—SFO, for instance, is a (necessarily) flat area right on the water—but also to the local geology.

So the subsidence is bad, and it’s widespread across US coastal cities. But the problem is especially acute for lower-income Americans and people of color in disadvantaged neighborhoods, the study finds. They lack both the funding and the governmental support to properly adapt to sea level rise even without subsidence thrown into the mix. In a place like the Gulf Coast, successive hurricanes and flooding create a deeper and deeper hole for people to get out of. “You have this continuous vicious cycle of events,” says Ohenhen. “Each time it makes them even more vulnerable and unable to recover.”
So what can be done about it? That depends on what’s driving the sinking. If a stretch of coastline once hosted wetlands, restoring those can help replenish sediments, and they can act as natural buffers against rising seas. That’d be especially useful where there’s differential subsidence, as this destabilizes any engineered seawalls. (In Indonesia, the government is moving its capital out of Jakarta because of subsidence so extreme, it’d make seawalls useless. We’re talking nearly a foot of sinking a year in some places.) “We need to know, when we're addressing sea level rise, what problem we're exactly solving for,” says Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. “If you're getting a lot of land subsidence that's happening because you're over-extracting groundwater, you're going to address that problem very differently than you would if the problem were purely just sea level rise.”

To that end, a city can find other water sources. A growing number of metropolises are finding ways to capture more stormwater, for instance, which reduces pressure on aquifers. With the right infrastructure, you can force stormwater to trickle underground, thus replenishing an exhausted aquifer and slowing subsidence. Los Angeles is already doing this: Early last month, it captured 8.6 billion gallons of water over the course of three rainy days, enough to supply more than 100,000 households for a year. “The solution really has to be tailored to the community,” says Shirzaei. “One size does not fit all.”

https://www.wired.com/story/cities-arent-prepared-for-a-crucial-part-of-...

The vast majority of national government are grossly underestimating their greenhouse gas emissions because they are "typically out of date, inconsistent, and incomplete. For most countries, “I would not put much value, if any, on the submissions,” says Glen Peters of the Centre for International Climate Research in Norway, a longtime analyst of emissions trends. The data from large emitters is as much open to questions as that from smaller and less industrialised nations."  The data from large emitters is as much open to questions as that from smaller and less industrialised nations. China's emissions reports have "uncertainties around its carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal are larger than the total emissions of many major industrial countries. ... Two of today’s three biggest emitters — China and India — as well as oil-rich Gulf states with per-capita emissions higher than any Annex 1 nation, need only comply with the less strict reporting standards." A study in the US found that "air over the country’s oil and natural gas fields found that they emit three times more methane — a gas responsible for a third of current warming — than the government has reported." while in California "wildfire emissions have in some years been as great as those from the state’s power stations. But the state government excludes them from its greenhouse-gas inventories" ... A review "of U.N. data has found that Qatar, the natural gas-rich Gulf state with the world’s highest per-capita CO2 emissions, has all but given up publicly reporting its emissions". (https://e360.yale.edu/features/undercounted-emissions-un-climate-change) Some data, suchas international shipping is left out because nations cannot agree on how to apportion their emissions. Others such as military emissions are also left out. With the US having by far the largest military in the world and the emissions created by the Russia-Ukraine war further spiking emissions, "globally armed forces may be responsible for more than 5 percent of global CO2 emissions. ... Military fuel use, ammunition firing, and fires set off by bombing during the first 18 months of the conflict in Ukraine caused more emissions than Portugal. Another study estimated that the U.S. military also emits more CO2 than Portugal’s national total."(https://e360.yale.edu/features/undercounted-emissions-un-climate-change)

Canada's 2023 world record wildfire emissions were "23% of the world's wildfire emissions" (https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/copernicus-canada-produced-23-global-wi...) and "triple the annual climate pollution from burning fossil fuels in Canada. It's more than the combined emissions from 100 nations." (https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/08/21/analysis/our-forests-have-re...). But like California and many other countries they are not counted in emissions even the record wildfire seasons are a direct result of the climate crisis's global warming. "These emissions ... are not counted towards the reported totals by either B.C. or Canada, in line with international practice.” (https://globalnews.ca/news/10080419/concern-carbon-emissions-canada-fore...“In%20B.C.%2C%20forest%20fire%20emissions,in%20line%20with%20international%20practice.”)

What a world we are leaving our children as the claims of achieving the 2015 Paris emissions reductions targets become virtually meaningless when the vast majority of nations are failing to report greenhouse gas emissions with even a modicum of accuracy. The UNFCCC ( United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) web page on reporting rules sums it up not so nicely: “Without transparency, we are left to act blindly.

The Oak Fire burns near Mariposa, California, in July 2022. DAVID MCNEW / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Because of lax rules, national inventories reported to the United Nations grossly underestimate many countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. The result, analysts say, is that the world can not verify compliance with agreed emissions targets, jeopardizing global climate agreements.

They are supposed to be the climate-savers’ gold standard — the key data on which the world relies in its efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions and hold global warming in check. But the national inventories of emissions supplied to the  United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by most countries are anything but reliable, according to a growing body of research. 

The data supplied to the UNFCCC, and published on its website, are typically out of date, inconsistent, and incomplete. For most countries, “I would not put much value, if any, on the submissions,” says Glen Peters of the Centre for International Climate Research in Norway, a longtime analyst of emissions trends.

The data from large emitters is as much open to questions as that from smaller and less industrialised nations. In China, the uncertainties around its carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal are larger than the total emissions of many major industrial countries. And companies preparing data for its carbon-trading system have been accused of widespread data fraud. 

In the United States, an analysis published this month of the air over the country’s oil and natural gas fields found that they emit three times more methane — a gas responsible for a third of current warming — than the government has reported.

Meanwhile, a Yale Environment 360 review of U.N. data has found that Qatar, the natural gas-rich Gulf state with the world’s highest per-capita CO2 emissions, has all but given up publicly reporting its emissions. Its last formal submission to the UNFCCC only covered emissions up to 2007. Since then, the country’s undeclared emissions have almost doubled. 

The proof of these greenhouse-gas bookkeeping failings lies in the real atmosphere. By one recent count, national emissions inventories total just 70 percent of the actual additions to the air, as calculated using remote sensing and model analysis. The remaining 30 percent are unaccounted for. As a result, say analysts, the world is flying blind, unable either to verify national compliance with emissions targets or figure out how much atmospheric “room” countries have left for emissions before exceeding agreed warming thresholds.

The UNFCCC requires countries to report regularly and in detail on their greenhouse gas emissions. “Moving confidently towards net-zero emissions requires high-quality emissions statistics for tracking countries’ progress,” says Jan Minx, a climate-change policy analyst at Berlin’s Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. But for many countries, including some of the largest emitters, analysts say, no such reliable statistics exist.

One reason is that the reporting rules for national inventories are a political compromise. They are precise and detailed for rich developed nations, known in U.N. climate jargon as Annex 1 nations. Even if there are gaps, “these are the gold standard, well-resourced and peer-reviewed,” says Peters.

But the rules are much less rigorous for developing countries, known as non-Annex 1 nations, which prior to the 2015 Paris Agreement did not have emissions targets. Data submissions from them can be arbitrary, sometimes outright implausible, and are rarely independently checked, analysts note. 

This even though many “developing” nations, including China, have emissions greater than their “developed” counterparts. As a result, two of today’s three biggest emitters — China and India — as well as oil-rich Gulf states with per-capita emissions higher than any Annex 1 nation, need only comply with the less strict reporting standards. 

“I would not trust a non-Annex 1 emissions estimate without cross-checking across multiple sources,” says Peters.

“The existing patchwork of greenhouse-gas inventories is woefully inadequate,” concluded Amy Luers, director of sustainability science at Microsoft, in a 2022 review with academic colleagues for Nature. They are “rife with measurement errors, inconsistent classification and gaps in accountability.” The situation is made worse, says coauthor Leehi Yona, an environmental lawyer at Stanford University, by “inflexible and outdated” U.N. guidelines for national reporting.

The reasons for the data gaps vary. Some emissions are eminently measurable but are expressly excluded from the U.N. reporting system because there is no agreement on how to apportion them to national inventories. These include international aircraft and shipping, which make up around 5 percent of global emissions.

Another category is military activity. It is “one of the most urgent,” says Matthias Jonas, an environmental scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. He has found that military fuel use, ammunition firing, and fires set off by bombing during the first 18 months of the conflict in Ukraine caused more emissions than Portugal. Another study estimated that the U.S. military also emits more CO2 than Portugal’s national total.  The British advocacy group Common Wealth last year calculated that globally armed forces may be responsible for more than 5 percent of global CO2 emissions.

Another category is military activity. It is “one of the most urgent,” says Matthias Jonas, an environmental scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. He has found that military fuel use, ammunition firing, and fires set off by bombing during the first 18 months of the conflict in Ukraine caused more emissions than Portugal. Another study estimated that the U.S. military also emits more CO2 than Portugal’s national total. 

The British advocacy group Common Wealth last year calculated that globally armed forces may be responsible for more than 5 percent of global CO2 emissions. But “we do not have guidelines for estimating these emissions and attributing responsibility,” says Jonas. So, they mostly remain off the books. Another gaping data hole is forest fires, says Yona. ...

