Demonstrations Saturday!

A reminder for all us paddlers -- make Saturday morning's time on the water really quick, because November 16 is a day of peaceful demonstrations across the country! It's time to assemble at public gatherings and state our interest in taking care of this beautiful country and its natural resources.

In Victoria, the local demonstration takes place at 1:00 pm at Clover Point, seen above in a stunning photo from a local photography company. (Check here to see where your local gathering takes place, or here to read about the history of Clover Point.) If there's no big demonstration planned for your community, that's your opportunity to be the small demonstration that does take place.

Speak out in favour of maintaining pipelines and cleaning up after the spills that are taking place. Speak out for no new pipelines and tankers because we humans are still not managing the existing ones responsibly. And most specifically, speak out to our elected representatives to make careful decisions that reflect our concerns for the environment, resource management, and climate change! Here's the open letter to Premier Christy Clark written by MLA Andrew Weaver, who is an oceanographer. Weaver's Facebook page can be found here. It didn't escape our notice that during two weeks while many Canadians found their attention absorbed by Senate controversies and Toronto's mayor, the premiers of British Columbia and Alberta discussed their pipeline plans.

Need to think more about pipelines and oil tankers? MLA Andrew Weaver writes about these matters as an ocean scientist. Meanwhile, check out these maps from the Wilderness Committee's website. Click on this link to find their website of pipeline route maps which you can see in an interactive format that lets you zoom in to see satellite images. These are our home waters, where we paddle. These are the waters we drink. These are the rivers we cross to go to work, or our camping places, or to see family.

If you need to know more about the Tar Sands development in Alberta, click here to read about the Beaver Lake Cree and how First Nations communities are being affected, or check out their page on Facebook. Where are you paddling next summer? How will that place be affected?

Let's all be good citizens, leading by our good example. I know one person who plans to hold a "teach-in" at her local demonstration. Two other friends are taking the bus to the demonstration so as not to fill up one of the few parking places. I'm bringing some trash bags to pick up litter on the shore at Clover Point.

USA's EPA report on the Salish Sea

The Salish Sea is our home waters here at Kayak Yak. That's the inland waterway newly re-named to acknowledge the Salish First Nations people; previously, maps named parts of the Salish Sea according to various protocols. It's good to have a collective name that acknowledges how Georgia Strait, Desolation Sound, Puget Sound, the harbours of major cities, and the watersheds of many islands and the mainland are all connected and affected by common factors.

Western Washington University's map is on the EPA website

As a kayaker, it's tremendous to realize that we are living in what is one of the finest places in the world for cold-water sea kayaking. Apparently tropical sea kayaking is pretty darned nice too, but hey, I still haven't paddled every launch site near home yet, so I'm not jonesing for warm water! And we've got some terrific lakes to paddle as well, and river kayakers have good times in our area.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the USA has some comments to make in their recent Health of the Salish Sea Ecosystem Report. Check out their website and see what key indicators they've been studying to monitor changes both good and bad in this part of the world. I'm pleased to see that they're acknowledging both the needs of humans and of wildlife!

So far, they've found good news about air quality, freshwater quality, and toxic chemicals in the food web. But there is not good news about stream flow, and marine species at risk, and other key indicators. The executive summary of the EPA report sums up all their findings in plain language -- read it here.

The bottom line: appreciate where we are, and take good care of it.

Vote For The Coastal Environment

Yes, there's an election called for May 14, here in British Columbia. No, that's not a kayaking topic, not at first glance. But I'm hoping we'll all go into this election ready to vote not only as citizens, but as small boat people.
I hope that we'll all make sure that whoever we vote for as a local candidate, whichever party they represent, all of the people we want to represent us will also represent our concerns for the natural world where we live. Sustainable use of our resources supports jobs and people as well as the environment! The Department of Fisheries and Oceans cannot do good work without good directions from provincial and federal authorities.
Check out Alexandra Morton's blog here to see her concerns for salmon preservation. There must be other websites and blogs that you can recommend to help us all be informed about our candidates and our parties, and our local concerns. I also like to go to Anne Hansen's blog, not only for her comments but for her artwork -- check it out and scroll down to see oystercatchers & other charming coastal creatures!

