In Vancouver, governments are promising to spend $9 million to rehabilitate historic Stanley Park devastated by a wind storm.
In Halifax, work continues to restore Point Pleasant Park after Hurricane Juan devastated it several years ago.
For Canadian scientists involved in international research and reporting on climate change, these two catastrophes are part of a pattern of extreme weather that support their arguments about global warming.
As a rich developed country, Canada is better able than most to adapt to climate change, says Paul Kovacs, executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction in London, Ont.
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“But we continue to see examples where we are overwhelmed.”
He was part of a group of Canadian scientists who presented an international report at a news conference in Ottawa April 10 that argues evidence of climate change and its negative effects is overwhelming, despite the global warming skeptics.
Polar ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising, but Kovacs offered his own Canadian examples.
The 1998 ice storm in Quebec and Ontario cost $5.4 billion and was the most expensive weather catastrophe ever in those provinces.
Hurricane Juan in Nova Scotia was the most costly hurricane ever in Canada.
Wild fires in British Columbia in recent years were the most damaging and expensive in Canadian history.
The scientists said evidence is growing that food shortages will cause famine in poor and weather-vulnerable countries, rising sea levels will inundate coastal communities and island states, and climate change will make world political and social structures susceptible to unrest and upheaval.
Kovacs said governments must take the threat seriously and move to create policies that require greenhouse gas reduction and adaptation policies to deal with the effects of changes that already are inevitable because of increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
“The climate already is changing,” he said. “It’s quite critical that adaptation is part of a package that deals with this. We have to learn how to cope.”
Gordon McBean, a geography professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, told reporters that skeptics who continue to dismiss global warming warnings are wrong.
