The Climate Change Discussion Thread
 

I was shocked to find we didn't have a climate change discussion thread in the Canada section yet. As anthropogenic global climate change is beginning to affect Canadian urban areas, I feel like it is a topic of concern for most of us here.

Some disturbing new information about climate change in Southwestern Alberta and Calgary's abilities to keep the region adequately... moist? in the future was released today. While Calgary appears (temperature-wise) to be one of the cities least affected by climate change over the next 50 years, we are to be severely impacted by the disappearance of glaciers and extreme weather events as the primary clash zone between Pacific and Arctic systems.

https://postmediacalgaryherald2.file...l&w=691&zoom=2
https://postmediacalgaryherald2.file...l&w=691&zoom=2


Calgary could reach daily water licence limit by 2036
Calgary could reach the provincial limit on daily water withdrawals from the Bow and Elbow rivers within less than 20 years, thanks to population growth and climate change, the city said Monday.
MEGHAN POTKINS | CALGARY HERALD | May 14, 2019

Full story: https://calgaryherald.com/news/local...-limit-by-2036

Great thread. I’ll certainly participate in this. Yes, climate change is happening, but this unfortunately reads like the now all too common fearmongering. It’s hard to tell from the piece whether the writer twisted what the scientist said, to create fear and drive clicks, or whether it was the scientist himself. People are making a career out of this now. There’s quite a bit here to respond to but I’ll pick a couple of points and maybe come back for more.

- “The reason the river is declining slowly is the loss of the glacier ice and snow pack at high elevation.”
This statement doesn’t make sense. I just looked at this link quickly but it looks ok.
https://albertawater.com/nexus/conve...ow-river-basin
You can see from the graph that glaciers account for about 1% of the river flow, and that’s when they’re melting back. Think about the mountains in the winter. They are covered in meters and meters of snow. That and the rain that falls in the watershed produce essentially all the water in the bow. The tip of each glacier that melts back each year produces about 1%. River flow actually increases by this amount when glaciers are melting. If there’s been a loss of snowpack then that’s another matter, but there would have to be some other reason for that. That would have nothing to do with the glaciers. And he has not given any here.

- “the interim impact of climate change in Calgary will likely involve intermittent periods of severe flooding”
I have seen no evidence for this, and he has presented none here. Yes, we had a big flood in 2013, but we had two bigger floods in the late 1800s. Big floods just happen from time to time. When you build a house on a floodplain you should be aware that that floodplain is there because there was a flood, and most likely it took more than one to create it. And where there was one flood there will likely be another. For this to be convincing he would have to make some argument for why climate change would produce more floods here, and he has not done so.

There is so much just straight fearmongering going on these days that you should reject all fear without facts. If someone has a real point to make they will present the facts to convince you.

Here is Doug Ford's BS attack ad on the Carbon Tax. He has no plan. This is all just meant to help get Sheer(is that his name?) elected in the fall.

• Video Link

"Calgary won't have enough water for its projected population by 2076" is nonsense.

Out of curiosity, I went and took Ireland's population growth during their boom (~1750 to ~1820) and I just realized we have a HUGE problem - there are 150+ million Irish nowadays in 2019 populating that little green island, and there's no way to feed all of these people!

Since we have two climate change threads going, can this one be merged into the original?

I'll be glad to do it as soon as someone gives me mod powers :)

What? Try 6,572,728 (2016)

The U.K and Northern Ireland combined amount to 71,891,524 (2019)

No, that's impossible! My projection can't be wrong, it's pure math! ~4 million Irish in the late 1700s and a 1.6% yearly growth rate says there are ~150 million of them today.

(You probably could've figured my point from my original post, but if not then it should be more clear now)

The problem is the climate. We need to finally eliminate the climate and make the world carbon free.

We started with those plastic six pack holder things and drinking straws but it's not enough. We will need to find at least 5,000 more Swedish girls to protest at Davos and identify many more small consumer items to ban. I suggest banning oversized plastic hipster eyeglass frames, and making people use more reasonable-sized ones (instead of LITERALLY DESTROYING THE PLANET WITH THEIR STUPID FASHION CHOICES). If we all make at least 500 tweets per day *we* *can* *do* *this*.

