Canada – Page 4 – Desdemona Despair

People walk between homes that are covered in ice on Wednesday, 28 December 2022 in the waterfront community of Crystal Beach in Fort Erie, Ontario. Photo: Cole Burston / AFP / Getty Images

December 29, 2022

Buffalo’s “blizzard of the century” and Southwest’s 2,900 canceled flights prompt closer look at climate change and severe storms – “Nobody ever said global warming would eliminate winter”

By Rachel Koning Beals 27 December 2022 (MarketWatch) – Snowed-in Buffalo, N.Y., braced Tuesday for more wintry accumulation just days after an epic blizzard that killed at least 34 people, stranded some motorists in cars for days over the Christmas holiday and brought the city’s airport to a standstill. About 4,000 domestic flights were canceled […]

Map showing GFS 2m Temperature Anomaly for 20 December 2022. Much of the Arctic in December 2022 experienced a burst of freak warming. Graphic: Climate Reanalyzer

December 20, 2022

December 2022 serving up baked Alaska and warming most of Arctic – “Record-setting weather like we’re seeing plenty of examples of in recent years does tell a real story of climate heating”

By Seth Borenstein 5 December 2022 (AP) – Much of the Arctic is in a burst of freak December warming. In Utqiagvik, Alaska’s northernmost community formerly known as Barrow, it hit 40 degrees (4.4 degrees Celsius) Monday morning. That’s not only a record by six degrees (3.3 degrees Celsius) but it’s the warmest that region has seen […]

Members of the Wampis Nation Peru listen as Indigenous representatives of Latin American countries hold a press conference during the United the Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Canada in December 2022. Photo: Andrej Ivanov / Getty Images

December 17, 2022

Business is using COP15 to show it’s serious about saving nature, but environmentalists aren’t so sure – “If you come here and your objectives actually are against the objectives of the convention, then we have a problem”

By Marisa Coulton 17 December 2022 (Financial Post) – The UN biodiversity conference in Montreal might go down in history as the moment that business engaged in the fight to preserve nature, but the presence of a thousand corporate representatives is making some the environmentalists who have been attending these meetings for years uneasy. Some […]

A person wearing a carved wooden mask takes part with other people in a march during COP15, the two-week U.N. Biodiversity summit in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on 10 December 2022. Photo: Christinne Muschi / REUTERS

December 10, 2022

Activists dressed as birds and trees rally for nature at COP15 in Montreal – “We see what is happening and it is clearly not sufficient compared to our ambitions and our priorities”

By Gloria Dickie 10 December 2022 MONTREAL (Reuters) – Hundreds of people on Saturday braved sub-zero temperatures to march the streets of Montreal, the host city of this year’s U.N. biodiversity summit, demanding a strong new deal to protect nature worldwide. Wearing costumes to look like birds, trees, and caribou, activists said the COP15 summit could fail […]

Landsat images from 21 February 2000 (left) and 27 July 2019 (right) illustrating glacier retreat on top of Mount Kilimanjaro (United Republic of Tanzania). Photo: U.S. Geological Survey

November 19, 2022

Kilimanjaro’s and Africa’s last glaciers to go by 2050, says UN – “What is quite unprecedented in the historical record is how quickly this is happening”

By Patrick Hughes 3 November 2022 (BBC News) – Glaciers across the globe – including the last ones in Africa – will be unavoidably lost by 2050 due to climate change, the UN says in a report [UNESCO finds that some iconic World Heritage glaciers will disappear by 2050 –Des]. Glaciers in a third of […]

Projections of GHG emissions under different scenarios to 2050 and indications of emissions gap and global warming implications over this century (medians only). Looking beyond 2030, this figure projects global GHG emissions out to 2050 under different scenarios and indicates the associated global warming implications over this century. The figure illustrates the substantial increase in the emissions gap for 2050 if climate efforts implied by current policies and NDC scenarios are continued without further strengthening. Implementation of net-zero targets by around mid-century would significantly reduce these gaps, but even then, gaps with the 1.5°C scenarios would remain. Graphic: UNEP

November 1, 2022

UN: Inadequate progress on climate action makes rapid transformation of societies only option – “It is a tall, and some would say impossible, order to reform the global economy and almost halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but we must try”

NAIROBI, 27 October 2022 – As intensifying climate impacts across the globe hammer home the message that greenhouse gas emissions must fall rapidly, a new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report finds that the international community is still falling far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place. However, the Emissions Gap Report […]

The conservation status of the world’s 58,497 tree species in 2022. Graphic: BGCI

September 17, 2022

At least one-third of Earth’s trees face extinction – Scientists issue “warning to humanity” that tree species extinction could bring economic as well as ecosystem crisis

LONDON, 1 September 2022 (BGCI) – Today a new paper by leading scientists and the Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) reveals the severe impact that tree species extinction will have on other species, ecosystems and livelihoods. This comes exactly one year on from the landmark State of the World’s Trees report, which examined global tree species and found that a […]

Insured losses linked to extreme weather in Canada, 1983-2021. Data: Insurance Bureau of Canada. Graphic: Reuters

August 8, 2022

Canada village razed by wildfire wrestles with climate-proofing its future – “I’m not expecting I’ll be rebuilding ever”

By Nia Williams 5 August 2022 REVELSTOKE, British Columbia (Reuters) – A year after a wildfire destroyed the western Canadian village of Lytton, residents, municipal leaders, and the British Columbia government are grappling with the slow and costly reality of future-proofing a community against climate change. The remote village sits at the confluence of the […]

Russia tree cover loss, 2001-2021. The rate of loss in in boreal forests reached unprecedented levels in 2021, increasing by 29 percent over 2020. An unprecedented fire season in Russia drove much of this increase. Russia experienced the worst fire season since record-keeping began in 2001, with more than 6.5 million hectares of tree cover loss in 2021. While fires are a natural part of boreal forest ecosystems, larger, more intense fires are worrying. Hotter, drier weather related to climate change has led to fire-prone conditions, drier peatlands and melted permafrost. Siberia’s vast peatland area — the largest in the world — stores massive amounts of carbon, which is released into the atmosphere when peat dries up. Melting permafrost also releases stored carbon and methane. These conditions may represent a new normal, impacting people living in Siberia and creating a feedback loop in which increasing fires and carbon emissions reinforce each other and lead to worsening conditions. Graphic: WRI

May 8, 2022

Vast forest losses in 2021 imperil global climate targets, report says – “We’re seeing fires burning more frequently, more intensively and more broadly than they ever would under normal conditions”

By Jake Spring 28 April 2022 SAO PAULO, April 28 (Reuters) – The world lost an area of forest the size of the U.S. state of Wyoming last year, as wildfires in Russia set all-time records and Brazilian deforestation of the Amazon remains high, a global forest monitoring project report said on Thursday. Global Forest Watch, which […]

Vandals defaced Jewish gravestones with swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti at a Jewish cemetery near Strasbourg in eastern France, 3 December 2019. Photo: AFP

April 30, 2022

Antisemitism rose dramatically in 2021 – “Right at the outset of the pandemic in 2020, conspiracy theories began to sprout around the world, blaming the Jews and Israel for spreading the virus”

27 April 2022 (BBC News) – The number of anti-Semitic incidents around the world dramatically increased last year, a study by Tel Aviv University has found. The report identifies the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia as among countries where there was a sharp rise. This was fuelled by radical left- and right-wing political […]