The Narwhal | News on Climate Change, Environmental Issues in Canada

Government Weather Forecasters Shouldn’t Discuss Climate Change: Environment Canada

Mike De Souza — Wed, 28 May 2014 15:52:13 +0000

This post originally appeared on MikeDeSouza.com and is republished here with permission.

Weather forecasters at Environment Canada aren’t supposed to discuss climate change in public, says a Canadian government spokesman.

Environment Canada made the comments in response to e-mailed questions about its communications policy.

The department defended its policy by suggesting that Environment Canada meteorologists — among the most widely quoted group of government experts in media reports and broadcasts — weren’t qualified to answer questions about climate change.

“Environment Canada scientists speak to their area of expertise,” said spokesman Mark Johnson in an e-mail. “For example, our Weather Preparedness Meteorologists are experts in their field of severe weather and speak to this subject. Questions about climate change or long-term trends would be directed to a climatologist or other applicable authority.”

Environment Canada estimates that nearly half of all the calls it takes from journalists are related to the weather. Its meteorologists also offer a 24-hour media hotline that, unlike most government scientists, allows them to take calls directly from journalists, without seeking permission for granting an interview.

But the department’s communications protocol prevents the meteorologists from drawing links to changing climate patterns following extreme weather events such as severe flooding in southern Alberta or a massive wildfire in Northern Quebec in the summer of 2013.

Johnson said that all public servants must adhere to a government-wide communications protocol that was introduced in August 2006, a few months after Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative party was first elected to form a government. Johnson also said that Environment Canada hasn’t received any feedback about its restrictions on meteorologists or wasn’t aware about any concerns.

Meantime, the department has touted job satisfaction among its employees, by posting some of its own interviews with staff on its website.

New survey indicates scientists afraid of speaking out

In contrast, some recently released quotes from a union-sponsored survey by Environics Research show the opposite, instead demonstrating fears among scientists about speaking out.

“With meteorology we are in a somewhat unique position in that our availability to the media is relatively unrestricted,” one government employee told the survey. “We do have to be careful what we say and keep it to the weather however. I outright refuse to answer climate questions, it is an issue fraught with too many traps. Could be career limiting.”

The quote was among dozens of first-hand accounts from federal scientists who expressed frustration about what they described as political interference in research based on the ideological views of Prime Minister Harper’s government.

The quotes, released by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, include references to “Orwellian” practices and descriptions of Canada as a “Banana Republic.” The union didn’t release the names of employees in order to protect their identities.

Many Canadian scientists from universities have alleged that the Harper government is muzzling public servants who do research on air pollution, water pollution or climate change that contradicts efforts to support growth in the oil and gas industry, which can contribute to these environmental problems.

Several cases of alleged muzzling have surfaced in recent years, including an internal Environment Canada analysis that found scientists felt muzzled and had observed an 80 per cent drop in media coverage of climate change issues, due to new restrictive communications policies introduced in 2007 that required scientists to obtain management approval before giving interviews about their research. But the government has denied it was trying to suppress scientific evidence.

Some of the employees quoted in the union survey slammed the Harper government for damaging the scientific credibility of their departments, including Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Health Canada.

“I think it is unbelievable that an organization that used to be looked up to for its climate records and the like in the past is now laughed upon due to its lack of resources and quality control,” one scientist told the union.

Weather forecasters can play key role informing public

Catherine Potvin, a biologist and Canada Research Chair on Climate Change Mitigation and Tropical Forests at McGill University, said that all weather forecasters, including those in the media, could play a role in helping the public understand what’s happening with unusual weather patterns.

“I think it’s good if scientists speak about what they know about,” said Potvin in an interview, after delivering a presentation Monday at the “Genomes to Biomes” science conference in Montreal.

“I don’t necessarily agree (with) the government trying to shut down these very capable scientists from talking. It’s a loss of expertise for the general public.”

The quotes from government scientists were released in support of the union’s internal investigation into allegations of muzzling of federal scientists. Its survey found that 90 per cent of federal scientists and professionals felt they couldn’t speak freely in public about their work and that 24 per cent had been asked to exclude or alter information for non-scientific reasons.