LOL:dunno:

I think you mean UK which includes N.I.(65 M) + Ireland (6M)

Fun fact: Ireland has still not yet reached it's pre-1840s population high of 7 million.

Calgary going from 1.3m to 2.5m in 58 years doesn't seem implausible to me. In 1960 Calgary was less than 250,000, so if anything the projection seems conservative.

Calgary growth in the second half of the 20th century was on the back of oil, the resource of the moment. What could possibly cause a further doubling in merely half a century in a post-oil world?

Ireland had ~3 million in 1780 and close to 8 million in the 1820s, surely ~35 million (same as Canada) in 2019 is a very very very conservative projection...?

That article isn't really about climate change. While flow volumes in the Bow river may decline, Calgary's water entitlement isn't in question. If Calgary does run up against its entitlement, the root cause will be growth, not a possible reduction of the entitlement due to climate change.

Another point to consider is that the vast majority (78%) of water entitlement in the Bow basin is to agriculture. See page 9 of: https://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$Department/deptdocs.nsf/all/irr13053/$FILE/ssrb2010.pdf. Agriculture accounts for 78% of water use in the Bow basin.

Maybe Alberta should consider additional water storage in conjunction with flood protection when looking at new dam and diversion projects. The Springbank project would do nothing for storage. No storage has been added upstream of Calgary since the Bearspaw Dam in 1954.

Calgary population growth has slowed down a lot. In the 1960's it was growing by around 6% a year. Last year it grew by 1.8%, right on the Canadian CMA average (which admittedly seems to have gone up a bit lately - https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/dail...g-b001-eng.htm).

Nobody has a crystal ball but my prediction for Calgary is "regression to the mean".

(This is a tangent but I can't help but notice how Statistics Canada's CMA population growth ranking in the link I posted doesn't match up very well with SSP Canada triumphalism levels. For example last year, Edmonton growth was faster than Calgary and Ottawa faster than Toronto. Vancouver has fallen down between St. Catherine's and Moncton.)

Not entirely true. Calgary's growth was in part because of oil, but moreso from natural gas, as well as agriculture.

While over the long-term, a matter of decades, global oil demand will eventually decline, however, with LNG plants being built around the globe, including LNG Canada's $40 billion plant in Kitimat, among others, natural gas will supply the world for much of its energy needs for the long-term, far beyond oil. While Calgary is well known for oil companies headquarters, the same producers of oil produce natural gas, which will continue to support Calgary's economy for a long time, especially with global natural gas demand rising to hopefully replace coal fired power plants around the globe. Natural gas is a clean burning fossil fuel (marginally more ghg intensive compared to many hydro powerplants), that would significantly decrease the worlds ghg's if all coal fired power plant were converted to NG. This is good news for BC's economy as well.

A competitive business climate (ex. low corporate taxes, balanced budget, perhaps right to work legislation and privatization of some government services to break the public sector's monopoly). Calgary grew like crazy in the 90's, a period of low energy prices, mainly due to corporate relocations. Being the most business friendly city in Canada is not difficult.

In Shanghai, the problem with climate change will not be too little water, but too much. Shanghai is already one of the world's most flood prone cities, and with rising water levels due to melting polar ice, as well as increased typhoon activity due to atmospheric and ocean warming, it's only going to get worse. Shanghai is more fortunate than many other cities in its situation as it is able to afford to build coastal defences (they've built over 500km of flood walls in recent years) and institute other anti-flooding measures that other poorer coastal cities (example Dhaka, Bangladesh) cannot afford.

The latest from here...

It's not your imagination. N.L.'s weather is getting weirder

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfo...g-nl-1.5128073

It isn't a doubling, it's increasing by ~60%, compared to the population increasing by 400% in the last 58 years. I'm sure the city of Calgary has done more research into this and has more data than you have but obviously population projections are just that, projections. It could be lower, it could be higher, the value they have put on that graph is probably the mid range.