Good to the Last Drop

It's hard to imagine as we paddle huge oceans or lakes that there really isn't a whole lot of water in the world. In fact, this tiny sphere represents all the world's water.
The sphere is about 1400km in diameter, including oceans, groundwater and water vapour.
That may seem like a lot, but very little of it is freshwater, only about 4%, and most of that is locked up in glaciers and polar ice caps.
The earth may look like a blue marble from space, but in actuality there's precious little blue on it. And we better take care of it.

Into The Not-So-Deep Past

After the day I spent touring the Greater Victoria region with a geologist, I staggered around for many days seeing my familiar surroundings with new eyes. The first thing I wrote about this experience was the Into The Deep Past post on the Kayak Yak blog.
I should also write about the next day as well, when I went wandering into the past, but not so ancient. It was still pretty long ago by modern standards. Let me digress a little. We modern Canadians tend to think of things a thousand years old as pretty darned old. But around this part of the Island and the Salish Sea, there are traces of humans five thousand and possibly ten thousand years old. Or more. I don't know how to see the past as clearly as I'd sometimes like to do.
People in Europe can go look at the Parthenon in Greece, and see marble carvings etching in modern air pollution, or walk along Roman roads that were built to last. Two thousand years seems like a long time in Europe, with artifacts to look at all along the way. The Great Pyramids in Egypt are older, and we've still got the invoices for beer and onions for the workers, kicking around in museums somewhere. But the history books don't always tell the whole story -- like the olive tree on the hill next to the Parthenon that tradition holds was a gift from Athena herself. Or the marching songs that let Roman soldiers keep time with a 30-inch stride that added up to exactly a mile marched at the end of the right number of verses and choruses.
At least local history books about Victoria tell that the main wandering roads through Victoria follow old footpaths from before the Hudson's Bay Company built a fort here. Fort Road leads out from downtown, where the company built a fort on the Inner Harbour. Much older is Cedar Hill Road, which leads from Cordova Bay Beach south along a ridge that's now called Cedar Hill. Originally the Hill of Cedars was the bedrock hill re-named Mount Douglas for the company's chief factor and later the governor of the British colony. Mount Douglas is a good landmark around here. It's visible from most of the city, and the peninsula. When we're out on the water, the shape of Mount Doug tells us where we are along the shoreline.
When I follow Cedar Hill Road, it's easy to tell that it's been a road for a long time, long before the colony settlers started using it a hundred and fifty years ago. I don't need the historical records to tell me this. My feet tell me this as I walk along, or ride my bike. The road follows the creek up from the Cordova Bay shoreline, and then heads south, always staying out of the low valleys where streams would make the going muddy, and usually paralleling the high ground on a more level track than the highest points of the ridge. Instead of a surveyor laying out a road with a level and scopes, this route was laid by the time and motion analysis of many feet taking a sensible path. Practical knowledge can be science, too.
The old road crosses another old road, called (sensibly enough) Cedar Hill Cross Road. This pair of names drives visitors batty as they try to figure out where they're going, along roads that veer to take a slope at a more convenient angle. These roads aren't laid out on a grid like downtown. These roads are going someplace important to the people who made the original footpaths.
I could tell that these places are important, not only because local history books tell me so, but because of what can be seen along the way. There are old fields and Garry oak meadows that still bloom with camas flowers, a crop grown by the First Nations peoples. There's Spring Ridge, where good water welled up year-round. And at the end points, there were villages. At one end of the cross road was where we've built Craigflower Bridge, at the other the cross road split. One path led along the modern Beach Drive to villages where the Royal Victoria Yacht Club is now on Cadboro Bay, and Willows Beach on Oak Bay, the other led to what's now Gyro Park Beach on Cadboro Bay.
Okay, so that was a longer digression than expected for a blog post about kayaking. But really, that set of paths took me right back to my home waters in Cadboro Bay. I've taken my kayak out on the bay hundreds of times, at all levels of tide. And this day I started writing about, the day after my tour with the geologist, I set out to do an ordinary paddle out to Flower Island and back.
But I was still seeing the past all around me, manifest in the present tense. When you're out in a kayak or other small boat, you get used to being aware of the weather around you. But now I was sensitized to seeing the past. I saw the slight rise at the shoreline above the beach by the east end of the park, where the land rises for less than two metres. It's a midden, where there was a village. I saw the flat sand exposed by low tide, where clams blow little holes up, fewer now than when I was a child, but there must have been more, enough to harvest, a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, a thousand years ago... And when I pushed off, my little boat was floating into the places where it showed me what this shoreline was like a long time ago in human terms.