Thus, California’s wildfire emissions have in some years been as great as those from the state’s power stations. But the state government excludes them from its greenhouse-gas inventories, “even though they are large, measurable, reducible and overwhelmingly caused by human activity,” Yona says.

The problem of underreporting is compounded because, according to the public online record, many non-Annex 1 nations have been extremely slow in meeting their requirement to submit inventories every four years. Some backsliders are states at war or with unstable governments. Syria last filed in 2010, Myanmar in 2012, Haiti in 2013, and Libya has never filed. But others have no such excuse. The Philippines last sent its inventory in 2014, and Guyana in 2012.

Most startling is Qatar — a major Gulf natural-gas exporter with per-capita emissions widely regarded as the highest in the world. At more than 35 tons of CO2 per person, Qataris emit more than twice as much as Americans. But their government has only filed a formal inventory of those emissions once, in 2011, and provided data for 2007. Since then, Qatar’s actual emissions are thought to have almost doubled.... 

Concerns about China have increased with the introduction of the country’s carbon trading system, which analysts say could allow energy companies to profit by fiddling the figures. Two years ago, China’s environment ministry found four companies auditing offset claims had routinely tampered with coal samples, doctored test results, concealed energy output data, and provided fictitious verification reports for their power-station clients, so cutting the declared emissions. ...

Away from the energy industry, data discrepancies are often even greater. Emissions from some chemical processes and landfills are poorly assessed, says Solazzo. So are methane emissions from cattle and rice production, while estimates of the global releases of nitrous oxide from fertilized soils could be undercounted by a factor of three.

There may also be previously unconsidered anthropogenic emissions. This month, ecologist Trisha Atwood of Utah State University published calculationssuggesting that fishing trawlers that churn up the ocean floor are releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere annually than Great Britain.

Then there are forests. Geographer Clemens Schwingshackl at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich found that governments collectively claim their forests are soaking up 6 billion tons more CO2 each year than scientists can account for. That gap is more than total U.S. emissions from all activities.

The good news is that such ruses in national inventories are under ever greater scrutiny from improved aircraft- and satellite-based data collection. ...

The UNFCCC web page on reporting rules says: “Without transparency, we are left to act blindly.”

https://e360.yale.edu/features/undercounted-emissions-un-climate-change

Trudeau's 2019 pre-election statements of declaring a climate emergency in June and the next day approving the purchase of the  the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion shows the hypocrisy of his fossil fuel agenda (https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjvkqq/canada-justin-trudeau-declares-cl...). When he took power in 2015, he simply adopted Harper's inadequate emission reduction targets. While Trudeau was in office a "report from Oil Change International found Canada provided an average of almost $14 billion a year in public support for fossil fuels between 2018 and 2020" (https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/oil-change-subsidies-1.6228679). A just released report from Canada's climate institute concludes "concluded that a mix of major climate policies across Canada are reducing emissions today, and market-based policies targeting industrial emissions (which we refer to as large-emitter trading systems) are having the biggest impact", with the gas tax also having a significant impact of 8% to 14% in reducing emissions. (https://440megatonnes.ca/insight/industrial-carbon-pricing-systems-drive...)  So what Trudeau is doing is having some effect; the trouble is, like the rest of the world is not sufficient, not even close. Last year wildfires burnt the equivalent of 1.4 Englands in Canada as this country produced "23% of the world's wildfire emissions" in 2023 (https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/copernicus-canada-produced-23-global-wi...), which is " "triple the annual climate pollution from burning fossil fuels in Canada. It's more than the combined emissions from 100 nations." (https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/08/21/analysis/our-forests-have-re. We also had two thirds of the population of the Northwest Territories had to leave the territory to survive, as did many people in BC, Quebec, Manitoba, northern Ontario and near Halifax and that's just last year. Do you Remember the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire that burned down one quarter of the town? Do you remember the 2011 Slave Lake wildfire that burned down one third of the town? Do you remember the Lytton wildfire that burnt down the entire town as temperatures hit 46 degrees Celsius? And that's just some of the wildfire community destructions, never mind the many other problems created by the climate crisis right here in Canada. ). 
The vast majority of national government are grossly underestimating their greenhouse gas emissions because they are "typically out of date, inconsistent, and incomplete. For most countries, “I would not put much value, if any, on the submissions,” says Glen Peters of the Centre for International Climate Research in Norway, a longtime analyst of emissions trends. The data from large emitters is as much open to questions as that from smaller and less industrialised nations. ... By one recent count, national emissions inventories total just 70 percent of the actual additions to the air, as calculated using remote sensing and model analysis. The remaining 30 percent are unaccounted for. As a result, say analysts, the world is flying blind, unable either to verify national compliance with emissions targets or figure out how much atmospheric “room” countries have left for emissions before exceeding agreed warming thresholds. (https://e360.yale.edu/features/undercounted-emissions-un-climate-change) So like most of the world governments, Trudeau is not doing enough to deal with the survival of life on this planet.

The trouble with Poilevre is he wants to do much less than even Trudeau in dealing with the climate crisis; he doesn't even have a climate crisis plan. Conservative governments always scream over the danger of leaving the burden of the national debt to our children. Yet, the three basket cases of Ireland (whose government was the result of bailing out the debt of the high risk debts of the banking sector as it had also no government debt), Iceland and Greece from the early 2010s, have all recovered and have booming economies with Ireland now having a per capita income of $104,000  (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=IE - unfortuately very evenly divided among the Irish people). Yet the same conservatives around the world pay virtually no attention to scientists warnings about the disastrous effects of climate change that will cause effects that will last centuries with catastrophic global effects. "Five important natural thresholds already risk being crossed, according to the Global Tipping Points report, and three more may be reached in the 2030s if the world heats 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures. Triggering these planetary shifts will not cause temperatures to spiral out of control in the coming centuries but will unleash dangerous and sweeping damage to people and nature that cannot be undone. “Tipping points in the Earth system pose threats of a magnitude never faced by humanity,” said Tim Lenton, from the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute. “They can trigger devastating domino effects, including the loss of whole ecosystems and capacity to grow staple crops, with societal impacts including mass displacement, political instability and financial collapse.” The tipping points at risk include the collapse of big ice sheets in Greenlandand the West Antarctic, the widespread thawing of permafrost, the death of coral reefs in warm waters, and the collapse of one oceanic current in the North Atlantic. … Scientists have warned that some of the shifts can create feedback loops that heat the planet further or alter weather patterns in a way that triggers other tipping points." (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/06/earth-on-verge-of-fi...)

The fossil fuel companies knew since at least the 1980s the risks produced by their greenhouse gas emissions. "“What we found is that between 1977 and 2003, excellent scientists within Exxon modeled and predicted global warming with, frankly, shocking skill and accuracy only for the company to then spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science.” (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-find...“What%20we%20found%20is%20that,denying%20that%20very%20climate%20science.”) Their solution was to hire the same researchers and advertising companies as the smoking industry to deny the problems cigarettes causing cancer and fossil fuels causing the climate crisis. "As early as the 1950s, the groups shared scientists and publicists to downplay dangers of smoking and climate change." (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-industries-us...) And when they could no longer credibly deny the problem, they minimized it, just like Canadian conservatives such as Poilievre, Smith, and Moe. Smith is so bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry that she is preventing wind and solar companies from investing many billions in Alberta, because their lower prices would outcompete the fossil fuel industry's oil. (https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/02/29/opinion/danielle-smiths-wind...), thereby ignoring "The burning question for today’s adults which is how violent and unpredictable of a climate legacy are we going to saddle our children and future generations with." (https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/02/09/analysis/gasoline-climate-em...)

So like Trudeau and many politicians around the world, Poilevre is a hypocrite on the climate crisis, but doesn't even have the half-measures that Trudeau has to deal with the existential problem of the 21st century. 

Fuelling our rising horde of gas-guzzlers in Canada is burning down our nation’s climate promises and our kids’ future.

A stable climate was a beautiful thing.

It allowed civilization to develop and humanity to prosper. And it allowed all the planet’s majestic ecosystems we cherish and rely on to thrive as well.

But that’s now gone — cooked away over a few short decades by rampant fossil fuel burning. In fact, 90 per cent of all planet-heating gases humans have ever released from burning fossil fuels have been dumped into the atmosphere during the lives of the baby boomers. That’s my generation. We got to grow up under a stable climate. And we’ve spent our lifetimes helping to burn it down. ...

The burning question for today’s adults is how violent and unpredictable of a climate legacy are we going to saddle our children and future generations with. Historically, Canadians have been one of the world’s top 10 climate polluters — both in total and per capita. For the last 35 years, we’ve repeatedly promised to do something about it. How are we doing? ...

As the decades have rolled on and climate breakdown has grown ever more dangerous, Canadians have been out in front, leading our peers. But not in a good way.

My first chart shows what Canadians — and our peers in the Group of Seven (G7) nations — have done with their climate polluting since 1990. 

As you can see, every G7 nation now emits less than they did in 1990 — except Canada. We are the climate rogues in the group, still emitting far more.

Collectively, these wealthy, industrialized nations emit one-third of global climate pollution and produce half the world's GDP. These nations have the resources, talent and capacity to reduce their emissions.

And most have. For example, the chart shows that our German and British peers have been steadily reducing climate pollution for decades. As a result, they’ve cut their emissions in half.

