Here’s all the latest local and international news concerning climate change for the week of Dec. 30-Jan. 5, 2025.
Here’s the latest news concerning climate change and biodiversity loss, from the steps leaders are taking to address the problems to all the up-to-date science. This year, expect more stories about environmental issues linked to climate change. For example, how threatened plant and animal species—such as B.C.’s spotted owl or the endangered southern resident orcas— reflect an ecosystem in crisis.
In climate news this week:
• Canada primed for more severe wildfire days, driven by dry forest fuel: study
• Ottawa’s ice fishing season shrinking due to climate change
• Drought, fires and deforestation battered Amazon rainforest in 2024
• High levels of road salt killing Metro Vancouver’s fertilized salmon eggs, say UBC researchers
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 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.
Climate change quick facts:
• The Earth is now about 1.3 C warmer than it was in the 1800s.
• 2023 was hottest on record globally, beating the last record in 2016. However scientists say 2024 will likely beat the 2023 record.
• 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 3.6 C this century, according to the IPCC.
• 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 humans are the cause.
Latest News
Canada primed for more severe wildfire days, driven by dry forest fuel: study
Canadian forests are increasingly primed for severe, uncontrollable wildfires, a study published Thursday said, underlining what the authors described as a pressing need to proactively mitigate the “increased threat posed by climate change.”
The study by Canadian researchers, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, looked at Canadian fire severity from 1981 to 2020.
“The widespread increases, along with limited decreases, in high-burn severity days during 1981 to 2020 indicate the increasingly severe fire situation and more challenging fire season under the changing climate in Canada,” the study read.
Co-author Xianli Wang, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, says there were on average an additional two days conducive to high-severity fires in 2000 to 2020, compared to the previous two decades. In some areas, it was closer to five days.
While that may not sound like much, last summer’s devastating wildfire in Jasper, grew to about 60 square kilometres in a matter of hours.
“This is just a more dramatic fire situation that we are currently having than before,” he said.
—The Canadian Press
Ottawa’s ice fishing season shrinking due to climate change
Yannick Loranger, owner of Ottawa River Guided Fishing, used to see a full ice-fishing season run from Jan. 1 to March 15. In recent years he has barely seen it last two months. Last year his season ran for 35 days.
“In 2008 I remember ice fishing on well over a foot of ice on New Year’s Day, as opposed to the last two or three years, where I wouldn’t even feel safe walking on the ice before early January,” he said.
Loranger saw a 70 per cent drop in sales last winter, which has led him to start selling his shacks. The majority of them sit on the Ottawa River, where the conditions are meant to be superior for ice fishing.
The shacks are built in the summer by Loranger and once enough ice forms, they’re brought out onto the river. There needs to be a foot of ice for them to be put out. Loranger said he has to pay close attention to ensure the ice stays thick enough.
He aimed to sell his shacks before this winter, but still has a few left, which his all-season customers use. A few days of below 20 will help the ice freeze over in order for fishers to get out, but as temperatures rise and fall Loranger feels uncertain.
A new analysis by Climate Central reported that Canada’s cities are losing as many as 19 days of winter every year due to high temperatures. Ottawa saw a loss of four days last winter, Vancouver being at the top of the list with a loss of seven days.
—Ottawa Citizen
Drought, fires and deforestation battered Amazon rainforest in 2024
Last year was brutal for the Amazon rainforest, with rampant wildfires and extreme drought ravaging large parts of a biome that’s a critical counterweight to climate change.
A warming climate-fed drought, in turn, fed the worst year for fires since 2005. And those fires contributed to deforestation, with authorities suspecting some fires were set to more easily clear land to run cattle.
The Amazon is twice the size of India and sprawls across eight countries and one territory, storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide that would otherwise warm the planet. It has about 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water and astounding biodiversity, including 16,000 known tree species.
But governments have historically viewed it as an area to be exploited, with little regard for sustainability or the rights of its Indigenous peoples, and experts say exploitation by individuals and organized crime is rising at alarming rates.
—The Associated Press
High levels of road salt killing Metro Vancouver’s fertilized salmon eggs, say UBC researchers
High levels of salt are killing fertilized coho eggs, raising concerns about excessive use of road salt in winter, according to the preliminary results of a five-year study led by UBC researchers.
The study — a collaboration among the University of B.C., Simon Fraser University, the B.C. Institute of Technology, the federal government, community scientists and stream keepers — involved monitoring salt in more than 30 streams in Metro Vancouver.
Clare Kilgour, who is working on her master’s degree in zoology at UBC, said researchers measured salt in streams and found there are surges in the winter. She said the largest pulse of salt was 10 times B.C.’s acute water quality guideline for chloride in freshwater systems.
Road salt is made up of sodium and chloride. When it dissolves on the road, it seeps into groundwater and streams.
Kilgour said high concentrations of chloride were found in streams during the winter. Some were notably bad, such as Serpentine Creek in Surrey and Stoney Creek in Burnaby.
The guidelines state a safe limit is 600 milligrams a litre but in some cases up to 6,000 mg a litre was found by the researchers.
—Tiffany Crawford
Want to put an EV charging cord across a Vancouver sidewalk? What you need to know
In 2021, the City of Vancouver introduced a licensing system for electric-vehicle owners who want to place a charging cord across city sidewalks.
Since then, the number of EVs has increased across the province with more charging cords appearing on city rights of way.
—David Carrigg
In deep mourning, famous orca mom drapes her dead calf over her head, again: experts
A mother killer whale who famously pushed the body of her dead newborn for 17 days in 2018 has lost another calf, and researchers say she is again carrying the body in an apparent act of grief.
The Center for Whale Research said in a New Year’s Day post on social media that the mother known as Tahlequah, or J35, has now lost two of her four documented calves.
The centre had announced on Dec. 21 that the new female calf was travelling with J pod in the Puget Sound area, on the northwest coast of Washington state. The pod also frequents B.C. waters.
But the organization expressed concern about the calf’s health, and on Wednesday said it had confirmed the calf had died, although a second newborn was also observed with the pod.
Orcas face a variety of threats in the increasingly industrialized Salish Sea, including reduced numbers and quality of fish, pollutants that are flowing into their waterways and noise.
—The Canadian Press
Climate change added 41 days of dangerous heat around world in 2024
People worldwide suffered an average of 41 extra days of dangerous heat in 2024 because of human-caused climate change, according to a group of scientists who also said that climate change worsened much of the world’s damaging weather last year.
The analysis from World Weather Attribution and Climate Central researchers comes at the end of a year that shattered climate record after climate record as heat across the globe made 2024 likely to be its hottest ever measured and a slew of other fatal weather events spared few.
“The finding is devastating but utterly unsurprising: Climate change did play a role, and often a major role in most of the events we studied, making heat, droughts, tropical cyclones and heavy rainfall more likely and more intense across the world, destroying lives and livelihoods of millions and often uncounted numbers of people,” Friederike Otto, the lead of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College climate scientist, said. “As long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, this will only get worse.”
Millions of people endured stifling heat this year. Northern California and Death Valley baked. Sizzling daytime temperatures scorched Mexico and Central America. Heat endangered already vulnerable children in West Africa. Skyrocketing southern European temperatures forced Greece to close the Acropolis. In south and southeast Asian countries, heat forced school closures. Earth experienced some of the hottest days ever measured and its hottest-yet summer, with a 13-month heat streak that just barely broke.
—The Associated Press