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The
Wettest Place in North America Is Burning
9
July, 2015
Vancouver Island is home to the wettest place in North America—and right now it's on fire.
Drought has
plunged the the Port Alberni-Clayoquot Region, part of Canada’s
only rainforest, into one of the worst dry seasons on record. Forest
fires are spreading quickly through sun-scorched woods that, in the
past, have
received almost seven metres—or 22 feet—of precipitation per
year.
The
fire, which has been burning since last Saturday on Dog Mountain near
Sproat Lake, has
reached over 245 hectares and is still spreading.
The region is also home to Henderson Lake; just 50 kilometres south
of the blaze, it is, on average, North America's wettest place.
So
far 35 firefighters and four helicopters have been deployed to help
stop the fire, which British Columbia Wildfire Service suspect was
human caused.
“What we're experiencing now is the kind of future that will become the norm here within a few decades"
The
region around Port Alberni receives most of its precipitation in the
winter and typically goes through a dry spell in July and August. But
this year, the dry season started two months early, leaving the area
in the middle of a drought with half the summer left to go.
Those
conditions are perfect for large forest fires.
“We
have a lot of fuel to burn because these forests are big and old.
Some places haven’t seen fire in in over 150 years,” said Richard
Hebda,
curator of botany and geology at the Royal British Columbia Museum.
He added that the drought-stricken forests of Vancouver Island are
extra susceptible to fire due to a lack of controlled burns in recent
years which usually help remove extra brush from the forest floor.
In
a not-so-surprising turn of events, climate change is likely to
blame. As
Arctic temperatures continue to rise in
the North, the Pacific coast can bank on hotter, longer, and more
dangerous dry seasons becoming the new normal.
Dog
Mountain near Sproat Lake, which is currently on fire. Image: British
Columbia Wildfire Service
“It’s
got a good deal to do with the jet streams changing their behaviour,”
Hebda said. He explained that, traditionally, the temperature
difference between the warmer mid-latitude jet stream moving up from
California and colder northern jet stream moving down from the Arctic
causes the jet streams to move from West to East across the country.
This pattern is the key to the normal cycles of wet and dry seasons
typically enjoyed by Vancouver Island’s rainforest.
But
as the Arctic warms, the temperature difference between these two jet
streams is decreasing, causing them to slow down and exaggerate
seasonal weather cycles, making the wet season wetter and the dry
season drier.
“Over
the last twenty years scientists have been talking about British
Columbia becoming like California, and here we are. We’re
California,” Hebda sighed. In the long term, longer, drier summers
could mean losing the rainforest, the heart and soul of Pacific
ecotourism, forever.
“What
we're experiencing now is the kind of future that will become the
norm here within a few decades,” said climate scientist Trevor
Murdock at
the University of Victoria, adding that we should “still expect
extreme years on top of the new normal, and [that] those extremes
will be new extremes that we haven't yet seen in recorded history.”
“I certainly envisioned this to be the condition with climate change; I didn’t envision it to happen so quickly"
Over
the next century, climate scientists predict that Vancouver Island’s
iconic trees—such as the cedar redwoods, western hemlocks and
Douglas Firs—could die off in large numbers, completely
transforming the island from a rainforest ecosystem to something else
entirely.
“Dry
zones will shift Westward and become dry rainforest. [...] The east
side will probably lose its tree cover. Progressively, by the end of
the century, we'll be more like the Bay area of California,” Hebda
said, adding that “parts of the rainforest will no longer be
rainforest.”
And
while the government is sending out extra firefighters to contain
fires on the island during this unprecedented dry season, little can
be done to stave off the long-term effects of drought.
By
analyzing 3,700 year old cedar tree rings, Hebda’s team discovered
that the health of cedar populations has in the past declined quickly
within a short time of being exposed to a warmer climate—and he
worries we have reached this point again. Because some trees require
constant groundwater to survive, long dry seasons can kill
susceptible coniferous species with short roots.
“I
certainly envisioned this to be the condition with climate change; I
didn’t envision it to happen so quickly,” Hebda said, adding that
the consequences of these conditions will not only change the
ecosystem on Vancouver Island, but will ultimately change the
distribution of ecosystems and climate all across the country within
the next century.
“Its
coming everywhere, no place will remain unaffected. [...] The overall
temperature is changing—period,” Hebda added. “Fundamentally
this is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced and we need to
read the signs, as people who spend a lot of time in the bush would
say.”
