Raging wildfires and apocalyptic smoke. Huge algal blooms visible from space turn seafood on the Pacific Northwest toxic. California’s drought. Alberta’s drought. Alberta’s floods.

There’s no doubt: it’s hot and weird out.

According to officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) July was the hottest month ever recorded, putting 2015 well on track to beat out 2014 for the hottest year on record. Records date back to 1880.

NOAA climate scientists Jake Crouch said the new data “just affirms what we already know: that the Earth is warming.”

“The warming is accelerating and we’re seeing it this year.”

According to figures released by the NOAA, the average temperature for July was 16.6 Celsius (61.86 degrees Fahrenheit). That beats out previous record highs from 1998 by 0.08 C (0.14 F).

July also broke the record for ocean warmth. The average sea surface temperature was 0.75 C (1.35 F) above the 20th century average.

Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace Canada, said when it comes to breaking temperature records we’re just getting started.

“I think from now on out the anomaly will be when a year or a month isn’t the hottest ever. These things do go up and down but the trend is upwards so we’re going to continue breaking records until we take serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and even then the warming is going to continue for decades,” he said.

NOAA climate scientist Marshall Shepherd said he is concerned the seriousness of breaking pervious temperature records may not be hitting home with the average person. “I worry the public will grow weary of reports of new records each month,” he told the Canadian Press.

"I am more concerned about how the Earth is starting to respond to the changes and the implications for my children," he said.

Breaking temperature records “is an abstract thing,” according to Stewart.

“But when people see the drought in northern Alberta, and in northern B.C., the wildfires, flooding in other parts of the country, this is where it’s really hitting home. Those things you simply can’t ignore.”

“By choosing not to act on climate we’re making a decision to increase future suffering.”

Climate scientist Michael Mann said not only are we anticipating 2015 to be the hottest year on record, but “now we learn that we just saw the hottest single month Earth has experienced since record-keeping began.”

He said the evidence points out the absurdity of climate science deniers: “the continuing false claims by climate change deniers that global warming has somehow stopped become more ludicrous by the day.” 

Mann said despite what deniers claim, the warming carries on.

“It is time to act by reducing carbon emissions before it is too late, and we lock in ever more dangerous and potentially irreversible changes in our climate.”

Stewart said he agrees with the way President Obama’s science advisor John Holdren put it.

“He said there are three things we can do about climate change: we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that we warm less, we can adapt so when the impacts hit they don’t hurt as much, and we can suffer.”

“We are going to do all three but the policy choices we make determine how much we do of each,” Stewart said.

“The more we change our energy system to low-carbon, the less we’ll suffer

That’s the kind of choice we need to be putting in front of people. So when people see these records being broken they know there is actual suffering that goes along with that.”

Image Credit: Wildfire near Kelowna, B.C. Brian Davis via Facebook

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

U.S officials are struggling to figure out how bitumen from the Alberta oilsands will behave if there is a spill either from a pipeline or into the Salish Sea, the fragile ocean environment between Canada and the U.S.

As the U.S. debates the future of the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport Alberta oil to the Gulf Coast, and Canada looks at Kinder Morgan's proposed twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline and the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway project, there is a growing urgency to find out how diluted bitumen behaves if there is a spill, said scientists, policy makers and environmentalists gathered in Seattle for the Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference this week.

"Does it float or not float? That's the question," said Gary Shigenaka, marine biologist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hazardous materials response division, flashing a picture of thick, black bitumen extracted from the oilsands.

NOAA is studying the behaviour of bitumen and the diluent with which it is mixed to make the peanut-butter like substance flow through pipelines, but, so far, there are few concrete answers, Shigenaka said.

Studies show that although diluted bitumen — dilbit — initially floats in water, it sinks when it is mixed with sediment, which would happen in high turbulence or in areas such as a river estuary, Shigenaka said.

Fears about the behaviour of bitumen in water have been growing since the 2010 spill of about 3.2 million litres (843,000 gallons) of thick crude into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. It was the first spill of diluted bitumen from Alberta into a waterway, and agencies struggled to cope with a substance that released toxic fumes from the diluent and then sank as the bitumen mixed with river sediment.

Conventional cleanup equipment proved useless and, four years later, the cleanup continues.

"We are not very good about finding or recovering oil we can't see," Shigenaka said.

Additional problems with bitumen are the difficulty of rehabilitating oiled animals and little legislation regulating what goes into diluents, he said.

"That's a big hurdle for us."

More legislation is needed to control what is contained in diluents, speakers said.

"And we need to advocate for legislation that defines diluted bitumen as an oil, subject to oil spill regulations and crude oil taxes," said Stephanie Buffum, executive director of Friends of the San Juans.

In the U.S. Pacific Northwest, the debate is centred more on expansion of coal terminals around Puget Sound and the emerging question of transporting oil by rail, especially oil from the Bakken shale oil fields in North Dakota, which is believed to be highly flammable, said Eric de Place, policy director for the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based think tank.

But pipelines carrying dilbit are a vital issue, he said.

"There's a pipeline boom," ee Place said.

"Enbridge Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan in the south would add dramatically more oil to coastal markets than Keystone XL, but the American audience knows little about it."