Clearly, it has been possible for Canadians to reduce our oversized climate impact as well. We’ve just refused to act.

If we want to save our kids and future Canadian generations from a dystopian future, we have to stop fuelling the crisis. And a critical place we have to slam the brakes on is the amount of climate pollution we dump out our tailpipes. Few sources of Canadian climate pollution are larger and more out of control than the gasoline and diesel we pump into our cars and trucks. It’s arguably our nation’s single biggest climate impact. My next chart compares the immense scale of these emissions to those from other sectors of our economy and lives.

That tall orange bar on the right is tailpipe emissions from all the road vehicles in Canada — around 120 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) per year.

This “pump it and dump it” climate damage rises to around 150 MtCO2 when we include the additional emissions from extracting, refining and shipping all that gasoline and diesel.

That “wells to wheels” total is shown by an orange dot on the chart, way above everything else.

For scale, there are more than 140 nations that emit less than that for everything in their economy and society.

As the chart shows, it is also more climate pollution than from major sectors in our economy — like heavy industry, agriculture, electricity or all our buildings. In fact, even Canada’s notoriously polluting oilsands industry emits less (86 MtCO2) than our tailpipes.

Not only are our tailpipe emissions massive, we’ve also been increasing them twice as fast as our overall emissions. Canadian tailpipe emissions have risen 28 per cent since 1990 — versus a 14 per cent rise for everything else combined. This surge in tailpipe pollution has erased our climate progress in other areas and dragged our national emissions even higher.

What’s driving this trend? Lots more tailpipes — attached to the world’s worst gas-guzzlers. Let’s look at each of these problems in more detail.

Problem #1: Canada’s rising horde of burners.

The primary reason our tailpipe emissions are going up is that the number of fossil fuel-burning cars and trucks (a.k.a. burnermobiles) keeps going up. My next chart shows the relentless trend.

Back in 2000, we had 18 million burners on our roads. Now we have 26 million.

That means we have eight million more gas tanks we are filling. And eight million more tailpipes spewing climate pollution.

Canadians could choose pure battery electric vehicles (BEVs) instead of burnermobiles. These run on made-in-Canada electricity, which is far less climate- damaging than gasoline.

In fact, gasoline engines are about as climate dirty as you can get — producing twice the climate pollution of coal power plants to do the same work. 

So far, however, less than one per cent of Canadian cars and trucks are BEVs. On the chart, they’re shown by the tiny green smear of frosting on top of that hulking black mountain of fossil burners.

That last chart showed the trend over the last couple decades. This next one focuses on what we did last year.

The height of each bar shows the percentage of new passenger vehicles that burn gasoline or diesel.

The red bar is Canada. Last year, when Canadians decided to buy a brand-new passenger car or truck, 92 out of 100 bought a burner. That’s according to the most recent data from Statistics Canada.

As you can see, that’s a higher rate than our peers in many other nations.

For example, last year in the cold, northern, oil-producing nation of Norway, new car buyers only picked burnermobiles 17 per cent of the time. They chose all-electric BEV 83 per cent of the time. As a result, total emissions from Norway’s passenger vehicle fleet have been plunging.

New cars and trucks last a long time. As each new one rolls off the dealer’s lot, it commits us to tonnes more climate pollution spewing out its tailpipe for the next decade or two. How many tonnes are locked in depends on how big of a gas guzzler each car is.

And here again, Canadians lead the pack.

Problem #2: Canadians choose the world’s most climate-polluting cars.

A second major reason for Canada’s huge tailpipe emissions is the sad fact that Canadians choose to buy the world’s most climate-polluting new cars.

This was true a decade ago, according to a survey I covered back then by the International Energy Agency (IEA). And it’s sadly still true today, according to a new report by GlobalFuelEconomy.org.

My next chart shows what this most recent report found.

Each bar on this chart shows litres burned per 100 kilometres (L/100km), for the average new passenger vehicle.

For example, at the top of the chart, we see that the French, Germans and British choose cars that burn five litres on average. In the middle of the pack, we see that the Chinese buy new cars that burn six litres on average. And the world average is a bit under seven litres.

Where are Canadians? Way down at the very bottom. Our new passenger vehicles average 8.3 L/100km.

Some common new Canadian vehicles that burn around 8.3 L/100km include the all-wheel drive versions of the Toyota RAV4 and Camry, Honda CR-V, Ford Escape and Subaru’s Impreza, Forester and Outback.

Cars and trucks last a long time and those litres add up. In Canada, the average new passenger vehicle requires the owner to pump over 20 tonnes of gasoline into it over its lifespan. At recent gas prices of around $1.50 per litre, it will cost more than $40,000 at the pump.

All that gasoline gets dumped out the tailpipe and straight into the environment as it’s burned. That will pump more than 75 tonnes of planet-heating gases into our already destabilized climate.

It is easy to appreciate the massive size and weight of our cars and trucks. But hidden from view are the vastly larger amounts of gasoline and climate pollution that come with them. They each weigh many times more than the vehicle itself.

All that future gasoline production, burning and resulting climate damage gets locked in the minute the new car or truck is purchased.

Driving off the climate cliff…

We’ve got the kids in the back seat. Are we really going to drive them off the climate cliff? Because that’s the direction we’re headed with our growing horde of the world’s most climate-damaging vehicles. If we want to give our kids and future Canadians a fighting chance at a decent future, we'd better reverse course quickly —  while there is still time.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/02/09/analysis/gasoline-climate-em...

A cascade of lawsuits is coming for the fossil fuel industry. 

A 2021 wildfire lights up the ridge behind a gas station in Lassen County, California. Scott Strazzante / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

 

It’s been six years since cities in California started the trend of taking Big Oil to court for deceiving the public about the consequences of burning fossil fuels. The move followed investigations showing that Exxon and other companies had known about the dangers of skyrocketing carbon emissions for decades, but publicly downplayed the threat. Today, around 30 lawsuits have been filed around the country as cities, states, and Indigenous tribes seek to make the industry pay for the costs of climate change.

Until recently, most of these cases had been stuck in limbo. Oil companies were trying to move them from the state courts in which they were filed to federal courts, a more business-friendly setting. But just in the past year, the Supreme Court declined to hear their arguments to relocate these cases on three separate occasions, most recently clearing the way for Minnesota’s case to proceed in state court. That means executives from Exxon Mobil, BP, and other oil giants may soon have to defend their actions in front of a jury.

“Last year was a really pivotal year in terms of getting past the industry’s big push and their delay tactics,” said Alyssa Johl, vice president for the legal program at the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy organization that provides support for these cases. “That issue and that effort has been put to rest, and now they have to face the music.”

The long delays might have strengthened the legal arguments against fossil fuel companies. Researchers have uncovered more details about what oil companies knew about climate change and when, and the science connecting fossil fuel emissions to climate disasters has matured, arming cities and states with more evidence. All the while, the effects of climate change — the heat waves, the blazes, the wildfire smoke — have only grown more obvious, and more costly. Last year, the U.S. recorded a billion-dollar disaster every two weeks.

“With each month and with each year that these cases are stalled, the impacts for communities just grow,” said Delta Merner, the lead scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ litigation hub. “I think that’s important context for understanding these cases, and for understanding the additional cases that have been filed over the last six years.”

That might explain the spread of lawsuits from coastal cities and states to inland areas like Minnesota, Colorado, and most recently, Chicago. With the third-largest city in the country suing BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and other oil titans for lying about climate change, a quarter of Americans now live in cities and states that are taking fossil fuel companies to court, according to the Center for Climate Integrity.

One of the cases that’s furthest along, filed by Massachusetts against Exxon Mobil in 2019, is already in the process of “discovery,” the last major step before a trial. In this stage, both sides try to uncover evidence that could help their case in court. The discovery process could unearth further details of oil companies’ deception, such as what individual CEOs or other company executives did with the information they learned about climate change, Johl said. 

“It’s really what the industry fears the most,” Johl said. “They don’t want anyone digging through their archives and divulging their innermost thoughts and secrets.” Much of what the public learned about the tobacco industry’s effort to cover up the link between lung cancer and smoking, for example, came out of the discovery process, made public as part of a major settlement in 1998, when Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and other tobacco giants agreed to pay states $206 billion over the next 25 years. 

The discovery phase of the Massachusetts case is expected to wrap up later this year, and it could head to trial as early as 2025, Johl said.

Oil companies have plans to fight back, though. In response to the new lawsuit from Chicago, industry representatives characterized the lawsuits as a “waste of taxpayer resources” and contended that climate change should be addressed by Congress, not the courts. “They’re going to raise issues every step of the way and raise defenses every step of the way,” Johl said. 

Another case that’s at the front of the pack is Honolulu’s suit seeking damages from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Sunoco, among others. In October, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court dismissed the companies’ appeal to throw out the suit, clearing the way for a trial. Last week, the companies asked the Supreme Court to toss that ruling.

The industry’s current line of argument in the Honolulu case (and others) is that these lawsuits are about the broader issue of emissions and pollution, and that the federal Clean Air Act preempts any claim brought by cities and states. So far, this approach has seen some modest success. In January, Delaware’s Superior Court denied oil companies’ motion to dismiss the state’s case against them while granting a few concessions, including that out-of-state emissions were the territory of the Clean Air Act, beyond the limits of state law. Emissions that originated in Delaware, however, were fair game.

