Episode 9 of a podcast mini-series focused on Water and Southern Alberta, co-host Bob Morrison joins Jenny to discuss topics such as irrigation history, resource extraction impacts, water legislation, and climate change effects on insurance. The series features experts like Dr. David Sauchyn, who studies climate and hydrology in Canada’s Western interior, contributing to future climate and water supply scenarios. Dr. Sauchyn has served as an expert witness on climate change in Canadian legislative bodies.
This conversation highlights the incremental nature of global climate change, emphasizing regional climate phenomena over global statistics. Southern Alberta faces unique challenges, with drought identified as a significant risk due to its creeping nature and potential for long-term impacts. The discussion underscores the importance of local adaptation within regulatory frameworks, with provincial governments playing a key role in water allocation.
This episode also addresses the need for transformational adaptation strategies, focusing on reducing water demand and enhancing soil and land water retention. The conversation concludes with reflections on the emotional response to climate issues and the challenge of reducing consumption to mitigate climate impacts.
Introduction to Dr. David Sauchyn and his Climate Work
Jenny (00:00:06):
Welcome to the Gravity Well Podcast with me, Jenny Ami. I host the gravity well to celebrate and share the stories of people looking to empower others with the knowledge and skills required to reestablish stability in our communities. My mission is to work through heavy issues in conversation and process in order to lighten the load. I acknowledge that I live on the traditional territories of Treaty seven and Metis districts five and six. The treaties and self-governance agreements established by indigenous peoples were created to honour the laws of the land, maintain balance with nature, and give back to uphold reciprocal relationships. This knowledge and intention are what guide the Gravity Well conversations. I ask for genuine dialogue, real hearts, and openness to different perspectives. This is your invitation to find common ground with me. Positions taken by participants either individually or collectively do not necessarily represent those of the gravity well. This podcast is dedicated to the natural world, our children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and all future generations. The gravity well is on YouTube and streaming wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you see and hear, remember to like and subscribe.
Good afternoon, Bob. Thank you so much for joining me again. Just a reminder for everyone. This is Bob Morrison. He’s my co-host through the Water and Southern Alberta mini series that we’ve been working on. Bob has been hard at work over the last few months, regrouping us for the second half of this series. We started this series off learning about The History of Irrigation from Professor Shannon Stunden Bower and Jordan Christianson. We talked about The Impacts of Resource Extraction on water from David Mayhood, Dr. Younis Alila, and David Unger. We talked about The Water Act and Licence Transfer System with Professor Arlene Kwasniak and Davin Macintosh. We discussed The Water Cycle and Modelling with Dr. Tricia Stadnyk of the U of C. We discussed Watershed and Lake Stewardship with Mike Murray, Susan Ellis and Tim Romanow. And then we discussed Dryland, Irrigated, and Ranchland Farming with Dwight Popowich, Julian Vandenberg and John Smith, and Markham Hislop met with me and Derek Connick to talk about The Impacts of Climate Change on Insurance.
Then on Monday we met with Brad Stelfox to talk about The Impacts of Land Use on Water. And today we are thrilled to welcome Dr. David Sauchyn to the studio. David is a professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Regina. His research focuses on climate and hydrology of the past millennia in Canada’s Western interior and how this knowledge can inform future climate and water supply scenarios. He’s been involved in various roles at the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative over the past 25 years, including a director since 2017. Dr. Soin has been invited as an expert witness on climate change in the Canadian Senate and House of Commons, and at forums hosted by provincial premiers and environmental ministers. Welcome to the studio, David. It’s a pleasure to have you here.
David:
Thanks for having me. Hi, Jenny. Hi, Bob.
Jenny:
Yes. We’d love for you to just start and offer your background. How did you come into this work and how your focus came to be, what it is today, please. Thank you.
David:
How I came into studying climate and climate change? Well, I grew up east in Edmonton and I actually don’t remember a whole lot about living at Edmonton because when I wasn’t in school, my father took us hunting and fishing in the foothills and in the summertime we spent a lot of it on our grandparents’ farm near Hardesty, Alberta. I guess growing up I spent a lot of time and I had to walk to school, I spent a lot of time outside and just developed an interest in the natural world. Went to the University of Alberta as an engineering student, decided I didn’t want to be an engineer. And I looked at the course calendar and discovered, wow, you can actually take courses in rivers, glaciers, weather, climate. I didn’t know that because in the Alberta public school system at the time, they didn’t teach those things in high school. I switched from engineering to science, just loved it. And I went to graduate school in Colorado so I could ski. And I lived in a log cabin up in the mountains for two years and one month, no plumbing, no heat. It was fantastic.
And then for a PhD, I went to the University of Waterloo because there was a professor who was from Calgary and did his research in Kananaskis. I spent three years living with my wife in a tent in summertime in Canon ascus before it was developed and did research. My graduate research was on natural hazards, so snow avalanches, rock slides, mud flows, and the kind of weather that triggered these things. There you go.
