planted city

It’s gettin’ hot in here: ‘Dramatic temperature increases could threaten Canadian health, infrastructure’ (Infographic)

From The Globe and Mail:

In the past 65 years, Canada’s national average winter temperature has risen 3.2 degrees.

This reaffirms what many suspected. Canada is getting hotter faster than ever before and at a faster rate than almost any other country. Rain, snow, sleet and hail storms are becoming more erratic. What were once considered exceptional weather patterns – the kind researchers reject to avoid skewing their data – are becoming common.

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Canada’s infrastructure wasn’t built for this kind of climate. And much of the burden falls on municipal governments, with road, sewer and transit systems that can barely cope with existing weather conditions, let alone future vagaries.

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Local public health officials are also paying close attention to vulnerable populations as extreme heat and cold become more frequent. They use climate projections to plan West Nile virus prevention – milder winters and springs can mean more mosquitos carrying the disease.

It’s a big deal for businesses, too, although many don’t know it yet. “Or they don’t want to know: They see it as a kind of capitulation,” said Blair Feltmate, who runs Canada’s Climate Change Adaptation Project.

More here.

It’s Gettin’ Hot in Here: ‘Key Climate Change Impacts’ (Slideshow)

- An average temperature increase of 1.6 degrees Celsius across Canada compared to a global increase of 0.7 degrees Celsius, and a 2.1-degree-Celsius increase in the Canadian north from 1948 to 2010;

- Combined spending of $1.2 billion by the governments of Canada, British Columbia and Alberta to respond to the mountain pine beetle epidemic that is resulting in the loss of 8,000 jobs and the closure of 16 lumber mills by 2018;

- Economic losses of $5.8 billion and 41,000 jobs lost because of droughts in Alberta and Saskatchewan in 2001 and 2002 that have affected the agriculture industry;

- A 20-day annual increase since the 1950s in the average number of days with rain;

- The year 2010 was the warmest on record with average temperatures three degrees Celsius above normal; it was also the 14th consecutive year with above-normal temperatures;

- Massive Arctic ice melting is opening the door to a doubling of cruise ship voyages and new opportunities for gas exploration; it’s also opening the door for transmission of diseases across oceans and species;

- Melting permafrost creating risks to waste containment and resulting in a 130-kilometre retreat in the southern limit of Quebec’s permafrost, as well as up to $50 million in costs to the province of Manitoba in a season to airlift fuel and food that could not be transported by ground;

- Lower water levels in the Great Lakes, forcing ships to lighten their cargo, causing multimillion-dollar decreases in business shipping volumes, as well as reducing hydroelectricity outputs and compromising wetlands that filter contaminants and absorb excess storm water;

- Record costs of up to $400 million to fight forest fires in a single season in British Columbia, with the three most expensive seasons recorded over the last decade;

- Hundreds of millions in damage in recent years from extreme weather and rain events that have affected Toronto, Atlantic Canada and other regions;

‘NASA Images Depict Rapid Loss of Thick Arctic Sea Ice’, 1980 - 2012

From Yale e360:

A new comparison of satellite images from 1980 and 2012 vividly depicts the rapid disappearance of thick, multi-year Arctic Ocean ice in winter. Over the past three decades, the extent of the Arctic’s thickest ice has declined by 15 to 17 percent per decade, according to NASA climate scientist Joey Comiso.

Details over at Yale e360 and NASA’s Earth Observatory.

It’s also worth noting that a new study has found an important link between melting Arctic sea ice and extreme weather being experienced in some regions of our planet. BBC coverage of the study explains that:

The progressive shrinking of Arctic sea ice is bringing colder, snowier winters to the UK and other areas of Europe, North America and China.

More here.

From Reuters:

Global warming threatens China’s march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods, says the government’s latest assessment of climate change, projecting big shifts in how the nation feeds itself.

The warnings are carried in the government’s “Second National Assessment Report on Climate Change,” which sums up advancing scientific knowledge about the consequences and costs of global warming for China — the world’s second biggest economy and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gas pollution.

