Canada Climate Risk – Global Climate Change

What is the Climate in Canada?

Canada’s climate is a big country with harsh winters its latitude and continentality, as well as the location of mountain ranges, make it one of the world’s coldest countries.

The population distribution (the country’s largest cities are in the south) and scarcity (despite being one of the world’s largest countries, Canada only has about 35 million people) demonstrate how harsh the environmental circumstances are in parts of the country, owing to the frigid climate.
Nonetheless, there may be some scorching days throughout the brief summer, particularly in the southern interior areas. The coast of British Columbia (see Vancouver), where the environment is oceanic, chilly, and rainy, is the only place where the average temperature above the freezing point (32 degrees Fahrenheit or zero degrees Celsius) in winter.

Because the Rocky Mountains restrict the passage of warm Pacific air masses, and there are no geographical barriers to impede cold air masses arriving from the North Pole, the rest of the country experiences frigid winters, with the exception of the west coast.

The Atlantic coast (see Nova Scotia and Newfoundland) is much colder than the Pacific coast, both because the dominant winds originate from the west (and hence from interior on the East coast) and because a cold sea current, the Labrador Current, runs down the Atlantic coast.

So, from January to April, the temperature of the water near Halifax is 1 °C (34 °F), whereas it drops to 8 °C (46 °F) on the coast near Vancouver.

The Great Prairies, east of the Rocky Mountains (Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan), get the most sunshine, with over 2,300 hours of sunshine each year in places like Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Regina. However, in the summer, southern British Columbia (see Vancouver) and the Arctic regions (see Alert) are both sunny.

World Climate Change

Warming of the climate system throughout the Industrial Revolution is undeniable, as evidenced by a variety of indications. The global average temperature, as well as atmospheric water vapour and ocean heat content, has risen.

Land ice has melted and thinned, adding to rising sea levels, and Arctic sea ice has shrunk dramatically. Climate change is one of the century’s most pressing issues. It is a global issue that necessitates global solutions.

Governments from all across the globe have pledged to work together to prevent global warming, understanding that climate-related dangers increase in proportion to the magnitude of warming and concomitant climate changes.

The Paris Agreement, which came into force on November 4, 2016,1 under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, set a goal of keeping global warming to 1.5–2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as well as a commitment to engage in adaptation planning and implementation.

The global temperature objective is being pursued by collective action; however, it is understood that this objective will only reduce, not eliminate, the risks and impacts of climate change. In order to plan and prepare for the issues that climate change will bring, governments and communities must first comprehend how climate change will affect them.

Physical, biological, and social disciplines are all used to understand climate change and its repercussions. Continuous research in these domains has resulted in an increasing volume of published scientific material on climate change.It’s difficult to assess this rising knowledge base and communicate how our understanding of climate change has progressed, especially because there’s such a large audience for this information.

Individuals, communities, businesses, and governments, on a local, regional, national, and international scale, are concerned about the effects of climate change. “Science assessments” are a method of critically analyzing and synthesizing existing information on a topic, including an appraisal of our confidence in our understanding and remaining uncertainties..

As a result, science evaluations can serve as a reliable source of information for addressing a wide range of queries and problems. Since 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (see Box 1.1) has performed global-scale scientific assessments of climate change on a regular basis, and these assessments have been critical in providing the global community with a knowledge base to inform decision-making.

Climate Change Canada

National-scale canada climate change science assessments address national audiences more directly. Canada has released three broad canada climate change assessments as well as sector- or region-specific studies on human health (Séguin, 2008), transportation (Palko and Lemmen, 2017), and marine coasts (Palko and Lemmen, 2017) over the last two decades (Lemmen et al., 2016).

These are informed Canadians about the hazards and opportunities posed by climate change, as well as our ability to canada climate adapt to its effects. Citizens and stakeholders can benefit from national climate change assessments by being better informed and participating in conversations about how to respond to the problems of climate change in Canada through both mitigation and adaptation.
While all of these reports contained high-level overviews of observed and expected changes in Canada’s climate, only one study provided this cancept on physical climate changes.

Climate change is a global issue, and Canada’s climate change assessments are based on the IPCC’s global-scale science assessments, which have been published every five to seven years since 1990.