Jenny:
That’s incredible. It’s it’s been in you from such a long time to just, yeah, and it’s funny, I actually did a similar exercise at the U of A myself. I started as a chem student and then decided to go into geophysics. Same thing, looked at what programs were offered and that’s how I selected it. That’s really interesting. Wow, that’s so cool that you’ve lived on the landscape like that as well. Very neat, David. Okay, Bob, you can go ahead and lead us off with the first question, please.
What does the future hold for Southern Alberta?
Bob (00:06:12):
Well, we hear a lot about what the future is going to hold in terms of climate and how it’s going to affect water. We’re talking about bigger floods, more drought, hailstorms that are going to be more severe, various things like that. From what you’ve found, what does the future hold for us, particularly in Southern Alberta, but maybe globally?
David:
Well, globally, I think everybody knows, I mean, if you’re ever online or if you read any kind of media, you’re aware of the fact that the temperature of the entire world has been changing incrementally, a few factions of a degree warmer every year. And that’s the result of a change in the global energy balance where there is less energy escaping back into space because it’s being trapped near the surface of the earth. We’ve changed the chemistry of the atmosphere. We’ve released certain gases. The concentration of certain gases has been increasing, trapping more heat. Globally it’s well documented that the average temperature of the whole world has been going up. Unfortunately, people translate that into heat waves and extreme heat, but the climate isn’t changing all the time and everywhere it’s changing more rapidly at certain places than others, in particular the Arctic. But also that concept of global warm is kind of misleading because the temperature of the whole world doesn’t exist.
It’s a statistic, it’s a statistical concept. You can’t find it on the weather app on your phone. We have to think in terms of how the human modification of the atmosphere, how this change in the amount of heat is affecting the climate where you live. Because after all, climate is a regional phenomenon. There is no climate of the whole world. There’s only climate in certain places. At our research center, we focus on the climate of the prairies and how that’s changing and it’s actually changing quite a bit differently than other parts of the world. That’s the danger in extrapolating from the concept of global warming and applying it to a place like the Canadian prairies. You have to know the prairies and study the prairies to realize that the trajectory of climate change is somewhat or quite a bit different than the rest of the world.
Bob:
How is it going to be different in the future for us, whether it’s compared to somebody else or compared to our past?
David:
Well, to begin with, like I said, we seem to be fixated on this idea that there is extreme heat. And certainly in certain parts of the world there have been record high temperatures. Parts of Europe, for example, Mediterranean, they have had record high temperatures, but not here. The highest temperatures ever recorded on the Canadian prairies were in the 1930s and that we’re not exceeding 40 degrees as often as we did in the 1940s, the 1980s. And the warmest summers we’ve had have been the driest years. 1961, 1988, 2001, when the soil is so dry that not much of the energy goes towards evaporation, a lot of the energy goes towards hitting the air. As you probably know, water has a cooling effect. And therefore in the driest summers are the warmest, our driest summer on record, 1937. Despite what people think and people tell me, boy, it’s getting so hot. Well, that’s not what the weather records show.
Jenny:
I’m curious, when you bring in water, as you already did here into the conversation, does that change the discussion? I’ll say, the thing that I’ve heard is that there’s a global water shortage in our future. Can you translate that to a local perspective for us, David?
David:
Yeah, that’s a good point, Jenny. Because we are so fixated on this temperature statistic that we don’t recognize that most of the impact of climate change in our part of the world is not a change in temperature. It’s a change in the availability of the water.
Jenny:
Water.
David:
I don’t understand that concept of a decline in the global water supply because the global water supply is pretty much fixed. We don’t lose much water to space, and we don’t create too much more water on new water. There’s some, but the water balance, again, is a regional concept. It’s most meaningful to think in terms of watersheds or other types of regions, although the watershed is the most physically reasonable way to think in terms of the water supply.
Jenny:
I guess the ways that I think that water might be removed from the system, if you will, and I understand what you’re saying, the system must be in balance, but the things I’ve heard are things like with reduced vegetation and with reduced forests, that water that would normally be kept in the system is free to move to the oceans ultimately. So that fresh water is actually being net added to the oceans rather than that balance that we want where it stays locally and in the local system. And I guess the other thing I’d add is from a industrial water use perspective, we are in fact moving some water out of the system through disposal as well.
David:
Yeah, quite a bit of water. The major consumptive water uses in the southern prairies are irrigation and pot ash mining solution pot ash mining. In Saskatchewan, by far the largest consumptive use of water is for ash mining. And in Alberta, of course, it’s irrigation. And as a result, the water level record at Medicine hat the flow of the South Saskatchewan River at medicine hat has been declining quite a bit, but most of that is extraction of water for irrigation. Some of it is the wastage of the glaciers. Now, the major loss of water under natural conditions is evaporation. We have a large amount of evaporated water loss, there is the potential for an increase in the evaporative water loss. If our summers get longer, they don’t necessarily have to get hotter, but as they get longer, there’s more days of net evaporation. We expect in the future that we’ll have evaporation, for example, in May and September, even April and October, whereas historically it’s been the temperature has not supported much evaporation.
Jenny:
That makes so much sense. We’re having, just the other day, we had massive chinook winds, and I just kept thinking, there’s so much water that must be leaving our system. Whereas normally we would be receiving snow and we’d be actually being net gaining water. That’s the alarming piece from an observation perspective. Like he said, we often, I dunno, you’re saying that that one is potentially real, that we could be experiencing loss of water right now rather than a net gain. Interesting.