Global warming fed by greenhouse gases from industry, transport and shifting land-use poses a long-term threat to China’s prosperity, health and food output, says the report. With China’s economy likely to rival the United States’ in size in coming decades, that will trigger wider consequences.

“China faces extremely grim ecological and environmental conditions under the impact of continued global warming and changes to China’s regional environment,” says the 710-page report, officially published late last year but released for public sale only recently.

Even so, China’s rising emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from burning fossil fuels, will begin to fall off only after about 2030, with big falls only after mid-century, says the report.

Assuming no measures to counter global warming, grain output in the world’s most populous nation could fall from 5 to 20 percent by 2050, depending on whether a “fertilization effect” from more carbon dioxide in the air offsets losses, says the report.

But that possible fall can be held in check by improved crop choice and farming practices, as well as increased irrigation and fertilizer use.

China is the world’s biggest consumer of cereals and has increasingly turned to foreign suppliers of corn and soy beans.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credits: Reuters; The Guardian)

‘How 2011 Became a ‘Mind-Boggling’ Year of Extreme Weather’

From PBS via Climate Progress:

From snowstorms to floods and tornadoes, severe weather wreaked havoc across the United States this year, with 2011 marking far more extreme weather events than a typical year. Hari Sreenivasan discusses the science behind this year of extreme weather with NOAA’s Kathryn Sullivan and Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters.

This quote is drawn from the article, ‘Year’s wild weather wrecked costly havoc’, in the Globe & Mail. 

(Photo credit: Environment Canada)

From Discovery News:

Most Canadians will not wake up to a white Christmas on December 25 for the first time since Canada’s weather office began recording snowfalls in 1955, the government agency reported.

With just days before the Christian holiday, Environment Canada senior climatologist Dave Phillips told AFP he has never seen so little snowpack in Canada’s cities.

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“We are usually the snowiest country in the world,” he said. “But this year, like no other since we’ve been monitoring in 56 years, there will be many Canadians just dreaming of a white Christmas and not getting one.”

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Phillips said Canadian winters are generally becoming milder, and starting later, and so the idea of a white Christmas may be something of the past.

He pointed to a combination of climate change and an “urban heat island effect” created by Canada’s growing cities. High energy use generates heat that is retained by materials in urban developments, resulting in areas that are consistently hotter than surrounding rural areas.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: CTV)

From Rolling Stone:

In the past year – one of the hottest on record – extreme weather has battered almost every corner of the planet. There have been devastating droughts in China and India, unprecedented floods and wildfires in the United States, and near-record ice melts in the Arctic. Yet the prosperous nations of the world have failed to take action to reduce the risk of climate change, in part because people in prosperous nations think they’re invulnerable. They’re under the misapprehension that, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Tom Schelling puts it, “Global warming is a problem that is going to primarily affect future generations of poor people.” To see how foolish this reasoning is, one need only look at Australia, a prosperous nation that also happens to be right in the cross hairs of global warming. “Sadly, it’s probably too late to save much of it,” says Joe Romm, a leading climate advocate who served as assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration.

This is not to say that the entire continent will sink beneath the waves anytime soon. What is likely to vanish – or be transformed beyond recognition – are many of the things we think of when we think of Australia: the barrier reef, the koalas, the sense of the country as a land of almost limitless natural resources. Instead, Australia is likely to become hotter, drier and poorer, fractured by increasing tensions over access to water, food and energy as its major cities are engulfed by the rising seas.

To climate scientists, it’s no surprise that Australia would feel the effects of climate change so strongly, in part because it has one of the world’s most variable climates. “One effect of increasing greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere is to amplify existing climate signals,” says Karoly. “Regions that are dry get drier, and regions that are wet get wetter. If you have a place like Australia that is already extreme, those extremes just get more pronounced.” Adding to Australia’s vulnerability is its close connection with the sea. Australia is the only island continent on the planet, which means that changes caused by planet-warming pollution – warmer seas, which can drive stronger storms, and more acidic oceans, which wreak havoc on the food chain – are even more deadly here.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: National Geographic)

Infographic: ‘Arctic Ice Melt’

The infographic accompanies the Globe & Mail article, ‘Canadian Arctic nearly loses entire ice shelf from global warming’