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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
All eyes are on Los Angeles this week, as severe fire conditions are forecast for the coming days. Already 24 people have died. Canada is sending firefighters and other resources to California to assist in the fight against the flames.
“The seasons for all these extreme events are expanding,” climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe told The Globe. Fires don’t usually blaze at this time of year but unusually strong winds and drier than usual environments are adding to the spread.
Today, we are writing more about how a warming planet could make disasters such as this more common.
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Outdoor skating: ‘Ice Angel’ of Caledon finds his homemade rink is sunk by climate change and bureaucracy
- Insurance: Canada-based Fairfax among worst insurers in world for climate action, advocacy group says
- Winging it: Lovers of the embattled monarch butterfly mark the discovery that made a legend
- Carbon capture: Canadian Natural Resources still budgeting for carbon capture project despite Trudeau resignation
- Agriculture: Robotic technology automating mushroom harvest as industry facing labour challenges
- Fishing: With Washington state moving to ban open-net fish farms, B.C. becomes an outlier on the West Coast
- E-bikes: Prominent brands struggle to adapt to an e-bike industry dominated by cheap, direct-to-consumer sales
- Nuclear power: As construction of first small modular reactor looms, prospective buyers wait for the final tally
- On the ground with The Narwhal: These are the stories of the people on the front lines in British Columbia
A deeper dive
2024 declared hottest year yet
Ivan Semeniuk is science reporter for The Globe. For this week’s deeper dive, he talks about a report that says 2024 was the hottest year ever measured.
In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report on the effects of global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
Many climate scientists saw the document as an important addition to the regular series of assessments on global climate that the IPCC puts out every five to seven years.
The Paris Climate Agreement – the international treaty that most countries are trying to adhere to in an effort to slow the rise in global warming – calls on countries to stay “well below” a warming of 2 degrees in the planet’s average global temperature and also pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees.
It’s fair to say that the wording around the two separate numbers is confusing. How much is “well below” 2 degrees, and why does 1.5 degrees matter if the target is already under 2 degrees?
The answer illustrates the tensions between what policy-makers say is possible and what scientists say is needed to prevent some of the more extreme effects of climate change. Back in 2019, when the climate had already warmed by more than 1 degree, the idea of keeping to 1.5 was looking like a very tall order. Since then, it has only grown more challenging.
The 1.5-degree special report was meant to make clear what’s at stake if governments give up and let the global temperature exceed that lower threshold. It includes an overview of the changes in extreme weather and other risks, including drought, fire and floods, and the consequences for vulnerable populations, cities, resources, food security and biodiversity.
In summary, it shows that the world at 1.5 degrees warmer is already one that is likely to be profoundly affected by climate change and one that has the potential to upend social stability.
Perhaps most sobering of all, the 2019 report suggested such a world could be arriving as early as 2030, offering little time to prepare.
However, new figures released last week by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reveal that we are already there, five or more years ahead of schedule. With this in mind it is hard not to look at the fires in Los Angeles as more evidence that we are indeed living in a different world.
By next year, it’s possible the planet may slide back below the 1.5-degree threshold, thanks to shifting currents in the Pacific Ocean. But the overall trend is clear. We have arrived where climate scientists said we shouldn’t be. The picture painted in the 2019 report has become the stuff of daily headlines.
As many have noted before. This is not the reason to stop trying to rein in globe warming, at 1.5 or at 2 degrees. Rather, it is an unambiguous reminder of what’s at stake.
- Ivan
What else you missed
- How the warming Great Lakes could herald a new era of supercharged snowstorms
- Biden administration withdraws old-growth forest plan after getting pushback from industry and GOP
- Scientists pull 1.2-million-year-old ice core from the Antarctic, as they try to learn how Earth’s climate changed over the eons
- Wild chimpanzees adapt genetically to different habitats
- A quarter of freshwater animals are threatened with extinction, new research shows
Opinion and analysis
Conor Chell: 2025 will be the year ESG accountability ramps up for businesses
Toby A.A. Heaps: Why betting on green could be the ultimate Trump trade in 2025
Jasper Lament: Endangered species need urgent help. Here’s what we can do, right now
Adnan R. Khan: Recycling won’t solve our planet-killing plastic-pollution problem
John Zada: New planes that can limit window-gazing are taking the magic out of flying
Simon Dyer and Simon Langlois-Bertrand: Let’s face it, we are going to need a leaner, cleaner oil and gas sector
Green Investing
RBC, BMO signal future of climate-finance alliance ‘in flux’ after U.S. banks depart
Two of Canada’s biggest banks have signalled that they no longer believe the Net-Zero Banking Alliance is the most effective tool to encourage climate-change efforts at major financial institutions.
Major U.S. banks have been leaving the global alliance to combat climate change ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, as backlash against environmental initiatives mounts.
BlackRock and JPMorgan are some of latest U.S. groups to leave.
- Key solar themes to track after torrid 2024 for investors
- Canadian oil stocks climb as industry absorbs news of Justin Trudeau’s resignation
The Climate Exchange
We’ve launched the next chapter of The Climate Exchange, an interactive, digital hub where The Globe answers your most pressing questions about climate change. More than 300 questions were submitted as of September. The first batch of answers tackles 30 of them. They can be found with the help of a search tool developed by The Globe that makes use of artificial intelligence to match readers’ questions with the closest answer drafted. We plan to answer a total of 75 questions.
Photo of the week
Fire engulfs a structure as the Palisades fire burns during a windstorm on the west side of Los Angeles on Jan 7.Ringo Chiu/Reuters
Guides and Explainers
- Want to learn to invest sustainably? We have a class for that: Green Investing 101 newsletter course for the climate-conscious investor. Not sure you need help? Take our quiz to challenge your knowledge.
- We’ve rounded up our reporters’ content to help you learn about what a carbon tax is, what happened at COP29 and just generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
- We have ways to make your travelling more sustainable and if you like to read, here are books to help the environmentalist in you grow, as well as a downloadable e-book of Micro Skills - Little Steps to Big Change.
Catch up on Globe Climate
- The potato farm of the future
- On thinning ice
- Armed Forces in a changing Arctic
- A site for Canada’s nuclear waste
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