It's hard to keep track of all the local names for islands and points and bays around here. There's a different name for most places in each of the local First Nations languages. Some of these places were used by different groups at different times, or at different times of year. My paddling group is learning names from charts. We also make our own names for the little rock garden, the big rock garden along the Uplands shore, the channel that someone has blocked by chaining a steel float, and where we see animals.
I'm not sure how long ago the sea level was at the point that we see nowadays as our zero tide. Only on the lowest tides at the winter and summer solstices each year does the tide get that low nowadays. But during the latest Ice Age the water level was lower still. I paddled along the shoreline where the little rock garden would have been a lumpy point of land sticking out from the rocky shore, as it is during low tide.
I looked across to the other shore that rises above the west end of the beach, and saw that there had been a slide or a slump of part of the bluff. Until then, I had been assuming that most of that bluff was made of the same rock as this side of the bay. But no, the slide showed sand. It made sense after a moment's thought. There are sandy bluffs miles up the peninsula, up near Island View Beach, and on James Island and Sidney Island. But I didn't know this bluff was made of sand. I'd never tried to climb it, so I hadn't learned what was hidden under the greenery covering the steep slope. There's plenty of greenery trailing over the rocks on the rocky side, too. It was the sand showing against the greenery that let me see from across the bay that there had been a landslide. The new edge of the bluff looked rather too close for comfort to the patio of one of the fine houses along the top of the bluff. Suddenly, I felt even less craving for a waterfront house than ever before.
And now I understood why Cadboro Bay is so shallow under that bluff when it's deeper along the east shore -- under the bluff here is like the shallows south of the bluff at the end of James Island. The sand slumps. It's been slumping since the glaciers retreated at the end of the latest ice age. When I paddle over that shallow, sandy-mud bottom, I'm paddling over ten thousand years of sand slumping into a basin scoured between the bedrock of the east shore and the bedrock of the Uplands shore along the west and south. The tides pull the sand out and spread it along the beach between the arms of the bay. There's been a sandy beach here for ten thousand years.
That's only a heartbeat in the geological time that Dr Yorath the geologist showed me how to see. But it's all the time that the Salish-speaking people have lived at this end of Vancouver Island.
I paddled a little further along, to one of the many little islands in the bay that are part of the Ecological Reserve. Don't go ashore on those islands -- they're bird sanctuaries! There are other reasons not to go ashore there, as well. These were important places for First Nations people, places of transition. There are stories shared in books and on websites about how there were stones at special places, stones regarded as ancestral guardians showing good ways to travel or where to look for food. There are similar stories from Europe about the standing stones in fields and hills. I looked at one of the little islets in the bay, with a stone on it. The first time I saw it, I knew that this stone was clearly a glacial erratic left behind by the ice. But this time, when I turned away from the little island, I looked across the bay and could see the two old village sites. The modern houses faded to my new way of seeing -- I could see that this was a good spot to look over on both villages, from what would have been a little point or peninsula, not an island.
This stone makes a good memory stone.
I drifted on for a while, paddling slowly. Flower Island was living up to its name, all a-bloom with blue camas flowers. This island was someone's place to gather camas bulbs for special feasts, right up till a hundred years ago or so. This basalt rock would have been connected to the point ten thousand years ago. The narrow channel that separates Flower is also a shallow one. I took my boat around Flower to Evans Rock, where there's another channel, shallow at low tide. Drifting along, I could see the bottom is white there, not the white of barnacles so much as the white of a shell beach. How long ago was this channel a beach for harvesting oysters and clams? A thousand years, five thousand years ago? Only at a zero tide is the water shallow enough for me to see the bottom and guess at the work of hands opening shells, gathering seafood for all those years, all those years ago.
I remember that one time I was talking with my mother about Discovery Island and the Chathams, near Victoria off Oak Bay and Ten Mile Point. She hadn't known that much of those islands are an Indian Reserve. She wondered why the local First Nations people hadn't developed that area. After all, Victoria had plenty of houses and businesses, why not there too? I tried to suggest that maybe the people who had been using those little islands for thousands of years had developed them just exactly the way that they found them most useful.

