The mountain parks, including Banff National Park and Kananaskis Country, are not going unscathed as the climate crisis puts Canada on track to warm by at least 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
Locally, record-breaking high temperatures, low snowpacks and melting glaciers in the mountains, including Banff and Jasper national parks, are already happening at an alarming rate, and in the short-term, setting the stage for a potentially tough wildfire season ahead and probable downstream water restrictions.
Canmore’s Bob Sandford, senior government affairs liaison in global climate emergency response at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, says globally and locally “we are plunging into ever more difficult times, if not very dangerous times.”
“Nature is now providing new evidence daily of where we are going in terms of the breakdown of the global climate system,” he said during a March 26 presentation to Bow Valley Naturalists.
“Atmospheric, sea surface and land temperatures are presently off the charts in both hemispheres. What we are seeing is beyond the worst-case projections of all climate model scenarios,” he added.
“We now exist in a climate regime humanity has never experienced before and to which anything less than a well organized, aggressive and globally coherent response will be fatal to millions.”
In Canada, Sandford said the Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the global average, the high mountains are now warming as fast as the Arctic and the rest of the country is already warming faster than the rest of the globe.
In the Rocky Mountains, he said not enough snow is falling in the now warming winters and too much is melting away during longer, hotter summers to be able to sustain retreating mountain glaciers into the future.
“If you consider glacial ice as ‘water in the bank’, so to speak, our interest rate is falling and our principal is disappearing far faster than we could ever imagine,” he said.
Sandford said glacier loss in the Canadian Rockies continues to accelerate, adding projections indicate as much as 90 per cent of the glacial ice will be lost in Canada’s western mountains in the coming decades.
He said it is estimated there are presently some 18,762 glaciers still in existence in Canada’s western mountains, noting a projected 90 per cent loss would mean that 16,885 glaciers would disappear from the headwaters of western Canada’s streams and rivers.
“The direct impact on the hydrology of much of Western North America will be catastrophic,” said Sandford, who is also national co-chair for the upcoming United Nations International Year of Glacier’s Preservation in 2025.
“We can see now that even by the middle of this century, the mountain west and everything downstream of these headwaters is going to be a different place.”
But other places are going to be different, too.
What is being missed, said Sandford, is loss of glacial ice is a symptom of a much, much larger problem.
The same warming that is causing glaciers to rapidly disappear is at the same time reducing snowpack and the duration and extent of snow cover throughout the mountain west, he said.
“Snowpack and snow cover are presently declining widely,” Sandford said.
“The fundamental hydrology of the Canadian West, including the prairies, is changing right before our eyes.”
It doesn’t just stop there. Sandford pointed to the fact that almost all of the earth’s snow and ice-covered land is located in the northern hemisphere.
“What we have discovered is that 10 trillion metric tonnes of water are shifted from one hemisphere to the other in the form of a winter snow cover during only one annual seasonal cycle,” he said.
“That snow, however, does not just affect the lives of Canadians; the cold of that snow affects the climate of the entire planet.”
Sandford explained that it takes a lot of heat out of the atmosphere to melt snow, adding the melting of snow over the entire northern hemisphere each spring sucks a huge amount of heat out of the entire global climate system.
“The point I want to make here is that snow and ice are powerful climatic refrigerants that control the natural thermostat that has for millions of years regulated the climate of the entire northern hemisphere,” he said.
“In the absence of glaciers and with the decline of winter snow, the total amount of energy stored at any given time in the global climate system will increase dramatically, altering the stability of the natural climate thermostat of our continent.”
John Pomeroy, a distinguished professor who is director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Hydrology in Canmore and the Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change, said snowpacks locally in the mountains this winter are normal to slightly below normal.
For instance, he said Sunshine’s snowpack sits at about 335 mm of snow water equivalent – the depth of water that would be produced if the snow melted – compared to the normal of 550 mm, while surveys at Skoki near Lake Louise indicate 280 mm compared to the normal of 310 mm.
“Recent snowstorms are helping them catch up, but they haven’t fully caught up, and there have also been some mid-winter melts, even at higher elevations, that have reduced those snowpacks quite a bit,” said Pomeroy.
Many temperature records have been smashed in the mountains this winter, including in the Bow Valley.
Banff, which has temperature records going back to 1887, broke the March 16 record of 13.9 C set in 1947, reaching 15.3 C. The next day hit a March 17 record with 16 C, breaking the old record of 14.4 C set in 1956.
“I was up on Peyto Glacier last week and we had three days of 7 C during the day on the glacier. There was exposed ice, which was actively melting, and meltwater pools around,” Pomeroy said.
“It’s something I’ve never seen before in my life, and I’ve never heard it before in the Rockies, so it was quite shocking to see.”
Pomeroy has concerns heading into the summer.
He said last year’s snowpacks were slightly below normal, but they melted very quickly due to excessive heat.
“We had record warm temperatures in May at Banff and were about 5 C above normal, and so the snowpacks melted a month early, sometimes a little bit more, depending where they were,” he said.
“That’s still within the realm of possibility because every month since then has been another record high temperature for the globe.”
The snowpack is not the only consideration, said Pomeroy, but also water storage in the mountains, particularly given many reservoirs are at “incredibly low levels.”
“Spray Lakes reservoir’s at 20 per cent of its full capacity and about five metres below its normal levels right now. Most of the other reservoirs are in that shape,” he said.
Pomeroy said the Bow River’s flows through winter have been very low, resulting in low groundwater levels in places like Canmore.
“We see that where groundwater is expressed in places like Spring Creek or the skating pond, which have been dry all winter,” he said.
Because of the drought last year, Pomeroy said there is a water deficit that needs to fill up before the mountains generate stream flow.