Alternatively, Calgary is a hell hole and no one could possibly want to live here if it weren't for us all being up to our knees in tar to fund our jacked up trucks and McMansions. Maybe that is the future, but the City of Calgary's job is to plan for infrastructure, so it's prudent to make sure we have planned adequate capacity for what they see as a realistic scenario.

Con’t
To wrap this up, there are soooo many things wrong with that article. Canada is not magically warming 2x faster than the rest of the globe. Northern parts of the globe are warming faster, and really just northern parts of Canada, but that obviously wouldn’t generate the same kind of fear as, “CANADA IS WARMING 2X AS FAST AS THE REST OF THE WORD!” But this is such a clearly ridiculous statement that I doubt that very many people bought into it. This is the kind of thing that makes a mockery out of the climate change issue. Good thing we have real scientists working hard on the problem behind the scenes.

On the issue itself, it appears that the flow in the Bow is down by about 10% over the last century, and that could be part of a long term trend. It’s definitely something to watch, but there’s no reason to believe that it has anything with to do with AGM. Calgary’s growth is the much bigger issue. Every city in Canada, and North American save possibly LA and Phoenix, uses far more potable water than it needs to. We need about 30 liters of potable water per day for drinking and cooking, but in Calgary we use over 10x that amount. The rest goes to things like taking showers, flushing toilets, and watering lawns, and there is a lot of potential for savings here. We probably want to keep showering with treated water, but we don’t need to flush our toilets or water our lawns with it. Long term we could move to some kind of grey water system, but in the short term we could keep using it but switch to very high efficiency toilets, lawns that don’t require as much water, drip irrigation systems, and even rain barrels to collect rain water from roofs for use on the lawn and garden. Lots of potential savings.
https://www.calgary.ca/uep/water/pag...-the-home.aspx
https://www.calgary.ca/UEP/Water/Pag...fficiency.aspx

Does Calgary have water meters? If not then that would be an obvious first step.

Over the years, I've noticed a significant difference in behavior between Quebec (where water is free and people use needlessly crazy high volumes) and Florida and France (where there are water meters and people pay attention to their consumption).

The kind of system you describe in Calgary has existed in my area of FL for as long as I can remember - there's the potable water line (metered) and there's also a non-potable water line (non-metered, IIRC) which is optional (not all properties have it; if you want one you pay the installation fee, and there might be a token yearly fee too, not sure) and people use it to water the lawn, etc.

? No it's not. It's (very close to) a doubling. Approximately, it's okay to call it a doubling. I'm using your own numbers, see post below - it's an increase of 192.3%. (A true doubling would be 200.0%)

(Similarly, 58 years is what I approximately call "a half century".)



It's really easy to find projections that were totally wrong in retrospect.


Sure. I just don't think we need to panic because there isn't enough water in one given location for hypothetical people. If water is truly a limiting factor, then Calgary likely won't grow past that point where it'd need more water.

Notice how projection of growth was directly leading to the conclusion "Ireland won't have anywhere near enough food for all that people then!", and how in reality this limitation is precisely what caused the projection to be grossly incorrect...

Sorry, you're correct, not sure how I messed the numbers up there. Regardless, I'll trust the city of Calgary's projections over your skepticism of them. They could very well be wrong, but they are more likely to be correct than whatever you think the right number should be.

And Calgary does have water meters. My house does at least.

I've never run into a property in BC or Alberta that was connected to a domestic water utility that did not have a meter. People who are connected to community water systems or who are on wells obviously don't have meters

You can however get a second meter installed if you use domestic water strictly for an exceptional use (such as irrigation, for a swimming pool or flooding a hockey rink) where the water used won't need to be treated as wastewater, and the water treatment charges will be omitted from the bill from that meter. It's almost more work than it's worth though, Only really helpful for larger users

Calgary started implementing water meters in the mid 80's. For a while, houses built before that were grandfathered, but I believe all have been metered for a while now.

Something doesn't add up. From the city's own website, Calvgary's water usage has been declining:
https://www.calgary.ca/UEP/Water/Pub...lume-610px.jpg

https://www.calgary.ca/UEP/Water/Pub...ater-610px.jpg

Most older houses in Vancouver don't have a water meter.