As these climate cases have slowly begun to proceed, recent months have brought lawsuits from California, cities, and tribes. Last September, the state of California demanded that oil companies fund efforts to recover from extreme weather. In December, the Makah and Shoalwater Bay tribes along the coast of Washington state became the first Native American tribes to take oil companies to court over the costs of responding to climate-related risks from rising seas, flooding, and ocean acidification. Meanwhile, Hoboken, New Jersey, and a collection of cities in Puerto Rico have added racketeering lawsuits to the mix, alleging that oil companies engaged in a conspiracy of deception.

New research has made it harder for oil giants to say they couldn’t have known the outcome of burning so much fossil fuel. A study published in the journal Science last year found that Exxon’s scientists predicted the effects of climate change with startling accuracy in the 1980s. Exxon’s models nearly matched actual temperature changes over the past several decades.

Then there’s the blooming area of scientific inquiry that connects climate change to extreme weather events. Researchers are now able to quantify how corporate emissions have fueled climate disasters, a critical development for these cases, Merner said. “This is the cutting edge where the science is moving towards — to be able to look not just at these global averages, but to see what is happening regionally.”

A study Merner coauthored last year found that 37 percent of the forests burned in the Western United States since 1986 can be linked to carbon pollution from a group of 88 of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. Last June, Multnomah County — home to Portland — cited the research in its lawsuit against oil companies over their contributions to a deadly heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest in 2021. In newer cases, like Multnomah’s and the ones filed by Indigenous tribes, the oil industry is sticking to its strategy of trying to move the case to federal courts, according to Margaret Barry, who maintains a climate litigation database at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center.

The new and improved science linking climate change to weather disasters has been a game changer for all of these cases, Merner said. “We can’t sit back and argue whether or not climate change played a role in extreme weather or public health problems that we’re facing today, because attribution science shows that it does and can calculate what that role was.” 

https://grist.org/accountability/big-oil-climate-lawsuits-trials-attribu...

The Canadian Climate Institute analyzed the effectiveness of the different measures of Canada's emissions reduction plan. It concluded that industrial carbon pricing achieved the greatest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions with the fuel charge coming second. 

By 2030, these large-emitter trading systems contribute between 23 and 39 per cent (or 53 to 90 Mt) of avoided emissions relative to the no-climate policy baseline.

Our recent independent assessment of the federal government’s 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan Progress Report also looked at what would happen if Canada hadn’t implemented any emissions-reducing policies. In this “no climate policy” scenario, emissions would be higher today and rising steadily—reaching 765 megatonnes (Mt) in 2025 and 775 Mt in 2030, or 23 and 41 per cent higher than projected emissions under our legislated policy scenario, respectively.

This means that policies currently in place—from carbon pricing to the vehicle efficiency standards to support for heat pumps—prevent 226 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon emissions in 2030. That’s equivalent to the current emissions profiles of Quebec and Ontario combined.

In addition, every tonne of emissions reduced lowers long-term climate impacts and damages. The impacts of climate change are driving up the cost of living for Canadians and are a drag on the Canadian economy.

Of these 226 Mt of avoided emissions, our analysis estimates that federal, provincial, and territorial carbon pricing systems play a leading role. Carbon pricing consists of two distinct types of policies.

The first policy is the fuel charge paid by most households and small businesses (often referred to as the “carbon tax”—and accompanied by quarterly rebates). The fuel charge contributes between 8 and 9 per cent (or 19 to 22 Mt).

The second policy focuses on reducing industrial carbon emissions by establishing large-emitter trading systems(LETS). This approach varies by region and includes output-based pricing (such as Alberta’s TIER system), or Ontario's emissions performance standard. By 2030, these large-emitter trading systems contribute between 23 and 39 per cent (or 53 to 90 Mt) of avoided emissions relative to the no-climate policy baseline. Large-emitter trading systems play a larger role in emissions reductions compared to the fuel charge, in part because they cover a higher share of Canada’s emissions.

Determining the impact of climate policies implemented to date is one thing. But to understand what’s at stake in the policy choices happening today and going forward, we also worked with Navius Research to estimate the impact of major federal climate policies in the Emissions Reductions Plan between 2025 and 2030. These policies include:

1. Large emitting trader systems
2. Fuel charge
3. Oil and gas emissions cap
4. 75 per cent methane regulation
5. Waste methane capture
6. Clean Fuel Regulations
7. Investment tax credits
8. Zero emission vehicle standards

Since policies inherently exist as a package—working together, overlapping, and interacting—isolating a single number of emissions reductions for each policy is challenging. We therefore assessed the impact that each of the analyzed policies could have under two extremes. In the first, the policy is added to a baseline scenario, which does not include the legislated policies we assessed after 2025, namely the large-emitter trading systems, the fuel charge, the clean fuel regulations, and the investment tax credits . This scenario isolates the impacts of the policy without interactions with other ERP policies. In the second, the policy is added to a scenario that includes all other ERP policies. This scenario isolates the impacts of the policy including interactions between ERP policies.

This allows us to estimate the range of incremental emissions reductions attributable to each policy, and demonstrate the implications of policy choices today on future emissions. ...

Counterintuitively, the impacts of individual policies are not entirely additive: the combination of multiple policies will lead to fewer emissions reductions than the sum of emissions reductions each policy would deliver in isolation. While individual policies typically have the greatest incremental impact on their own, in practice, governments rely on combinations of policies that interact and overlap. As more policies are necessarily introduced to drive deeper emissions reductions from a given sector or source, the additional contribution of each policy often decreases. The only exception, of the policies we simulated, is the investment tax credits (ITCs), which work better in reducing emissions when paired with other policies.

These ranges highlight policy interactions and the challenges of attributing emissions reductions to individual policies. But notably, even with maximum overlap and interaction, almost all policies are reducing emissions in 2030. Each policy contributes varying levels of incremental emissions reductions, due to differences in their coverage, stringency, implementation timelines, technological availability, and cost, alongside other market drivers. Table 1 summarizes the impact of each policy in Figure 2. Note that the Clean Electricity Regulations are not included in the figure, as the policy does not bind on emissions until 2035.

Critically, this analysis provides a snapshot in 2030 and does not consider the emissions reductions—often significant—expected in 2035 and beyond. Impacts of policies will increase over time: some will only have been in effect for a few years, and others will increase in stringency after 2030—the zero-emission vehicle sales standards are a good example. Emissions reductions from policies will also accelerate over time, given that policies such as vehicle standards and carbon pricing will have the biggest impacts on new, rather than existing equipment. With more time, policies will affect more decisions and have greater impact.  

Our analysis shows that, even in comparison to the full suite of Emissions Reduction Plan policies, large emitter trading systems are still the biggest driver of emissions reductions in 2030—contributing between 20 and 48 per cent of incremental emissions reductions in 2030.

Even full implementation of every policy in the Emissions Reduction Plan Progress Report leaves a 42 Mt gap to Canada’s 2030 target. Weakening or backtracking on individual policies could further increase the gap to 2030 as well as reduce fewer emissions in the longer term, creating a need for new or stronger measures to deliver on targets. 

https://440megatonnes.ca/insight/industrial-carbon-pricing-systems-drive...

"Despite decades of global efforts to prevent a full-blown climate crisis, the primary driver of it — CO2 — continues to pile up in our atmosphere at an accelerating rate. And last year’s CO2 rise was record-busting extreme. ... As NOAA highlighted: “The rate of CO2 growth over the last decade is 100 to 200 times faster than what the Earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age. This is a real shock to the atmosphere. ... Canada, all by itself, is currently emitting far more CO2 each year than that required ... to melt the entire polar ice cap that covered nearly all of  Canada during the last ice age. 

“The accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere is irreversible on human timescales and will affect climate for millennia.” — World Meteorological Organization (WMO) 

Despite decades of global efforts to prevent a full-blown climate crisis, the primary driver of it — CO2 — continues to pile up in our atmosphere at an accelerating rate. And last year’s CO2 rise was record-busting extreme.

My first chart shows the latest data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Grey bars mark the CO2 increase for each of the last 60 years. And I’ve highlighted 2023’s ”off-the-charts”surge in red.

Last year, CO2 increased by 3.36 parts-per-million (ppm). That’s a 10 per cent greater jump than the previous record, which was set just a few years ago.

In sheer weight, last year’s surge added a record 26 billion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere — more than three tonnes per human. 

On the micro-scale, around 84 trillion new molecules of CO2 were added to every cubic centimetre of Earth’s atmosphere last year. A cubic centimetre is roughly the size of a sugar cube. ...

As NOAA highlighted: “The rate of CO2 growth over the last decade is 100 to 200 times faster than what the Earth experienced during the transition from the last ice age. This is a real shock to the atmosphere.” ...

As you may have noticed, the chart’s grey bars shift a lot from year to year. This is mostly caused by short-term fluctuations in how much CO2 global plants and oceans absorb each year. ...

So, to better show the underlying long-term trend, NOAA uses decade averages. I’ve added these 10-year averages to my chart as a series of black horizontal bars.

For example, during the first decade shown on the chart — 1963 to 1972 — atmospheric CO2 increased an average of 1.00 ppm per year. That’s the left-most black bar.

