It was impoverished Africans and Asians who were supposed to be the early victims of climate change, not the well-off residents of North America now getting clobbered by floods, fires, drought and melting ice. That’s making the long wait for a city response strategy look more and more problematic.
July’s global average temperature was the highest ever recorded and marked the fifteenth consecutive month that records have fallen. In what’s now being called the arctic death spiral, summer sea ice coverage has dropped 50 percent with no signs of recovery and its volume has shrunk [video] by two-thirds. Both trends are being implicated in extreme weather in North America.
Last week nearly two feet of rain in 48 hours over parts of Louisiana forcing the rescue of 20,000 people and marking the eighth time in 15 months that a US storm has reached or exceeded the once-in-500-year standard according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which tracks US and global weather patterns. Dozens of people have been killed and thousands of homes swamped in Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Maryland and West Virginia since May of last year.
At the other extreme, the five-year extreme drought in California is being blamed for the severity of the wildfire east of Los Angeles that forced evacuation of over 80,000 residents – nearly as many as were pushed out in the Fort McMurray conflagration earlier this year. Still a month ahead of the state’s peak fire season in September, the blaze burned over 150 square kilometres and has been followed by major fires in Oregon.
“Strong gusts, drought-parched terrain and southern California’s week-long heat wave fuelled the flames,” reported the Guardian. “It was the latest blaze in what is proving to be an especially destructive, unpredictable fire season in western states.”
About 20 extreme rain events flooded homes in Hamilton between 2004 and 2012, including several that exceeded the once-in-100-year standard and one that was only supposed to happen every 1000 to 5000 years. The city has been spared major flooding since that 2012 deluge in Binbrook and upper Stoney Creek, but has watched neighbours in Burlington and Toronto deal with their own super storms.
In October 2013 the city’s board of health directed staff to “form a working group to undertake a climate change vulnerability study and risk assessment of services and operations impacted by extreme weather events (e.g. flooding, increased temperatures, increased storms) and report back on the assessment, and actions to reduce these risks.” When no action was evident, activists of the Hamilton 350 Committee reminded councillors the following summer of the decision and got it reconfirmed.
However the following March councillors rejected strong staff recommendations to expand climate change staff beyond the half-time person then in place. Other resources have since been allocated to the climate file but the warning repeated last month by Clean Air Hamilton that “we are also approaching a critical time in dealing with climate change, with the very real possibility of non-linear effects leading to accelerating atmospheric disruption” remains unheeded.
That report also noted that “over the past 25 years weather patterns have dramatically changed as a direct result of human activities and the release of greenhouse gases (GHGs),” and urged implementation of a community change action plan put forward last year that would result in a “net reduction of about 202,920 tonnes of GHG emissions and avoided costs of $69.1 million … if all 10 priority actions are completed.”
While North American weather disasters generate more headlines, climatic extremes this summer and their consequences are evident across the planet. They include world record temperatures exceeding 54C in Kuwait City last month, and just under that in Iraq; massive coral die-off in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef; and the release of anthrax from reindeer carcass exposed by permafrost melting in Siberia.