Cities of Regina and Saskatoon each have growth plans for half a million people in the next 30 to 40 years so I wouldn't be surprised if Calgary has a growth plan for doubling it's population too in the coming decades.

https://globalnews.ca/news/2568282/o...oon-residents/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saska...-000-1.1396257


Even with 100-year-old record breaking cold temperatures in Saskatchewan this month of May, the province is preparing for climate change as predicted.

https://www.wsask.ca/About-WSA/News-...limate-Change/


https://thestarphoenix.com/news/loca...-sask-s-future

A few months ago Saskatchewan completed it's 250-page Provincial Flood and Natural Hazard Risk Assessment due to climate change.
https://leaderpost.com/news/saskatch...ays-new-report

After 5 years, Medicine Hat powers down $12M solar thermal power plant


This is a perfect example of why a carbon tax needs to be the backbone of our climate policy. This project was producing cheap energy (though apparently did go over budget) but now has to shut down because of how cheap natural gas is in Canada. Unless we ensure that burning fossil fuels has a predictable price penalty, then private investors will never be able to invest in clean projects. We will have to use ad hoc government subsidies and initiatives which are guaranteed to cost more than the guy burning gas.

It also apparently did not work well in winter according to this article. It was a five year pilot project and hopefully has provided good data to help improve future designs so something like this might be feasible at these latitudes in the future.

https://chatnewstoday.ca/article/596...t-operate-year

Reading the comments for that article makes my head hurt. Some people can't seem to grasp the difference between solar thermal and photo voltaic.

Natural gas is a clean burning fossil fuel, it's ridiculous to suggest to move away from that source of power generation today, especially with gas prices so low.

As I have provided is a separate post, when comparing natural gas to hydro...

Natural gas is a "bridge" commodity that is going to kill this planet and we should be phasing it out as fast as we are going to be for oil. Its a fossil fuel excuse used by oil & gas companies but the reality is there is absolutely nothing clean about it. Yes it's cleaner than coal and oil for electricity but that sets the standard embarrassingly low.

Emissions worldside will continue to grow as natural gas is simply exchanging one dirty commodity for another. Yes per plant emissions will fall but with soatring electrical needs around the world more natural gas plants will be built negating per plant reductions. Frankly I think I would rather the world continue to use coal or oil to produce electrcity until they switch to true clean power than this make-beleive "clean" alternative which is nothing more than an excuse for doing nothing.

This is where BC hypocrisy makes me sick. If it's an Alberta dirty commodity then it should be shunned and closed down but if it's a BC dirty commodity it should be embraced and expanded.

It still generates significant amounts of CO2 so it needs to go when possible. And in western Canada we have some of the cheapest gas in the world, it is too cheap. Which means that alternative power sources will rarely be able to compete. The solution is simple and obvious - we likely don't need onerous taxation, just enough such that renewables don't have to compete against something that is almost free.

Yes and no, because I'm not venturing a number, precisely because I think it's just impossible to forecast.

I don't mind long-term projections, as long as everyone is aware they're likely to be bullshit. An example of a situation where a projection would be more harmful than just not making any projections at all would be if Calgary starts investing resources right now into building special infrastructure for water supply that won't be needed until the city passes 3 million people, the logic being "we're doing this now because we don't want to risk not being ready on time", and then more likely than not all of that becomes a huge and expensive and environmentally-unfriendly white elephant.

I have been fighting FLDOT for a couple years now as they want to eminent domain acquire one of my favorite properties that's super well located on a State Route because they want to enlarge it, adding more lanes in each direction. I pointed out that IMO that boulevard was already wide enough based on all my firsthand experience, and that they should leave it alone, and the engineer replied something along the lines of "sure, it's okay now, but we're planning for 2050 and beyond, and by that point with the robust population growth we've been seeing in the area all those new lanes will be needed according to our projections".

In 10-15 years we may all be riding in self-driving pods... riding efficiently bumper to bumper at relatively high speed while intersections have become optimized compared to the current situation (nonsynchronized traffic lights). Frankly it's very possible that those extra lanes will never become needed.

Pisses me off...

And it's all because of a stupid long-term growth projection.

Some articles I was reading over the weekend. So much progress being made! These are exciting times.

