Just look at these images of flooding and landslides in British Columbia — which suffered record heat waves and fires a few months ago.
In Glasgow over the past couple of weeks, we were treated to one vision of the climate future: halting, inadequate policy progress coupled with ever-rising hyperbole and rhetorical alarm. In British Columbia, Canada, right now, a different vision is unfolding: one climate emergency following in the wake of another, indeed made possible by the previous disaster, and in a prosperous, modern, well-governed corner of the global north, absolutely overwhelming local infrastructure and the capacity of public officials and local bureaucracy to manage the crisis. In June, the Pacific “heat dome” shattered temperature records throughout B.C., forcing climate scientists to reconsider their models and killing hundreds of humans and more than a billion marine animals, along with harvests of whole regions of farmland — “ the cherries roasting on trees.” The wildfire season overall burned more than 3,000 square miles this year, an area of land about the size of Puerto Rico, releasing probably a hundred million tons of carbon into the atmosphere and destroying the city of Lytton. And now, as happened in California with much more modest rainfall after the historic wildfire season of 2018, a “ storm of the century ” powered by an “ atmospheric river ” has hit Canadian mountains totally stripped of tree protection, producing mudslides and rockslides and landslides, trapping hundreds of cars on roads suddenly piled with debris including “families in cars without food or medications.” The storm closed major highways, downed power lines, forced the evacuation of thousands, shut down two of the country’s biggest railroad lines and its largest container port, and literally washed away parts of the region’s chief east-west roadway, the Trans-Canada Highway.
