Manitoba isn’t alone in facing drought-induced wildfires. Northern Saskatchewan is ablaze. Northern Alberta is on fire while parts of the interior of Northern British Columbia are facing similar conflagrations.
For climate change skeptics, wildfire is seen as a normal occurrence. The truth, however, is far different. These latest fires are a growing trend, and climate change is seen as the key driver.
How so? Climate change in the Western half of North America has led to higher temperatures and long dry spell periods, even droughts. As each above-normal warm season follows another, we are witnessing temperatures creeping upward. Parts of Manitoba and Saskatchewan have recently experienced temperatures 6.6 to 13.5 Celsius (11.8 to 24.3 Fahrenheit) higher than normal. Northern Manitoba recorded a daytime high of 33 degrees Celsius (over 91 degrees Fahrenheit) at the end of this month, an unprecedented temperature. Climatologists link this increased heat to climate change, stating it is five times more likely because of anthropogenically caused warming.
Warming temperatures increase evapotranspiration (accelerated evaporation and transpiration from forests, soil and other vegetation). The governments of Saskatchewan and Manitoba have currently defined conditions across the two provinces as abnormally dry or in moderate drought.
Weather isn’t the same as climate change, but its patterns certainly exacerbate the current conditions. The two provinces have been locked into the heat by a persistent high-pressure system that stalled over Central Canada, preventing rain and cooler temperatures from moving in. Along with the heat and lack of rain have come high winds to add to the wildfire threat. Add to this thunderstorms with no rain but lots of lightning, and the fire threat gets even worse.
As in California and other parts of the Southwestern United States, the wildfire season in Western Canada is coming earlier each year and lasting longer. These conditions reflect an overall drying out of the western half of North America while the eastern half is getting wetter.
The health consequences of these wildfires cannot be understated. The effect on people includes exposure to fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds that get inhaled, contributing to rising levels of asthma, bronchitis, COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks and strokes, and premature deaths.
Other health effects from wildfire smoke include reproductive and developmental impacts, with low birth weights associated with exposure. As for mental health impacts, wildfires can be devastating, with depression and suicidal thoughts rising in populations exposed to them months and years later, a manifestation of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).
Humans aren’t the only life that suffer from wildfire smoke. Livestock and pets exhibit the same health effects. Wildlife isn’t just a victim of wildfire smoke. There is also the loss of habitat.
Other than reacting to these wildfire outbreaks, what can we do? Here are suggestions:
Various provinces operate their own FireSmart programs. FireSmart Canada is the national version that first started in 1993. It offers communities prone to wildfire threats, hazard assessment audits, mitigation plans, and teaches how to live with wildfire risk. Yet even with all the education, workshops and guidelines, humans remain unprepared when wildfires break out. Some stay and others flee. Every year there are needless deaths.
Climate change scientists talk about being a frog in a pot of water slowly being heated on a stovetop. The frog can jump out before the water gets too hot, or boil to death. Our wildfire experiences to date make it seem like we are no smarter than that boiled frog.
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Many staple crops have evolved natural resilience and tolerance to changing climate conditions like El Niños. Recently, however, climate predictability is going by the wayside with ramifications for food security.
Of all staple crops, rice is the one most eaten globally and has been most imperilled by climate change in recent decades. In Asia, 75% of calories consumed come from eating rice, which is extremely heat-sensitive. When an El Niño event happened in 2015, heat contributed to a 15 million-ton drop in rice production throughout Southeast Asia. Rice prices caused a 16% inflationary bump.
Philippine researchers have linked temperature increases to rice yield declines. The ratio is for every 1 degree Celsius rise in the minimum temperature during the growing season, yields decline 10%. That’s why agricultural scientists are targeting the rice genome to identify those genes related to heat tolerance of which there are 97.
Wheat is another global staple crop feeling the effects of global heating. In Asia, every 1-degree increase in minimum temperatures translates to a 6% decline in wheat yields. That’s why agronomists are testing 3,322 new wheat varieties since 2021 with the hope of identifying strains that produce better yields in more extreme heat conditions.
Developing new varieties of wheat and rice can be done through conventional cross-breeding. Increasingly, however, genome editing is preferred because compared to conventional breeding which can take multiple generations to produce results, genetic engineering is much faster taking less than a third of the time.