David:
Yeah. The loss of water during chinooks is most obvious. When there’s snow on the ground, they call it a snow eater. Right. The snow just sublimates it.
Jenny:
Fair enough. Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about.
David:
But you just made a good point. I mean, I started by saying that it’s not getting hotter on the prairies. I’m not denying climate change. It’s just that that’s not the type of climate change we’re observing in terms of extreme temperatures. But we are observing longer frost-free seasons. And especially, it’s not so much getting hotter, it’s getting much less cold. Our winters are much less cold than they used to be.
Provincial Governments are Responsible for Water Security
Jenny (00:15:04):
Oh, great. Yeah, I remember Christmas being very snowy, and the last five years it’s been in Calgary pretty much no snow until New Year’s, which is a big, big change. Yeah. I could go down a rabbit hole there, but let’s move forward for us. One of the things we were wondering about is around who’s responsible. Where do water decisions get made with respect to in particular rivers, ensuring that they’re monitored, they’re assessed, and that there is sufficient water security. Can you help us understand where are the roles and responsibilities around that this big topic, if you will?
David:
Well, ultimately it’s a responsibility of the provincial government. It’s the province. It’s the province that allocates water and makes those decisions. The federal government is involved if it’s a trans-boundary water supply. But otherwise, it’s the province. Although there are a lot of stakeholders, I mean, everybody’s a stakeholder. We all need water, and we all use water. Major stakeholders include the irrigation districts, the municipalities, the industrial water users are all involved in that conversation, although it’s the province that ultimately makes those decisions. For example, following the severe drought of 2001, 2002, there was a fairly radical change in water policy in Alberta, might be aware of that, where they actually closed the southern tributaries of the South Saskatchewan River. Ever since the mid 2000 lots that the bow and the old man river basins have been closed, with the exception of certain stakeholders who were able to apply for water licences.
Jenny:
Right. Is that when we would describe that the basin is considered to be fully allocated and that there’s no more licences available? Is that what you mean by that, David?
David:
Yeah, and actually those two basins, the Old Man and the Bow are the only two river basins in Canada that are considered fully allocated.
Jenny:
Wow.
David:
The two major basins, there’re probably some small basins in BC or somewhere, but in terms of larger river basins, those two are the only two. Wow, okay. You want to,
Bob:
And that’s been a significant change in terms of policy, but in terms of dealing with the climate impacts on water, is it again a provincial issue or are we talking about a federal issue, or are we basically talking about an international issue?
David:
All of the above, but very different responsibilities. And ultimately, water use and adaptation to climate change occur locally because adaptation to climate changes is adjustments to policy infrastructure, industrial water use, residential water use, everything we do pretty much we can adjust or adapt to lower the demand and possibly increase the supply. It’s all local in nature, but it’s within a certain regulatory framework. And those regulatory frameworks are established by provincial and national governments and municipal governments. I mean, there’s certain things you can do in your own backyard, although it has to be within the bylaws established by your municipality, but ultimately, it comes down to what individuals decide to do in terms of how they use water. And we’re all consumers and we can make decisions about the stuff we consume and whether it requires more or less water. And I mean, the ultimate, I’ve always thought that the ultimate solution to, not the ultimate solution, but a major solution to climate change is just don’t drive,
Jenny:
Which
David:
Seems ridiculous.
Jenny:
Right? Yeah.
David:
There are places, there are cities where people don’t drive, believe it or not.
Jenny:
A hundred percent. In Europe, there’s a couple of them, right. I know Spain just changed one, and there’s one in, is it one of the northern countries?
David:
Finland, Helsinki. I’ve been to Helsinki. I was blown away because the sidewalks are wider than the streets.
Jenny:
Amazing. The other thing I’ve been noticing, you see these videos of these massive flooding events, and I see these cars wash away, and I think, I wonder which ones of those are EVs? This is, to me, the scale of the issue that we’re not really realizing. Would you agree that I understand electric vehicles will use less materials and things like that, but I just think that that’s underestimating the scale of the challenge we’re facing when we’re thinking that just changing a vehicle and not changing our entire way of consuming less, which we sort of got into with Brad this earlier this week.
David:
Good. Yeah. I mean, electric vehicle is still a vehicle, like you said, has to be manufactured, and it still impacts the road. It requires a road network. The better solution is park your vehicle.
Jenny:
Right, altogether. Yeah, I hear that. That’s so fascinating. One of, go ahead. Yeah,
Are government’s incorporating limits to growth?
Bob (00:21:03):
We have met the enemy, and they are us, the old pogo saying. But there are lots of things that are happening, particularly at a municipal level and provincially in terms of managing the land. And our conversation with Brad Stelfox very much got into where are the limits to how much we expand onto the landscape, whether it’s urban sprawl, living in floodplains, developing the systems of roads and other kinds of linear disturbances. Do you see the different levels of government, municipal or provincial actually moving in the direction to limit growth to go back to the Club of Rome phrase? Or are they just simply so committed to more of one thing or the other that they’re incapable of dealing with those kinds of issues?
