B.C. climate news: Study offers glimpse of climate anxiety in Canada | Tariffs and climate change push coffee prices up | The blob is back in the northern Pacific Ocean
Here’s the latest news concerning climate change and biodiversity loss in B.C. and around the world, from the steps leaders are taking to address the problems, to all the up-to-date science.
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In climate news this week:
• Study offers glimpse of climate anxiety in Canada
• Tariffs and climate change push coffee prices up
• Polluters are starting to heed methane warnings
• The blob is back in the Northern Pacific Ocean: What does that mean for B. C.?
Human activities like burning fossil fuels and farming livestock are the main drivers of climate change, according to the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change. This causes heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere, increasing the planet’s surface temperature.
The panel, which is made up of scientists from around the world, including researchers from B.C., has warned for decades that wildfires and severe weather, such as the province’s deadly heat dome and catastrophic flooding in 2021, would become more frequent and intense because of the climate emergency. It has issued a code red for humanity and warns the window to limit warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial times is closing.
According to NASA climate scientists, human activities have raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50 per cent in less than 200 years, and “there is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.”
As of Sept. 5, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 425.48 parts per million, down slightly from 427.87 ppm last month, according to NOAA data measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory, a global atmosphere monitoring lab in Hawaii. The NOAA notes there has been a steady rise in CO2 from under 320 ppm in 1960.
Climate change quick facts:
• The Earth is now about 1.3 C warmer than it was in the 1800s.
• 2024 was hottest year on record globally, beating the record in 2023.
• The global average temperature in 2023 reached 1.48 C higher than the pre-industrial average, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. In 2024, it breached the 1.5 C threshold at 1.55 C.
• The past 10 years (2015-2024) are the 10 warmest on record.
• Human activities have raised atmospheric concentrations of CO2 by nearly 49 per cent above pre-industrial levels starting in 1850.
• The world is not on track to meet the Paris Agreement target to keep global temperature from exceeding 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, the upper limit to avoid the worst fallout from climate change including sea level rise, and more intense drought, heat waves and wildfires.
• On the current path of carbon dioxide emissions, the temperature could increase by as much 3.6 C this century, according to the IPCC.
• In June 2025, global concentrations of carbon dioxide exceeded 430 parts per million, a record high.
• Emissions must drop 7.6 per cent per year from 2020 to 2030 to keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 C and 2.7 per cent per year to stay below 2 C.
• There is global scientific consensus that the climate is warming and that humans are the cause.
• Scientific information taken from natural sources (such as ice cores, rocks, and tree rings) and from modern equipment (like satellites and instruments) all show the signs of a changing climate.
(Sources for quick facts: United Nations IPCC, World Meteorological Organization, UNEP, NASA, climatedata.ca)
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms the planet, causing climate change. Human activities have raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50% in less than 200 years, according to NASA.
Latest News
Two new studies are helping to shed light on the extent Canadians feel climate change is impacting their mental health.
A national study published today suggests about 2.3 per cent of people in Canada experience climate change anxiety at a level the authors considered “clinically relevant,” causing meaningful distress and disruption in their lives.
The severe manifestation of climate anxiety was more common among people who had directly experienced climate change impacts, women compared to men, those in Northern Canada compared to Southern Canada, younger generations compared to older generations, people in urban centres compared to rural areas, and people with lower incomes. The study published in the academic journal Nature Mental Health also suggests Indigenous people had the highest prevalence of severe climate anxiety of any group, at almost 10 per cent.
The paper suggests that number could reflect the disproportionate climate impacts Indigenous communities face due to wildfires, declining sea ice and warmer winters, as well as the heightened importance of the link between human and planetary health in Indigenous world views.
A second peer-reviewed study, published late last month and authored by a different group of researchers, found 37 per cent of Canadian teens who responded to a survey said they felt climate change was impacting their mental health.
Climate change, driven by planet-warming emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, is having serious impacts on the health of people in Canada, from worsening air quality due to intensifying wildfires to the northward spread of disease-carrying insects who thrive in the milder winters and longer summers.