Into The Deep Past

This year, I missed the first day of Paddlefest in Ladysmith, BC on a Saturday, May 14. After five years, it was a disappointment not to be there to see all the boats lined up along the shore, and talk with other kayakers. But I missed the first day of the kayaking festival for something really good instead -- something my paddling group has been looking for since we first paddled off Sidney, BC.
It was all for rocks.

One look shows how different the rocks are from one headland and island to another around Vancouver Island. There's something important to learn about geology here on the Saanich Peninsula. Look at some of our kayaking group's photos from Robert's Bay and Coal Island and the Little Group! But how to learn the local rocks? Hands-on is the best way to learn in the physical sciences. We needed a tour with a geologist. And I got one on that Saturday in May.

The Capital Regional District of greater Victoria set up the tour, finding a geologist from the Pacific Geoscience Centre on Patricia Bay near the airport. Dr Chris Yorath took two dozen of us volunteer naturalists off on a wild tour of several sites, from Island View Beach and Parker Park to Cattle Point, Finlayson Point, Goldstream River, Esquimalt Lagoon and then to Tower Point at Witty's Lagoon.

Most of these places I've been to lots of times as a child and an adult. Tower Point is a park that previously I've only seen from my kayak, when we're rounding Albert Head and going to Witty's Lagoon. You can see our blog posts on the website Kayak Yak about that area here. Parker Park is a beach access that I hadn't used before, but around Victoria there are beach accesses everywhere. The municipality of Saanich had to explain to a developer that property fronting onto Portage Inlet couldn't just cut off public access to the beach. I love it that the government is on our side on the issue of beach access!

Walking along the shoreline at place after place, Yorath spoke about the ancient origins of several kinds of rock in this part of the world. As the continent of North America drifted westward for millions of years, it ran into island chains (something like Hawaii today) that piled up along the West Coast. All of British Columbia is made up of these wrinkled ridges of rock, previously separate but now smushed together, called terrenes. Several of these terrenes can be found packed together here at the south end of Vancouver Island. Even easier to see were the most recent geological changes, caused by the glaciers of the most recent Ice Age. Yorath showed us basalt pillows that originated in undersea volcanoes a hundred million years ago, and that have been carved away by glaciers. The rock underfoot has veins of quartz, tilted layers of shale, sandstone, sandy bluffs, and conglomerate.

Yorath is exactly the geologist you want for a tour like this! He literally wrote the book on local geology -- Geology of Southern Vancouver Island, revised edition. While we were on the beach at Parker Park in Cordova Bay, we ran into students from Royal Roads University who carried copies of the book. Shyly, they asked for his autograph.

Yorath knows his earth science, and he has been walking over these local sites for decades. The man showed us his favourite basalt pillow. Any scientist with a favourite example of a rock formation is my kinda scholar! He spoke of how the scientists who studied mid-oceanic volcanic ridges were working locally, confirming not only the theory of continental drift but the reversals of the Earth's magnetic field. The places we walked over and examined were the ordinary parks we naturalists had visited for years, but with Yorath's commentary we understood them in new ways.

The rocks around us looked so permanent, but he showed us that we could see the changes and how one layer of rock overlay another. Fifty million year old rock actually looked newer than rock a hundred million years old. We could see the weathering and cracking in some places, and the big gouges from glaciers in others.

Yorath told us that the edge of the North American continent is colliding with and riding up over the Pacific Plate under the Pacific Ocean. Those mountains we could see across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Olympic Mountains in Washington State, were being forced higher and higher at an inch or a couple of centimetres a year. Wind and rain and gravity was wearing down those mountains too, at about the same rate, so the peaks wouldn't get much higher than they were now. John took this photo showing the Olympic Mountains.

We could see why, for example, the Gulf Islands are mostly made of harder shale, where the softer sandstone has been worn away by water and glaciers. John took this photo showing layers of shale along the west shore of Thetis Island. And now I understand why our beaches are a muddle of many kinds of stone -- it's because the glaciers scraped across this whole area time and again. Bits of stone and sand clung to the bottom of the moving ice and were carried for a short way or for many miles from one terrene to another before being left behind as the ice melted. During the latest Ice Age, sea level had been over a hundred feet lower than it is now. Ten thousand years after the great glaciers melted, the land here is still rebounding, springing up now that the great weight of ice is gone.

