Climate Change

~~Global food production is increasingly likely to be disrupted by extreme weather driven by climate change, say researchers behind a new analysis published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. And, paradoxically, the impact could be greatest in places where farming practices are the most technically advanced, including Canada.
 
The study is the first to quantify the relationship between weather-related disasters and crop yields in different parts of the globe.

Wonky weather conditions are prompting aboriginal leaders to raise concerns about the impact of climate change on winter roads, which serve as lifelines for food, fuel and other necessities in several northern communities.

Isadore Day, the Ontario regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations, said the reliability of the northern winter road network is in jeopardy in his province.

Many of Britain’s flood defences are being abandoned or maintained to minimal levels because of government cuts that could leave almost twice as many households at “significant risk” within 20 years, according to a leaked document submitted to ministers.

At the headwaters of the Bridge River in southwestern British Columbia, Bridge Glacier is breaking apart. The lake at the base of the glacier is littered with icebergs. Some are full of cracks and dirt, others pale blue and recently born. Here and there are little bits of ice that are almost gone, the colour of ice cubes in water on a summer day.

Every year, the lake is getting bigger and the glacier is getting smaller. Over the past 40 years, Bridge Glacier has retreated more than three and a half kilometres.

The Climate Summit in Paris has once again reminded us of how vulnerable we are on planet earth. However, humanity is faced with a number of deep and challenging crises: economic, social, political, over food – and, of course, over climate change, which is threatening the very existence of millions of people. These crises have many of the same root causes, going to the core of our economic system.

Andy Lee Robinson said it all-too-well — “El Nino + Climate Change = El Diablo.”

It has become a predictable pattern at the annual UN climate conferences for participants to describe the outcome in widely divergent ways. This was first apparent after the high-profile Copenhagen conference in 2009, when a four-page non-agreement was praised by diplomats, but denounced by well-known critics as a “sham,” a “farce,” and a mere face-saver. UN insiders proclaimed the divisive 2013 Warsaw climate conference a success, even though global South delegates and most civil society observers had staged an angry walk-out a day prior to its scheduled conclusion.

Last week, after a great deal of debate, the passengers aboard the Titanic voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship’s hull. Despite the torrents of self-congratulatory rhetoric currently flooding into the media from the White House and an assortment of groups on the domesticated end of the environmental movement, that’s the sum of what happened at the COP-21 conference in Paris.