David:
Yeah, I like listening to Brad when he talks about that. I find it inspiring. And in my experience, I just can’t imagine governments limiting growth. I can’t imagine a government being elected on a platform of limiting growth, but they can certainly determine where that growth occurs. Climate hazards, climate change, climate variability, extreme events, they’re a problem only if people are exposed to them. In fact, the entire concept of risk, risk is at the intersection of the hazard exposure and vulnerability. Climate hazards can exist, but only if you’re exposed and vulnerable to them will you suffer. And there are ways that we can limit our exposure and vulnerability. That’s the whole purpose of adaptation, is to limit the exposure to climate hazards is to reduce the risk or avoid the risk altogether. And probably the best example is floods work, just get out of the floodplain. You’re not exposed to that hazard unless you’re below a certain flood level.
Bob:
A strategic retreat from the floodplain, as Blair Feltmate said, from The Intact Center,
David:
Right? Yeah. Blair says it well, and certainly that’s a chronic problem in other parts of Canada, not so much in the prairies, even though there is this concern about flooding, and certainly it was heightened by the 2013 June, 2013 floods. Ultimately, the bigger hazard on the prairies is drought,
Jenny:
Right? Yeah. We could have instant, would you say it would be more like instantaneous flooding concerns, but long-term drought is more.
David:
The impacts of flooding are immediate. They’re damaging, they’re insurable. They get a lot of media attention. We call drought a creeping hazard. And a lot of the cost of drought is not insured. With the exception of crop insurance, but there’s a lot of loss in the ag sector that’s not insured. There’s a lot of, and I remember being at a meeting in Ottawa, and we were discussing natural hazards in climate change, and drought wasn’t on the list. And I said, what’s going on? They said, well, drought doesn’t kill people. I had just been to the family farm in eastern Alberta. My uncle told me that during the drought of 2001, they found his neighbour hanging in his barn by his neck.
Are we helping people prepare for disaster?
Jenny (00:25:04):
Yeah, I was just thinking that. I went to a watershed council meeting last year, and they were talking about the increased risk, and we talked about it with those three farmers. We met with the increased risk of suicide. And it was awful to hear, this is real, this is growing. Here’s a number you could call. And that was it. So this is when I think one of the questions that Bob was alluding to here is, are we equipped to make these changes, these decisions for, let’s use farmers as an example on the prairies. As you said, irrigation is such a big part of our business, especially in Alberta. Are we helping mitigate the chance of what extreme drought will do to irrigators? Should the supply not be there? Are we, is there, I dunno, I’ll stop there. I know you’re a climate expert. This is not necessarily your specific focus, but can you speak from your perspective what you know in that space?
David:
Yeah, I could speak to what terms of what producers have told me, because I hang out with them a lot. For some reason, they ask me to come into their meetings, and I think we are well equipped in a certain way. We’re well equipped technically and institutionally, and we have a lot of capacity to deal with these things because we’re a fairly wealthy country, not everybody, but we have good institutions and we have technical capacity, we have good education system, intellectual capacity, and we have the tools. I guess where we’re lacking is, and this is almost human nature, we have tremendous difficulty preparing for impacts that will occur in coming decades.
And when you think about it, and I’ve done a bunch of reading and social psychology and social history, is that for most of human history, we’ve been preoccupied with finding our next meal or avoiding the predator when we go down to the water hole, and we still instinctively have this recency bias, we have this distance bias where something has to be near to us in time and location for us to deal with it. That’s why natural disasters get a lot of attention is because we’re great at dealing with them after the fact, right after a flood or a storm or a hurricane. There’s all these stories about how people rallied together. Communities got bonded. We’re great at that. We chip in because it’s an immediate concern, immediate problem, but tell people, if we don’t prepare that there’s going to be a drought 20 years from now that’s going to just devastate our economy. We’re just not equipped intellectually to deal with that somehow.
Bob:
Well, and you mentioned time and location, and that flooding is the one hazard that we actually can predict in terms of both timing, frequency and in terms of where it’s going to occur. It’s certainly not one of those dispersed hazards that could happen anywhere.
David:
That’s a good point, Bob. Within a certain timeframe, we can actually fairly accurately predict, but then you need a warning system. You saw what happened in Texas when those poor kids had no idea what was coming.
Bob:
Right. Well, that’s also personal responsibility because the warnings did get through to some people, and they may have been able to stop it, stop the deaths if they had acted quickly enough. But in terms of the adapting to the hazards, where are the successes that you have seen in terms of adapting to those kinds of hazards, being able to get out of the floodplain, build better buildings, stop sprawling further and further out into the countryside? Where have you seen the successes?
David:
High River Calgary, mostly the result of the 2013 flood. Not necessarily as a result of climate change, but if you’re better prepared for flooding, then that represents an adaptation to climate change, even though that wasn’t the motivation for it. And there’s a lot of actually success stories in southern Alberta. A fair number of municipalities have climate adaptation plans, Lethbridge Medicine hat Okotoks.
Jenny:
Ok. Yeah.
