COVER

CLIMATE Climate stability becomes a relic of the past in B.C.

Water-policy expert Robert Sandford says the implications are profound and far-reaching for everyone

by Charlie Smith

Here’s a phrase that most British Columbians have never heard before: hydrologic stationarity.

But to Canadian water-policy expert Robert Sandford, hydrologic stationarity is a vitally important concept that people must consider in evaluating recent extreme-weather events in B.C.

In a phone interview with the Straight from his home in Canmore, Alberta, Sandford said that if anyone wants to truly comprehend what’s going on with the climate, they really must understand water cycles.

“Hydrologic stationarity is the relative stability of the hydrologic system that we’ve relied on for the stability upon which we built our civilization,” Sandford, a senior policy adviser for the Adaptation to Climate Change Team at Simon Fraser University, said. “And we’ve lost hydrologic stationarity.”

Think about that for a moment. The basis upon which civilization has been built—relatively predictable weather cycles and rainfall patterns—can no longer be counted on, according to Sandford, who’s also a fellow of the Centre for Hydrology at the University of Saskatchewan.

That has profound ramifications for the economy, food production, and transportation systems, among other things.

Without a relatively stable water system, weird things can happen. Like hundreds of millimetres of rain falling on the Fraser Valley in a rapid-fire series of atmospheric rivers this month. Like a massive mudslide trapping and killing motorists. Like 75 B.C. Hydro power poles washing away along with large sections of Highway 8 between Merritt and Spences Bridge. Like an entire town of 7,000 people, Merritt, being evacuated due to the Coldwater River overflowing its banks. Like huge gashes being ripped into the Coquihalla Highway from rushing water that makes mincemeat of previously sacrosanct engineering standards.

According to Sandford, hundreds of engineering rules of thumb have been rendered irrelevant by the recent extreme weather. “As tragic as it is, what’s happened in British Columbia should awaken us to a really sweeping revelation,” Sandford said.

In a recently completed and unpublished paper, Sandford insisted that the truth of what just occurred in B.C. is “far more staggering than the scale of the flood damage and their impacts on people just like us that we see before our eyes on the nightly news”.

“That truth is that we have located our agriculture and built our communities and all associated infrastructure in places and to standards appropriate to what we thought was a relatively stable climate; climate conditions upon which we can no longer rely,” he wrote. “What should be deeply alarming to all is that climate we have taken for granted for so long is, right before our very eyes, being replaced by a climate that, unless we act now, we may not survive.”

He also predicted in the paper that the Coquihalla Highway “could be wiped out again and again before being fully repaired, if, in fact, that will ever be possible again”.

“The costs of rebuilding to a new standard of risk—a standard that unless we stabilize our climate will forever keep moving beyond our grasp—are incalculable,” Sandford declared.

THE RECENT biblical-scale flooding is, of course, not the only freaky climate-related event of 2021. There were also B.C. wildfires that scorched more than 860,000 hectares—an area more than 75 times the size of Vancouver’s entire expanse—and a heat dome in the last week of June that killed almost 600 British Columbians, according to chief coroner Lisa Lapointe.

Sandford linked the heat dome to changes in the jet streams brought on by a warming Arctic. He said that the north-to-south modulation of these oscillating air currents has grown dramatically at different times of the year, slowing their movement eastward.

“It literally parks, like your heat dome,” he said. “So, consequently, what you’re seeing is these big events—whether they’re snow events, cold snaps, heat waves, or flooding events—are more intense and last longer.”

Sandford has been warning of this for years in several of his books published by Rocky Mountain Books (RMB). In 2015, for example, Storm Warning: Water and Climate Security in a Changing World laid out how the planet’s atmosphere is warming at an astonishing rate, in part because of the acceleration of the global hydrological cycle.

Years before local TV weather forecasters were talking about atmospheric rivers, Sandford starkly explained in the book how these “corridors of intense winds and moist air” could wreak havoc on communities.

“It wasn’t until we ended up with really good satellite-based data that we could see the extent of what an atmospheric river was and does,” Sandford explained to the Straight. “And now we find a strong atmospheric river could be thousands of kilometres long, 500 kilometres across, and carry 10 to 15 times the amount of water that is carried in the Mississippi [River] in a given day.”

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has studied the works of two influential 19th-century thermodynamics researchers: German physicist Rudolf Clausius and French engineer Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron. Sandford pointed out that the so-called Clausius-Clapeyron equation determined that the atmosphere’s capacity to hold water increases about seven percent for every 1° C increase in temperature.

Due to rising greenhouse-gas emissions, the Earth’s average temperature has risen see next page

Earlier this month, the Highway 1 entry to Abbotsford was covered in water—and that was far from the only major road that became impassible by automobile in widespread flooding, raising questions about how often this will occur in the future. Photo by Richard Stawn/Getty Images Plus.