Hiroshi Maeda, a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin in Madison is working on modifying citrus crops like oranges and grapefruit. In the United States citrus farmers face devastating challenges from climate change including extreme weather events and freshwater scarcity. Maeda and his colleagues have also taken the genetic modification route to make citrus climate resilient. He states:
“Climate change is happening so fast that classical breeding approaches are not enough to overcome the challenges we are facing. It took 10,000 years for us to domesticate the crops, and we do not have that kind of time. We must accelerate the process using biotechnology, gene editing and transgenic approaches.”
Another staple crop is sorghum which is closely related to corn and an ingredient used to make cereals and pasta. Areas where sorghum is grown in the United States have witnessed extreme temperature changes in recent times with an expanding Arctic polar vortex causing chilling stresses and crop losses.
Rebecca Roston, a plant scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is studying plants like sorghum and how they respond to temperature changes, especially cold. Her research looks at the lipid composition of plant cell membranes and how they withstand freezing temperatures. States Roston:
“The reality is that the cold has driven human habitation and agriculture for millennia, and it is a problem that is so big that we don’t see it because it’s opportunity loss, not direct crop loss.”
Roston is using lipidomic sequencing to analyze sorghum and a cold-tolerant cousin plant, foxtail millet, and to understand the metabolic influences that affect crop stress. Unsaturated fatty acids contained within the plant membrane are key to promoting plant survival at low temperatures.
Soybeans have proven to be sensitive to disappearing ozone caused by increases in greenhouse gasses and smog. Notes Joseph Jez, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, a 1% decrease in the ozone layer corresponds to a 1% drop in soybean yields and since 1979, the ozone threshold has plummeted by more than 47%. That means a race against time to up the ability of soybeans using gene editing and modifications in the face of a more hostile growing environment. Jez notes:
“The plants we have now are not going to be the plants we have in 2050. The big unknown is whether we can either breed or edit the path forward to make plants survive the climate of 2050 or 2100.”
Climate-resilient future crops like corn, rice, sorghum, soybeans and wheat are being epigenetically modified to deal with drought and heat. Rice is being altered genetically to survive flood-prone growing areas. These staple crops are re-engineered to tolerate higher salt levels in the soil as sea levels rise. Re-engineered to withstand diseases, fungi and insect pests, plants are being weaponized against all of these.
In addition, scientists are enhancing photosynthesis in plants to help them grow faster. Root systems are being engineered to go deeper to find water and to become carbon sequestration storage sites. And finally, plants like rice are being modified to use less water and produce lower methane emissions from paddies.
It is a brave new world we face as the planet heats up and agronomists and geneticists try to develop new armour for our plants to survive the anthropogenic climate change that is taking hold in the 21st century.
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Pisoft notes that eight research centres in five countries collaborated in this research which shows the stratosphere contracting by more than 100 metres (330 feet) per decade since 1980. They hypothesize that this contraction was happening before the observed period for the study which begins in the 1980s with satellite data as well as climate modelling.
Pisoft notes that the discovery could have implications for:
Climate and atmospheric scientists have known for some time that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have caused the troposphere to grow in height. The impact on the stratosphere which extends from 20 to 60 kilometres or 12 to 37 miles above the Earth, however, was largely subject to speculation. The discovery of yet another unforeseen consequence of anthropogenic global warming joins with other recent findings including the shifting of the Earth’s axis.
The researchers looked at ozone as potentially a determining factor. The ozone layer which lies in the stratosphere has been assaulted for decades by human-produced chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) leaking from refrigerants and aerosol spray cans. But it turns out that it is carbon dioxide (CO2) that most impacting the physical changes to the stratosphere. As CO2 floats up into it the stratosphere layer cools.
Juan Añel, from the University of Vigo, in Spain, one of the authors of the paper, is quoted in a Guardian article by Damian Carrington stating, “It is shocking…This proves we are messing with the atmosphere up to 60 kilometres.”
Paul Williams, a professor at the University of Reading in the UK has praised the study for providing “the first observational evidence of stratosphere contraction” and showing “that the cause is in fact our greenhouse gas emissions rather than ozone.”
