Canada's stake in the global climate crisis
A look at what has been done federally and why experts say it is important to act
The Canadian House of Commons declared a national state of climate emergency in June 2019. The motion for this declaration says it is a way to acknowledge the climate crisis the world is facing, and the effects that a warming world will have on Canada.
“Canada is in a national climate emergency which requires, as a response, that Canada commit to meeting its national emissions target under the Paris Agreement and to making deeper reductions in line with the Agreement's objective of holding global warming below two degrees Celsius and pursuing efforts to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius,” it reads in part.
“To achieve this long-term temperature goal, countries aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to achieve a climate-neutral world by mid-century,” reads the United Nations’ description of the Paris Agreement.
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As of February 2021, 22 national governments worldwide have declared a climate emergency. They include, along with Canada, such nations as Japan and New Zealand, as well as the 28 member states of the European Union.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report from 2018 notes how federal governments are not the only jurisdiction that has a role to play when it comes to dealing with climate change.
“Adaptation takes place at international, national and local levels. Subnational jurisdictions and entities, including urban and rural municipalities, are key to developing and reinforcing measures for reducing weather- and climate-related risks,” reads the IPCC report.
“Declaring a climate emergency has the potential to facilitate political support for action, and this, in turn, tends to result in a mandate for action within municipalities,” says Jeff Birchall, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Alberta, in an email.
“However, in order for meaningful change to occur, the declaration must involve [or] lead to tangible actions to incorporate climate change adaptation thinking at a granular level, including within strategic policy and planning. It needs to be more than a vision statement, or a high-level aspirational goal.”
Nearly 500 municipalities in Canada have declared their own climate emergencies, but some cities, including Calgary, have not been inclined to do so.
Only two of Canada's ten most populated cities have not declared a climate emergency: Calgary and Winnipeg. GRAPHIC: Zach Worden
Impacts from climate change in Canada are set to worsen as temperatures fluctuate, according to Canada’s Changing Climate Report (CCCR) from 2019.
“The changing frequency of temperature and precipitation extremes can be expected to lead to a change in the likelihood of events such as wildfires, droughts, and floods,” reads the report. This is due to both natural or anthropogenic — human-caused — greenhouse gas emissions entering the carbon cycle.
The carbon cycle is one of the cycles of the earth that help to balance the environment, according to Garry Clarke, a professor emeritus for the earth, ocean and atmospheric science department at the University of British Columbia.
“There is not that much CO2 in the atmosphere … it's a trace gas, but it's one with an important role. It's important in life processes, and it is one of the major greenhouse gases that provides a sort of atmosphere blanket for the earth that keeps it warm.”
Through the carbon cycle, forests take CO2 out of the atmosphere as well as the ocean, but emissions from fossil fuels are adding to this process.
“The ocean plays a very big role, because most of the stored carbon that isn't in the atmosphere, but has been released by humans, is actually taken into the ocean and turns into a slight acidification of the ocean … and also warming because it's taking heat out of the atmosphere as well,” says Clarke.
“So, it's this big bank or insulator ... that keeps things from changing fast, but it's slowly accumulating both the CO2 to make it more acidic and the warmth of the planet to make it warmer.”
The impacts humans can have on global climate are important to understand, Clarke says. The Subcommission on Quarterly Stratigraphy — the largest scientific organization within the International Union of Geological Sciences — voted to declare the term ‘anthropocene’ as the geological time period in which humans have had a direct impact on the environment, with a start date of 1950.
Clarke believes this term is helpful when understanding the involvement that is related to human interference with the natural environment. This warming is discussed in the CCCR report, which notes that Canada is warming at more than twice the global rate. Part of this is polar amplification, which is how areas that are closer to the poles, such as western Yukon and Alaska, are some of the fastest-warming places on the continent.
According to Clarke, many have not noticed how much change in global temperature has occurred over the last five years, because of the slow impact climate change can have.
“That's the thing that makes it kind of insidious. It's small in terms of the annual increments. Some people say, ‘Oh, that was a lovely summer, wasn't it?’ and things like that, and it's true, but the general tendency, if you look at this over 50 or 100 years, is quite dire.”
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Risks
According to Canada’s Changing Climate report from 2019, the Arctic is warming at three times the global rate. PHOTO: Pixabay
Arctic
The Arctic is warming at approximately three times the global rate according to the CCCR, impacts of which can be seen through, for example, Canada’s last intact ice shelf collapsing in the summer of 2020.
