People were skiing the side streets of Vancouver two weeks ago while parts of Western Canada dropped to 40 below, and worse. Now you can’t even ski the local mountains — the resorts are closed and people are ditching cross-country gear for T-shirts. Not just on the sidewalk patios of Lotusland, but in Saskatchewan. In January.
Maple Creek, Sask., hit a high of 21.1 C to close out January. An all-time record for the month in Saskatchewan, even balmier than balmy Key West, Fla.
Key West was slightly chillier than usual — the average high in January is 24 C. But there was nothing “slightly” off about Maple Creek’s temperatures — it should have been around -5 C, an extraordinary 26 degrees divergence from the norm.
And the broader swings have been even more extraordinary. Over the last two weeks of January, Maple Creek’s temperatures stretched over a preposterous span of 63.7 degrees centigrade.
The 2,000 souls in Maple Creek lived through an extreme range but bigger cities north and south experienced similar swings. In both Edmonton and Lethbridge, thermometers registered highs and lows for January over 56 degrees apart.
And the wacky weather has been even wackier beyond Canada. In the Northern Hemisphere, where it’s winter, many places felt more June than January. Parts of Mexico hit 41 C.
Europe set a January record, above 30 C in Spain. “We are entering a new climate reality,” President of the Government of Catalonia Pere Aragonès said as he announced emergency measures to deal with its worst drought on record. Winter has not replenished water reserves, which now are below 16 per cent with one reservoir at five per cent of capacity. The government is declaring a drought emergency in and around Barcelona — the region has been suffering a lack of rain for 40 months.
The Southern Hemisphere’s summer has been searing hot. Parts of Australia topped 48 C in January. Residents of Birdsville, Queensland sweated through nights where the temperature never dropped below 35.2 C.
Several countries in South America registered their hottest days on record. Weather historian Maximiliano Herrera described Jan. 22 as “the most extreme in its climatic history.
Records were destroyed all over the continent from Colombia to Argentina, Chile, Brazil, from north to south from east to west.”
You have probably been following reports about the exceptional drought across the Amazon River Basin. Scientists at World Weather Attribution just completed their analysis, concluding the Amazon drought was made 30 times more likely to happen because of “the effects of climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels and deforestation.”
Without planet-heating emissions from oil, gas and coal, the scientists determined the drought would have been much less extreme. One of the burning questions has been the role of El Niño, and the scientists concluded that “climate change, not El Niño, is the main driver of exceptional drought in the highly vulnerable Amazon River Basin.”
Millions of people have been impacted by the drought and more than 150 endangered river dolphins died in one week last year. The Amazon rainforest is already considered close to a tipping point into a drier ecosystem, which would cause the mass dying of trees and the release of carbon into the atmosphere.
“If we protect the forest, it will continue to act as the world’s largest land-based carbon sink,” said Regina Rodrigues, a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, and part of the World Weather Attribution team that did the analysis. “But if we allow human-induced emissions and deforestation to push it through the tipping point, it will release large amounts of CO2. We need to protect the rainforest and move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”
Drought is a serious problem in Canada as well. Both B.C. and Manitoba are being forced to import power because of low reservoir levels. It’s a very disturbing development for what’s generally considered Canada’s great advantage in electrification — our massive hydropower “batteries.”
Large swaths of Western Canada are classified as in “severe” or “extreme” drought. All of Alberta is under at least moderate drought, with some areas suffering the highest level of “exceptional” drought. Some communities in Alberta are banning oil and gas companies from using municipal water, while the fossil fuel industry has been lobbying the government to drop its prohibition on water transfers between basins.
And fire season is fast approaching. “It’s only 10 weeks until some of the municipalities will start to have legitimate fire risk and some of that might be even earlier,” said the Alberta Fire Chiefs Association in an open letter to the provincial government.
The association urgently called for “disclosure of the province’s wildfire preparedness strategy” because “wildfires are occurring with greater frequency, intensity and duration across more expansive areas than in the past.”
The Oldman River is reportedly down to “about a third of its normal flow. The Bow, which flows through Calgary, has half its normal water. Even tributaries to the Peace and Athabasca rivers, those mighty arteries of the north, are well off their averages.”
Where is Premier Danielle Smith on all this? It’s a good question. We now know she was preparing new policies against trans youth. But on the day her environment minister was fielding questions about the drought, the premier was defending the right to suck Canada Dry. With plastic straws. Unnervingly long ones….