Carbon capture related:
New, largest in the US carbon capture project to go ahead. This one has some interesting new twists. The carbon is being captured from an ammonia plant, which in part at least is being used to make ethanol. The CCS aspect of this will lower the carbon footprint of the ethanol enough to work with California standards.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/large...130400612.html

Germany Revives Underground Carbon Capture Plan in Sign of Climate Struggle
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...imate-struggle

This is small but it’s yet another idea. The more different ways we can use captured CO2 the better. It all adds up.
Chemical Plant in India is Turning Its Carbon Emissions Into Baking Soda
https://weather.com/science/environm...to-baking-soda

SMR related:
Saskatchewan giving early consideration for small nuclear reactors
https://globalnews.ca/news/5286649/s...lear-reactors/
Comment: They don’t seem to understand the technology very well but the good thing is they’re starting to look into it. Sask would be a good fit for both the small and micro reactors, the latter of which would be used mainly up north.

Small nuclear reactors could make Alberta's oilsands cleaner, industry experts suggest
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...ands-1.5142864
Comment: Unfortunately this article is all too typical of today’s CBC. Terrible fact checking. The smallest reactors will fit into a shipping container, not a school gym. And lots of spin and false comparisons, the fake news element here is high. Today's CBC is not your grandparents’ CBC. But they do seem to be the only ones reporting this as of now.

Relatively unexplored ideas with relatively big potential:
Sucking methane from the air might deliver a bigger bang for the buck than just removing carbon dioxide.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6...limate-change/

Refilling the Carbon Sink: Biochar’s Potential and Pitfalls
https://e360.yale.edu/features/refil...l_and_pitfalls
https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0111112854.htm

Just listened to an interview with the City of Medicine Hat official in charge of the project. It was always considered an experiment to evaluate viability of concentrated solar at high latitudes. The conclusion is that the technology only works for a few months in the summer, even in one of Canada's sunniest locations. The analysis states that gas would need to be $22 per GJ for concentrated solar to be considered an alternative. That would require a 1,000% carbon tax

We're just too far north for large scale solar power plants. Wind is much more effective--Ontario makes good use of wind backed up by hydroelectric and gas.

There are approximately 150 Small Modular Reactor designs world wide.
For Saskatchewan to be a leader in this technology, the province will have to work more closely with America and The UK, the countries that seem to have to the most concrete plans for getting this technology viable.

Even though Saskatchewan being a world leader in Uranium mining, the province would undoubtedly have to import a new nuclear fuel source.
Russia currently has one of the only consumer market SMRs in use in the world, but will soon to be decommissioned this year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor

SaskPower's research into Carbon Capture has been expensive but second generation technology being developed, though less expensive, could mean more retrofitting of The Shand Power plant near Estevan, Sask.

SaskPower continues with lowering emissions with National Gas power generation such as Chinook Power Station being built near Swift Current, Sask.

Saskatchewan plans to have 20% of provincial power production by it's wind farms 1000+ turbines within 10 years.

https://www.saskwind.ca/our-vision

Ontario is mostly nuclear (currently about 10k MW). Wind is 3%.

Wind varies dramatically. At times it surges to as much as 15% of demand, other times it drops to nearly nothing. Dam output from reservoirs and gas plants adjust for this--when wind output is very high gas plants turn off and dams dial down to fill their reservoirs. When wind drops the reservoirs are drawn down and the gas plants spun up again. The province has a complex system of hourly demand and weather forecasting it uses to make these decisions allowing it to optimize output.

Wind allows OPG to get more out of its hydroelectric plants by providing more times for the reservoirs to recharge. It also reduces the provinces carbon footprint by allowing gas plants to be turned off at times.

In 2018, wind provided 7% of the province's total power. (10.7 TWh out of 147.6 TWh). By contrast natural gas was less, at 6% (9.6 TWh).