During Yorath's career, the rocks hadn't changed except for the most minimal of weathering, but the understanding of geology had changed profoundly. It made me dizzy, to see these stones the way he spoke about them. Time was suddenly something to think about differently than the speed of my own movements. Hot lava emerged from underwater volcanoes, cooling quickly to glass on the outside curves of slowly hardening billows and pillows. Grit and organic debris settled down so thickly and for so long that it compacted into rock under its own weight and under new lava. Mountains split and piled up like the snow I plowed from my driveway. Smooth, flat shale and slate bent like taffy, pushed by a continent colliding with volcanoes sprung from an ocean floor. There's a big bend in the layered rock visible on a cliff above Horne Lake, up-Island, and I could see it twisting in my mind's eye, an inch a year. Rigid bedrock was springing up underfoot as the weight of the glaciers melted away ten thousand years ago. The slump at the south end of James Island, making a sandy bluff and shallows, fluttered like my hair in the offshore breeze. The ocean water around our islands was as transparent as the air to my new vision.

I felt like a mayfly, or a daylily, fluttering in my short, twittering life while glaciers ran like the rivers where I paddle my kayak and the limestone and sandstone silted up and hardened like the mud on my kayak and my shoes. It was humbling.

You can understand that I kind of staggered around for the next couple of days. I was observing things! I was walking into the deep past, and watching how rock hardened and layered and bent. It all felt as familiar as cooking jam and watching it set, or stretching taffy, or baking an impossible pie that settles out its own crust and topping. It especially felt like shovelling snow off the frozen driveway -- the weight and the pressure and the texture changes. And of course, the rocks were familiar... they were the same ones I'd clambered over since I was a child.

Naturalist's Talks in Victoria

The Victoria Natural History Society has three events planned for the next week; at least two of these events are likely to bring out a few local kayakers who take an interest in the study of local water conditions and protected areas. We don’t paddle only in swimming pools, after all, but out in the wide world with a host of plants and animals around us! Here’s the notice of their events, from the Saanich News:

March 15 – Victoria Natural History Society presentation,
Protected areas, climate change and the path forward.
7:30 pm at Swan Lake Nature House. Free; all welcome.

March 23 – Victoria Natural History Society presentation,
Cache Only – The Feeding Habits and Ecology of the Gray Jay, Canada’s Bird for All Seasons,
7:30 pm, room 159 of the Fraser Building, UVic. Free; all welcome.

March 28 – Victoria Natural History Society presentation,
UVic’s Marine Protected Area Research Group: From Whale Sharks To Clam Gardens, What Are They Doing?
7:30 pm, room 159 of the Fraser Building, UVic. Free; all welcome.

For more information on any Victoria Natural History Society events, go to their website at http://www.naturevictoria.ca/

Logging to Begin Next Year on Flores Island? WTF??

Spotted this post today over at Active Sea Kayaking concerning the jewel of the old-growth forest of Clayoquot Sound. Nick at Active Sea Kayaking rightly says of Flores Island,  "If you are a paddler on Vancouver Island and you have not been there yet, trust me you will. And that day will be one of the most beautiful of your life…. "
But according to the Friends of Clayquot Sound, logging companies are doing some prep work in advance of possible logging operations in the pristine forests of Flores Island beginning next year. According to their website:

"One or more intact (unlogged) old-growth valleys on Flores Island are being surveyed, and road-building and logging could begin early next year. Flores is Clayoquot Sound's largest island and is 96% intact.
"This is a hugely significant development. For the first time Iisaak Forest Resources is deliberately breaking its 1999 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with a coalition of conservation groups. The MOU states that the unlogged watersheds of Clayoquot Sound, including Flores Island, would be off limits to logging. At the time, the MOU was billed as a peace treaty in the "war in the woods" — a peace that has held for 11 years.
"With the world climate and biodiversity crises, every untouched valley is increasingly precious. Write or email the minister now and ask that no road or cut permits be issued for any intact areas in Clayoquot Sound's globally rare, ancient temperate rainforest."

Want to take some action to help stop this? Sign an online petition, or send an email to the provincial and federal ministers responsible.

