How healthy is natural B.C.?

A killer whale swims along the treed and rocky shore of Johnstone Strait near Robson Bight.

A killer whale swims along the treed and rocky shore of Johnstone Strait near Robson Bight.Photo by File photo by Les Bazso - The Province

Predicting the future of the planet is far from an exact science. Describing its present circumstance isn't.

But in this teeter-tottering 21st century of hesitant environmentalism, politicians, activists, industry leaders and scientists are all clamouring for their minute at the microphone, and the result to date has been a very confused public.

Two years ago, a national poll found that only 46 per cent of Canadians agreed there was scientific consensus that global warming was happening.

Last year, the same annual poll, conducted by McAllister Opinion Research, found that 58 per cent of British Columbians believe there is a lot of disagreement between scientists about whether global warming is being caused by humans. This, despite the consensus of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier that year that there is a 90 per cent chance the warming of the planet is being caused by human activities.

In another McAllister poll conducted this past March, 79 per cent of Canadians said they understood the issue of climate change fairly or very well. But only 38 per cent could correctly identify greenhouse-gas emissions, carbon dioxide, or the burning of fossil fuels, oil, gas or coal as the factors believed to cause global warming.

Perhaps all the confusion comes because the cacophony of voices struggling to convince us to either heed or shrug off some of the direst predictions is drawing our anxious eyes ever further down the road ahead, while distracting us from checking the rear-view mirror.

With that in mind, The Province asked some of Canada's top government scientists for a report card on the state of the B.C. environment.

The product is a snapshot of a province that has seen dramatic ecological shifts since the time of European settlement, making man-made contributions to climate change a tough link to miss..

1. Sea levels

Water has risen 10 cm in 100 years

We've all heard the nightmarish global warming scenarios warning coastal communities and islands could eventually drown as melting glacial ice caps merge with swelling and increasingly stormy seas.

But how much have water levels risen in B.C. already?

The answer is about 10 centimetres, according to Greg Flato, manager of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, who explained that this level of sea rise is consistent with the global average over the last 100 years.

"The sea level rise that we're seeing has been mostly due to the warming that we've seen for the last 100 years, that is, warming that is mostly due to human activities," said Flato.

However, he added, some B.C. land-lubbers have felt this rise more sharply than others due to vertical movement of land masses caused by the shifting of tectonic plates. For example, in Tofino, where the west side of Vancouver Island is gradually sinking due to subduction, that 10 cm has been magnified. Conversely, on the other side of the island, the land is being lifted up, so communities there may not have noticed much change.

Ocean levels in B.C. are monitored continuously by the Canadian Hydrographic Service, using a computerized network of 15 tidal gauges strategically placed throughout the province. Once every minute, these highly precise instruments log fresh data, offering scientists the most up-to-date picture of subtle changes in the ocean's tides, currents and water levels.

Flato said if the current rate of "business as usual," human-produced greenhouse- gas emissions continues, conservative estimates predict another 50 cm of global sea rise by the year 2100.

2. Temperature and Precipitation

Expect winters to get soggier

It doesn't take a federal researcher to tell you something's amok with the climate in B.C.

Just ask Denny Robertson, a retired logging machinery supplier who has lived in the Interior -- first in Prince George in the 1960s and then in Kamloops since the '70s -- for most of his 69 years.

"There's something happening here, and you can pooh-pooh the scientists, but when you've lived here, you get the feeling over a long time," he said in a phone interview from his cattle ranch, about 35 km east of Kamloops. "I would say there's less water coming in the creeks. They seem to run dry quicker in the summer."

Robertson also said that the springs have seemed to heat up much more quickly, sending the melting snowpack downstream at a very quick pace.

His considered observations echo the government's. Paul Whitfield, head of environmental studies at the Meteorological Service of Canada, said the trend in B.C. over the last 100 years has been toward warming -- a provincewide average rise of more than one degree Celsius to be precise -- which is felt particularly in the spring and fall.

"The start of the snow melt is happening earlier, so you get a longer period of water recession in the creeks in the summer," Whitfield said.

The statistician explained that coastal and interior regions of B.C. are consistently getting more rain in the winter instead of snow, and that this pattern is slowly moving eastward. He believes within the next 10 to 20 years the snowy winters in the east will also turn to soggy ones.

3. Greenhouse Gases

Not even Tofino can escape the smog

Estevan Point on Vancouver Island, the site of a quaint, century-old lighthouse, is about as far away from the smog-spewing pipes of industry and traffic as one can get.