This is HUGE, and by huge I mean it’s a major milestone and not a finish line reached. The sooner we get facilities like this built the sooner we can refine them and bring the costs down. About 10 years ago when David Keith was still at the University of Calgary and working on this with his research group he did a detailed breakdown of this process from a cost perspective looking at all the best and worst case scenarios. With all the best case scenarios he calculated that he could remove CO2 for $20/tonne. This is in line with what the other major players in this area have said as well. Global Thermostat has said they could potentially do it for a s little as $15/tonne. Of course it’s unlikely that all the best case scenarios will line up, but it’s also possible that a technological improvement or currently unforeseen refinement of the process could bring down the cost. Right now Carbon Engineering is at about $100/tonne, with already makes it practical for large scale projects like this:


“Two companies together have set their sights on Texas oil country for building the world's largest facility for sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, a project that would use the trapped CO2 for boosting oil production.

Driving the news: Carbon Engineering and Occidental Petroleum said Tuesday they're going ahead with engineering and design for a plant in the booming Permian Basin of Texas.
Why it matters: A major UN-led scientific report last year concluded that pathways for holding global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius all require atmospheric carbon removal in addition to steep emissions cuts.
• Canada-based Carbon Engineering — whose investors include Bill Gates, the venture arms of Occidental and Chevron, and private equity backers — hopes to commercialize a direct air capture (DAC) technology.
• Occidental, which specializes in using CO2 injections to boost production from oil wells, can use that trapped CO2.
Where it stands: They're weighing plans for an initial plant that would capture around 500 kilotonnes of CO2 annually, and then scale up with additional facilities around twice that size.
• If the project moves forward, construction of the first plant would likely begin in 2021.
• One thing helping to make the project possible are expanded tax credits for carbon-trapping projects signed into law last year.
The big picture: If this project indeed moves ahead, it'll be an important move. "This project shows that this technology isn’t 10 or 20 years away," said Erin Burns of Carbon180, a nonprofit that advocates for negative emissions tech.
• "The first few projects like this are important not just because of the carbon dioxide they’ll pull out of the air, but because they’ll help pave the way for next tens and hundreds of these plants," she said.
The intrigue: Carbon Engineering CEO Steve Oldham told me the plant would cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
• He said Carbon Engineering is looking at multiple funding options, including existing investors and other parties. “We have some interested third parties who like the look of the business model,” he added.
• Carbon Engineering had closed a $68 million financing round earlier this year.
But, but, but: There's a tradeoff in using CO2 for producing oil that's later burned in engines.
• But Oldham said that the crude produced using the captured CO2 would pencil out to be carbon-neutral or even negative.
• And, he added, it's a big step toward helping DAC become a tool in fighting global warming.
• “This is proving the technology to achieve what the [UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] says is utterly necessary,” he said.”
https://www.axios.com/new-project-su...96a24ba40.html

I'm skeptical of carbon removal tech simply due to basic thermodynamics but sure, lets research it. Might go somewhere.

Exactly, and this is why this is so big, imo. They operated a tiny unit at the UofC for some years, and for the past year or two they've been operating a much bigger but still small unit at their facility in Squamish BC, and now this is the next step. This would basically be a full sized unit. If this is successful then I think they will officially be going somewhere. 20 years ago very few people would have predicted that solar would be where it is today. Keep in mind that we are only 4 years into the 85 year project laid out in the Paris agreement in 2015. I hate saying that technology is going to solve the problem, because technology is not going to do it on it's own. We can't just sit back and let "technology" solve the problem, iow. It's takes very smart people and a lot of hard work, but with very smart people and a lot of hard work much is possible using technology.

Some good news adn some bad news. I’ll start with the bad, another CBC fearmongering/fake news bit on climate change, this time trying to exploit the High Level Alberta fire.
https://podcast-a.akamaihd.net/mp3/p...G-20190523.mp3

During the first half they interview residents, but the host refers to fires like this being the “new normal”. She provides no explanation but I think she’s trying to suggest that climate change is a major factor in this fire, which is known not to be true. In the second part she talks to an “expert”, a guy from Queens, who continues the story. He says that forest fires are getting “bigger, hotter, and more frequent,” and in the short term this is true, but there is a known cause and it’s not climate change. He then goes on to say that climate change IS a significant part of the issue here and that High Level is 1.7 degrees warmer than it was 80 years ago (referring back to Kenney’s comment), and with every degree there is a 12% increase in lightning, extended drought, and a longer fire season.