David:
Venture Creek, the MD of Bighorn. I know about some of these because our Climate Change research center was contracted to provide the climate science for some of these plans. There’s a relatively fair number of small to media, municipalities, indigenous communities, sorry, the blood tribe that have developed resilience to climate change. And partly it’s because, and you mentioned before, what’s the role of provincial and federal governments? Well, to a large extent is because they had made funding available. The province had a municipal climate action fund money well spent. A lot of, especially compared to provinces like Saskatchewan in particular, but also Manitoba, there has been more effort made to prepare for climate change, at least developing strategies and plans. They haven’t necessarily been implemented, but at least they have a plan.
Bob:
Well, and I hear, oh, go ahead.
Jenny:
Okay. I was just going to ask, because Okotoks is something that we’re quite familiar with, obviously, because in our basin, and I look at Okotoks is getting some of their water from Calgary still. I wonder about, is there a gap between what is truly climate resiliency versus adaptation through human infrastructure that might not be available to us? And I’m just curious, is that a risk, is that something that we need to take seriously when we’re thinking about climate resiliency in a watershed?
David:
Well, nearly all the adaptation has been to historical natural climate variability.
Jenny:
Not thinking of those future shortages that might be.
David:
Yeah, exactly. We wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if there hadn’t been a whole lot of adaptation. Because when you think about it, there’s very few places on earth where there is an advanced economy in such a harsh climate, find someplace else on earth where they practice commercial agriculture at the latitude of Peace River, maybe on a coastline somewhere in Scandinavia. But there was a whole lot of adaptation throughout the 20th century that resulted in a viable commercial agricultural industry on the prairies and enabled cities to get established and succeed. And probably the city that has done the most in Canada, other than Vancouver, which they can, they don’t have Irish climate, but Calgary, I mean, Calgary has a pretty advanced climate adaptation strategy and devoted a fair bit of, in fact, this coming week, city of Calgary is hosting a week long climate change symposium.
Jenny:
I did not know that. Yep. Are you attending David?
David:
I’m speaking on Thursday. I think I speak on Thursday. Yeah. Okay. Most of it’s virtual.
Jenny:
Yeah. Wonderful.
David:
Though our climate change research center has a big project with ENMAX, and ENMAX, of course is the electricity supplier for Southern Alberta. Yeah.
What are our prospects of major drought?
Bob (00:34:09):
Well, there’s certainly, certainly lots of talking going on. And I know that Bob Sanford is monitoring COP30, and when we have him on for the podcast on the future of water in Southern Alberta, he’ll be updating us on what he’s seen coming out of the latest cop exercise. But you talked about basically a good crisis is a way for people to adapt, and Brad Tel Fox talked about that, about a place in India where they had a lot of overpopulation and mismanagement of the land, and then they had a terrible drought and a collapse of their economy, and they adapted to it successfully, apparently, but they only did it because they had such a disaster. You mentioned drought as creeping, a creeping disaster. What’s our prospects in terms of drought from a climate point of view that you’ve been able to see from the modelling or from your research you’ve been doing?
David:
Okay, now I’m feeling comfortable in my space here. That’s mostly what we’ve studied for the past 30, 40 years. And Brad made a very good point. People ask me, what’s it going to take for us to do something about climate change? And I said, probably a disaster, a catastrophe. It’s just human nature. And we hear the terminology all the time. We’re in the climate crisis, climate catastrophe, well, perhaps globally, but locally, not really. Although when we get a multi-year drought, that’s when we’ll have a climate crisis, because unfortunately, that’s the worst case scenario for the prairies, is a drought that lasts year after year after year.
And it happens. I mean, it hasn’t happened in our lifetimes unless you’re a hundred years old. But when I said, you’re in my space, in the 1980s, my students and I began collecting wood in the Cypress Hills because trees need water. The amount of tree growth each year is a function of water. And we were able to determine that in these trees. A couple hundred years old, there was a drought that lasted about 20 years in the mid 19th century, A is actually well documented when Captain John Palliser came through with his crew and said, I wouldn’t farm here. He said, A large area will be forever comparatively useless. Well, he came through during a 20 year drought now since, because that worked pretty well every summer since the late 1980s, I’ve hauled students out to all over Alberta, Saskatchewan, NWT, Montana, North Dakota, up and down the eastern slopes of the Rockies collecting. And now we have thousands and thousands of samples, and we have about 4.8 million measurements of tree growth. And each of those measurements is actually a measurement of soil moisture, because that’s what determines tree growth in our dry climate. We have a thousand year millennial record of drought on the prairies, and there have been droughts that were decades in duration, and they will reoccur. But when they do, it’ll be in a warmer climate
Jenny:
Well, and in a bigger drawing system. The thing I struggle, I attend these watershed council meetings to understand, and I see these as you’re talking about these 20 year drought cycles and that we’re in these shorter drought cycles more frequently in the last 80 years. But then what I layer on is well, but we also had glaciers as a water backup supply, and we also had, we weren’t using, as Brad says, the biggest amount of water per person. Well, he didn’t say water, but resources in general, natural capital as we are today. I see those two things coming together in such a, you talked about Canada’s being a wealthy nation, and I look at that as being something that could change on a dime if the way that we’re having these two things potentially come together, the growth of the irrigation districts, let’s be specific. And this long period drought coming into play, is that what you foresee as a potential catastrophe that might surface in the prairies?