These reports are largely regarded as the most authoritative sources of information on the current state of knowledge about climate change, its probable impacts, and response options. The most recent consensus of the world science community, based on publicly available knowledge at the time, is considered to be the conclusions of successive IPCC assessments.

comprehensively assess this new literature, as doing so would duplicate the IPCC process. Rather, this  focuses on assessing new literature that advances understanding of climate change in Canada.
The atmosphere, the hydrosphere (liquid water on Earth), the cryosphere (frozen materials), the land surface, and the biosphere (all living creatures on land and in water.) are all interconnected physical components of the Earth’s climate system.

All of these systems’ measurements of variables give distinct lines of evidence that the global climate system is warming. The signal consistency across different components of the climate system tells a compelling picture of unmistakable change.

Global mean surface temperature (GMST) is the most well-known indicator for tracking climate change. It is calculated as the world’s average (or mean) temperature using measurements of sea surface temperatures and near-surface air temperatures above the land.

Over the period 1880–2012, this metric increased by 0.85°C (with a 90% confidence interval of 0.65°C to 1.06°C). The average 10-year temperature has broken records in each of the last three decades (1980s, 1990s, and 2000s). Even though the decadal temperature for the 2000s was higher than the 1990s, there was a cooling trend in the early twenty-first century.

Natural climate variability effects GMST on a number of timescales as a result, decadal timescales should predict periods of reduced or increased warming. The causes of the early-twentieth-century warming pause are now more understood, and it appears to have ended, with the years 2015, 2016, and 2017 being the warmest on record, with GMST more than 1°C above pre-industrial levels.

Other components of the climate system are also showing signs of climate change. Warm extremes have increased and cold extremes have decreased as the global climate has shifted toward a warmer average.

The amount of water vapour in the atmosphere (atmospheric humidity) has most certainly increased, owing to warmer air’s ability to hold more moisture. Not only has the water warmed at the top, but the entire upper ocean (to a depth of 700 m) has very certainly warmed as well.

As a result of the expansion of ocean waters due to warming (warmer water takes up more volume) and the addition of new meltwater from shrinking glaciers and ice sheets worldwide, global mean sea level has risen an estimated 0.19 m (90 percent uncertainty range between 0.17 m and 0.21 m) between 1901 and 2010 (90 percent uncertainty range between 0.17 m and 0.21 m).

The area of Arctic sea ice has been reducing throughout the year, with the greatest noticeable losses occurring in the summer and autumn. Multiple lines of data are used to determine how much human activity has contributed to the observed warming of the climate system.

Evidence from observations, greater knowledge of system processes and feedbacks that influence how the climate system responds to both natural and human-induced disturbances, and canada climate change .

It’s difficult to say how much of the observed global warming and other climatic changes are due to these causes because the climate system doesn’t respond to them in a predictable way.
Climate (or Earth system) models are critical tools for identifying the reasons of observed climate changes in order to complete this task. Studies using these models simulate how the climate system responds to real-world changes, including the effects of human activities, and compare the results to idealized experiments with no human intervention.

Based on observations and tests, it is highly likely that human impacts, especially GHG emissions, have been the primary cause of observed global warming since the mid-twentieth century.

On a worldwide scale, studies have proven that there is a human contribution to observed changes in the lower atmosphere, cryosphere, and ocean.

Precipitation and related hydrological changes

The hydrological (water) cycle is affected by rising global temperatures. With rising temperatures, the amount of moisture that the atmosphere can contain increases (about 7 percent per degree Celsius of warming).

Global specific humidity — a measure of the amount of water vapour in the air — has most certainly grown near the surface and in the troposphere during the 1970s, which is consistent with the observed temperature increase during that time.

Climate Risk

The Canada climate has already transformed, and experts expect that it will continue to do so. According to forecasts, the country will become warmer, with more days exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Intense rainfall events are predicted to become more common and severe, posing a greater danger of wildfire ignition and extending the fire season, putting more populations at danger.

another Canada climate define the Coastal flood danger is expected to rise as sea levels rise, posing a hazard to coastal infrastructure and buildings. The Arctic Ocean of Canada is expected to be ice-free for a long time.

Changes in the Canadian climate during the next 15 to 25 years are well-known and will be mostly driven by emissions emitted over the last century, as well as other decisions made by governments, businesses, and individuals.Longer-term climate change, on the other hand, is dependent on emissions that occur over the next 50 years and beyond.

reference- climate atlas