Earth's Water Cycle Broken

 

Life on Earth depends on two elements, water and oxygen.

Water is constantly recirculated by the hydrologic cycle. Water goes up into the atmosphere via evaporation and transpiration and it comes back down as precipitation.  When the cycle works well it's wonderful. When the cycle goes haywire it's anything but wonderful.

Today, thanks to global heating, the hydrologic cycle is going haywire and faster than we had ever imagined.

Rising global temperatures have shifted at least twice the amount of freshwater from warm regions towards the Earth’s poles than previously thought as the water cycle intensifies, according to new analysis.

“When we learn about the water cycle, traditionally we think of it as some unchanging process which is constantly filling and refilling our dams, our lakes, and our water sources,” the study’s lead author, Dr Taimoor Sohail of the University of New South Wales, said.

Sohail said the volume of extra freshwater that had already been pushed to the poles as a result of an intensifying water cycle was far greater than previous climate models suggest.

“Those dire predictions that were laid out in the IPCC will potentially be even more intense,” he said.

“We’re seeing higher water cycle intensification than we were expecting, and that means we need to move even more quickly towards a path of net zero emissions.”

We saw the devastating impact of the water cycle shift last November when flooding overwhelmed British Columbia rapidly taking out every major rail line and highway connecting the province to the rest of Canada.

The UK has just been hammered by its third "name" storm in the span of just one month.

We have known for decades that global heating would alter the water cycle, that wet areas would get wetter while dry areas became drier.  We didn't imagine it would happen this quickly with such severity. As with other climate impacts we looked the other way and were caught unprepared.

"We need to move even more quickly towards a path of net zero emissions."  Canada needs billions of dollars of new infrastructure to prepare for these climate impacts. Instead we're pouring federal revenues into a goddamn pipeline.

For years our Liberal government ignored warnings that the TMX line would be a bottomless sinkhole. The prime minister wanted the pipeline and he was going to have it, bugger the costs and consequences.

From the outset independent economist Robyn Allan estimated a cost of 20 billion, perhaps even more. The Trudeau government insisted they could bring it in for 12 billion.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland talked about borrowing more money from public debt markets or the very bank, TD Securities, that originally, in 2018, recommended that Kinder Morgan sell to the Canadian government its 66-year-old pipeline along with engineering plans for an expansion.

Freeland promises that “no more additional public money” will go into the project.

But Allan told The Tyee this week that such a claim is absolute nonsense, because “all borrowing by Crown corporations is ultimately backed by taxpayers.”

The project’s business case has always been dubious. The only reports claiming that a profit could be made selling bitumen to overseas Asian markets were all paid for by Kinder Morgan. Critics have consistently raised doubts about such claims.

The most lucrative market for Canadian bitumen remains U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, which pay a premium for the heavy crude. Last year David Hughes, one of Canada’s foremost energy analysts, calculated that TMX was not needed, given additions to existing North American pipeline systems.

“The federal government, which owns TMX, has claimed higher prices are available in offshore markets that could be accessed by completing the TMX project,” wrote Hughes. “This is clearly not the case, as a detailed analysis of historical prices in Asia and transportation costs has shown. In fact, shippers on TMX stand to lose US$4-6 per barrel compared with U.S. exports on existing pipelines.”

Yet another huge fossil energy subsidy.

The big problem with galloping cost overruns boils down to tolls, says Allan: pipelines typically pay for their capital costs by charging shippers a toll to transport oil through their pipe.

But the contracts with oil products shippers such as Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Suncor and Cenovus stipulate that a large share of the cost overruns can’t be passed on in tolls. They were signed when the pipeline was budgeted at $7.4 billion. Therefore, fully 75 per cent of the cost overruns at that time could not be passed on.

“No one in Ottawa or the tarsands will discuss the toll rates,” said Allan.

She says that taxpayers, not bitumen shippers, are not only liable for the majority of cost overruns now totalling $14 billion but will be subsidizing some of the richest oil companies in Canada with artificially low tolls that won’t reflect the cost of the project.

Adding to the perils and burdens of climate change.

And then there is that small issue of climate change, added Allan.“This project is a global-warming machine by the very fact it proposes to move more than half a million barrels of high-carbon bitumen a day. The very people who had their homes flooded by atmospheric rivers or burned by heat domes are now being asked to pay for this global-warming machine.”