Expert
says even if fires are contained they may not be out until it snows
The
fires burning in northern Saskatchewan could burn until the first
snowfall, according to researchers.
Kerry
Anderson, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, said
the weather pattern known as El Nino, which is caused by the warming
of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America, is responsible.
He
expects weather conditions will settle down in Saskatchewan in the
coming weeks, but warmer than normal temperatures will likely persist
in B.C. and Alberta
Farmers
in Thailand's rice-growing Suphan Buri province are becoming
increasingly desperate for water to irrigate their parched fields as
the nation, a leading producer of the staple food, suffers its worst
drought in more than a decade.
The
wet season is under way, but Thailand is contending with drought
conditions in seven out of 67 provinces, according to the National
Disaster Warning Center, and water rationing is taking place in
almost a third of the country.
Farmers
have been asked to delay planting their main rice crop until August.
As
a result of the drought, the Thai government lowered its forecast for
this year's main-crop rice output by more than 2 million tonnes,
according to a report this month by the Office of Agricultural
Economics.
Out
of desperation, farmers in the central province of Suphan Buri, 103
km (64 miles) from Bangkok, are fighting over the Tharakam canal, a
small waterway that has not previously been used for irrigation.
Scientists
investigating the mysterious deaths of nine endangered fin whales
spotted in late May and early June in the Gulf of Alaska report that
the death toll has increased.
Decomposing
carcasses of five additional whales -- one fin whale and four
humpbacks -- have been reported by fishermen, pilots and survey
crews, said Kate Wynne, a marine mammal specialist with the Sea Grant
program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Those reports came in
over the past several weeks, and all the whales appear to have died
at about the same time, said Wynne, who is working with her
colleagues to investigate the deaths.
Researchers
at the University of B.C. say the world’s monitored seabird
populations have dropped 70 per cent since the 1950s.
Michelle
Paleczny, a UBC master’s student and researcher with the Sea Around
Us project, says the drop indicates that marine ecosystems are not
doing well.
Paleczny
and co-authors of the study, published in PLOS ONE, a journal
published by the Public Library of Science, compiled information on
more than 500 seabird populations from around the world, representing
19 per cent of the global seabird population.
They
found overall populations had declined by 69.6 per cent, equivalent
to a loss of about 230 million birds in 60 years, according to a UBC
news release.
Yahoo!
News reports:
“They
require enormous amounts of water,” said Anthony Ambrose [2], a
tree biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has
been studying redwoods and giant sequoias for nearly two decades.
“For the big, old trees, they can use more than 2,000 liters of
water per day during the summer.”
Water,
however, is in increasingly short supply in the Golden State [3]. All
around drought-stricken California, coast redwoods appear to be
suffering. They’re shedding leaves, turning brown, and dropping
undersized cones. Some of the state’s younger trees, situated in
parks and residential areas hundreds of miles away from their native
forests, are even dying
UC
Santa Cruz team reports first direct measurement of heat flow from
deep within the Earth to the bottom of the West Antarctic ice sheet
The
amount of heat flowing toward the base of the West Antarctic ice
sheet from geothermal sources deep within the Earth is surprisingly
high, according to a new study led by UC Santa Cruz researchers. The
results, published July 10 in Science Advances, provide important
data for researchers trying to predict the fate of the ice sheet,
which has experienced rapid melting over the past decade.
This is the rhetoric
But this is the reality
China,
faced with ever-worsening pollution in its major cities—a recent
report deemed Beijing "barely suitable for living"—is
doing what so many industrializing nations have done before it:
banishing its titanic smog spewers to poor or rural areas so everyone
else can breathe easier. But China isn't just relegating its dirty
coal-fired power plants to the outskirts of society; for years, it's
been building 16 unprecedentedly massive, brand new "coal bases"
in rural parts of the country. There, they won't stifle China's
megacities; they'll churn out enough pollution to help smother the
entire world.
The
biggest of those bases, the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry
Base, spans nearly 400 square miles, about the size of LA. It's
already operational, and seemingly always expanding. It's operated by
Shenhua, one of the biggest coal companies in the world. China hopes
to uses these coal bases not just to host some of the world's largest
coal-fired power plants, but to use super-energy intensive technology
to convert the coal into a fuel called syngas and use it to make
plastics and other materials.
