The Climate Keeps Yelling At B.C. To Wake Up
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Will they ever tire of making it worse for themselves?
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 until we run out of things that burn.
That was hot on the heels of the heat dome which broke Canada’s all time heat record not once, but three days in a row, climbing to 49.6ºC (that’s 121.28º F for American readers).
Oh yeah, and there was also that time when a container ship full of toxic chemicals that shouldn’t get wet was on fire in the path of a historic weather bomb storm.
So, at the risk of understating things, the weather hasn’t been kind. You’d almost think that the climate was trying to tell them something.
The BC government is still racing to worsen climate disruption.
The provincial government has been focussed primarily on carbon intensive extractivism as its primary economic policy for twenty years, and shows no sign of slowing down. The current NDP leadership won power in part by criticizing the…
