Climate Change is a Lot Like Prize Fighting



Most boxers can take a punch. The champions can take a lot of punches and keep fighting to the end.

The climate emergency is not for rookies. Today, the punches come in bunches.

This year, British Columbia has dealt with killer heatwaves, wildfires and, now, heavy flooding.  Last Wednesday an atmospheric river dropped massive amounts of rain that swelled gorges and waterways, knocking out all four mountain highways and both rail lines, flooding the lowlands of the Fraser Valley.

The damage was extensive. Some of it won't be repaired until 2022, perhaps into 2023. We should have a better idea once we see how much additional damage is inflicted by the coming severe rain events.

There are three more of these atmospheric rivers to contend with. One is overhead right now. A big one is due Saturday and the biggest of them all may hit on Tuesday.  After Tuesday, who knows?

Imagine a six pack of "once a century" storms showing up in the span of less than two weeks.  

This caught the provincial government flat-footed. It caught the federal government unprepared. All the warnings were ignored. There is no playbook for fixing this. We're winging it from here on in.

At Canada's largest sea port, the nation's doorway to Asia Pacific, the port authority is struggling to cope with the global supply chain chaos and, now, the damage to the province's highway and rail networks.  Grain needs to come from the west, goods need to be shipped east.  Port authority CEO, Robin Silvester, says "the crisis is here."



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