David:
I like the way that you used your hands to show that it’s a threshold. Like Bob said, it’s a threshold. We pass a certain threshold or water demand exceeds supply, which happened historically in the old man and basin. But throughout the prairies, if we have a drought that lasts more than a few years, there won’t be enough water to go around.
Jenny:
Right. Yeah.
Bob:
Now you mentioned, oh, sorry, go ahead.
David:
No, and people say, yeah, okay, well, multi-year drought, and they talk about it, but I don’t think we really prepared for it. Yeah,
Bob:
Because recently the droughts we’ve seen, if you wanted to call them natural or manmade, were basically two year at the most. You weren’t seeing these decade long kinds of droughts recently, at least in terms of the, sorry, I’m losing my train of thought here. Oh, sorry. In terms of the climate and these multi-year droughts that you’ve been talking about historically, is there that connection between greater warmth and the drought? Or is it the rainfall in the drought? What are the connections there that you’ve seen historically?
David:
Well, periodically you’ll see a headline that say that climate change caused a flood or drought. That doesn’t make any sense. That’s ridiculous. It’s just that these are perfectly natural events. They’re occurring in a warming climate.
To some extent, the impacts, the impacts of these events could be exacerbated because they’re occurring in a warming climate, but also in a population that is exposing itself to these events. We’ve increased our exposure to flooding a drought because there’s a lot more of us, and we’re not necessarily functioning in a way that prevents the impact.
Multi-Year Drought Future Modelling
Bob (00:41:33):
I was thinking of your thousand year record, going back in terms of how the climate has changed or the weather, I guess in this case might be the best term, as opposed to climate. What were the factors that were driving these multi-year droughts that you could see from the data you’ve collected?
David:
Great question, Bob. And that’s an area of research where a number of scientists, especially in the Western North America, have been focusing their attention because, and the simple answer is it’s mostly related to the circulation of the Pacific Ocean, because most of our weather on most of our water comes from the Pacific. And there is the slow, and it’s huge. The Pacific Ocean is 16 times larger than Canada. One third of the earth is a Pacific Ocean, and they’re at this slow circulation. There’s an annual cycle called El Nino | La Nina, which is sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific. But then there’s a slower cycle circulation of the ocean water where the North Pacific Ocean, off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, it cycles in terms of the sea surface temperature, which can have a profound effect on our climate because the ocean temperature and the temperature of the water that is above it will determine the circulation of the atmosphere. We can’t get into these longer cycles where the storms, the air masses that bring us water go someplace else. They take a different trajectory, they follow a path. It’s that through California, for example, or through Oregon, California, the Southwest us. The water has to go somewhere, and there are years and the fact there are decades where it tends to go elsewhere and not here, and it’s related to the circulation of the Pacific Ocean.
Bob:
Okay. Is human caused climate change having those kinds of effects now on that larger system of circulation within the Pacific?
David:
It is, because most estimates are about 90% of the extra heat that we’re trapping next to the Earth. It’s being stored in the oceans. Most of the world is ocean, and water has a very large heat capacity to store water. The oceans are warming. And even though these are natural phenomenon, the circulation of the ocean and the fluctuation or oscillation in sea, sea surface temperature is natural. They’re occurring in a warming ocean, just like droughts and floods on land are occurring in a warming atmosphere. These oscillations of sea surface temperature are occurring in a warming ocean.
Jenny:
I just want to repeat what I, you’re saying we have these natural occurrences, but then we have this warming that’s happening underneath that which is altering these natural occurrences. You’re talking about the specific circulation, but I’ve heard comments around the Atlantic, like the AMOC, so the Atlantic…
David:
Meridional Overturning Circulation. It’s a jargon.
Jenny:
Yes. Thank you. Can you expand on, because I’ve understood, and I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that ocean, forgive me if you need to translate it to what you’re talking about here, but that it’s slowing, and that’s due to this, like you said, the heating and it’s actually causing the Atlantic circulation to slow in a much faster way than modellers had been predicting. Is that true in the pacific?
David:
In the Atlantic, it’s a different system because the Greenland ice sheet is in the North Atlantic. The Greenland ice sheet is melting, and all that cold, fresh water is causing is running off into the North Atlantic, affecting the temperature gradient. You have all this fresh cold water being input. It is affecting the circulation of the Atlantic Ocean and the climate of places that are in close proximity to the Atlantic. But out here in the west, Western North America we’re affected more so by the circulation of the Pacific Ocean. And the equivalent would be, there’s all kinds of jargon. I mentioned Enso, there’s the Pacific Dec oscillation, there’s the Pacific North. I dunno, there’s a bunch of acronyms. It’s not important. But they all refer to these oscillations of sea surface temperature at different tempo or scale, annual decal, multi decal.