Tree Appreciation Day Coming Up

Dear Kayak Yak:
I feel guilty for my carbon footprint. Kayaking puts me in touch with nature, but it's hard to get my boat to water without using a car. I tried growing a tree to offset my carbon footprint, but the tree isn't getting very big in its pot on my balcony. What can I do?
Tree Wannabe

Dear Tree Wannabe:
There are several alternatives that can help you.
One alternative to using a car is using a set of wheels and taking your kayak for a walk. Works for us at a couple of our usual launch places! Not a bad idea if the walk is through a quiet neighbourhood.
Another alternative is keeping your kayak (or one of your kayaks if you are lucky enough to have more than one) at or near the launch place. Works for me!
Want to plant a tree but don't have any room in your yard for it -- or even a yard? Come on out to Tree Appreciation Day and help Saanich Municipality plant native trees and shrubs in two parks.
One park is Cuthbert Holmes Park, where Colquitz Creek wanders before draining into Portage Inlet. If you look back through the blog, you'll see we have paddled right under the bridge where volunteers will be gathering, and right past one of the two areas to be restored in that park. The other park is Mount Douglas Park, and we've paddled along that park's open shoreline in Cordova Bay a couple of times -- once when Alison and I were on our way to Island View Beach. Both of the parks for planting are accessible by a short walk from a bus, and have ample parking.

Here's the notice that the municipality of Saanich posted on its website at http://www.saanich.ca/parkrec/parks/info/whatsnew.html Take a look:
Tree Appreciation DayThe 17th annual Tree Appreciation Day will be November 7, 2010 from 10:00 am - 1:00 pm.
At Cuthbert Holmes Park (CHP), Saanich is partnering with the Gorge Tillicum Community Association (GTCA) and the Friends of Cuthbert Holmes Park to plant native trees and shrubs. The Friends of CHP along with GTCA in partnership with Saanich Parks have been actively removing invasive species within CHP over the past few years. These native trees and shrubs will help restore areas where the invasive species has been removed. We invite community and school groups to participate in this event. Groups will gather at the staging area as indicated in the attached map. Parking is available in Tillicum Mall by Silver City, at the rear of Pearkes Arena, and in the parking lot off admirals Road. And signs will direct you to the staging area.
Marian McCoy, Natural Areas Technician for Saanich Parks, along with members of the Friends of Cuthbert Holmes Park, invite you to participate in a interpretive walk through the restoration area.
At Mount Douglas Park, Saanich is partnering with the Friends of Mount Douglas Park (FOMD) to plant native trees along sections off the Whittaker, Norn and Irvine trails. Groups will gather in the parking lot at the base of Churchill Drive.
We will also be hosting a native tree and shrub planting event in Mount Douglas Park along the banks of Douglas Creek. Groups for this planting will gather in the main parking lot off Mount Douglas Parkway by the washroom building.
Please contact Saanich Parks if you have any questions regarding Tree Appreciation Events or visit http://www.saanich.ca/resident/parks for updates on Tree Appreciation Day.
Volunteers are asked to dress appropriately for any weather event as Tree Appreciation Day will proceed regardless of the weather.
A limited amount of shovels will be provided, volunteers are asked to bring along their own planting tools if possible.
Refreshments and light snacks will be provided.

West Coast Waves Getting Taller

According to this story (and picture) from the Victoria Times-Colonist, scientists from Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries using data from buoys that have been in place off the coast of Oregon since the 1970s have found that coastal wave heights are increasing at a rate of about 2.5cm a year, and storm waves by about 10cm a year. And it seems that the largest waves are showing the biggest increase; the highest waves might now reach 15 metres compared to 10 metres in 1996.
Obviously this news affects kayakers, but it also has has significant implications on design work of seawalls, breakwaters and jetties, and for homeowners along the coast.
But what about the west coast of Vancouver Island? According to the story:

Buoys off the coast of Vancouver Island have not collected such long-term data, but B.C. information was used in the study and scientists at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney also have concluded that waves are getting bigger.
Physical oceanographer Steve Mihaly said that in the northeast Pacific Ocean, wave size increases with latitude.
“The trend to slightly larger waves is stronger as you go north,” he said.
The big question, with no definitive answer, is why the waves are growing.
“While these increases are most likely due to the Earth’s changing climate, uncertainty remains as to whether they are the product of human-induced greenhouse warming or represent variations related to natural, multidecadal climate cycles,” the study says.
“And, as we go into the future and sea-level rise accelerates, this part of the country gets a double whammy,” said Peter Ruggiero, assistant professor in the university’s department of geosciences and one of the study’s authors.