So let’s check his claims. They referred to the Slave Lake and Fort McMurray fires as part of this pattern so I’ll include them as well. I found a useful link which summarizes weather changes in Alberta since 1950:
http://albertaclimaterecords.com/#

- It’s true the High Level area has had an increase in average temperature of about 1.7 degrees in that time, but if you look closer most of that has been in the winter, while the summers have been essentially the same.
-If you check the precipitation tab in the link you will see that there has been an increase since 1950 around SL and HL, and a slight drop around FM but only in winter. So no drought. In fact these areas tend to be wetter.
- All three fires have been in May, so the there was no impact of an “extended fire season”. This is a known high risk time of the year for fires, btw. There is a high risk period after the snow melts but before the forest “greens up”, before the new grasses sprout up, and the new leaves come out, and the sap starts flowing in the trees again. This is a very dry window that every year is high risk for fire.
- But for there to be a fire there has to be a point of ignition. I don’t recall hearing a reference to increased lightning with increased temperature before, but both the SL and FM fires were started by man. The SL fire has been called arson, and the FM fire has been identified as being started by man, leaving open the possibility that it was an accident. I don’t think we know yet what started the High Level fire.

So the only thing this guy said that was true was that the area has warmed by 1.7 degrees, but he left out the fact that almost all of this has happened in the winter. If I’m being charitable to this “expert” I would say that he has no idea what he’s talking about. There are many academics in this area and throughout AB, SK and MB who understand these forests very well, so I guess it’s not surprising that the CBC had to go as far away as Queens to find someone clueless enough to say the things they wanted him to say. Some may remember that the CBC did this in its coverage of the Calgary Stampede some years back as well, going to someone from the Vancouver Humane Society for comments on rodeos.

Another very important part of this is that the fires have become very big and destructive, but there is a known cause for this and it’s not climate change. It relates to the forestry practices over the last century, and the same thing is happening in the US as well. In short fire is a natural and necessary part of the regeneration of these forests but about a century ago in both the US and Canada we decided that we should try to fight and put out forest fires. The result has been that instead of having much smaller but much more frequent fires that clear out the old, dead, growth in the forest floor, we have put these fires out and now have a huge accumulation of dead material on the forest floor, in many places over half a century worth, and these places are now essentially HUGE bonfires just waiting to go off. These huge fires burn much differently. The fire races to the crown much quicker, and from there is spreads much quicker. They are much hotter and can burn green forests much more easily. PBS did a piece called Inside the Megafire on these fires. The critical bit starts at about 30 min and runs to about 40 min, but the part from 20 min to 30 min adds a lot as well.
https://www.pbs.org/video/inside-the-megafire-uzvhug/

But as an example of how wide spread today’s climate change hysteria is, even this piece isn’t free from it. After about the 40 min mark, after they have explained why there are so many more fires today and why they’re so much bigger, even they start into the same baseless fearmongering. “There’s no fire season anymore. There’s a fire year, year after year.” Well, no. They’ve just finished explaining why and how these fires are caused by a century of build up of dead material on the forest floor, and they’ve just showed visually an area that had been cleared out and then subjected to a prescribed burn, and they showed it 16 years after the burn and showed that that it’s still wide open without a great deal of buildup on the forest floor, and then they say this?? No, there could not be a major fire there “year after year”, as they have just shown! If you did nothing and let the material build up for another 100 years you could have another one then, but the lessons learned here are that if you manage the forest properly and do a prescribed burn every few decades or so you will never have another megafire again. This is, however, a good example of the bizarre and counterfactual hysteria around the climate change issue these days.