Jenny:
Okay. And are we seeing a rapid change in those oceans right now relative to human impacts, or,
David:
I’m not aware of any rapid change. It’s more incremental. In fact, most of the global climate change is steady and incremental in nature, which doesn’t make for great headlines. The media focuses on these extreme weather events that may or may not be related to climate change. But most of the global climate change, like I said, is incremental in nature. But at some point, it passes a threshold beyond which we get some damage. We can only withstand so much heating, although it may not occur until several decades from now, which again, is not conducive to people doing something about it right now.
Bob:
Okay. Is the science, as you understand it, in terms of the Pacific and Southern Alberta, is it telling us that the multi decade, multi-year multi, maybe multi-decade droughts are going to be a reality? Do they have the ability to say that? At this point,
David:
Yes, but we can’t say when.
Bob:
No, I know. I understand that.
David:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, just the probability, our thousand year record, there was a multi-year prolonged drought in every century. The 20th century was the 19th thirties, the 19th century was 1850s and sixties. Every century has had its prolonged drought. It’s yet to occur in the 21st century. Just the probability.
Bob:
Okay. Are they, oh, sorry, go ahead.
David:
Yeah, but also that’s just in terms of the empirical evidence, the statistical probability. But there’s also the geophysics where we get these, these drivers, these determinants of drought, and there’s a bunch of them, and they’re all occurring at different wavelengths. If you know anything about spectral analysis or wavelengths, at some point they all line up and bang, you get this ideal ocean for a long drought.
Jenny:
Gotcha. There a convergence, I would call that, well, in this case, destructive interference. Are you seeing a convergence of those things in the modelling? Again, I know you can’t put a time on it, but are you at least seeing indications of those converging?
David:
And you mentioned modelling because the only information we have on the future is models.
Jenny:
Of course.
David:
We have no weather data for the future. We have no tree rings for the future. And even though models have their limitations, even though, and this is kind of a cliche, but all models are wrong, some are useful, and we know they’re wrong because we can’t possibly know what the future climate is going to be, but we can simulate the climate and we don’t even say predict. We can project what the future climate might be like.
The problem is that because every model is likely wrong, we use a whole bunch of models. That’s the safe bet. That’s the most rigorous scientific approach. At our research center, we use output from a whole bunch of models. We even run our own model for Southern Alberta thanks to ENMAX. We look for consensus amongst the models, and nearly all the models will produce a multi-year drought in the future, but at different times, they all occur at different times. We can’t really say when it’s going to occur. It’s just that there is a high likelihood of a multi-year drought because nearly all the models will produce one.
Jenny:
If I were to do any forward modelling, remember I was a signal processor, the work that we would use, I can’t remember the term. It is an envelope like what you’d expect to be in the realm of possibility to narrow, like you said, these simulated annealing processes, let’s say. I guess my question is, are you finding that envelope is changing? Is there some indication that No. Okay.
David:
It’s not getting smaller. Ideally, would you would think the more research we did and the more models we have, the envelope would shrink, but it’s not. And the best explanation is most of the uncertainty is natural climate variability. We have a pretty good handle on how humans are affecting the climate, and we have a pretty good handle. We’re able to model the response to changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere. What’s difficult is modelling the natural climate variability and how these different drivers interact over time to produce more or less water or drought or higher and lower temperatures. Because even if you look and you can go online, there’s a bunch of websites that have the average temperature of the world every year, every month back to 1880. And you can see this big upward trend, but look more closely and it fluctuates from year to year. There is natural variability even at the global scale. And the more you scale down to smaller and smaller areas, there’s increasing natural variability. Of course, until at a regional scale, it’s pretty hard to detect climate change because there’s so much natural variability. And people complain when I’m giving talks in Vancouver, Toronto people, those prairie people, those farmers, they don’t believe in climate change. And I say, wait a minute, they don’t experience climate change. They experience year to year variability.
Bob:
They experience weather,
David:
They experience weather. We’re exposed to weather. Weather is real. Climate is abstract
Bob:
Now. What I’m hearing in terms of drought, to get back to that, we know that the natural occurrence of these decade long or more or longer droughts is basically one a century to put a gross generalization on it.
David:
Exactly.
What are the solutions and what are not? Key takeaways
Bob (00:54:10):
But we don’t quite know whether that once in a century, one in 100 years might turn into one of every 75 years or one in every 50 years. Is that a fair assessment of where we stand at this point in terms of getting down to this regional level?
David:
Sure. I wouldn’t say we don’t know because we do classify droughts according to their severity and duration, and we extract from the model the probability of a drought of a certain length in severity. We do that kind of analysis. But the fundamental problem is not so much the hazard is that we are adapted on, the prairie used to deal with a two year drought. Nearly everything we do equips us to deal with a two year drought and beyond two years. Oh, the reservoir is empty. Wow. Reservoirs are built the whole store, two years of water. If there’s no rain for two years, you’ve got this reservoir. But look at the old man reservoir in 2023, it was virtually empty. We’ve done a whole lot of historical adaptation to climate variability, but it equips us to deal with drought of about two, maybe three years in duration and beyond that we have to go to government for relief.