Of course the good news is better kayak surfing. The bad news is my house on the hill may become beach front property in a couple of decades.

Copenhagen climate change conference: 'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.
Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.
Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.
The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.
Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.
But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."
At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.
Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.
Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.
Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.
The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.
Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.
But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.
Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.
Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".
It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.
The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.
This editorial will be published tomorrow by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.

This editorial is free to reproduce under Creative Commons

'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation' by The Guardian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at guardian.co.uk.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/02/guardian-environment-team
(please note this Creative Commons license is valid until 18 December 2009)

Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change

Just in time for Blog Action Day 2009 comes this piece of news: Canada's rivers are at risk due to climate change and growing demand for water.
Canada is blessed with a huge supply of fresh water but this WWF-Canada report concludes that "...even seemingly remote northern waters like the Mackenzie are at risk. As temperatures rise, and industrial water withdrawals and interest in hydropower increase, we must start planning now to protect river flows to ensure water security for the communities and economies that depend on them." We are sowing what we have reaped, of course. Years of criminal inaction by our government has resulted in Canada being dead last in the world at meeting its paltry Kyoto commitments.
From the seat of my kayak I can offer anecdotal evidence that the climate is changing. Spring and Autumn used to be full-fledged seasons, now they are short three-week transition periods between Summer and Winter. Winters seem to be milder, although some may argue that as they recall last December's month-long barrage of below zero temperatures and snow. But that was the first significant snowfall in the region in 12 years. In the 1970s and early 1980s, I remember that we would get at least one or two good snowfalls every winter; now, we don't get snow at all. Summers are warmer and dryer, and I'm not the only one who thinks so.
Readers of this blog will know that my old van finally died a few weeks ago. I'm struggling with the decision of what to replace it with, or to even replace it at all. I don't want to be limited to one put-in, namely The Gorge at the bottom of my street, but traveling the island with our big kayaks requires a vehicle of some heft. Not an SUV necessarily, but something more than the fuel efficient environmentally friendly car that I should be aspiring to. I find myself feeling tremendously guilty when I look at cross-overs or mini-vans. I want to Do The Right Thing, but I don't want to sacrifice My Lifestyle to do it. I've already decided to never fly again, the carbon footprint from a jet plane is just too huge, yet I can't help but feel jealous when co-workers tell me stories of the week they've just spent in New York or of their Mexican vacation even though I know of the environmental damage wrought by their flight, and that they are either oblivious to it or just don't care.
But this is just the beginning of this kind of hard choice that we all are going to have to make if we are to survive. As Churchill said, we are entering a period of consequences.
I've been hearing about the so-called "greenhouse effect" since I was a child in the 1960s. Climate change is not a new issue, but has been dismissed as something future generations will have to deal with and solve, but the effects of climate change are with us today. The future is now. The time to act was 20 years ago.
We and our leaders have ignored it at our peril.

We All Live on the Greenland Ice Sheet Now

By way of serendipitous happenstance, a couple of separate but related news nuggets jumped out at me as I surfed the net today. First, Bernie posted some links over at one of our other blogs (The Central Ganglion) on some climate change matters, particularly on the 10:10 Climate Change campaign, an effort to get everyone to reduce their carbons emissions by 10% in 2010. (More info here, and George Monbiot writes about it here.)
But Bernie also noted that the Greenland ice sheets are melting faster than most predictions. 10% of the world's fresh water is tied up in the Greenland ice sheets and that fresh water is moving into the Atlantic Ocean a lot faster than anyone has imagined. And that's bad news for the future.
According to an article in the Guardian, "Helheim, an enormous tower of ice that calves into Sermilik Fjord, used to move at 7km (4.4 miles) a year. In 2005, in less than a year, it speeded up to nearly 12km a year." Another glacier, Kangerdlugssuaq, is now moving 24mm (about an inch) every minute, making its movement visible to the naked eye. Where the glaciers meet the sea, the glacial calving events are now big enough to generate seismic events transmitted through the earth, and these events actually help speed up the glaciers. That's a feedback loop few people had ever thought of.
And while comptemplating that worrisome news, I found this story by Olaf Malver at The Adventure Corner reporting on his just completed kayaking trip to eastern Greenland. He describes passing 12 mile-long tabular icebergs the likes of which his 55 year-old Inuit guide has never seen before. These icebergs can only make their way south because so much of the Arctic Ocean has opened up during the summer. Olaf, who has camped along eastern Greenland for fifteen years, also noted that many of the fresh water pools at his favourite campsites have dried up, and he also comments on receding glaciers.
As the author of the Guardian article noted, "We all live on the Greenland ice sheet now. Its fate is our fate."