Birchall, along with University of Alberta master’s student Seghan MacDonald, published a report in 2019 about the Arctic’s vulnerability to climate change, and the resiliency of local populations in the face of it.
The report stated that isolated communities throughout the region are uniquely challenged by the quickly-changing climate and that any attempts at solving this issue through adaptation and development must include Arctic voices.
“Indigenous populations, making up the majority of Canada's Arctic communities, are uniquely sensitive to climate change impacts. With strong cultural ties to the environment and a heavy reliance on hunting and fishing to support their way of life, climate change in the Arctic has impacted many Indigenous groups’ traditional daily activities and, in some cases, put livelihoods at risk.”
The Arctic is an interesting case study to Clarke because of how it can affect heat distribution around the planet.
“The organization of ice on the planet that we're accustomed to is to have the Arctic ocean frozen for most parts of the year, and that keeps the North polar area cold,” he says.
“That then sets up a kind of climate circulation or atmospheric circulation that has this cold, very dense air perched around the pole trying to flow south.”
Given how the earth rotates, this northern air flows south through the coriolis effect, which deflects anything that flows over a long distance, thus causing the air to spread the way it does.
“One of the things about this circulation pattern is it ring-fences in the cold air, it locks it in place. The circulation of this kind of merry-go-round caused by the Coriolis effect … limits the southern penetration of this air,” says Clarke.
The coriolis effect, as demonstrated here, is how air moves normally around the globe. GIF: Wikimedia
“But, when we take this gradient of temperature from the cold north to the warm equator, and we decrease it by warming the North, that makes that outflow of arctic air less strong, and it becomes kind of feeble, that jet stream, which is generated partly by the flow of the air from the North Pole outwards, but also by the rotation of the earth.”
This feebleness of the jet stream is causing colder air to occasionally go further south, altering the tendency at which the weather rotates and moves air streams from west to east and directly affecting all provinces across Canada.
“That drift of this weather from west to east is slowed down, so [Alberta gets] more persistent hot spells and more persistent cold spells than [British Columbia] would. So, they're quite strong influences … and then the other influences, of course, are warmer summers have melting permafrost and a lot of damage in that direction.”
Tipping points
Smoke going through the mountains at Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park in British Columbia. PHOTO: Unsplash
According to a 2021 study published in Communications Earth & Environment, climate tipping points may be coming sooner than expected, making the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming below two degrees Celsius all the more important to meet.
“Tipping points refer to critical thresholds in a system that, when exceeded, can lead to a significant change in the state of the system, often with an understanding that the change is irreversible,” says IPCC’s report.
A 2019 report describes tipping points as being observable through ice collapse, biosphere boundaries and global cascades, resulting in irreversible climate change.
“In our view, the evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute,” it reads in part.
Carbon Budget
The carbon budget is a measurement of how much carbon can be emitted in order to still limit warming as necessary, as described by Joe Vipond, co-chair of the Calgary Climate Hub.
“We have a carbon budget that the planet is allowed to burn. Because CO2 lasts in the atmosphere for 1,000 years plus, there's only so much CO2 that we can emit into the atmosphere before tipping points occur and before we reach thresholds,” says Vipond.
Vipond believes these thresholds are now evident, as the impact of the world going over one degree Celsius from pre-industrial levels is being felt.
“There are significant impacts that are happening to our ecosystems and to our civilization structures. So, therefore, it's increasingly becoming obvious that 1.5 [degrees Celsius] is where we should be heading … which means the reduction in CO2 emissions have to be very steep in order to achieve those, and they should happen yesterday,” he says.
According to the IPCC report, “If emissions do not start declining in the next decade, the point of carbon neutrality would need to be reached at least two decades earlier to remain within the same carbon budget.”
The effects of climate change in Alberta could be grim, according to Clarke, who predicts the province will experience water shortages. He thinks that the role of municipalities in working to prevent these consequences is an important one.
“I think a number of people who were looking for something resembling global leadership on climate have been disappointed for so long. And then you look around and see the success stories … the best ones seem to be at the civic level, and municipalities doing something smart and aiming for net-zero and things like that. So, that's a kind of hopeful development and I think every community should consider taking that on.”
He also thinks that engaging with citizens on the issue personally at this level is a better way to start addressing it, rather than delegating to an international body like the United Nations.
“Most of what has to be done is going to be done locally.”