The good news will be in the next post.:)

I'm happy to see we can be in agreement once in a while, Allan. That's the "good news" from your "bad news" post. :)

On the SMR front, Moltex is back in the news. This is the company that is partnering with NB Power to develop a SMR project in NB. There’s nothing very new to me here, but their claims have gotten bigger, as I recall anyway. They’re probably too big, in fact, but just for fun let’s get them on record in this thread and see how things pan out.

https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/bu...-waste-313709/
“Moltex believes its technology has the capacity to solve the climate change crisis on its own. In time, says Moltex, it could deliver affordable electricity with no carbon emissions while reducing the world’s stock on nuclear waste.
“The opportunity here is so big,” said Moltex CEO North America Rory O’Sullivan in an interview. “The GDP increase for the host nation would be $1.5 trillion and it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. That opportunity is too big just for Canada.”
Moltex is one of a handful of companies around the world that is working on technology that would convert the waste from nuclear plants into electricity — another is Bellevue, Wash.-based TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates.
Some environmentalists believe nuclear power is key in battling climate change because it produces energy on-demand, whereas renewables like solar or wind are sporadic. This new technology would mitigate the downside of nuclear power by consuming nuclear waste.”

Here are a couple of links on the technology from their site.
https://www.moltexenergy.com/ourbreakthrough/
https://www.moltexenergy.com/stablesaltreactors/

"In a Molten Salt Reactor, the gases are not produced and the reaction takes place at atmospheric pressure, so explosive release of radioactive products is not possible. Also the reaction slows down as the temperature rises, and so the system is self-damping. The net effect is to simplify the engineering massively and thereby to significantly reduce the size and cost of the reactor. The SSR will be one eighth of the cost of a current nuclear reactor of the same output and cheaper even than coal or gas."

More big news on the carbon capture front, and from a Canadian project too:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ilestone-early
“A Royal Dutch Shell Plc-operated carbon capture and storage project in Canada has hit a milestone of sequestering 4 million tons of carbon dioxide about six months ahead of schedule and at a lower cost than estimated, helped by better-than-expected reliability.
The Quest facility, which sequesters emissions from the Scotford Upgrader near Edmonton, Alberta, started up in November 2015 and has since run ahead of its target of capturing 1 million tons of carbon a year, said Anne Halladay, a geophysicist who has been an adviser on the project since it was in construction in 2014. That performance has been driven by less unplanned maintenance than projected and more efficient performance, including less chemical usage, she said.
While Shell's carbon storage project has been a success, Halladay sees more of a future for projects that use the sequestered carbon for industrial purposes such as fertilizer, pharmaceuticals and enhanced oil recovery. Halladay said large projects like Quest tend to need large amounts of capital and more regulatory incentives to get built. The Quest facility cost about C$1.35 billion ($1 billion) to build and received C$865 million from the Canadian and Alberta governments.”

https://www.jwnenergy.com/article/20...trending-down/
“”I think what we’ve been able to demonstrate over the past four years is that our costs are coming down. Initially in the project phase 5-10 years ago we thought it was going to cost us about $120/tonne to build and operate this facility. Now we’re finding that costs are more around $80/tonne, so that’s super significant,” she said.
“If we did this again, we think we could even get that lower to $60/tonne.”
That’s also an estimate of the cost to replicate the Quest CCS facility and not for a carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) project that involves a commercial use for the carbon dioxide - something like the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line.
The $900-million ACTL project is currently under construction and expected to start operating in 2020.
When completed, it will be the world’s largest CO2 pipeline. The 240-kilometre pipeline will collect captured CO2 from a fertilizer plant and the new Sturgeon Refinery near Edmonton, and pipe it to mature conventional oilfields near Clive, Alberta.
It is estimated that the CO2 from the pipeline will allow producers to wring an additional one billion barrels of light oil out of mature, largely depleted reservoirs.
ACTL is also expected to sequester up to 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 per year.”


$60/tonne is a very impressive number. It’s easy to see that even with a small carbon tax rebated to teh operator, say $30/tonne, it’s very realistic to think that there could be commercial uses for CO2 for the remaining $30/tonne plus a profit margin. And remember that we’re only 4 years into the 85 year project laid out in the 2015 Paris agreement, and already this is where the technology is at. There is still a lot of work to be done, however. There is a huge amount of carbon to be captured and it will be necessary to develop industries that use it and roll them out on a large scale over the next few decades. With CO2 this cheap lots of possibilities exist, but lots of work is still needed to turn them into realities.

So what you’re saying is that an $80 carbon tax would be just the thing to get carbon capture going.