The government, in response, has touted an OECD ranking that places Canada first among G7 countries for research and development in colleges, universities and other institutes. This ranking also showed that Canada had reduced the percentage of federal spending on government research and science in recent years, that it was below the OECD average and was proportionately spending less than half as much as the United States in terms of the size of overall economic output or GDP.

Potvin urged scientists at the Montreal conference to inform all politicians about the evidence to improve Canada’s climate change policies in the 2015 federal election.

“We have a responsibility to say (to all politicians) that they’re making a mistake by not listening to us, because all of the research and all of the evidence is pointing to that,” said Potvin, who also worked as a negotiator for Panama at international climate change negotiations. “I did my PhD on climate change in the 1980s and ever since then I’ve read all of the climate models…(and for) all of these impacts that were being predicted in 1985, we see them now.”

The union, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, has estimated that the Canadian government is cutting about $2.6 billion and nearly 5,000 jobs from science-based departments between 2013 and 2016.

“I’m probably quitting. Harper wins": scientist

Among some of the other quotes released by the union:

– A scientist with 30 years of experience in government said that federal labs used to be well-equipped and funded, but are now often being run by economists without scientific expertise, who focus on industry needs: “The mood has changed dramatically, we don’t appear to be concerned with public good. Rather we must do what industry wants us to do. In addition travel is impossible and equipment is old and labs look like some that I’ve seen in the developing world.”

– A scientist said the Conservative government is ready to silence evidence when the “facts play against their economic agenda: Two examples: the environmental damage and pollution caused by the exploitation of the tar sands and the serious impact of chemical pollution on the health of the population living in and around Sarnia.”

– A scientist who works on environmental assessments of industrial projects — specializing in waste, water, and species at risk – said his or her role as an environmental steward was silenced: “We are tasked with work that we ethically do not agree with and must support. If we do not, they simply bring in project people who are non scientists who will write what senior management wants to hear. I am over worked, disrespected, undervalued, and I hate every day of my job where I used to love coming to work.”

– A scientist said he or she has given up on giving interviews and now refers journalists to NGOs for comment because he or she feels it’s too much of a burden to go through all the steps of the approval process for granting an interview — a process that lasts several days if not more than a week.

– A research scientist said management responds negatively to “potentially significant data” and asks him or her to downplay findings, while discouraging consultation with the academic world.

– Another scientist said the government is “very subtly manipulating scientific information.” One example is that the minister wouldn’t approve a publication and instead asks questions and provokes delays until that publication is outdated: “Since the current government came into office, the words ‘climate change’ started to disappear from the titles of divisions and subdivisions of Environment Canada.”

– Several scientists said they were giving up and leaving government, including one who said: “I’m probably quitting. Harper wins.”

Image: Weathergirl goes rogue via Deep Rogue Ram

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The Here and Now of Climate Change: Storms and Sea Level Rise in Canada

Erika Thorkelson — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:24:34 +0000

In early January, Vancouver’s Mayor Gregor Robertson announced that a part of the city’s iconic seawall would be closed for major repairs following damage from winter storms over the previous month. Mayor Robertson, in no uncertain terms, attributed the unusually serious damage to rising sea levels and climate change. “Seawall damage = cost of climate change + sea level rise,” he posted to his more than 30,000 Twitter followers, along with Vancouver resident John Woakes’ startling December 17 video of violent waves crashing past the beach and demolishing a walkway.

Woakes, who has lived in the city since 1995, took the video during his morning commute to work. “I was amazed by the height of the sea,” he told DeSmog. “It was higher than I've ever seen it. There were places under water that I've never seen under water before. … I was actually cycling through seawater at one point – it was five or six inches deep and I couldn't see where I was cycling. I knew I had to get out.” “It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen on that route.”

