Weekly roundup of local and international climate change news for the week of Sept. 23 to Sept. 29, 2024.
Here’s all the latest news concerning the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and the steps leaders are taking to address these issues.
In climate news this week:
• Canada’s net zero advisory body says country must boost emissions targets
• An Alaskan town is destroyed because of climate change. Now the residents must move.
• Tampering with heavy duty truck emissions a concern for Metro Vancouver
• As many forests fail to recover from wildfires, replanting efforts face huge odds — and obstacles
Human activities like burning fossil fuels and farming livestock are the main drivers of climate change, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This causes heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere, increasing the planet’s surface temperature.
The panel, which is made up of scientists from around the world, has warned for decades that wildfires and severe weather, such as B.C.’s deadly heat dome and catastrophic flooding in 2021, would become more frequent and more intense because of the climate emergency. It has issued a “code red” for humanity and warns the window to limit warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial times is closing.
Once again, Canada had a catastrophic wildfire season that began with much of Jasper being destroyed. Although wildfires usually ignite because of lightning or human activities, heat waves and drought from human-caused global heating dry out vegetation and make it easier for fires to start and spread, according to the Canadian Climate Institute.
For example, during the eight days of the 2021 heat dome in B.C., the number of wildfires rose from six to 175, with fires that spread during that time consuming nearly 79,000 hectares, including the entire town of Lytton.
But it’s not too late to avoid the worst-case scenarios. According to NASA climate scientists, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many centuries.
Climate change quick facts:
• The Earth is now about 1.2 C warmer than it was in the 1800s.
• 2023 was hottest on record globally, beating the last record in 2016.
• Human activities have raised atmospheric concentrations of CO2 by nearly 49 per cent above pre-industrial levels starting in 1850.
• The world is not on track to meet the Paris Agreement target to keep global temperature from exceeding 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, the upper limit to avoid the worst fallout from climate change including sea level rise, and more intense drought, heat waves and wildfires.
• On the current path of carbon dioxide emissions, the temperature could increase by as much as 4.4 C by the end of the century.
• In April, 2022 greenhouse gas concentrations reached record new highs and show no sign of slowing.
• Emissions must drop 7.6 per cent per year from 2020 to 2030 to keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 C and 2.7 per cent per year to stay below 2 C.
• 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that the climate is warming and that human beings are the cause.
Latest News
Canada must boost climate change targets: report
Canada needs to boost its target for greenhouse gas emission reductions to keep pace with the ambitious climate goals of its G7 partners, says a new report Thursday from the federal Net-Zero Advisory Body.
The report recommends the federal government implement a 2035 emissions target of between 50 and 55 per cent reduction below 2005 levels. That would mean an ambitious 10 per cent jump in five years from the current 2030 target of between 40 and 45 per cent.
Efforts have been made to reduce emissions, however the report notes that more aggressive and sustained action is necessary to reach the target.
Canada isn’t on track to meet even 40 per cent yet. A separate report last week from the Canadian Climate Institute found that Canada only made a modest cut of about 0.8 cent last year compared to 2022, or eight per cent since 2005.
Simon Donner, co-chair of the advisory body, says this new target would be in line with what several other countries, including the U.S., are already doing.
“We’re only at eight per cent and we want to get to at least 40 by 2030 and at least 50 by 2035. That’s challenging, but the modelling and analysis, the research shows that it is possible,” said Donner, who is also a climate scientist and professor at UBC.
—Tiffany Crawford
New water and land ministry in ‘crisis’ as it fails to deliver priorities for B.C.’s natural resources: critics
B.C.’s new land and water ministry is in disarray, according to several groups that hoped its creation would lead to better management of the province’s natural resources.
Instead, conservationists say provincial wildlife programs are “in crisis.” Farmers are watching the groundwater licensing system fall apart, and adventure tourism operators say confusion over the land tenure process could force them out of business.
Even those who were pleased with the creation of the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship two years ago believe it’s failing to deliver.
“Part of the rationale for this ministry was to prioritize values like waters and biodiversity on par with resource extraction,” said Torrance Coste, associate director with the Wilderness Committee. “That absolutely hasn’t happened yet.”
—Glenda Luymes
B.C. wildfires: Blaze under control after prompting evacuation order in Grand Forks
A wildfire that had prompted brief evacuations of homes outside the southern Interior city of Grand Forks is now classified as under control.
The B.C. Wildfire Service says the Goosmus wildfire that spread north from Washington state this week has grown to nearly seven square kilometres in size, but it’s no longer projected to spread beyond its current perimeter.
An update from the service says the size reflects the “main body of the fire” located in Washington, while a spot fire west of Grand Forks had been put out.
The Regional District of Kootenay Boundary had issued an evacuation order Wednesday, saying the wildfire was moving north toward the Grand Forks area, and “tactical evacuations” were underway.
A few hours later, the district issued another statement saying the threat had diminished, and the order had been replaced with an evacuation alert.
The wildfire service says it has partnered with its counterparts in the U.S. to support suppression efforts on both sides of the border.