Williams, who is not one of the study’s authors, notes that the discovery demonstrates how little we understand the implications of the human-caused climate crisis. He remarks, “Some scientists have started calling the upper atmosphere the ‘ignorosphere’ because it is so poorly studied.”
Modern commercial jet aircraft fly at elevations that take them into the upper troposphere which is definitely feeling the heat, and Williams speculates so will air travellers who will be subject to increasing turbulence when they fly.
So how much stratospheric contraction has happened? About 400 meters (over 1,300 feet) since 1980 and who knows how much before that date. But based on the current rate of shrinkage, researchers believe the phenomenon will continue to grow to cause a thinning of up to 1.3 kilometres (0.8 miles) by 2080 unless we humans dramatically reduce GHG output.
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We see the Sun as a constant and yet we know it is not because the geological record proves the latter. Radiative output has varied dramatically which may explain how Earth has gone through cycles of cooling and heating with the latest cooling trend happening in the last 50 million years. Hence the Ice Age of the past 2.75 million years with glaciers expanding and contracting in rhythm with the amount of solar radiation, and the wobble of the Earth’s axis. Throughout these last few million years, each cycle of glaciation and interglacial warming has been cooler than the last. The peaks have been lasting approximately 100,000 years.
But other natural cycles have also played a role in this recent climate variability. The 41,000-year periodicity caused by Earth’s non-circular orbit combined with the axial tilt variability has impacted the northern hemisphere more than the southern leading to the more pronounced cycles of glaciation in the former than the latter. Throughout, however, Antarctica has remained ice-bound.
The recent Ice Ages, however, don’t compare to what geologists describe as an extreme period of cooling that lasted from 750 million to 580 million years in the past. Evidence indicates an ice-ball Earth from the poles to the equator. Orbital mechanics and solar radiation levels were probably contributing factors to this extreme climate event. What reversed it remains a bit of a mystery? And how early single and multi-cellular life survived the 170 million years of extreme cold is a mystery as well. Could the ice build-up on Earth’s surface have altered the axial wobble to the point where it impacted Earth’s internal circulation within the mantle? Could that have contributed to a period of volcanic activity causing greenhouse gas outgassing to warm the atmosphere and cause the extreme glacial event to end? We are still searching for answers to these questions.
We know today that planets in our Solar System do not all have similar axial tilts to Earth. The most noted exception is Uranus whose axis lies close to 90 degrees from the vertical. In effect as Uranus rotates around the Sun, it acts like a bowling ball rolling down a lane. What caused this to happen on that planet? Could it have been a planetary-sized collision in its past? Could Earth’s axial rotation at some point become as extreme as that of Uranus? Would the magnetic orientation within sedimentary rocks laid down during that past global Ice Age help us understand if a change to Earth’s axis played a significant factor in the 170 million-year period?
These are interesting speculations that the geological record may soon reveal. But there is nothing in Earth’s past history that compares to our present. Because right now, global atmospheric warming caused by our industrial activities and explosive population growth over the past 170 years is affecting the Earth’s axial tilt physically as polar ice vanishes with warming atmosphere and seas.
In an article appearing in The Guardian this past week, Damian Carrington writes, “the massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused mark shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s.” In other words, the poles are shifting, not the magnetic ones although they are as well, but the physical poles that mark the antipodes of the Earth’s axis. The loss of hundreds of billions of tons of ice annually is the cause with scientists recording the shift in the rate of axial drift since 1995, 17 times greater than the preceding period. In fact, the polar positions since 1980, the research shows, have moved 4 meters (more than 13 feet). Now that doesn’t sound like a lot, but prior to this life influencing the physical movement of Earth’s axis wasn’t in the cards.
The researchers ruled out other axial triggers that include movements within the mantle that affect continental drift, activity within the oceans from the seafloor to surface waves, and atmospheric changes such as winds and air currents that could contribute to changes to our axial wobble.
So it is us. We, humans, are even impacting the alignment of the Earth’s axis. The change, a mere 4 meters, isn’t a lot. But who would have thought our activity on the planet’s surface could lead to such a consequence?
]]>A plague of blackflies and mosquitoes used to envelop us from the moment we left our car until we got out on the lake. Then upon arrival at the dock beside the cottage, the pests would return in force.
