KNOX — Disappearing glaciers a climate sign from above

COLUMN — When Mayor Phil Kent waved to the Duncan Days parade crowd on the weekend, it was from a dust-caked convertible covered in signs reading “Don’t Wash Me” and “Save Water.”

Also in the parade were costumed superheroes Water Woman and Wilma the Watershed Warrior, along with the Cowichan Watershed Board’s Conservation Cruiser.

Meanwhile, across the moat, neighbours are using their camera phones to narc out and drought-shame the #grassholes who maintain green lawns in defiance of Metro Vancouver’s sprinkling ban.

Across the other moat, Juan de Fuca Strait, it was reported this week that a lack of water might force Port Townsend’s paper mill, the biggest private employer in Jefferson County, to shut down.

In every case, it’s no secret where part of the problem lies: high in the mountains. We’re not just suffering through a lack of rain these days. Much of the coast is also feeling the lack of the snowpack that it usually relies on to top up the water supply in the dry months. Stand on Victoria’s waterfront and stare across at the Olympic Mountains, and the absence of the familiar white peaks is disconcerting.

The Olympics experience also applies to the mountains of Vancouver Island. With temperatures three degrees above normal last winter, all our precipitation fell as rain, not snow, leaving nothing in the high-altitude savings account for the lean times. That’s fine for the capital region, where the Sooke Lake reservoir relies on rainfall alone, but tough for the likes of Cowichan Lake, normally augmented by snowmelt through the summer.

The question is, is this the new normal? Is this what summer looks like from now on?

Dunno. The current conditions are consistent with climate-change projections, but scientists are generally loathe to declare it to be at the root of any single event.

Based on what’s happening high above us, the signs aren’t promising, though. In April, the journal Nature Geoscience published a paper that predicted the volume of Western Canada’s glaciers will shrink by 70 per cent by the turn of the century, relative to 2005. The greatest loss will occur between 2020 and 2040.

Included in the study were the few glaciers on Vancouver Island — 60-odd of them, averaging a third of a square kilometre in size. They already shrank by 20 per cent between 1985 and 2005, says Brian Menounos, a professor of Earth sciences at the University of Northern B.C. and one of the authors of the paper.

“I would be surprised to see glaciers on Vancouver Island past 2050,” he said Wednesday.

In fact, he said, change could come faster than that if the current trend persists. This has been a “bad” year for glaciers, the low snowpack combining with high temperatures to quickly rob them of mass in this summer’s melting season. “In some cases, we’re almost a month ahead of schedule.”

Unlike snowpack, glaciers don’t provide much of Vancouver Island’s drinking water (though the large Comox Glacier, highly visible southwest of Courtenay, does feed Comox Lake). They do, however, give an indication of what is going on high above us.

Elsewhere in the world, their importance is more obvious. When we read of glaciers and climate change, it’s often in relation to the big ones receding in Alaska and Greenland. “They can change global sea levels,” Menounos said.

But don’t ignore glaciers’ impact in B.C., where they can be critical to both fish habitat — cooling streams enough to allow some species to survive — and the generation of hydro-electric power. In the late summer, by which time the snowpack has usually melted, glacier water can account for a quarter of the flow in the Canadian portion of the Columbia River.

That will be a problem if the Incredible Shrinking Glaciers projections hold true.

“Once the glacier disappears, you don’t have the same buffering in the late summer against these warm, dry periods,” Menounos said.

Meanwhile, the coast is gasping. The Blob — an area of unusually warm Pacific Ocean surface water stretching up the west coast — continues to create a ridge of high pressure blamed for diverting moisture-bearing storms from the region. With an El Nino strengthening, it could persist.

Parched Islanders are left wondering when it will rain again, and whether this winter will get cold enough for snow to stick to the mountains. Right now, looking up brings us down.

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