The good news may be the history of environmental action in B.C., Washington and Oregon, de Place said.

"I think there's a good chance we could be the place that can say no to tar sands expansion," he said.

"In some ways it could be the most important global contribution this region can make."

Photo: Water and sediment sampling operations during the Environmental Protection Agency's Enbridge spill response near Battle Creek, Michigan. Photo courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Second Class Lauren Jorgensen via Flickr.

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The days of cheap abundant natural gas from US shale gas ‘fracking’ operations are most likely numbered, three experts testified before the Ontario Energy Board (OEB). Far better for Ontario to increase energy efficiency and look elsewhere to meet its natural gas needs.

“If (US and state) governments respond with effective regulatory and economic measures to the environmental challenges facing the shale gas industry, the cost of shale development will certainly rise, and in some cases is likely to become uneconomic,” says Lisa Sumi, one of the three experts and a environmental consultant, in a recent report The Regulation of Shale Gas Development: State of Play.

Ontario’s gas distributors Enbridge Gas and Union Gas want to expand the Greater Toronto Area’s natural gas delivery network and import natural gas from the surging shale gas industry in the US northeast (primarily the Marcellus shale and Utica shale gas reserves).

“The first step in any energy strategy should be looking for ways to conserve energy, not increase energy consumption,” Mark Calzavara, Ontario-Quebec organizer for the Council of Canadians, told DeSmog Canada.

Lisa Sumi, along with geoscientist David Hughes, and Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, professor of engineering at Cornell University warned the OEB importing US shale gas will increase Ontarians’ household heating costs in the future. And using shale gas from fracking operations will put more global warming greenhouse gases (GHG) into the planet’s atmosphere.

“The large GHG footprint of shale gas undercuts the logic of its use as a bridging fuel over coming decades, if the goal is to reduce global warming,” says Ingraffea in his report.

Fracking Has Dirtied Natural Gas’ Clean Energy Name

Hydraulic fracturing or fracking to get access to unconventional sources of natural gas like shale gas involves digging underground wells 200 to 3,000 meters vertically and another 1,000 meters or more horizontally to penetrate the rock-like shale. Pressurized water laced with toxic chemicals is shot down the well to break apart the shale and push the natural gas to the surface.

Poorly constructed or cracked fracking wells have led to fracking chemicals and methane (natural gas is mainly methane) contaminating drinking water. A study of 141 drinking water wells in northeastern Pennsylvania (home to the Marcellus shale) published last June found 82% of water samples taken within a kilometer of fracking wells contained levels of methane six times higher than samples more than a kilometer from fracking wells. 

Fracking operations also leak methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading scientific body on climate issues, methane has 84 times more global warming potential over twenty years than carbon dioxide.

“This does not justify the continued use of either oil or coal, but rather demonstrates that substituting shale gas for these other fossil fuels may not have the desired effect of mitigating climate warming,” concludes Cornell's Ingraffea.

Ingraffea was named one of TIME Magazine’s “People Who Mattered” in 2011 for his research on methane emissions from shale gas. A study published last August by the US’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) indicates fracking wells may leak anywhere between 6 – 12% of the methane they produce. A 2% methane leakage rate is already too much according to the Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

These ‘fugitive emissions’ from fracking operations remain largely unreported or under reported by the gas industry as DeSmog Canada revealed in an exposé on British Columbia’s gas industry last May.

Shale Gas is Becoming Uneconomical

“U.S. supply growth assumptions made by Enbridge and Union Gas are overly optimistic at the natural gas prices assumed,” wrote geoscientist Hughes in his critical report on the GTA project.

Hughes has spent four decades studying energy resources, and says many of the projections for the US shale gas industry are overblown.

“Four of five shale gas plays comprising 80% of shale gas production in the U.S. are in or near decline,” states Hughes.

Fracking wells tend to produce a lot of natural gas in the first three years, but then head into a steep production decline afterwards. Hard-to-access shale gas is expensive to produce and reduced supplies of shale gas will increase the price of natural gas coming from the US.

The Pushback Against Fracking

According to environmental consultant Sumi, the US is introducing regulations that are slowing the production of shale gas and making it less economic for producers. Sixty bans and one-hundred and twelve moratoriums on fracking have been introduced in New York alone, which is part of the Marcellus shale.

Public pushback against fracking in the US alone could make shale gas uneconomical. And the bans and moratoriums go beyond New York.

France and Bulgaria have banned fracking and Germany has been very hesitant to endorse the method. Quebec’s moratorium on fracking is still in place and indigenous and non-indigenous residents of New Brunswick have locked horns with their government to stop fracking exploration in their province.

Fracking has created a new type of environmental movement that has brought rural farmers and environmentally conscious urbanites together. In pro-mining countries such as South Africa and Australia the fracking industry has come up against surprisingly stiff public opposition in the Treasure the Karoo and Lock the Gate movements.

On October 19th, the second annual Global Frackdown will be held “to challenge fracking” worldwide. Last year’s Global Frackdown took place in over 200 communities in twenty countries.

Ontario may be betting on the wrong horse by locking their energy future into ‘frack gas’ imports to warm the homes of the most populous province of Canada.

Image credit: Global Frackdown, Fracking Resources, Council of Canadians

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