This Is Really Cool

Earth Pub, the Discovery Channel's Global Science Blog, has a great little story by Kieran Mulvaney about a recent expedition to the Petermann Glacier in Greenland. Scientists, worried that the glacier might be on the verge of breaking up, wanted to deploy a special ice-penetrating radar to examine the glacier's interior.
The scientists brought along everything they could think of to drag the radar across the ice -- including snowmobiles and kites -- however the ice was in much worse shape than they'd imagined. Pitted and worn, the melting ice had formed melt lakes and whirlpools, and large cracks had filled with water to form long rivers of crystal-clear ice water.
So then the kayaks came out. Stringing out the radar between them, three kayaks made a 25km trek down the glacier gathering data, the initial results of which seem to indicate that the ice is thinner than the scientists were expecting.
And that's bad news. But if you're going to get bad news, you might as well do something fun to get it.

Hundreds Attend Global Warming Protest

Sno' Canada!

You'll excuse me if I bitch about the weather for a moment, but I'm Canadian -- bitching about the weather is what we do.
Normally, December is the month we kayak the least, what with the holidays, and winter storms and all that. Still, we often can get out at least once or twice. But for some of us this December is looking like a wash-out. Or should I say white-out.

No-one from our group went paddling again this Sunday (not unless Paula spotted another derelict kayak adrift on the bay) as for the fifth time in a week we were dumped on by snow. (The latest big dump started as soon as I finished shoveling my walk from the last big dump. Go figure.) We aren't alone; there's three major storms dumping snow across the 7000 km wide breadth of the country. Starting at 4:00 PM Saturday afternoon, Victoria received its fourth largest snowfall in a 24 period since they started keeping records. 31cm fell, and a lot more came down Sunday night on top of that. This is my street at 6:00 this morning.

The problem with the snow is that the Victoria area only gets any sort of measurable snowfall only every couple of years and has limited snow removal capabilities. Rumor has it that the city's snowplow has been slowed down because the hamster got too cold. (Usually after a snowfall here, my lawn resembles my scalp: a few small tufts poking through a dusting of flakes. But I digress.)

So while Paula can kayak in snowy weather because she lives on the beach (not literally, of course), the snow makes the side roads treacherous and road access to beach area can be problematic at best for the rest if us.

But the snow isn't the only issue. Over the weekend we had 35 knot winds which means blowing snow and nasty wind chills. We're well into our second week of this deep freeze and strong cold winds, which has resulted in near record low temperatures. It's probably been 20 years since we've had such a prolonged and deep cold snap. And winter only officially started yesterday!

Are we done yet? No, not by a long shot. More snow on Tuesday is expected, and the outlook for Christmas is iffy at best. In fact, Environment Canada is predicting that it might be the first country-wide white Christmas in Canada since 1971.

It looks a little better after Christmas, at least temperature-wise, but there's a lot of rain and snow still expected. But there's time to possibly get a quick paddle in before the clock runs out on this month.

The Weather Sucks - Continuum

Having set some dubious weather records this year (including the first July ever with seven straight days of rain, and the hottest day ever recorded here -- also in July) Victoria set another one yesterday.
It was the wettest day ever in Victoria -- a one-day rainfall record of 80.6 mm.

For The Kayaking Family that Wants to Leave Behind a Big Footprint...

It's Official: The Weather Sucks - Addendum

As noted in a previous blog entry, the weather sucks.
After our record-setting all-time warm day on July 11 (36.3 Celius), yesterday we set another dubious record. We had some rain yesterday. Not much rain, but enough to make it the first July ever when Victoria has recorded rain for seven straight days.

Record heat!

According to the Environment Canada website, yesterday's temperature topped out at 36.3°C at the airport. That's just shy of normal body temperature. It was certainly a record for the day, and, based on a Google search, it was an all-time record, the previous record being 35.3°C (96°F) on July 23, 2004. Fool that I was, I did not go kayaking. I will know next time. The alternative is developing a taste for recreational shopping: some of the malls are air-conditioned.