Even if the weather was warm you kept completely covered. I remember the hat with the netting that covered my face and neck, and having to put on long socks and tuck my jeans in them. Even our hands needed to be covered.
Despite all of that protection which often included a generous spraying of insect repellent, we got bitten. The mosquitos were nothing compared to the blackflies which would land and crawl under all that protective layering to find a nice surface capillary to drill into.
I keep thinking about those days anytime I read about insect plagues such as the ones currently infesting East Africa. My memories don’t equal what is currently happening there with billions of Desert Locusts descending on villages and farms, wiping out crops, and competing for the grass that nourishes sheep, goats and cattle.
Schistocerca gregaria is the Latin name for the Desert Locust. And since the fall of2019 and into 2020, these insects have been the beneficiaries of an extreme weather event that occurred back in May of 2018 when a tropical cyclone named Mekunu caused heavy rainfall over the Arabian Peninsula leading to the perfect environment for desert locusts to breed.
Mekunu was the 8th tropical cyclone to develop in 2019. When it crossed into Oman and Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter, the rain left standing pools of water across the desert floor, perfect breeding grounds for insects, and among them the Desert Locust.
Mekunu’s rain resulted from a warming Indian Ocean which is today is seeing temperature increases faster than any other large body of water on Earth. The average increase has been 1.2 Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit). With warmer water comes increased evaporation and subsequently increased rainfall leading to one of the wettest rainy seasons ever seen in East Africa. Djibouti City near the southern access of the Red Sea saw 336 millimeters (13.2 inches) fall in four days, an amount equal to two normal years of precipitation.
The Desert Locusts have bred in the billions and followed the winds to Africa. The first wave arrived at the end of 2019 destroying 70,000 hectares (270 square miles) in Ethiopia and Somalia and 240,000 hectares (926 square miles) in Kenya. Since then several new waves have arrived, and with East Africa seeing above-average precipitation, the insects have bred and moved on to other parts of the African continent where they are eating their way through food crops and grazing lands. Kenya described the infestation as the worst seen in 70 years. Ethiopia says it is the worst the country has experienced in 25 years.
The geopolitical challenges Africa faces plus the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic has further exacerbated the plague of locusts. Coordinating a common response has been near impossible. Limited financial resources have made it impossible to control the locusts upon arrival. Conflict in Somalia has given those fighting the infestation limited to no access to breeding grounds. And COVID-19 lockdowns have made it next to impossible for farm families let alone urban dwellers to contribute physically to the fight.
In a June 30, 2020 article published in Nature Climate Change, authors Abubakr Salih, Marta Baraibar, Kenneth Kemucie Mwangi, and Guleid Artan, of The Intergovernmental Authority on Development Climate Prediction and Applications Centre, in Nairobi, Kenya, write:
“The recent locust outbreaks and the role of Indian Ocean warming show that the impact of climate change is not merely the consequences of changes in mean temperature, but also of increases in extreme and unprecedented events. Such extremes are exacerbated further in a butterfly effect by non-climate factors such as political instability, armed conflicts, poor governance, weak early warning systems, and limited financial resources, hurting the most vulnerable communities.”
The increase in Indian Ocean extreme weather events with cyclones like Mekunu has been linked to anthropogenic climate change, making this part of the African continent and its population more vulnerable than at any time in recorded history. This threatens both human and animal food security. The solutions to mitigate climate change and its risks are well known but not necessarily easy to execute without the political will and the majority within countries to back it up. The remaining questions:
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May 10, 2018 – While in Aruba last week I met a couple from Kentucky who described the bitter cold and snow they experienced this winter. When I mentioned climate change they looked at me like I was crazy because to them the only climate change is global warming and if it isn’t warm out then the whole idea is bunk. This is not an uncommon state of mind for many who find themselves confused by the two very different terms. Whereas global warming makes us think of a very specific type of climate change, the latter more generic term better describes what is happening here on our planet.
Climate change has always happened throughout our planet’s history. Before our modern civilizations came into existence the planet experienced several million years of episodic ice ages. Prior to that, the climate of most of the planet was warmer than anything we experience today. And going back further Earth has gone from a frozen ball of ice to a tropical sweatbox. The carbon we burn today came from one of those sweatbox periods in the planets’ geological past.