Notice how those black bars have marched ever higher? They’ve shrugged off three decades of global climate conferences trying to slow them down — to reach a blistering average of 2.38 ppm per year during the previous decade.

And that doesn’t even include last year’s epic surge.

As this chart clearly shows, the annual increases are increasing. When increases are increasing, you’re accelerating. And when you are doing that with the primary control knob of the Earth’s climate — CO2 — you’re accelerating away from climate stability and safety.

Net zero?

To stop the climate crisis (and its evil twin, ocean acidification) from growing increasingly extreme and dangerous, CO2 levels in the atmosphere must stop rising.

That point when CO2 stops increasing is called “net zero” and it is literally the zero line at the bottom of the chart. I’ve highlighted this zero-CO2-increase line in green.

Net zero is one of those bright-line targets. Getting close isn’t enough.

To understand why, look again at that dashed line just above it.

As we saw above, even CO2 increases this small were enough to radically alter the global climate. That rate melted Canada-sized ice sheets, inundated coastlines, and forced major ecosystems to migrate thousands of kilometres or perish. 
 

And yet Canada, all by itself, is currently emitting far more CO2 each year than that dashed line. 

So, it’s net zero or bust. Which will it be?

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/03/27/analysis/co2-jumped-record-a...

Climate-crisis induced drought has had major impacts across Canada, but has hit Alberta particularly hard with severe economic consequences in addition to the environmental ones. "Climate change is expected to increase flooding and drought, lower soil nutrient content and cause greater pest damage. Proposed responses to these threats include irrigation expansion and increasing fertilizer and pesticide use. These management strategies, in addition to environmental costs, can be economically expensive. ... 

Costs of fertilizer and pesticides are also on the rise. Prices jumped an average of 80.2 percent for fertilizer cost in 2022, while pesticides rose at a slower 7.7 percent. Farm Credit Canada estimated fertilizer sales totaled $10.1 billion, with an additional $3.3 billion in agricultural chemicals, including pesticides. These costs are expected to increase by five percent or greater in 2023.

Higher production costs are already inflating bread and flour prices. In March 2022, Canadians paid an average 13.5 percent more for bread than the previous year. While some of this cost was attributed to global events, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, causing uncertainty in the wheat market, some of it was linked to production costs. Statistics Canada reports that the price of grain rose 65.1 percent, with agricultural chemicals, such as pesticides and fertilizers, increasing 33.9 percent. In addition, drought conditions in the prairies severely lowered yield, causing a 37.1 percent decline in Canadian wheat production compared to the previous year. ... We are already experiencing the consequences of climate change, and these costs will worsen as global warming continues. At the current rate of emissions, the world could exceed 1.5°C of warming in the next five years. Even if all greenhouse gas emissions stop immediately, there is still a high chance of overshooting 1.5°C. (https://albertawilderness.ca/the-cost-of-climate-change-food-production/)

Drought in 21st Century Alberta

One of Canada’s Costliest Natural Disasters

Drought once again affected Alberta in the early 21st century. Starting in 1999, and lasting until 2004 the drought during this period was felt across North America.

The 2001-2002 drought was devastating to Alberta.   Net farm income was zero in Alberta in 2002, and the drought cost the Canadian economy $5.8 billion, making it one of Canada’s most costly natural disasters.   Farmers abandoned their farms and 41,000 jobs were lost across the country [1], [2]. 

Recent Droughts

Alberta experienced droughts in 2009, 2010, 2015, 2021 and 2023 [3], [4]. In 2009, the drought most affected central Alberta in “Palliser’s Triangle” region. The region experienced the smallest amount of precipitation in the past fifty years and ten counties declared states of emergency [5].  

In 2010, northern Alberta was hit hard by drought. Ten municipalities including the counties of Grand Prairie, Saddle Hills and Birch Hills, as well as the Municipal Districts of Big Lakes, Northern Sunrise, Spirit River, Fairview, Clear Hills, Smoky River and Greenview, all declared agricultural disaster zones [6].  

In 2010, the Government of Alberta responded with the “Agriculture Drought Risk Management Plan for Alberta,” a risk management framework for managing drought’s impacts on agricultural areas of the province [7].   This was replaced in 2016 (following the 2015 drought) with “Alberta’s Agriculture Drought and Excess Moisture Risk Management Plan” [8].

2021’s drought was considered the worst in 60 years [9] and is considered to have exceeded the extent of the “Dirty Thirties” drought [10].

Current Situation

As of early 2024, Alberta is currently experiencing drought in much of the province.   A low snowpack in winter 2022/23 and low precipitation in 2023 resulted in water shortages in many areas and the declaration of agricultural disasters in many areas.   The 2023 emergence of an El Niño [11] has heightened the risk of ongoing or deteriorating drought conditions in Western Canada during 2024 [12].  

Alberta water shortage management is currently in Stage 4 (of 5 stages [13]) indicating that multiple water management areas are experiencing water shortages and a significant number of water licence holders are unable to divert water.   Stage 5 is the declaration of an emergency under the Alberta Water Act and occurs when human health and safety are considered at significant risk.

In an undated letter to Alberta municipalities, probably written in December 2023, Minister Schulz of Alberta Environment and Protected Areas notes that the Government of Alberta had completed an early draft of a “2024 Drought Emergency Plan”.   The Minister goes on to request that all Alberta municipalities develop water shortage plans [14].

https://albertawater.com/history-of-drought-in-alberta/drought-in-21st-c...'s%20most%20costly%20natural%20disasters.

Trudeau and several premiers have pushed hydrogen as part of the solution to the climate crisis. However, that's because "the fossil fuel industry sees hydrogen as a way to keep on drilling and building new infrastructure". That alone tells you its not a solution to the climate crisis, except in a tiny very limited sense. 

A green hydrogen production facility project in Africa at Namaqua Engineering in Vredendal with the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Photograph: Esa Alexander/Reuters

How grey, blue and green hydrogen are made

Grey hydrogen Hydrogen is extracted from fossil gas releasing CO2 emissions into the air

Blue hydrogen Hydrogen is extracted from fossil gas before CO2 emissions are trapped and stored permanently underground

Green hydrogen Hydrogen is extracted from water using renewable electricity and releasing oxygen into the air

Hydrogen is now being pushed as a clean and safe alternative to oil and gas for heating and earthly modes of transport. Political support is mounting with almost $26bn of US taxpayer money available for hydrogen projects thanks to three recent laws – the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Chips Act. Hydrogen is politically hot, but is it the climate solution that its cheerleaders are claiming?

Why all the hype about hydrogen?

The short answer is that the fossil fuel industry sees hydrogen as a way to keep on drilling and building new infrastructure. Friends of the Earth has tracked how the industry has successfully deployed its PR and lobbying machines over recent years to get policymakers thinking that hydrogen is a catch-all climate solution. Research by climate scientists (without fossil fuel links) has debunked industry claims that hydrogen should be a major player in our decarbonised future, though hydrogen extracted from water (using renewable energy sources) could – and should – play an important role in replacing the dirtiest hydrogen currently extracted from fossil fuels. It may also have a role in fuelling some transportation like long-haul flights and vintage cars, but the evidence is far from clear. However, with billions of climate action dollars up for grabs in the US alone, expect to see more lobbying, more industry-funded evidence and more hype.

Currently about  96% of the world’s hydrogen comes from coal (brown) and gas (grey), with the rest created from nuclear (pink) and renewable sources like hydro, wind and solar. Production of both grey and brown hydrogen release carbon dioxide (CO2) and unburnt fugitive methane into the atmosphere. This super-polluting hydrogen is what’s currently used as the chemical base for synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, plastics and steel among other industries.

Blue hydrogen is what the fossil fuel industry is most invested in, as it still comes from gas but ostensibly the CO2 would be captured and stored underground. The industry claims to have the technology to capture 80-90% of CO2, but in reality, it’s closer to 12% when every stage of the energy-intensive process is evaluated, according to a peer-reviewed study by scientists at Cornell University published in 2021. For sure better than nothing, but methane emissions, which warm the planet faster than CO2, would actually be higher than for grey hydrogen because of the additional gas needed to power the carbon capture, and likely upstream leakage. Notably, the term clean hydrogen was coined by the fossil fuel industry a few months after the seminal Cornell study found that blue hydrogen has a substantially larger greenhouse gas footprint than burning gas, coal or diesel oil for heating.

Green hydrogen is extracted from water by electrolysis – using electricity generated by renewable energy sources (wind, solar, hydro). Climate experts (without links to fossil fuels) say green hydrogen can only be green if new renewable sources are constructed to power hydrogen production – rather than drawing on the current grid and questionable carbon accounting schemes. The industry disagrees: “Strict additionality rules requiring electrolytic hydrogen to be powered by new renewable energy is not practical, especially in the early years, and will severely limit the development of hydrogen projects,” said BP America.

 “There may be some small role in truly green hydrogen in a decarbonised future, but this is largely a marketing creation by the oil and gas industry that has been hugely overhyped,” said Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, a co-author of the paper on blue hydrogen.

“There may be some small role in truly green hydrogen in a decarbonised future, but this is largely a marketing creation by the oil and gas industry that has been hugely overhyped,” said Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, a co-author of the paper on blue hydrogen.

What’s at stake?

