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Weather whiplash
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.
I did not have Saskatchewan being warmer than Key West FL at the end of January on my weather bingo card. #SKwx #FLwx pic.twitter.com/wFGwThvuYV
— Rob's Obs (@robsobs) January 30, 2024
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….
Federal tax credits for carbon capture and hydrogen are expected to cost over $11 billion. That’s almost $1 billion more than expected, according to the Parliamentary Budget Office.
LNG projects proposed for the West Coast are coming under renewed scrutiny after the Biden administration’s pause on approvals. Matteo Cimellaro digs into the impacts on the climate and economic development for First Nations.
Ontario is moving ahead with plans to extend the life of Pickering Nuclear Generating Station. Pickering is one of three nuclear plants in Ontario and generates about 14 per cent of the province’s electricity. Plans to refurbish the plant would still have to be approved by the nuclear safety commission.
Refurbishments at Darlington and Bruce Power are already underway. “Opposition critics have said Ontario wouldn't be in as much of a supply crunch if the Progressive Conservative government hadn't cancelled 750 green energy contracts during its first term,” reports The Canadian Press.
Know your type
“Everyone has a caring relationship to the natural world,” says Emily Huddart Kennedy. But research for her new book Eco-Types revealed five very different ways of relating to nature.
“If we are to keep our planet habitable, we need civil society to be united,” she tells Patricia Lane. “This is entirely possible even if we love Earth differently.”
Overhauling global finance
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley is a fierce advocate for international financial reform to address the climate crisis. Mottley sat down with John Woodside to discuss the Bridgetown Initiative and unpack some of the reforms that are needed.
“‘You have financial transactions being done every day [and] we're going to need to be able to take a percentage of that,’ she told Canada’s National Observer. She isn’t talking about much: a 0.1 per cent charge on every financial transaction could raise more than $400 billion annually.”
Drilling rights granted, quashed
The U.K. handed out drilling rights in 24 new areas of the North Sea. “The move has angered MPs and environmental campaigners who called the move ‘grossly irresponsible’ and accused the government of overstating the economic benefits of the North Sea and sacrificing Britain’s climate leadership for ‘a pipe dream,’” reports The Guardian.
On the other side of the North Sea, a Norwegian court ruled against that country’s latest approvals. Oil companies and the government must consider the full climate impacts of new drilling, the court ruled. It found oil licences invalid because approvals didn’t take into account the climate pollution from actually burning oil and gas and only considered the emissions from getting it out of the ground.
“It is beginning to feel like the net is closing in,” says Tessa Khan, a U.K. lawyer and executive director of Uplift. “The reality of the repeated conclusions of the world’s climate scientists, the International Energy Agency, the UN secretary-general and many others — that if we want a safe climate, there is no room for new oil and gas projects — is finally being brought to bear on the growth ambitions of oil and gas companies.”
End of an era
The U.S. and Chinese climate envoys are both retiring. John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua have been pivotal to global negotiations since before the Paris Agreement.
Kerry will be replaced by John Podesta, who is currently working in the Biden administration stickhandling implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act. Podesta is a longtime climate and environmental advocate — chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, architect of President Barack Obama’s climate change agenda. Podesta was also chairman of Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2016 campaign for president.
Looking peaky
“Peak oil for burning has already happened,” argues Ross Belot, a retired senior manager with Imperial Oil.
“We’ve already hit peak oil for the uses that burn crude oil products like gasoline and diesel and the growth in oil demand is mainly coming from a surge in Chinese petrochemical development.”
You’ve probably seen a lot of news stories about troubles in the EV market. Rarely do those stories pan out to the big picture. Here’s a notable exception from Bloomberg: The World Hit ‘Peak’ Gas-Powered Vehicle Sales — in 2017.
Good morning with good news: Global sales of gas-powered vehicle sales peaked in 2017, dropped every year since 2017, and are down 23% from peak.
— John Raymond Hanger (@johnrhanger) February 1, 2024
EVs were 20% of global auto sales and 35% of sales in China in Q4 2023. Global EV spending rose 36% in 2023.https://t.co/2565ehkZvv pic.twitter.com/edzjQgMtYI
A president determined to ditch oil wealth
Colombia is a big fossil fuel producer — the world’s fifth-largest coal exporter and a major oil and gas country as well — but the country has joined the push for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and President Gustavo Petro is blocking oil and gas drilling.
I’ll leave you with Justin Worland’s article for Time: Why Colombia’s President is Determined to Ditch the Country’s Oil Wealth.
“The correct policy, in Petro’s view, is to ditch fossil fuels. And he is positioning Colombia not only as a key advocate for the global energy transition but also as a test case of how a fossil-fuel-producing country can decarbonize. ‘What I’m proposing is not jumping into a void, as some denialist voices say,’ he says. ‘Rather, it’s a change in the way forward. A way forward which, from my point of view, can be much more powerful, and prosperous, than the path that we would be leaving behind.’
“As fossil-fuel interests, at both the corporate and national levels, continue to resist the transition to clean energy, Petro could offer a powerful rebuke, showing how an economy can transform and prosper. Now, he just has to deliver.”