“To get out of the deficit, we would need a snowpack that’s well above normal, that’s actually hundreds of millimetres higher than normal, and that’s what we don’t have this year,” he said.
“We may sneak up on normal still with a few more storms, but in general, it’s normal to below normal, so that’s why the City of Calgary is still quite worried.”
Environment Canada’s longer range precipitation forecasts indicate nothing out of the ordinary for the next couple of months; however, the so-called probabilistic and deterministic temperature forests predict above normal temperatures for the next two months.
“It looks like May warms up quite a bit more, so that’s the danger of rapid snow melt again,” Pomeroy said.
What is needed, said Pomeroy, is a slow melt with periodic rains during the traditional melting period to fill up reservoirs and generate stream flow.
“Otherwise, we’re likely to see an early peak, such as we had last year, and then very low flows by June and July and August,” he said.
“That was really problematic for downstream water supply, and not so much for Canmore or Banff, but it was for Calgary and for the irrigation districts.”
In the mountains, however, the low water flows were very problematic for fish.
“Those low water flows were also very warm and didn’t provide a good habitat for trout, in particular,” said Pomeroy.
Pomeroy said the snowpack is quite below normal levels in the valley bottoms as well, and soils are drying up.
“If we get in an early snowmelt, then that is often associated with increased wildfire risk and that was very much the case in Fort McMurray in 2016 and then the wildfires last year as well,” he said.
“We already have shallow snowpacks in the Bow Valley bottom right now, in the forest, and with warm conditions coming, then we could be at early risk of wildfire.”
When Sandford took on his new UN role last year, it was predicted that because of already rising mean global temperatures and a gradually intensifying El Niño, 2023 would bring higher mean temperatures than humans have ever experienced.
“And that is what happened. For two months last summer, we all had first-hand experience of what a 1.5 degrees C warmer world will be like,” said Sandford.
“Even the worst-case totally-off-the-wall model scenarios did not come close to predicting what we are seeing now happen until well into the next century.”
Sandford said conditions for the coming summer are ripe to likely be worse than last year, noting the heat has not let up.
“We have experienced the highest mean temperatures ever recorded in every one of the last nine months,” he said.
“It is anticipated that in the coming months, we are going to experience what it is going to be like in a 2 C warmer world. We are not going to like it.”
While ocean surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific clearly reflect El Niño, Sandford said sea surface temperatures in other parts of the globe have been persistently and unusually high for the past 10 months.
He said this warming is causing a more rapid rise in sea level and is resulting in hurricanes and storms of greater intensity widely, and in ocean acidification and the further bleaching of coral reefs which form the foundations of marine ecosystems humans rely upon as a food source.
“On the global scale, because we waited so long to act on the threat, climate heating has gotten away on us and now all scientists and governments can do is chase after it,” he said.
Canada’s Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the global average and, according to scientists, the warmest February globally in modern times was recorded this year, with Europe and Africa especially hard hit.
By later this century, Sandford said it is projected that as many as 3.5 billion people could be pushed to migrate out of their region, nation, or continent by flooding, storms, fires and/or extreme heat and humidity.
“I don’t know if it is possible to be more clear on the spectre of massive involuntary human migration than that,” he said.
People, however, will be far from alone in their suffering, Sandford said. If atmospheric heating goes unchecked, he said few species will be left unscathed.
“In general, adaptation measures can substantially reduce the adverse impacts of a 1 or 2 C rise in global temperature, but beyond that limit, losses will increase including species, extinctions, and changes, such as major biome shifts, which cannot be reversed on human timescales,” he said.
As it stands now, Sandford said roughly one per cent of land on earth is considered uninhabitable, but the projection is climate heating will increase that number to 20 per cent in the future.
Because of climate warming impacts, he said the habitable zone in the United States is already shrinking northward toward Canada. Much of south Florida, the Carolinas, the American west and southwest are projected to soon be barely habitable, he said.
When this happens, Sandford said the displaced and homeless will try to go to higher latitudes for cooler temperatures to avoid heat and wildfire, inland away from violent hurricanes and rapid coastal sea level rise, and will gravitate toward places with reliable water and food security.
One of the questions often asked of Sandford centres around where it would be possible to maintain a semblance of modern life if climate change destroys the habitability of the tropics and most of the temperate zones.
He said five areas, all islands, stood out in a recent analysis, including New Zealand and the Australian state of Tasmania scoring the highest, followed closely by Ireland, the United Kingdom and Iceland.
Although Alaska, Canada, Patagonia, and Scandinavia also scored well in carrying capacity and self-sufficiency, Sandford said they are ranked lower in isolation.
“The fact remains, however, that while there will be some places that will be impacted less than others, climate heating and its aftermath will spare no one, no matter how isolated,” he said.
The climate science consensus that became the Paris Accord agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions responsible for a changing climate by 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030.
In almost every case, Sandford said there has been no real movement towards a viable strategy, and in the meantime, total carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise not fall.
“There will be more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 2030, not 45 per cent less than there was in 2010,” Sandford said.
“All the warm assurances to the contrary, there is absolutely no way now that average global heating will be limited to 1.5 degrees C or even 2 C. We won’t even come close.”
In Sandford’s work in global climate emergency response, one of his main jobs is to put “bad news” and “reality checks” before people in the highest political circles, who often, he said, simply do not want to hear it.
Despite the gloom and doom reality, Sandford’s parting message during his presentation was one of hope and finding resiliency and power in communities and each other.
He urged everyone to wake up and act as though “our lives and our future depend upon immediate action, because they do.”
“It won’t be easy. We are at a critical moment in history,” he said.
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