In addition to $26bn in direct financing for so-called hydrogen hubs and demo projects, another $100bn or so in uncapped tax credits could be paid out over the next few decades, so lots and lots of taxpayers’ money (in the US and Trudeau has talked about subsidizing it here). Fossil fuel companies are also using hydrogen to justify building more pipelines, claiming that this infrastructure can be used for “clean hydrogen” in the future. But hydrogen is a highly flammable and corrosive element, and it would be costly to repurpose oil and gas infrastructure to make it safe for hydrogen. And while hydrogen is not a greenhouse gas, it is not harmless. It aggravates some greenhouse gases, for instance causing methane to stay in the atmosphere for longer.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in actual zero-emission solutions, but could be a disaster if the federal government pours scarce resources into infrastructure and technologies that could make the climate crisis worse and cause further public health harms,” said Sara Gersen, clean energy attorney at Earthjustice. “Sowing confusion about hydrogen is a delay tactic, and delay is the new denialism.”

Is there any role for hydrogen in a decarbonised future?

Yes, but a limited one – given that it takes more energy to produce, store and transport hydrogen than it provides when converted into useful energy, so using anything but new renewable sources (true green hydrogen) will require burning more fossil fuels.

According to the hydrogen merit ladder devised by Michael Liebreich, host of the Cleaning Up podcast, swapping clean hydrogen for the fossil fuel-based grey and brown stuff currently used for synthetic fertilisers, petrochemicals and steel is a no-brainer. The carbon footprint of global hydrogen production today is equivalent to Germany’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, so the sooner we swap to green hydrogen (created from new renewables) the better. This could also be useful for some transportation, such as long-haul flights and heavy machinery, and maybe to store surplus wind and solar energy – though none are slam dunks for hydrogen as there are alternative technologies vying for these markets, said Liebreich.

But for most forms of transport (cars, bikes, buses and trains) and heating there are already safer, cleaner and cheaper technologies such as battery-run electric vehicles and heat pumps, so there’s little or no merit in investing time or money with hydrogen. Howarth said: “Renewable electricity is a scarce resource. Direct electrification and batteries offer so much more, and much more quickly. It’s a huge distraction and waste of resources to even be talking about heating homes and passenger vehicles with hydrogen.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/07/hydrogen-clean-fuel-....

I will answer your question about how much money the Canadian government in carbon tax based on what I have found, but I also intend to look at what the tax costs are of subsidizing the fossil fuele industry, as the environmental and social costs of the fossil fuel industry and its emissions throughout society, which are regarding as externalities by economists. In the early years of economics, Jonathan Swift, who also wrote Gulliver's Travels, satirized economists in "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick" , essay suggests that poor people in Ireland where a famine (not the Irish Famine of the 1840s) in the 1720s that killed more than 100,000 peple could ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the elite. In other words, by ignoring the non-monetary costs of the famine in totalling up costs and benefits, the economists had failed to take into account that those non-monetary costs of the famine that killed 100,000. Sadly, during the 1840s Irish Famine that reduced the population of Ireland from 8 million in the 1840 census to 5 million in the 1850 census, economists were still ignoring "externalities". They said starving people needed to be put in poorhouses where they worked 12 to 16 hours a day, only to find that these people died faster from overwork and living in unbelievably crowded and unsanitary condidtions than many of the starving who simply died without food on the roadside. Some even argued against providing the Irish with even a trickle of food aid because they might stage another famine more work projects, such as the building of roads. 

Some of the same kind of economic reasoning can be seen in the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) report "confirms that 80 per cent of Canadian households will get more money back than they pay in most provinces. ... But the PBO assesses the broader “economic costs” in a misleading way. It fails to consider economic benefits of carbon pricing and the costs of climate inaction, both in terms of stabilizing the climate and competing in a global economy racing to net zero. ... Canadians already pay roughly $720 a year for climate-related damages. Those costs will keep rising (to around $2,000 a year by 2050) as climate impacts get more extreme. Canada needs to do its part to curb emissions. That’s why we have carbon pricing in the first place." (https://climateinstitute.ca/pbos-latest-carbon-pricing-report-has-big-fl...) When PBO Director General Chris Matier appeared on CBC Power and Politics he admitted that when calculating the net costs of carbon pricing he did not take into account any of the environmental and social costs of the climate crisis, such as the costs of wildfires in 2023 that burned more square km than the size of England or the extreme weather flooding estimated at $10-$17 billion in BC in November 2021 or the social cost of the 600 people who died in BC in the summer of 2021 heat wave (I intend to describe much more of these economic, environmental and social costs in subsequent posts). 
 

Further illustrating that the climate crisis is continuing to accelerate, it was announced today by the European Union climate agency Copernicus that  March 2024 was the warmest month in recorded history and the tenth consecutive month to break this record as the costs of climate change fianancially, environmentally and socially continue to mount. 

Thailand was one of a number of countries enduring a heatwave in March [Lillian Suwanrumpha/AFP]

For the 10th consecutive month, Earth in March set a new monthly record for global heat — with both air temperatures and the world’s oceans hitting an all-time high for the month, the European Union climate agency Copernicus said.

March 2024 averaged 14.14 degrees Celsius (57.9 degrees Fahrenheit), exceeding the previous record from 2016 by a tenth of a degree, according to Copernicus data. And it was 1.68 degrees C (3 degrees F) warmer than in the late 1800s, the base used for temperatures before the burning of fossil fuels began growing rapidly.

Since last June, the globe has broken heat records each month, with marine heat waves across large areas of the globe’s oceans contributing.

Scientists say the record-breaking heat during this time wasn’t entirely surprising due to a strong El Nino, a climatic condition that warms the central Pacific and changes global weather patterns. ...

Climate scientists attribute most of the record heat to human-caused climate change from carbon dioxide and methane emissions produced by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

“The trajectory will not change until concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop rising,” Francis said, “which means we must stop burning fossil fuels, stop deforestation, and grow our food more sustainably as quickly as possible.”

Until then, expect more broken records, she said.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world set a goal to keep warming at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. Copernicus’ temperature data is monthly and uses a slightly different measurement system than the Paris threshold, which is averaged over two or three decades.

Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, said March’s record-breaking temperature wasn’t as exceptional as some other months in the past year that broke records by wider margins.

“We’ve had record-breaking months that have been even more unusual,” Burgess said, pointing to February 2024 and September 2023. But the “trajectory is not in the right direction,” she added.

The globe has now experienced 12 months with average monthly temperatures 1.58 degrees Celsius (2.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above the Paris threshold, according to Copernicus data.

In March, global sea surface temperature averaged 21.07 degrees Celsius (69.93 degrees Fahrenheit), the highest monthly value on record and slightly higher than what was recorded in February.

“We need more ambitious global action to ensure that we can get to net zero as soon as possible,” Burgess said.

https://globalnews.ca/news/10411275/hottest-march-record-2024/

The Trudeau government, the one that declared a climate emergency in June 2019 and the next day bought and then spent $31.5 billion on the Trans Mountain pipeline in order to triple natural gas transfer from Alberta to BC for export in an example of its ongoing two-faced climate policy, is now warning that 2024's wildfire season could be worse than the 2023 one. In 2023 Canada produced "3% of the total global wildfire carbon emissions" (https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/copernicus-canada-produced-23-global-wi....) "This magnitude is comparable to the annual fossil fuel emissions of large nations, with only India, China and the U.S.A." (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376088148_Unprecedented_Canadia...)

Canada's government says it is preparing for another "explosive" wildfire season, for which it is training extra firefighters.

A warmer-than-normal winter has left little snow on the ground and has compounded droughts in several regions. 

Last year was by far Canada's worst for wildfires, with 15 million hectares (37 million acres) of forest burned. Linking the issue to climate change, a minister warned that this year could prove even more devastating.

The summer was impossible to predict, but wildfires would continue to pose a "significant challenge" for the foreseeable future, said Harjit Sajjan, the minister for emergency preparedness. At a news conference, Mr Sajjan called attention to "extreme drought conditions" in southern Alberta, British Columbia and Southern Ontario. He said above-normal temperatures had also caused earlier snow-melts, and that heat and dryness nationwide meant that the wildfire season was likely to start sooner.

Globally, last year was the hottest on record - driven by human-caused warming, but also boosted by a natural weather system called El Niño. The continuing effects of El Niño mean that 2024 could see even higher temperatures. ...

Eight firefighters died and some 230,000 people were displaced from their homes during last year's worst-ever season. Thousands of firefighters - including some drafted in from countries including South Africa and Spain - were deployed to fight the blazes, along with members of the armed forces.

Authorities' figure of 15 million hectares burnt in 2023 is a downward revision of the 18 million they had previously given. But this is still roughly seven times the annual average.

Smoke from the fires was also experienced as far away as the US and Europe.

This year, dozens of fires are already burning, with several categorised by fire authorities as being "out of control".

Elsewhere, so-called zombie fires have been burning over the winter under thick layers of snow cover.

Fires happen naturally in many parts of the world. It is difficult to know if climate change has caused a specific wildfire to spread because other factors are also relevant, such as changing land use.

