Climate Snapshot

A basic rule of thumb is that climate change will make rainy areas grow ever rainier and dry areas grow ever drier. Sure enough, Vancouver's rainy climate is getting significantly wetter in the spring months.

According to my calculations using Environment Canada weather records, Vancouver's rainy climate is already:

• 49 percent rainier in April
• 35 percent rainier in May
• 27 percent rainier in June

Good news for the umbrella industry, I guess.

This soggy increase has happened with global warming of less than 1 degree C so far. Both the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have recently said we are on track for five times more warming this century. The IEA says we are heading for a "catastrophe". MIT, meanwhile, says there is "no way the world can or should take these risks."

The Americans? Really?

Every year the International Energy Agency (IEA) calculates humanity's CO2 pollution from burning fossil fuels. And once again, the overall story line is one of ever-increasing emissions:

"Global carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel combustion reached a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes in 2011."

The world has yet to figure out how to stop the relentless increase in climate pollution. But mixed in with all the bad news there was one shining ray of hope. One of the biggest obstacles to climate action may be shifting. As the IEA highlighted:

"US emissions have now fallen by 430 Mt (7.7%) since 2006, the largest reduction of all countries or regions. This development has arisen from lower oil use in the transport sector … and a substantial shift from coal to gas in the power sector."

On August 6, 1945, the bomb doors on the Enola Gay opened above the Japanese city of Hiroshima. An atomic bomb packed with 60 kilos of uranium fell for less than a minute before exploding with the energy of thirteen thousand tons of TNT. The radius of "total destruction" extended a mile in every direction. The force of the blast killed an estimated 70,000 people instantly.

Unnoticed by the world at the time, the Enola Gay was also releasing a much more subtle threat to humanity: an invisible, odourless and tasteless gas called carbon dioxide. Even today, a third of Enola Gay’s CO2 from that mission is still up in our atmosphere and around a sixth will be there for millennia. Most of the CO2 that does leave the atmosphere dissolves into our oceans, acidifying them.

One common excuse I hear for why the transportation in BC and Canada is so much dirtier than in Europe is that Canada is a much bigger and more spread out. It is certainly true that denser populations usually use less gasoline per person.

But the reason for the huge gulf in gasoline burning between Europe and Canada is more complicated than just the relative size of our countries and populations would suggest. For one, Canada is actually a very urban nation. Second, Europeans pay 80 cents more per litre for gasoline, and lastly, Europeans drive much more efficient vehicles.

The result of lower gas prices and less efficient vehicles is that even within our densest and greenest cities, like Vancouver, we struggle to get down to the national averages for European nations like France, Germany and UK.