Canada is warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world – and that warming is “effectively irreversible,” a new scientific report from Environment and Climate Change Canada says.
Warming is happening even faster in winter, leaving southern Canadians with more winter rainfall and northern Canadians with melting permafrost and less sea ice.
The Arctic is hit the hardest, with estimates that it is warming three times as fast as the rest of the world, leaving the risk that by the middle of this century most marine regions in the Canadian North will be ice-free for at least a month at a time.
More than 40 scientists worked on the report and say if nothing is done to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions building in the atmosphere, Canadians will end up with 10 times as many deadly heat waves and twice as many extreme rainstorms.
Canada’s Changing Climate Report, the first Canadian-specific modelling of climate change, is coming the same week the federal Liberals roll out the signature piece of their climate-change plan: the carbon tax.
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says the era of polluting for free in Canada is over, decrying carbon-tax critics as climate-change deniers and skeptics.