City Councillor Andrea Reimer confirms the waves that day were the highest in recorded history – a staggering 16.4 feet. “I would say we're absolutely feeling the effects of climate change,” she says. “It's hard not to look outside and say, jeez, the weather is different.” Although Simon Fraser University professor and CRC Chair in Natural Hazard Research John Clague is reticent to call any one coastal winter storm direct evidence of climate change, he expects damage from serious storms to grow more severe in coming years. “In the future, we can expect more of this,” he says. “Sea level will rise. It's currently rising at a rate of about three millimetres per year. Of course, when you say that to most people, you put your fingers together and three millimetres isn't really that much, but that's a continuous process and over a period of decades, that does amount to a lot. Storms, tides are built on top of that higher sea level, so that any rare storm event is going to inevitably be more severe.” In February of last year, Clague and a panel of colleagues warned the B.C. government that Vancouver should expect a rise of about one metre by 2100, forever changing the shape of the coastal city and endangering several outlying communities. A report released by the government of British Columbia Forest, Land and Natural Resources Water Management Branch in October 2012 estimated the cost of adapting Vancouver and surrounding communities to rising sea levels at $9,470 million over the century. “That's for one city,” Clague says. “You think about the potential impact right across the country on both coasts, it could amount to more than $100 billion to deal with this problem in one country. In a way, Vancouver is likely to be the most impacted city because it has the highest population near sea level, but other cities—Victoria, Nanaimo, Halifax, Dartmouth—they're all having to deal with this as well.” On the other side of the country, the Halifax-based Ecology Action Centre has been carrying out community discussions on the impact of climate change on the small Cape Breton community of Chéticamp Island. Although imprecise and antiquated mapping technology have made it difficult to specifically track the coast’s change through time, project manager Veronika Brzeski says that residents of the community have ample anecdotal evidence that their town is disappearing into the ocean. “There’s a post office in Chéticamp that’s so close to the water, it’s scary,” says Brzeski. “One of the men at the community meeting said he used to play soccer behind it. There was a field there and now it’s gone.” She tracks this damage not just to rising sea levels but also to warmer winters which have reduced the amount of ice that would normally dampen the impact of waves during winter storms. To help anticipate future erosion of the coastline, which could lead to flooding in the centre of the scenic tourist destination and historic fishing town, researchers with Ecology Action Centre use a 3D map of the coast created with Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology. Brzeski points out that this is the same technology that helped the northeast coast of the United States prepare for Hurricane Sandy, the ‘superstorm’ that unequivocally linked climate change to extreme weather events. Predictive technologies, however, will help residents anticipate, not mitigate, events already in process. According to Ecology Action Centre, there are three possible ways to prepare for changes to our coasts brought on by climate change: armour, accommodate or retreat. To armour means to build up coastal defense around the shores with rock barriers, for example, that would prevent wave damage. To accommodate entails a variety of strategies, including encouraging the growth of vegetation close to the water line to prevent serious erosion. And a retreat would see the halt of residential and commercial development along coastal areas entirely. At this point, says Brzeski, inaction is simply not an option. Back on the West Coast, Clague warns that there is only so much that a city like Vancouver can take. “We can accommodate up to a metre of sea level rise,” he says. “If you get any more than that, it gets prohibitively expensive and the defensive measures you can take are probably not going to be very effective.” Then it won’t be a matter of cosmetic damage to a tourist icon like the seawall, but the complete loss of communities such as the suburban city of Richmond, which is home to about 200,000 people. “You can only raise the dykes so much to protect that low lying area,” Clague says. “Unless something changes or sea level stabilizes, ultimately down the road maybe 200 years, if we're going the way we're going, we're going to have to abandon that surface.” Both Brzeski and Clague see the greatest defense against rising sea levels in a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions that would help stabilize global temperatures. Unfortunately, says Clague, it is simply too late to prevent the damage completely. A new UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, due later this year, will give us an idea of what we can expect for the future. “There's a certain amount that's locked in, with the projected forecast warming that we have,” Clague warns. “Once carbon dioxide is in the air, it stays in the air for a long time. The question now is more how we behave globally as people toward the middle of the century. Can we begin to seriously reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which will, toward the end of this century and toward the end of the next century, reduce the sea level rise?” Image Credit: Evan Leeson, via Flickr.

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