Climate of Change
When David Wayne, manager of Stanley Park’s Brockton Oval, turned out the lights and slipped into bed beside his wife on the evening of December 14, nothing could have prepared him for the fury that would awaken them in the inky darkness of the following morning.
At 1 a.m. there wasn’t a puff of wind to rustle the leaves on the centuries-old maple outside. But while the Waynes slept, the first gusts of a ferocious storm front gathering over the Pacific began buffeting the Lower Mainland. The big old maple grew restless; the forest came to life. Wayne stirred in his bed. When the gusts grew in intensity, he glanced at his bedside clock.
“Things started to get crazy at 2:30 a.m. I went outside and I could literally hear trees screaming and snapping in the forest around us,” Wayne explains on a foggy January morning outside the 90-year-old stone and timber house. “We’ve experienced a lot of windstorms before, but never one like this. It would go from being completely quiet to wild gusts and then back to quiet again, like you had suddenly walked into a giant fan.”
At 3:30 a.m. Wayne started pacing. He woke his wife Normande and 19-year-old son Jared and moved them to the other side of the house away from the copse of old conifers now swaying dangerously. Wind speeds in Stanley Park quickly approached 120 kilometres an hour, and on Race Rocks near Victoria the weather vane recorded staggering velocities of up to 157 kilometres an hour.
Just before 4 a.m., the Waynes’ dog and two cats started circling presciently. Suddenly there was a deafening crack, the sound of a 30-metre-tall cedar’s thick trunk finally succumbing to the relentless force of the wind. A fraction of a second later, before the Waynes could react, the tree came crashing down on the peak of the roof.
Miraculously, not a single rafter was broken. Not even a cedar shingle was cracked.
It’s been called the “miracle in Stanley Park,” as much a testament to building standards of a bygone era as to sheer luck. Chance had placed the Waynes at the fierce heart of a storm that laid waste to Stanley Park and large parts of the Lower Mainland in just hours, and chance had spared them.
“I guess I’ve had my 15 minutes of fame,” Wayne says, chuckling at the media frenzy that bubbled up after his gripping story was made public.
No question: Canadians love to talk weather. However, the sheer concentration of extreme events that ripped through B.C. last November and December had ominous undertones. The events also sparked a tidal wave of public and political debate over global warming and climate change – a wave whose impact on local businesses remains a question mark.
It started with some severe weather events that began with chart-topping rainfalls. On the fifth and sixth of November, a Pineapple Express left over from Typhoon Cimaron drenched us in 15-millimetre-an-hour rain. On November 15, 150 millimetres of rain fell in 15 hours in some parts of the southern coast. Vancouver tied its all-time precipitation record for November, with 350.8 millimetres of water. Two hundred thousand people in eight communities were left without power. Most Lower Mainland rivers were flowing at levels that are only seen an average of once a decade. On November 26, Abbottsford broke its one-day snowfall record with more than 44 centimetres.
Then, in December, not one but three consecutive storms, each of them one day apart, battered the south coast. The third, and most devastating, culminated in David Wayne’s 15 minutes of fame and left Hydro crews scrambling to restore power to 250,000 customers while insurance adjusters tallied up an estimated $100 million in property damage. These three powerful storms touched land in almost the exact same locations, something Environment Canada’s senior climatologist David Phillips says is unprecedented for as long as weather records have been kept on the coast.
The wild fall of 2006 might soon have been filed in the memory scrap heap if it weren’t for something else afoot. As legions of climate-change believers and skeptics alike drove their gas-guzzlers down to the theatres to see Al Gore’s slick Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, a paradigm shift was well underway. With pine beetles gorging on Interior forests, glaciers melting, ocean temperatures rising and sending salmon northward in search of colder climes, and polar bears marooned on shrinking arctic ice floes, people were already alarmed. When the climate-change debate converged with the extreme weather of 2006, it formed a perfect storm of consciousness-raising that seemed to solidify the notion among the public that global warming has largely human causes.
Today, you can’t crack open the Vancouver Sun or Globe and Mail without finding at least a few front-page stories devoted to climate change. Companies are hastily coming out with public policy statements on climate change and carbon-dioxide reductions. And if you’re a conservative politician who’s not a born-again environmentalist, your stock is tubing. Stephen Harper – who deep-sixed Canada’s Kyoto commitments ratified by former PM Jean Chrétien in 2002, pulled funding from the One-Tonne Challenge program and barely mentioned the environment during the January 2006 election campaign – is now trying to recast himself as a green environmental champion. And in an astonishing about-face, the Gordon Campbell Liberals, who not long ago were helping condemn the moribund Kyoto protocol, came out swinging like superheroes against climate change in the February 13 throne speech. (Campbell did it with the First Nations file, why not try it with global warming?)
“The science is clear. It leaves no room for procrastination. Global warming is real,” proclaimed Lieutenant Governor Iona Campagnolo.
It was an obvious nod to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report, the so-called Fourth Assessment, which declared that the debate around the science of climate change is over and the time for action is now. (The report has its critics, many who argue that yes, the globe may be warming, but human activity is not the cause.)
When it comes to climate-change rhetoric, at least, Campbell is a Canadian pioneer. The recent throne speech reads like a breathtaking shopping list of climate-change-fighting goals. It boasts a 33-per-cent reduction in current levels of greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020, going further than California’s tough new legislation passed last August that aims to cut emissions by 25 per cent. By 2009, new automobile tailpipe standards will be in place, aimed at reducing emissions 30 per cent by 2016. Landfills will be required to capture methane gas. Consumers will be offered tax incentives to buy hybrid cars and install energy-efficient windows in their houses. And B.C. will have the first carbon-neutral government by 2010, thanks to measures that include making all new government vehicles hybrids.
However, throne speeches are just that – speeches. The fact that our total emissions have soared by almost 30 per cent between 1990 and 2004 can’t be anything but sobering for our ambitious premier.
So on 2007 budget day, the Tuesday following the throne speech, details about the government’s climate-change plan were scant. Those that did exist were buried deep within the weighty document, lending credence to the skeptics’ claim that government was simply engaged in pragmatic vote-grabbing. To them, it seemed the procrastination had already begun. Others, who see drastic action on climate change as potentially damaging to the economy, were relieved that Victoria was taking it slow and methodical.
Then on February 27, more details about the long-awaited energy plan emerged, including a goal to make the province self-sufficient in electricity by 2016, creating a new building code by 2010 that incorporates energy-saving design, eliminating gas flaring in the energy industry by 2016, establishing a green levy on utility bills to raise $25 million annually and educating consumers to cut energy consumption at home. (Thanks to our rich endowment of hydro power, B.C. residents pay some of the nation’s lowest utility rates, so teaching energy conservation could be an upstream struggle.)
When it comes to reaction from inside B.C. business circles, what’s the verdict? Jock Finlayson, executive VP with the Business Council of B.C., says business was blindsided by the sudden tough talk on climate change. “2020 is a hugely ambitious target. Let’s be honest here: our emissions are going up as we speak. It will require a lot of homework on behalf of the government to find low-cost options to reduce emissions.”
“There is little doubt that it was hastily cobbled together,” adds Shane Gunster, an SFU assistant professor who studies political communications. “The budget, for instance, had virtually no real expenditures set aside for meeting the targets identified in the throne speech. The contrast between the lofty rhetoric in the first document and the almost complete lack of hard numbers in the second suggests that the environmental themes were largely thrown together at the last minute.”
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