Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
A piece of Canadian radar technology will play a key role in a satellite mission scheduled to launch Friday that aims to study almost all of the Earth’s water surfaces and provide data that will be a boon for Canadian researchers. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is led by NASA and France’s space agency –Centre national d’etudes spatiale– with contributions from the Canadian and United Kingdom space agencies.
Here’s your weekly update with what you need to know about the global and ecological crises and the steps leaders in B.C. and around the world are taking for the week of Nov. 14 to Nov. 20, 2022. COP27 goes into overtime as Canada continues to face criticism on oil and gas stance, UN climate talks poised for deal creating disaster fund, Indigenous people an ‘afterthought’ as world leaders gather to confront climate change, As climate change progresses, trees in cities struggle The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned for a decade that wildfires, drought, severe weather, such as B.C.’s deadly heat dome last June, and flooding would become more frequent and more intense because of the climate crisis.
Canadian lakes are in hot water over climate change, a new research survey has concluded. "Canadian lakes are warming twice as fast as the rest of the lakes globally," said York University biologist Sapna Sharma, a co-author of a paper published in the journal Bioscience. Sharma and her colleagues pored over 143 studies from around the world to try to summarize how climate change is affecting the globe's 100 million lakes. Lakes that have been ice-covered at least part of the year are experiencing the biggest changes, they found.
It’s sheer coincidence last summer’s severe Prairie drought and climate change-related disasters in B.C. immediately preceded a major review of Calgary’s water management policies, says the person leading it. But those realities only make the assessment of the city’s drought management practices more urgent and will colour its conduct, said Harpreet Sandhu, the city’s watershed strategy leader.
Lakes in the Northern Hemisphere have been warming six times faster since 1992 than they were at any other time period in the past 100 years, a Canadian study suggests. The study, entitled “Loss of Ice Cover, Shifting Phenology and More Extreme Events in Northern Hemisphere Lakes,” was published in the October issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences and led by York University in Ontario.
The researchers found that from 1980 to 2017, oxygen levels fell by about five per cent near the surface and 19 per cent in deep waters, they reported in the journal Nature last week. The decline in oxygen levels in lakes is 2.75 to 9.3 times higher than the decline in oxygen in the world's oceans, which has also raised concern among scientists about the health of aquatic life. The fact that water can't hold as much oxygen at warmer temperatures is a main factor in decreasing oxygen levels in both lakes and oceans. When the surface waters warm, they also mix less with deeper waters, disrupting the downward flow of oxygen.