University
of Michigan researchers, in collaboration with NOAA, are predicting
the Lake Erie algae bloom season of 2015 will be the most severe in
recent years, and could set the record as the second-worst season
behind the record 2011 algae bloom.
It
was reported last week that Monsanto will be replacing their
controversial herbicide RoundUp with another dangerous substance
known as Dicamba.
In
a statement released last month, the World Health Organization’s
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced that
glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide “RoundUp”,
is “probably carcinogenic.”
The
report indicated studies that “sufficiently demonstrated” that
this substance caused cancer in animals. According to multiple
reports, Monsanto was well aware that this chemical caused cancer for
decades yet still continued to sell it.
TRANSLATION: "Cimate change fight" will spur more warming
"Fighting climate change creates jobs" (and fills his pockets
Fighting
climate change will provide a massive stimulus to the global economy,
lift the world out of poverty and erase the lingering troubles of the
Great Recession.
Former
U.S. vice-president Al Gore laid out this sweeping fiscal case for
battling global warming at the Climate Summit of the Americas, in an
effort to refute the most common argument against driving down
greenhouse
With
the Lib Dems gone, the brake is off. New roads are to be built, fuel
duty frozen and green taxes scrapped
CREDIT: NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTE
A
major new analysis on the impact melting polar ice sheets could have
on sea level rise has given rise to some worrisome conclusions.
Researchers
found that sea levels increased some 20 feet during three warming
periods of 1.8 to 3.6°F (1 to 2°C) that took place at different
interglacial periods over the past three million years. The study’s
findings mean that the planet could be in for major sea level rise
even if warming is kept to 2°C — a limit that the world is set
to exceed without
major action on climate change.
Published
in the
journal Science,
the review compiled more than 30 years of research from scientists
around the world to show that changes in the planet’s climate and
sea levels are closely linked. It found that even a small amount of
warming can lead to significant sea level rise.
Then why can't the mention the elephant in the room, then?
The
world is suffering a surge in record-breaking rainfall because of
climate change, scientists say.
Extreme
rains, like those that led to flooding and a cholera outbreak that
killed hundreds in Pakistan in 2010, are happening 12 percent more
often globally and 56 percent more frequently in Southeast Asia than
if the world wasn’t warming, according a study by the Potsdam
Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“One
out of 10 record-breaking rainfall events observed globally in the
past 30 years can only be explained if the long-term warming is taken
into account,” Dim Coumou, co-author of the report released
Wednesday, said in a statement. “For the last year studied, 2010,
it is even one event out of four.”
Fires
burn out of control across Saskatchewan, British Columbia and
Alberta, sending thick smoke across the region and into the US
Wildfires
were burning out of control across large swathes of western Canada on
Friday, forcing thousands of people to evacuate their homes.
In
Saskatchewan one out-of-control blaze was more than five times the
size of the province’s largest city, Saskatoon, officials said.
Fires also raged in British Columbia and Alberta.
Air
advisories have been issued across central and western Canada, as
well as parts of the western US, due to the thick smoke over the
region.
About
200 fires burned in British Columbia, fire information officer Kevin
Skrepnek said. About 2,300 people were fighting the blazes and a crew
of about 50 people from Australia were expected to join them next
week.
Data
posted by the Canadian interagency forest fire centre said wildfires
have burned almost 2.4m acres (1m hectares) in Saskatchewan alone so
far this year.
It’s
too late to stop the seas rising at least 5 metres and only fast,
drastic action will avert a 20-metre rise, New Scientist calculates
based on recent studies
WHATEVER
we do now, the seas will rise at least 5 metres. Most of Florida and
many other low-lying areas and cities around the world are doomed to
go under. If that weren't bad enough, without drastic cuts in global
greenhouse gas emissions – more drastic than any being discussed
ahead of the critical climate meeting in Paris later this year – a
rise of over 20 metres will soon be unavoidable.
"
Recent studies have shown that both the Greenland ice sheet and West
Antarctic Ice Sheet have seen massive increases in ice loss in just
the past five years. The rates of losses far exceed even those
imagined a few years ago. Furthermore, there is evidence that the
West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun an irreversible process of
collapse, in part because it is melting from underneath."
