The Climate Keeps Yelling At B.C. To Wake Up

Michael Nabert
4 min readJan 6, 2022

Will they ever tire of making it worse for themselves?

Photoshop of British Columbia map by author

A low pressure system is expected to dump up to 30 cm (11.8 inches) of snow on Vancouver, British Columbia over the next day or so. As the system moves Northward, warmer air behind it will probably follow up with freezing rain. Before mid January, this will already be one of the ten snowiest winters in the city’s history.

They’re ill prepared for it. What snowplows they can muster to clear thoroughfares may be short of drivers due to Omicron. Municipal services are short staffed all over the place as cases proliferate.

Extreme flooding in mid-November triggered landslides, forced the evacuation of thousands, and cut off every road and railway connecting Canada’s busiest port with the rest of the country. The primary highway only reopened on December 20th. Those floods were one of the ten most financially catastrophic climate events on Earth in 2021.

1600 wildfires burned 8,700 square kilometres of the province in 2021, with the most attention paid to the fire that obliterated the entire town of Lytton. That was only bad enough to count as the third worst year on record, but the eight worst wildfire years have all been within the last ten years, and new records likely won’t stop intermittently being set…

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Michael Nabert

Researching a road map from our imperilled world into one with a livable future with as much good humour as I can muster along the way.