It's for that exact reason that this point, about 56 km northwest of Tofino, is the sole station in B.C. where greenhouse gases are measured.

Once a week, scientists take flasks of air from the station and analyze them, checking carbon dioxide and methane levels, as well as a handful of other pollutants.

What they have found is that greenhouse gas levels in B.C.'s air measure about 385 parts per million (ppm), which is negligibly higher than the global average of 380 ppm.

"Greenhouse gases are among the longest-lived atmospheric gases, so globally they're very well mixed," explained Marjorie

Shepherd, manager of climate chemistry measurements and research at Environment Canada.

"You do see gradients latitudinally because the vegetational coverage of the globe varies by latitudinal band," she said, but explained that B.C.'s slightly higher concentration of pollution comes from winds blowing in from all over the globe, rather than a lack of vegetation to generate oxygen.

Before federal scientists started taking regular air samples, first in the Northwest Territories in the 1970s and then at Estevan Point in 1992, the most accurate record kept of greenhouse gases was frozen in time, in the earth's glaciers.

Referring to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report released last year, Shepherd said ice-core samples from glaciers show that in the pre-industrial era, about a century and a half ago, greenhouse gases in the air measured about 265 ppm.

That means that since the time humans started stoking the engines of development by burning mass quantities of fuel, carbon dioxide levels and other pollutants have risen 43 per cent worldwide.

"That level of rise is faster than has been observed before [industrialization]," said Shepherd.

Because of our planet's very efficient atmospheric mixing machine, no spot on earth -- including B.C. -- has escaped this unprecedented global rise.

4. Forests

Pine beetles are fans of warming

Despite the headline-capturing tradition of B.C. activists chaining themselves to trees, the vast majority of the province's forest trees have never been touched by saws.

Jim Snetsinger, the province's chief forester, explained that 60 per cent of the province's 60 million hectares of forests is in mint condition, which leaves 24 million hectares for him to carefully juggle between logging companies. What's more, of that 24 million hectares, only one per cent is harvested each year.

And on the whole, since pre-industrial times, just three per cent of B.C.'s forests have been bulldozed to make way for residential and agricultural lands.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean the forests are safe from the destructive effects of climate change. Rather, the warmer winters spreading throughout the province have allowed a once relatively harmless little bug called the pine beetle to explode in numbers, causing an infestation that is intensifying with each passing year.

"About 14 million hectares of B.C. forests have been killed by the pine beetle -- an area which is bigger than all the maritime provinces put together," said Allan Carroll, an insect ecologist with the Canadian Forest Service and pine beetle expert. "There's no question that this has been caused by the milder winters, warmer summers and drier springs we're seeing in this province."

Thankfully, Carroll said the epidemic is near its peak, and after another four or five years of intensification it should begin to ease. (Small comfort to our Kamloops retiree Denny Robertson, who estimates he's lost about 10 per cent of his pine trees to the voracious critter over the last few years.))

5. Endangered species, fisheries

Losses have been staggering

When the first European settlers arrived in B.C. 150 years ago, the richness of the pristine lands and oceans dazzled them.

Pods with hundreds of humpback whales could be seen from the coastlines and the fisheries swam with enough protein to jumpstart a thriving canning industry.

Sea otter pelts also made many a settler's fortune, according to Department of Fisheries and Oceans researcher Kim Hyatt, giving the early explorers an easy bid for bargaining with the Chinese.

"At the time of first contact with B.C., the European settlers encountered an aboriginal fishery that was quite diverse, and there is a fair bit of evidence that the First Nations groups had territories for fishing and exerted control over various species," said Hyatt. "They had a system of management."

But since the two greatest fishing harvest peaks in British Columbia's modern history -- the first came in the early 1900s and the second in the late 1980s -- salmon stocks have declined to about 40 per cent of what they were, and the population of resident humpbacks that once crowded the Strait of Georgia has long since collapsed due to whaling.

Meanwhile, over the last century and a half, about 25 species of plants and animals have disappeared from B.C. entirely, according to the Ministry of Environment's Conservation Data Centre. Some of them, such as the Dawson Caribou, have gone extinct entirely, while others, such as the Viceroy butterfly, have simply vanished from our province and migrated to more hospitable pastures elsewhere.

The sad statistics show that the number of species still struggling to cling to existence here is staggering. The ministry's list details 719 plants and animals that are currently either extirpated (extinct in B.C.), endangered or threatened, and another 654 that are of "special concern."

The species-at-risk database is at:

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