Reports from earlier this year
Lake
Baikal contains 20% of the planets fresh water and daming it is very
dangerous. I posted recently on algae blooms on the lake, this would
make it worse. To turn this into a hydro damn would generate huge
amounts of methane, like all dams. The extinction wish continues
unabated
---Kevin Hester
Vladimir
Putin has stepped into the row over Mongolia's plans to construct
controversial hydroelectric power plants that could threaten Lake
Baikal.
The
Russian President has joined the growing consternation over potential
environmental problems from the giant facilities being built on
tributary rivers leading to the lake.
Campaigners,
including Greenpeace, have already pleaded with the World Bank to
block funding for the plants, which will see rivers dammed and water
diverted.
Levels
at the world’s oldest and deepest freshwater lake are 40cm lower
than in 2013, with water shortages in many communities already and
fishermen reporting a lack of fish. The crisis was blamed by many on
'excessive drainage' for an existing hydroelectric station in
Irkutsk.
The
world’s oldest and deepest body of freshwater, Lake Baikal, is
turning into a swamp, Russian ecologists warn. They say that tons of
liquid waste from tourist camps and water transport vehicles is being
dumped into the UNESCO-protected lake.
One
of the natural wonders and the pearl of Russia’s Siberia, Lake
Baikal has recently been a source of alarming news, due to an
increased number of alien water plants which have formed in the lake
waterlogging it, ecologists said at a roundtable discussion recently
held in the city of Irkutsk.
Typhoons
line up across the Pacific
Wildfires are burning in
several Spanish provinces, forcing evacuations, and EU authorities
say there is an extreme risk of further blazes breaking out in the
country as a heatwave shows no signs of abating.
In
the southern region of Andalusia, emergency services said they
deployed aircraft on Thursday to water-bomb a fire near the village
of Lujar in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
They
said flames estimated to have engulfed around 1,800 hectares led to
more than 600 people being moved from their homes overnight.
Authorities
in the region, where temperatures were forecast to peak at 42 degrees
Celsius (107.6 Fahrenheit) on Thursday, said other fires were burning
in the provinces of Huelva and Jaen.
No
deaths have been reported in the current spate of still relatively
small fires, which late on Wednesday also affected five other Spanish
provinces, the Agriculture Ministry said.
But
a run of hot, dry days has created an extreme risk of others breaking
out across swathes of southern Europe, particularly in central and
southern Spain, according to the European Commission's Forest Fire
Information System.
"There
are many woodland areas in Andalusia and the region remains in a
state of high alert," said a spokeswoman for regional
authorities in Granada.
A
heatwave affecting large parts of Europe has settled on most of
Spain.
State
meteorological office Aemet said on Wednesday it expected extreme
temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius in central provinces for at
least another week.
Madrid
has broken temperature records for both June and July this year,
peaking at 39.9 degrees Celsius on July 6.
We'll probably be gone from the planet by then
Kansas
City, Missouri
Blizzards,
gale-force winds, heavy rain continue to descend across continental
Australia, while Tasmania 'escapes' the cold.
Virgin
Australia and Jetstar have cancelled all flights in and out of
Denpasar Airport, Bali, on Sunday morning after a volcanic ash cloud
changed direction and their meteorologists deemed it unsafe to fly.
Jetstar
said it would make a second assessment around 5pm on Sunday to decide
whether evening flights would go ahead.
Mt
Raung in East Java continues to erupt and winds are now blowing in an
unfavourable direction. These conditions are forecast for the rest of
Sunday.
Indonesia
raises alert as Mt Raung volcano erupts
At
least 50 homes are still without power in remote parts of Gisborne
after snow and ice knocked out parts of the region's power network
last week.
Yesterday
five additional line crews were brought in from Bay of Plenty, Napier
and Wellington to help get the power back on.
Lines
company Eastland Networks said ice, snow drifts and fallen trees had
slowed progress.
Network
general manager Brent Stewart expects power to be restored to all
properties over the next few days.
An
endangered turtle, normally found in tropical climes, has washed up
at Wellington's Lyall Bay beach.
The
turtle is now undergoing treatment at Wellington Zoo.
Veterinarian
scientist Lisa Argilla said the turtle had a 50 percent chance of
survival.
"I
don't think he could have picked a worse week actually to get off
track because it's been freezing, especially around Wellington last
week and that cold temperature and that cold water he would not be
used to that and that's what's caused a lot of his issues."
Dr
Argilla said the turtle was found hypothermic and barely responsive.
She
said the turtle's species was generally found in the tropical belts
of the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
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