(file photo/CKOM News Staff)

By Bryn Levy/CKOM News Staff

U of S climate scientist reacts to Environment Canada report

Apr 3, 2019 | 12:53 PM

A leading Canadian water security expert says a recent Environment and Climate Change Canada report highlights the need to change how Saskatchewan designs and builds communities and infrastructure.

“We already had an extreme climate and to make it more extreme really pushes the viability of our agriculture, our cities, communities and our transportation networks,” said John Pomeroy, who is a Canada research chair in water resources and climate change and chairs the global water futures program at the University of Saskatchewan.

Monday’s Environment Canada report stated that Canada is warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world and that the change is “effectively irreversible.”

Pomeroy backed that assessment.

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“It was very well-worded and based on really solid science from across this country and around the world, and it’s very grim reading unfortunately,” he said.

Pomeroy said his research and that of his colleagues shows some of the effects the process has already had on Saskatchewan.

He noted the province now sees 50-per-cent more multi-day rainstorms in the summer months than it did in the 1950s and pointed to the 2014 floods that caused billions of dollars of damage.

He said what stands out in particular about those floods was that they happened in June and July and were caused entirely by some 200 millimetres of rainfall, whereas most flooding has historically come with the spring melt.

“We simply never had flooding of that nature ever reported before since the western settlement of the region, nor is it noted in the traditional knowledge of the Indigenous peoples in the area,” Pomeroy said.

On the other end, Pomeroy said droughts in the 21st century have been longer and hotter than those seen in the 20th century — including the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

While he said reducing human emissions of greenhouse gases planetwide remains essential to buy more time, Pomeroy noted it will likely take centuries to reduce the carbon already accumulated in Earth’s atmosphere.

As such, he said every level of government needs to start planning around having what would have been considered once-in-a-century storms and droughts becoming the new normal.

Pomeroy suggested building up and hardening our infrastructure against the future climate while simultaneously cutting emissions would require levels of mobilization across society not seen since the days of the Greatest Generation.

“We have to treat it as if we’re in a world war situation,” he said. “Because if we don’t, the world as we recognize it now isn’t going to survive the lifetimes of the younger part of our population.”

He noted the challenge is made even more difficult by resistance from a large segment of the public, industry and politicians who either refuse to acknowledge the relationship between human emissions of carbon dioxide and the changing climate.

“Frankly, there are groups that make money off of carbon and they’ve been disseminating false information and blocking social action,” Pomeroy said. “And I think someday they’ll be viewed as the equivalent of war criminals for that sort of action.”

Still, Pomeroy said he remained hopeful despite the potentially grim outcomes.

“We can start to pull back from this,” he said, “but it will take very clever solutions and finding new ways of doing things and that’s the opportunity for our youth.”

Cold Sask. February not evidence against climate change: scientist

With some in Saskatchewan citing the coldest February recorded in the last 80 years as evidence against a warming climate, Pomeroy took a moment to stress the distinction between long-term climate trends and shorter-term weather.

“That extremely cold February was occurring when temperatures were close to zero in the western Arctic and was then followed by extremely warm temperatures, almost in the upper teens in Saskatchewan within a few weeks,” Pomeroy said.

He also emphasized the tendency for people to recall extreme weather as opposed to slower-building trends.

“And the earlier part of the winter was also extraordinarily warm. And back in August we had record high temperatures. So it’s flipping back and forth. The average of all of that is creeping up ever so slowly by a few degrees and that’s hard to notice sometimes, but it’s those extremes that we remember,” he said.