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<div style="direction: ltr;font-family: Tahoma;color: #000000;font-size: 10pt;">This is about the best I've seen about the Alberta floods. Well worth a read. Maybe the good citizens of Calgary could take out a class action suit against John Baird for having
wrecked the Kyoto agreement and Stephen Harper for his government's inaction on climate change.
<div>- Greg<br>
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<h1 class="title" style="font-size:1.33em; font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; line-height:1.25em">
Calgary’s Manhattan moment </h1>
<div><a href="http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/06/24/calgarys_manhattan_moment.html" target="_blank">http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/06/24/calgarys_manhattan_moment.html</a></div>
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<div><i style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">This article originally appeared on </i><a href="http://thetyee.ca/" style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify; text-decoration:none; color:rgb(32,0,127)" target="_blank">The
Tyee</a><i style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">.</i></div>
<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p><i>"The frequency with which Canada experiences events such as heavy rainfall of a given intensity (known as the return period), is projected to increase such that an event that occurred on average once every 50 years will be likely to occur about once every
35 years by 2050." -- Telling the Weather Story, Insurance Bureau of Canada, 2012</i></p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>My city, a vibrant place that often transcends the province’s narcissistic oil culture, has had a Manhattan moment.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>We thought we were big and powerful and beyond humbling just like New York. But as every true cowboy knows, Mother Nature invariably has the last word.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>And so Calgarians are now living a chronicle foretold by climate scientists.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Many once worked at federal agencies that the nation’s federal government ruthlessly axed in an ideological assault on science and reason.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>My friends and neighbours have also experienced another extreme weather event that Insurance Bureau of Canada reported a year ago, "will likely result in continued flood risk throughout Alberta."</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Alberta, always a geography of maximum weather, is now climate change central in Canada due to exponential growth in human communities and all in the path of increasing floods, droughts, fires and hail storms.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Only a decade ago bad weather was racking up $100 million worth of damages every year. Today unpredictable events create half a billion dollars in disasters almost every year.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Yet most Albertans still can't believe the scale of the multi-billion-dollar disaster that has dampened Calgary and environs – affluence tends to dull the senses.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Tragedy, too, breeds its own strange brew of incongruities.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>In Calgary a citizen can still down a cappuccino on 17th Ave. while watching fire trucks laden with yellow Zodiacs race to flooded homes just blocks away.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>So here's what happened in the semi-arid Bow River basin (four per cent of Alberta) – an occurrence largely predicted by climate scientists and water experts: an "extreme" weather event fell upon us like some Texas belly washer, and left tens of thousands
homeless. Damage will total in the billions.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>The speed and scale of the event "stunned" Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a climate change skeptic, and it mortified Premier Alison Redford, whose deficit-plagued government hasn't budgeted for disasters, let alone the future. (One 2011 report described
Alberta's reticence on the issue this way: "Leadership on climate change adaptation from senior levels in all departments is weak.")</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>The Great Flood, which punched a giant hole in the TransCanada Highway in Canmore, swelled rivers and undermined infrastructure built for, well, a more stable and reliable climate. The flood also exposed some market-driven deceptions about geography and
basic hydrology.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>It seems that flood plains will fill with water in oil-rich Alberta, a truth most might find evident but one the province's one-party government has tried to conceal from the public for years.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>A 2006 Provincial Flood Mitigation Report even recommended that the province forbid the selling of flood plains to developers. But the one-party state deep-sixed the report for five years and did not make it public until 2012.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>The freak storm washed away landmarks, towns, homes, memories, roads, pipelines, wells and bridges. It broke precipitation and stream flow records.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>First came scattered rainfall, which saturated the ground in the foothills. Then the skies greyed like a man sick with cancer. The air, redolent of water, hung with a heavy menace.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>When the skies opened they delivered buckets of rain that seemed oddly tropical in their intensity.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Along the foothills 80 to 340 millimetres of water fell in a 24-hour period. Calgary alone broke a record and received 45 mm in a day.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Alberta's sprawling cities suddenly rediscovered that mountain water moves downhill as fast as torrents ripped through Canmore and Bragg Creek first.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>And then the Bow and Elbow rivers swelled, spilling their banks with three times more water than the so-called landmark flood of 2005. (Climate change seems to be all about scoring Olympic records in global weather.)</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Many citizens including myself gathered at an off-leash dog park above the Elbow River to gawk and stare at rising waters on Friday morning in Calgary.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>It was a remarkable day because the force and volume of water in the city's rivers brought much of Calgary's oil economy to a standstill.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Due to road closures and flooding, curious cyclists took to the streets in record numbers too.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Save for the odd reconnaissance helicopter and emergency vehicle sirens, the city seemingly lost its vehicular bustle and grew quiet. The sound of flowing water became, for a day at least, Calgary's loudest radio station.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>The suspension bridge by Sandy Beach crumpled and collapsed in a muddy torrent.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>The onlookers photographed the chocolate water of the Elbow with their phones like tourists as it whooshed its way into city neighborhoods inundating thousands of homes and the Stampede grounds.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Meanwhile the Bow River took on the shape of the Mississippi and shut down the downtown core of the city. Canada's oil capital could be without power for days if not weeks.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>As I watched with a mixture of sadness and horror (the energy of Mother Nature is unlike any mechanical energy) I recalled a long list of dry climate change reports and emotionless forecasts for Alberta.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>In 2005 the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative promised warming temperatures, melting glaciers, variable rainfall, changes in stream flows, accelerated evaporation and more extreme events.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>In 2006 climate scientist Dave Sauchyn told a Banff audience that "droughts of longer duration and greater frequency, as well as unusual wet periods and flooding" would be the new forecast. Meanwhile researchers documented a 26-day shift in the onset of