—The Canadian Press
As many forests fail to recover from wildfires, replanting efforts face huge odds — and obstacles
Camille Stevens-Rumann crouched in the dirt and leaned over evergreen seedlings, measuring how much each had grown in seven months.
“That’s two to three inches of growth on the spruce,” said Stevens-Rumann, interim director at the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute.
Her research team is monitoring several species planted two years ago on a slope burned during the devastating 2020 Cameron Peak fire, which charred 844 square kilometres in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
They want to determine which species are likely to survive at various elevations, because climate change makes it difficult or impossible for many forests to regrow even decades after wildfires.
As the gap between burned areas and replanting widens year after year, scientists see big challenges beyond where to put seedlings.
The U.S. currently lacks the ability to collect enough seeds from living trees and the nursery capacity to grow seedlings for replanting on a scale anywhere close to stemming accelerating losses, researchers say. It also doesn’t have enough trained workers to plant and monitor trees.
The Forest Service said the biggest roadblock to replanting on public land is completing environmental and cultural assessments and preparing severely burned areas so they’re safe to plant. That can take years — while more forests are lost to fire.
“If we have the seedlings but we don’t have the sites prepped … we can’t put the seedlings out there,” said Stephanie Miller, assistant director of a reforestation program.
Scientists, private industry and environmental agencies are acutely aware of the challenges as they consider how to restore forested landscapes in an increasingly arid region.
—The Associated Press
Climate change destroyed an Alaska village. Its residents are starting over in a new town
Growing up along the banks of the Ninglick River in western Alaska, Ashley Tom would look out of her window after strong storms from the Bering Sea hit her village and notice something unsettling: the riverbank was creeping ever closer.
It was in that home, in the village of Newtok, where Tom’s great-grandmother had taught her to sew and crochet on the sofa, skills she used at school when students crafted headdresses, mittens and baby booties using seal or otter fur. It’s also where her grandmother taught her the intricate art of grass basket weaving and how to speak the Yupik language.
Today, erosion and melting permafrost have just about destroyed Newtok, eating about 70 feet (21.34 meters) of land every year. All that’s left are some dilapidated and largely abandoned gray homes scraped bare of paint by salt darting in on the winds of storms.
“Living with my great-grandmother was all I could remember from Newtok, and it was one of the first houses to be demolished,” said Tom.
In the next few weeks, the last 71 residents will load their possessions onto boats to move to Mertarvik, rejoining 230 residents who began moving away in 2019. They will become one of the first Alaska Native villages to complete a large-scale relocation because of climate change.
—The Associated Press
B.C. residents want climate change action, but not the carbon tax: poll
The poll, released Friday, found that more than half of B.C. respondents (52 per cent) think the provincial government should scrap the provincial carbon tax if Ottawa does, up nine points since a similar Research Co. poll was conducted in October 2023.
More than a third of those polled (35 per cent) would keep the provincial carbon tax even if the federal version is abandoned, while 13 per cent are not sure.
Mario Canseco, president of Research Co., said most people who voted for the B.C. Green Party would keep the consumer carbon tax while some NDP and former B.C. Liberal voters have changed their minds on the tax over four years.
Thirty-nine per cent said they think the introduction of the carbon tax has led people to be more mindful of their carbon consumption and change their behaviour—a proportion that reaches 55 per cent among those aged 18-to-34.
A majority (63 per cent) say the carbon tax that was introduced in July 2008 has negatively affected the finances of their household.
Residents of the Fraser Valley and Northern B.C. were more likely to report a detrimental impact from the carbon tax than their counterparts in Metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island.
More than half of British Columbians (54 per cent) think climate change is mostly caused by emissions from vehicles and industrial facilities, according to the poll.
Fewer than one-in-five British Columbians (17 per cent) think we do not need to do anything to deal with climate change, mainly men aged 35 to 54 and those who voted for the former B.C. Liberal Party in the last provincial election.
The survey of 801 B.C. adults was conducted from Sept. 5 to Sept. 7 and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
—Tiffany Crawford
Jail time for activists who threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers
Two British climate activists were sentenced on Friday for throwing tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers two years ago, nearly destroying one of the great masterpieces at London’s National Gallery.
Phoebe Plummer, 23, received a two-year sentence while Anna Holland, 22, was sent to prison for 20 months. In October 2022, the pair threw two tins of tomato soup over the painting before kneeling down in front of it and gluing their hands to the wall beneath it. They were found guilty of criminal damage by a jury in July.
During the attack, both women wore T-shirts supporting Just Stop Oil, an environmental group pushing the British government to halt new oil and gas projects.
Over the past few years, the group has been behind a series of high-profile stunts, including at major sporting events and on Britain’s transport networks. The attack on Sunflowers was the second artwork at the National Gallery targeted in 2022, after two Just Stop Oil activists glued themselves to John Constable’s The Hay Wain.
Van Gogh’s 1888 masterpiece, painted in Arles in the south of France , was not damaged in the 2022 attack as it was covered by protective glass.
—The Associated Press