But climate change is making the weather conditions needed for wildfires to spread more likely, according to the UN's climate body. Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more and more moisture out of the ground and vegetation. These tinder-dry conditions provide fuel for fires, which can spread at an incredible speed, particularly if winds are strong. Rising temperatures may also increase the likelihood of lightning in the world's northernmost forests, increasing the risk of fires.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68789278

The climate crisis has generated many additional costs for Canadian that are described in posts #1070-1081, but one of the most staggering are the additional $1.28 billion dollar healthcare cost created in just one week of wildfires in just one province, Ontario, in 2023. With 2024 predicted to at least as bad and quite possibly worse because of ten consecutive months of record-breaking temperatures through March and drought conditions in much of Canada, these healthcare costs could be even higher this year. 

Image credit: A person wearing a face mask walks down a street as wildfire smoke engulfs the region in Ottawa on Wednesday, June 7, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Spencer Colby 

 

With much of the country’s forests ablaze in June, a thick haze of wildfire smoke blanketed much of Canada’s population. A fire season like no other had erupted, making very real and immediate the dangers of a changing climate. No longer was climate change a distant and diffuse threat, but rather a very personal experience for millions of Canadians.

Here at the Institute, we have been studying the costs of climate change for several years. Our 2022 report, Damage Control, identified 15 impact areas that are slowing Canada’s economy, eroding household and business wealth, and jeopardizing long-term prosperity. While we did look at the health impacts of a changing climate, due to data limitations, Damage Control did not forecast the air quality implications of forest fires for people in Canada.

This blog uses real time air quality data to estimate the cost of the Quebec forest fires that covered Ontario in smoke from June 4 through June 8. We focus on Ontario given the availability of real time air quality monitoring data.

The health costs are eye popping

Using an approach that relates changes in ambient air quality to human exposure and subsequently to adverse health outcomes, we estimate the health cost of forest fires between June 4-8 to be $1.28 billion in Ontario alone. Let’s unpack this.

Real time air quality data from June 4-8 indicates PM2.5 exposure, a major determinant of premature mortality (death) and respiratory illness, spiked considerably in Ontario. For example, the five day 24-hour PM2.5 average for Ottawa for the June 4-8 event is 79.3 ug/m3 or 13 times the annual average from the monitoring station. Similar data is available for major population centres in Ontario that were significantly impacted by forest fires covering about 58 per cent of Ontario’s population or close to 9 million people.

The health impact of fine particulates is well established, with the science indicating numerous health impacts experienced at any level of exposure including premature mortality, an increase in child bronchitis and heart attacks, and more hospital room visits due to asthma attacks. Health Canada’s Quality Benefits Assessment Tool (AQBAT) quantifies and values health impacts for 8 health outcomes associated with PM2.5 exposure.

Figure 1: Health costs by census division (millions)

We use AQBAT to estimate the health cost of the wildfire event by transforming the five-day average PM2.5 level during the five-day period for seven large population centres in Ontario into a change in the annual concentration of PM2.5. This is then applied to each of the seven population centres to provide an estimate of health costs of the June wildfire event.

This gives us the estimate of the wildfires’ effect on health outcomes of $1.28 billion for June 4-8.

Other costs not included would be additional including ecological damages, business disruption, the costs of fighting the fires, household costs to avert some of the impacts of PM2.5 on indoor air quality, lost tourism, and costs associated with restricting recreational activities for our kids.

Some can continue to argue that climate change is somebody else’s problem, and that Canada is a small global player, and there’s not much we can do. Such an attitude is foolhardy, ignoring climate science and keeps us from addressing impacts, literally fiddling while the boreal forest burns and chokes us with smoke.

https://climateinstitute.ca/with-the-forest-ablaze-the-health-costs-hit-...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric  Administration (NOAA) has confirmed 4th global coral bleaching event is happening now as the oceans reach record temperatures due to the climate crisis.

NOAA Coral Reef Watch's global 5km-resolution satellite Coral Bleaching Alert Area Maximum map, for January 1, 2023 to April 10, 2024. This figure shows the regions, around the globe, that experienced high levels of marine heat stress (Bleaching Alert Levels 2-5) that can cause reef-wide coral bleaching and mortality. (Image credit: NOAA)

The world is currently experiencing a global coral bleaching event, according to NOAA scientists. ...

Bleaching-level heat stress, as remotely monitored and predicted by NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch (CRW), has been — and continues to be — extensive across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean basins. CRW's heat-stress monitoring is based on sea surface temperature data, spanning 1985 to the present, from a blend of NOAA and partner satellites. ....

"From February 2023 to April 2024, significant coral bleaching has been documented in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of each major ocean basin," said Derek Manzello, Ph.D., NOAA CRW coordinator.

Since early 2023, mass bleaching of coral reefs has been confirmed throughout the tropics, including in Florida in the U.S.; the Caribbean; Brazil; the eastern Tropical Pacific (including Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia); Australia’s Great Barrier Reef; large areas of the South Pacific (including Fiji, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Samoas and French Polynesia); the Red Sea (including the Gulf of Aqaba); the Persian Gulf; and the Gulf of Aden.

NOAA has received confirmation of widespread bleaching across other parts of the Indian Ocean basin as well, including in Tanzania, Kenya, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Tromelin, Mayotte and off the western coast of Indonesia.

“As the world’s oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe,” Manzello said. “When these events are sufficiently severe or prolonged, they can cause coral mortality, which hurts the people who depend on the coral reefs for their livelihoods.”

Coral bleaching, especially on a widespread scale, impacts economies, livelihoods, food security and more, but it does not necessarily mean corals will die. If the stress driving the bleaching diminishes, corals can recover and reefs can continue to provide the ecosystem services we all rely on.

“Climate model predictions for coral reefs have been suggesting for years that bleaching impacts would increase in frequency and magnitude as the ocean warms,” said Jennifer Koss, director of NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP).  ...

The 2023 heatwave in Florida was unprecedented. It started earlier, lasted longer and was more severe than any previous event in that region. ...

This global event requires global action. The International Coral Reef Initiativeoffsite link (ICRI), which NOAA co-chairs, and its international members are broadly sharing and already applying resilience-based management actions and lessons learned from the 2023 marine heatwaves in Florida and the Caribbean. ICRI and its members are helping to advance coral interventions and restoration in the face of climate change by funding scientific research on best management practices and implementing its Plan of Action.

https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-confirms-4th-global-coral-bleachi...

The climate crisis is also causing major flooding problems around the world with hundreds of thousands evacuated in Russia and Khazakhstan and a year's flooding occurring in the United Arab Emirates in one day as the climate crisis creates an exponentially growing toll in lives, as well as economic, social and environmental disasters. These previously unseen torrential downpours are directly linked to our carbon emissions. "Oman flooding death toll rises to 18 as heavy rains lash UAE ... Russia, Kazakhstan evacuate over 100,000 people amid worst flooding in nearly 70 years" (https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/oman-flooding-death-toll-...)

Drone video shows rows of houses and streets underwater in Russia and Kazakhstan, where thousands of people have had to evacuate their homes due to flooding caused by unusually severe melting snow and ice.

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/4/11/drone-video-shows-e...

"Nearly half of China's major cities are suffering "moderate to severe" levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released on Friday." (https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/nearly-half-of-china-s-major-cities-are-sin...)  While part of this comes from diminishing water table as residents use the water and the weight of buildings on the land, these effects are being compounded by sea level rise created by the melting of ice and glaciers as the climate crisis futher warms the planet. As a result of this "270 million people are living on sinking land in China’s major cities. ...Land subsidence isn’t just a problem in China. In the US, dozens of coastal cities, including New York City, are sinking. In the Netherlands, 25% of its lands have sunk lower than sea levels. And in Mexico City, likely the world’s fastest subsiding city, land is sinking at the speed of up to 50 centimeters, or nearly 20 inches, a year." (https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/climate/china-sinking-cities/index.html) Vancouver faces the same problem: "The cost of dike improvements over the next 90 to 100 years could hit $9.5 billion, according to a report released today by the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations" (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/metro-vancouver-dike-upg...).

A new report says the Lower Mainland of B.C. could require nearly $10 billion in dike upgrades by the end of the century. (B.C. Government)

Quote:

Land is sinking underneath millions of peoples’ feet in China’s major cities due to human activities, putting the country’s coastal areas more at risk of floodingand rising sea levels, new research shows.

Nearly half of China’s urban areas comprising 29% of the country’s population are sinking faster than 3 millimeters (about 0.12 inches) per year, according to the studypublished Thursday in the journal Science. That’s 270 million people living on sinking land.

Meanwhile, 67 million people are living on land that is subsiding faster than 10 millimeters (0.4 inches) each year. ...

The study suggests roughly a quarter of China’s coasts will be lower than sea level because of subsidence and projected sea level rise, priming the area for colossal damage and putting lives at risk. Tianjin, Shanghai and areas around Guangzhou are significantly exposed to both issues, the study found. ...

But some coastal areas in China have already built physical protection from the growing risk of inundation, and the study does not take those protections into account. In Shanghai, for example, Shengli Tao, co-author of the study and professor at Peking University, said the city has built “impressive” dike systems that are meters tall.

“Such massive coastal dike systems will largely reduce the risk of being inundated even given both land subsidence and sea level rise,” Tao told CNN. “I am not aware of other countries that have built such massive dike systems.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/climate/china-sinking-cities/index.html

And of course insurance in Canada is becoming more expensive because of climate change and some areas are starting to not be able to get insurance. Getting insurance is now becoming a global problem. Already "10 per cent of Canadians can’t purchase overland flood insurance because it is unavailable or too expensive in high-risk areas."