Bob:
Well, and the belief that the Alberta government wants to do is to basically build more storage, build more reservoirs to extend that period from maybe two years to a third year or maybe a fourth year, possibly
David:
In dry climates. The default approach is irrigation and reservoirs. And this worked well for millennia, but I think that’s kind of old thinking. We need some more transformational adaptation to climate change. We have to in terms of lowering the demand as opposed…
Bob:
Well, that’s what happens is you build the storage and then you have more irrigation, which puts more stress on that storage, which means you want more storage, which then leads to more irrigation or municipal use or whatever it happens to be.
David:
Yeah, I mean, irrigation districts in Alberta are very efficient. They’ve really ramped up the efficiency of the application of water. But I think we need to pay more attention of means of retaining that water, not just in reservoirs, but in the soil on the land.
Bob:
Well, and the efficiency, as I understand it at this point, they’ve pretty much used up all the good efficiency measures in terms of using water more efficiently for irrigation in particular. There’s not much more they can then do than maybe a little bit more of what they’ve already done.
David:
Yeah, I’m sure you noticed in the irrigation podcast. I’m sure you heard about that. Yeah.
Jenny:
Well, I want to make sure that we honour your time here. I would love to, I’m sure Bob will too, want to offer some takeaways and then maybe leave you with some comments to offer. The key takeaways I had for this is that one of the main concerns or the ways we are going to experience climate change in the prairie provinces is through drought. That drought is our biggest risk in terms of our long-term access to water security and water quality. Our biggest draw is irrigation in Alberta. We have had some tributaries being closed off. We are having evidence of those, of that water insecurity coming into light that we don’t have. The local climate can be very specific, that it has a lot of variability. And those are the issues with nailing down the timing of these severe events that might cause us issues. And then I love that you spoke about climate risks is at the, well, maybe I’m not saying it right. Climate hazards is at the intersection of risks, vulnerability, risk and vulnerability. Is that right?
David:
And exposure.
Jenny:
And exposure. That was the word I missed. I think that’s one of the things that I would like to ask you as we’re potentially closing is you mentioned that you don’t see a growth model going away in our economy, but you said we can certainly grow in certain areas. From my perspective, as somebody who’s looking at the amount of land use that we have, adaptation you’ve said that we’ve done, I would love to see our governments invest in water regeneration to have some thoughts about how do we reforest, how do we just flipping the switch in that regard, it’s certainly growth, but growth in the sense of climate resiliency and climate stability, if you will. So I’m just curious from your perspective, if you could say, this is the area where I’d like to see growth. What does that look like for you?
David:
I mean, that makes perfect sense that we would want to invest in these climate resilient technologies and uses of water. And we haven’t talked about mitigation at all. That’s not my area, but I know that the more we slow climate change, the less adaptation we have to do. Although we don’t seem to be, well, like I said, that’s a different topic. Ideally, we would undertake actions, technologies, land uses that are both mitigative and adaptive. Wonderful. For example, there are farming practices whereby you can store carbon and you can store water. Right? Well, that’s mitigative and adaptive at the same time. That’s kind of a win-win,
Jenny:
Right?
David:
Yeah. Although it has to be economically viable,
Jenny:
Right? The potentially incentives for that type of, like you’re saying, both adaptation and mitigation strategies, right? Yeah.
Okay. Bob, your turn. Let’s let you ask him some hit your last question home before we let him back to his family.
Bob:
I don’t think I’ll ask another question because we’re almost over time here. But you’ve done a good job, Jenny, summarizing what I got out of the conversation. And it’s been an excellent conversation, Dave. It’s been terrific. You’ve really expanded my understanding of where we are and where we’re probably going to end up if we don’t adapt, if we don’t mitigate the kinds of problems that we have with water and climate. Very much appreciative of you taking the time to chat with us, and hopefully you’ll be able to continue all the good work you have been doing because you certainly are adding a lot of valuable knowledge and expertise to the issues we face.
David:
Thanks, Bob. I can’t believe it’s been an hour. I was having so much fun that hour. Just,
Jenny:
Yeah. Is there anything we missed that you would’ve liked to touch on before we let you run, David?
David:
I don’t think so. I gave a TEDx talk. TEDx, yeah. Talk last spring and said it has to be motivational. I avoided the science because people don’t respond to facts. People respond emotionally.
Jenny:
Right?
David:
That’s why, like I said, the solution is a disaster because then people have an emotional response. And that’s why I tossed out the idea that the problem is consumption. We’re just consuming individually way too much. And I talked about the very small proportion of people who actually are attempting to under consume, and I expressed my admiration for them because I drive a 2012 gas guzzling Chevy Silverado, and I just love my fossil fuel lifestyle. We know the solutions and we know the adaptations. It’s just extremely difficult to get there.
Jenny:
Yeah, I’m sure we could have another conversation entirely because I’m left with a whole bunch of other questions in this, but I think the main thing for me is I think there’s other pressures that are going to come into this too. We talk about this fossil fuel lifestyle, and there are limits to that availability as well. That’s certainly going to be a limit from a availability perspective for it to continue. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, thank you so much. I’m taking you over time here. I hope you have a good rest of your afternoon. Thank you Bob Morrison for organizing this for us.
Bob:
Okay, thank you, Jenny. Thank you, Dave.
Jenny:
Thank you.