spring in Alberta over the past century.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Five years later the Bow River Council concluded that "Our rapidly growing population demands much of the land and water. Our climate is changing and the future of our water supplies is uncertain."</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>In 2010 the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, an agency that the Harper government killed last year because it didn't like its messages on climate change, reported that changing precipitation patterns were "the most common gradual,
long-term risk from a changing climate identified by Canadian companies."</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>In particular oil and gas firms "with operations in Alberta expressed the highest level of concern. A number of them described potential water shortages due to decreased precipitation and runoff as the most significant risk from physical impacts of climate
change that they are likely to face."</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>In 2011 the NREE published more inconvenient truths in a document called Paying the Price. It concluded that the annual cost of flooding in Canada due to climate change could total $17 billion a year by 2050.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>It added that "economic and population growth, coupled with anticipated effects of climate change, will impact Canada's freshwater systems and create new pressures on the long-term sustainability of our water resources."</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Moreover rising temperatures will "affect precipitation patterns and evaporation rates, as well as the frequency, intensity and duration of extreme weather and climate events like droughts, heat waves and storms."</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>The redundancy of the reports is startling. A 2011 document on climate change's impact on the Bow River warned that events could be “far more severe than modern water management has previously experienced.”</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>And then came the kicker. In 2012 the Insurance Bureau of Canada produced a report by Gordon McBean, an expert on catastrophes. It bluntly warned that Alberta "will be greatly affected by drought and water scarcity under changing climate conditions, and
can expect potential increases in hail, storm and wildfire events." Spring rainfall could increase by 10 to 15 per cent in southern Alberta too.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>In addition to changing rainfall patterns, "Retreating glaciers and stream flows may create difficulty in providing potable water to Alberta's rapidly increasing population, and water scarcity may constrain Alberta's economic development."</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>And the list of warnings and chronicles foretold goes on and on like the Bow River itself.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>After Hurricane Sandy pulverized Manhattan last year, New Yorkers realized that they lived at sea level and were extremely vulnerable to climate change. They also learned that placing electrical stations and emergency equipment in basements of buildings
or at street level wasn't smart thinking.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>The city's state of emergency convinced the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, that "anyone who says there hasn't been a dramatic change in weather patterns is in denial."</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>According to a recent Nature commentary by energy analyst Chris Nedler, a Google search now turns up more than one million hits "that mention both 'Hurricane Sandy' and 'renewable energy.' "</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Calgarians, who are as hardy and distinct as New Yorkers, might react in a similar way after the Great Flood of 2013. They may even reassess their government's carbon-laden pipeline fantasies as well as the pace and scale of the tar sands.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>If nothing else the city's often arrogant elites have been reminded that the province's Chinese-style economic growth is vulnerable to extreme events. A crowded and overdeveloped province of four million is nowhere near as resilient as a province of one
million. (By some estimates the province's untamed growth could make Alberta a net water and food importer by 2050.)</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Albertans have also learned that climate change delivers two extremes: more water when you don't need it, and not enough water when you do. The geographically challenged have also become learned, once again, that water travels downhill and even inundates
flood plains.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>So climate change is not a mirage. Nor is it weird science or tomorrow's news. It is now part of the flow of daily life.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Moreover there is a steep price to pay for inaction on the destabilizing pollution emitted by our proliferating energy slaves.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>Water scientist David Schindler, who has warned repeatedly about the extreme droughts and water scarcity that climate change is bringing to the prairies, summed up the whole messy situation in an email to The Tyee and BBC.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>"Costs (from the flooding) will be in the billions, and human error is a good reason why, but for the most part it is due to underestimating and ignoring natural flow patterns, rather than the usual watershed modifications," wrote Schindler.</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>"Could the wacky weather be part of what is predicted due to climate warming? Very possibly, but of course it is impossible to say so with any certainty."</p>
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<div style="font-family:Palatino,Georgia,Times,'Times New Roman',serif; font-size:20px; line-height:28px; text-align:justify">
<p>In any case Calgary has had its Manhattan moment.</p>
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<p><a href="http://thetyee.ca/Bios/Andrew_Nikiforuk/" style="text-decoration:none; color:rgb(32,0,127)" target="_blank">Andrew Nikiforuk</a><i> is a multiple National Magazine Award-winning journalist who has been writing about the oil and gas industry for
nearly 20 years.</i></p>
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<div>Lauren Eric Swenarchuk, Ph.D.<br>
Apt 914, 580 Christie Street<br>
Toronto. Ontario M6G 3E3<br>
Canada<br>
Ph: 416-658-7747<br>
email: <a href="mailto:l.swenarchuk@utoronto.ca" target="_blank">l.swenarchuk@utoronto.ca</a><br>
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