As wildfires prompted evacuations just outside of Halifax last spring, brokers at Royal LePage Atlantic encountered an unexpected challenge. Many insurers were unable to issue new home insurance policies within a 50-kilometre radius of the evacuation zone – an area that covered most of the greater Halifax area during the year’s busiest real estate season.

“For lack of a better description, our markets were shut down for three weeks while we waited for that evacuation order to lift because nobody could get insurance,” Matthew Honsberger, broker, president and owner of Royal LePage Atlantic, told BNNBloomberg.ca in a telephone interview. Insurance companies have been quick to address the backlog since the evacuation order lifted in early June, and Honsberger said he’s not overly worried about fire-related disruptions to his business – yet. “If we start to see this become more regular, it's something that we will have to concern ourselves with,” he said. ...

Climate change has rattled the global insurance market as fires and other natural disasters become increasingly frequent, intense and destructive, leading to bigger annual losses. Against that backdrop, governments and industry players in Canada are racing to find solutions to ensure home insurance does not become a luxury for the rich.

CALIFORNIANS LOSE INSURANCE OPTIONS

In one startling global example, insurance giants State Farm and Allstate said in the past year that they the would stop issuing new home insurance policies across the entire U.S. state of California, citing increasing wildfire risk.

Could such a situation happen in Canada?

Marcos Alvarez, global head of insurance at DBRS Morningstar, said he doesn’t see that playing out any time soon, as most fires in Canada tend to be in less-populated areas that result in manageable losses to companies – though that could change if fires move closer to urban centres.

California is also known for its uniquely strong consumer protections that have kept premiums low and frustrated insurance companies as fires result in major damages.

What Alvarez sees as a more likely scenario in Canada is that insurance could become essentially unaffordable over time as more frequent severe weather events and higher inflation push premiums upwards.

Alvarez published a report for DBRS Morningstar last month on wildfires in Canada, predicting insurers will “come under pressure” from an “above-average wildfire season” in 2023 but most will be able to handle the losses. Damages will likely be lower than the record $4.3 billion from the 2016 wildfires that hit the Alberta oil town of Fort McMurray, the report said. While this year’s fire damages will likely be manageable, the report warned there may be cumulative effects on insurance costs.

“As Canada experiences more intense and frequent extreme-weather events, the challenge is that certain zones of the country might become too expensive to insure against natural catastrophes, or become uninsurable altogether,” his report said.

Matt Hands, vice-president of insurance at Ratehub.ca, said Canada’s insurance industry is in the early stages of responding to climate change and weather impacts, but overall the situation isn’t as “dire” as in the U.S. because wildfires are still considered unpredictable in Canada, even as they occur more frequently. ... Insurance is becoming more expensive for all Canadians as a result of more extreme weather, inflation and other factors, Hands said, with people in more disaster-prone zones feeling the pinch most acutely. ...

Weather-related damages caused $3.1 billion in insured losses in Canada in 2022, the third-costliest year on record. That total would be higher, said Rob de Pruis, Insurance Bureau of Canada’s national director of consumer and industry relations, if it included more damages from flooding – a major gap in the Canadian insurance market that the federal government is now trying to fill. De Pruis explained that about 10 per cent of Canadians can’t purchase overland flood insurance because it is unavailable or too expensive in high-risk areas. For example, many Atlantic Canadians whose homes were battered by post-tropical storm Fiona last year were not able to claim insurance for their losses, and some affected by 2021 floods in British Columbia similarly found themselves without coverage. ...

With some people currently unable to insure their homes against floods due to excessive cost, could Canada already be heading towards a situation where insurance isn’t accessible to everyone?

“We certainly hope not,” said de Pruis. “Ultimately, our goal in the industry is to be able to provide available and affordable insurance coverage for all Canadians. But having said that, we have to work together to improve our overall climate defences.”

He argued climate resilience planning should go into new infrastructure and land use planning, and also called for incentives to develop homes and businesses further way from high-risk areas. Canada is working towards some of these goals with its early-stages national climate adaptation strategy, announced last month.

“It requires collaboration from governments and stakeholders and even the individual property and business owners to create a more climate-resilient community,” de Pruis said.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/how-will-climate-change-affect-canada-s-insu...

The insurance industry has a lot of problems, including in the way it treats its customers, but it did not create the climate crisis -the principal culprit in that regard remains the fossil fuel industry - and it has made some beneficial if limited suggestions in dealing with this crisis, even those suggestions also benefit the industry in its struggle to survive as insurance claims around the world mount into the stratosphere. 

Already​ in Alberta, there were more wildfires burning by April 18th than last year on the same date with five times as much land burned as on April 18th 2023, in a record setting year when more land was burned in Canada than there is in all of England. Will 2024 bring us another record-breaking wildfire year because of the climate crisis?

NOTE: Areas of the map that are white mean there is still snow on the ground. Once snow free conditions occur the wildfire danger will be visible on the map. (https://srd.web.alberta.ca/slave-lake-area-update/slave-lake-forest-area...)

 

According to the minister of forestry and parks, Alberta is experiencing "heightened wildfire risk" this year, with 148 fires already extinguished and more still burning."To date in 2024, we have had more wildfire starts than we had in 2023," said Minister Todd Loewen. "All wildfires are currently being held under control or are extinguished.

As of Thursday, there were 50 wildfires burning in Alberta, according to Christie Tucker with Alberta Wildfire. Four of those fires are being held and the other 46 are considered under control. The four fires being held are in "fairly remote areas" and not close to communities or highways, according to Loewen. There were still 64 wildfires burning from last year(opens in a new tab) at the start of 2024, Tucker said, and more than 500 hectares have burned since January. "That's about 400 hectares more than we had at this time last year," Tucker said. ...

Water is a worry this year, with the warmer than average winter and lakes still frozen, hampering crews' ability to fill water skimmers. "Any situation that we have where we feel like we won't have readily available water, we're working on water contracts to make sure that water can be trucked in, tanked into to help us with those responses," Loewen said. Wildfires outside of protected forest areas, inside county lines, are handled by local fire departments. ...

Earlier in 2024, municipalities asked the province for access to additional wildland and wildfire attack training. Efforts to extinguish 2023 wildfires continue, even as preparation is done for 2024 "Municipalities have been requesting to be able to access that training so that there's joint training between the experts within the wildland fire zones as well as the municipalities, so that if the fires move between wildland areas and municipalities, the communication and the understanding of that training is already done," said NDP MLA Heather Sweet….

Sweet is calling for the emergency response team to be present at the weekly updates. "I have heard from industry, municipalities and Indigenous communities that they have not heard from this government about what the plans are in case of evacuation and supports to protect their communities," Sweet said. "It's about that openness and transparency by the government to ensure that people understand that if those plans are being worked on, what does that look like."

https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/mobile/148-wildfires-extinguished-in-alberta...

Wildfires have also triggered two evacuation alerts in Endako and Burgess Creek in BC triggering "fears of a long wildfire season" as the climate crisis around the globe comes to grow exponentially. 

An undated file photo shows members of the BC Wildfire Service on duty.

Shifting winds triggered an evacuation alert for the tiny community of Endako in central British Columbia over the weekend, as fears of a long wildfire season in the province start to materialize. Residents of the 50 or so properties that make up Endako, about 1,000 kilometres north of Vancouver, have been told to prepare to leave because of an out-of-control blaze that the BC Wildfire Service said was less than a kilometre west of the town on Sunday.

Mark Parker, chair of the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako, said the evacuation alert was issued Sunday after 60 km/h winds began pushing the flames toward the community that sits on the north side of Highway 16. “That fire started on Saturday afternoon, and at that time, the wind was blowing away from the community of Endako,” he said in an interview on Monday. “By Sunday though, the wind had completely shifted and was blowing back toward the community.” …

The Endako alert is one of two issued for central B.C. over the weekend, with both believed to have been caused by human activity. The Cariboo Regional District issued an alert on Sunday night covering six parcels of land over 32 square kilometres, saying a fire in the Burgess Creek area is dangerous and residents should prepare to leave at short notice. The BC Wildfire Service said in an update that the Burgess Creek fire, about 600 kilometres north of Vancouver, was discovered on Saturday and had grown to 16 square kilometres in size by Sunday.

Information posted Monday by the BC Wildfire Service said nine wildfires had started in the province in the previous 24 hours.

Officials have worried this year's wildfire season could be a challenging one, with much of the province continuing to experience significant drought and snowpack levels at record lows. Parker said his region, like much of the province, has been concerned about the lack of snowpack. “It's not good to start with, with the snow. And then we just have had limited, limited amounts of precipitation in the last month,” he said. “So, that dry grass season, it's even drier than it normally would be. It's always a threat, and we've always dealt with some grass fires during the early spring season, but this year they seem to be a lot more volatile, just from the dry conditions.”

Last year's B.C. wildfire season saw more than 28,400 square kilometres of forest and land burned, hundreds of homes destroyed and tens of thousands of people forced to evacuate. It was part of Canada's most destructive wildfire season on record.

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/wildfires-trigger-2-evacuation-alerts-in-b-c-1.685...