To clarify terminology, when speaking to people on this subject I call what we are experiencing anthropogenic climate change, that is, climate change influenced by human activity. It may sound more high fallutin than plain climate change, but adding anthropogenic points to the problem of the current planetary experience, and it is unprecedented in terms of the speed in which the change is occurring.
In the past few weeks, a number of reports have come out that should be troubling to all of us.
CO2 Continues to Rise
The first was results of tracked carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere as observed from the top of the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Those readings exceeded 410 parts per million over an entire month for the first time since CO2 records started being kept. To put it in perspective, atmospheric CO2 since 1880, when humans started burning a lot more fossil fuels to serve industrial growth, has increased from 280 to plus 410. That’s a 130 parts per million increase in a little more than 130 years. Project that out to the end of the century and CO2 could be as high as 490 parts per million with no human ever having lived through a time in Earth’s past when CO2 levels were that high. And that’s putting a positive spin on CO2 levels. Because in actual fact the rate of CO2 atmospheric growth is accelerating. Steady-state projects of 1 part per million a year underestimate the current reality of increases of 2.5 parts per million annually. That conceivably means we’ll see CO2 levels more than double from the first records kept back in 1880 by 2100. These are indeed uncharted waters. In the Mauna Loa observatory’s announcement, Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist at Texas Tech University states, “As a scientist, what concerns me the most is not that we have passed yet another round-number threshold but what this continued rise actually means: that we are continuing full speed ahead with an unprecedented experiment with our planet, the only home we have.”
Disease Vectors on the Move
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also gave us troubling news describing changes to disease vectors not normally seen in the Continental United States. New tickborne diseases were reported to be on the rise. In Puerto Rico, mosquito-borne Dengue and Zika were more prevalent. The latest Vital Signs CDC report noted that mosquito, tick and flea-borne diseases had tripled in the United States from 2004 to 2016. That nine new mosquito and tick-spread germs (Zika among them) had been discovered since 2004, and that 80% of disease control organizations within U.S. counties and states lacked the critical skills and capacity to deal with these spreading outbreaks. Why was this happening? As has become the case in almost all U.S. public service sites, there is little mention of anthropogenic climate change. These are words that are being scrubbed clean from the government under the new administration. But there is no doubt that disease vector changes and anthropogenic climate change are inextricably linked.
Nature Ill Adapted to “New Norms”
And to make matters worse, the alteration in weather patterns with exaggerated polar vortices, a Jet Stream that no longer conforms to what we have seen in the past, and even a weakening of coastal ocean currents with their attendant climate impacts, the new norms being experienced are screwing mother nature. Birds are arriving from winter habitats to conditions where feeding is difficult. Where unnatural warming is occurring the timing of insect emergence and bird breeding is completely getting screwed up. If birds are born before insects emerge, there is no food for them. If birds are born after insects have emerged and pupated to become adults, food supply may be insufficient as well. Mounting evidence in recent UK studies shows this to be the case. The animals that rely on seasonal change to mate and rear young are getting screwed.
Mad-hatter Geoengineers at the Tea Party
And then there are the reports of geoengineering experiments, from China’s Sky River artificial rain experiment to a number of U.S. experiments involving sunlight reduction including:
Even the Antarctic and Greenland are not being spared from geoengineering tamperers who want to wall off the continental and island-based ice sheets from the eroding effects of warming ocean waters. In one case engineers propose building walls of artificial islands to separate land ice from the ocean. In another idea it is proposed that glaciers be shored up by removing water from under the glacier to slow their descent towards the sea, and using the water collected to construct ice berms at the ice face. One proposal calls for artificial islands to jam ice shelves so the land-based glaciers behind cannot move the ocean edge and calve bergs. These ideas appear in a March issue of Nature.
Meanwhile, with all these geoengineering pie-in-the-sky proposals, a science advisor to the U.S. Senate warns that “there is zero governance” around humans tampering to reverse engineer anthropogenic climate change’s worst effects. Whether engineers are attempting to hold back the ice, or manipulate atmospheric processes, or deflect sunlight, there is no one in charge globally or locally. Yet if one or more of these projects is enacted, the consequences of a butterfly effect have not been considered. Change atmospheric processes in one area and who knows what negative consequences will occur somewhere else.
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