—The Canadian Press
Pycnopodia sea stars in Burke Channel. B.C. researchers now understand what’s causing billions of sea stars to die from a wasting disease.
A strong marine heat wave, known as a blob, is back in the northern Pacific Ocean, causing record warm ocean temperatures and a potentially wetter-than-normal winter for the Pacific Northwest, say climate scientists.
Berkeley Earth, an independent organization that provides environmental data and peer-reviewed scientific analysis, says northern Pacific temperatures were nearly 2.5 C warmer this August than the pre-industrial average, a significant and likely long-term change.
Temperatures in the northern Pacific are running at all-time records and reaching temperature anomalies that are more typical of land areas than large oceanic basins, according to Berkeley Earth scientists.
The scientists say the warming continues a long-term trend over the last three decades, but that it has accelerated.
Climate change is making these types of marine heat waves worse and more frequent, says Chris Harley, a zoology professor at UBC and expert on how global warming is affecting oceans.
—Tiffany Crawford
This week, prices spiked again in the futures market as stocks of Brazilian beans in the US dwindled to their lowest level since 2020 and Donald Trump threatened tariffs on Colombia, another big exporter.
But the president’s trade war obscures another major factor driving up coffee prices: climate change.
Coffee-producing regions in Brazil have been undergoing an intense drought. Over the past month, parts of the state of Minas Gerais, a major coffee-producing region, have recorded about 70% of the average rainfall for this period. Last week, the area got less than half the historic rainfall average, according to the Bloomberg Brazil Weather Analysis.
“There’s still the climate issue,” said Fernando Maximiliano, coffee market intelligence manager at financial-services network StoneX. “These tariffs, they’re an additional layer, but we can’t ignore the main, structural factor, which is the tighter supply.”
Since August of this year, future prices for arabica, a coffee bean variety mostly grown in Brazil, have climbed almost 40 per cent and are near record levels. Prices for robusta, another variety that’s mostly used for instant coffee, have increased about 37 per cent.
—Bloomberg News
File photo of flares burning off methane and other hydrocarbons at an oil and gas facility in Texas.
More governments and companies are responding to United Nations-issued alerts about methane leaks, though action still remains too limited to drive major cuts to emissions of the greenhouse gas.
The response rate to pollution warnings from the UN’s International Methane Emissions Observatory jumped to 12% from 1% over the past year, the agency said Wednesday in a report. IMEO has issued more than 3,500 alerts to 33 countries since its program was launched in 2022.
Atmospheric data shows efforts to limit the releases are so far having little impact on the volume of global methane emissions, produced from sectors like oil and gas production, agriculture, landfills and from natural sources such as wetlands.
Methane pollution has accounted for about 30 per cent of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. The gas has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide in the short-term, meaning tackling the releases is regarded as one of the fastest and most effective actions to limit planetary warming.
Tackling methane emissions from fossil fuel has long been viewed by scientists and policy-makers as some of the lowest hanging fruit in the fight against climate change because in many cases curbing emissions simply means upgrading equipment and improving operations.
—Bloomberg News
Canadian businesses face all sorts of pressing challenges these days, but a new report argues climate transition plans are still crucial to their long-term success.
Just as tariffs, interest rates and artificial intelligence have thrown curveballs in recent years, the report from Business Future Pathways says companies must prepare for a huge range of climate change impacts.
“We want to make sure businesses have plans built for disruption, which essentially will mean their long-term sustainability and success,” said Fate Saghir, who serves on the group’s financial advisory committee on top of her job as head of sustainability at Mackenzie Investments.
Financial institutions launched Business Future Pathways in May specifically to help companies put together their plans in order to ensure their success and help them attract capital.
While the group’s first report argues for their importance, it also shows that only about five per cent of Canadians firms have actually put out robust plans on the risks they face and what they’re going to do about them.
—The Canadian Press
File photo of a wildfire that destroyed roughly 30 per cent of Jasper.
Two new reports on last year’s devastating wildfire in Jasper confirm the blaze was caused by lightning and accelerated by “tornado-force fire-generated” winds and dry conditions.
The fire, which started as three separate blazes before merging as one, hit town two days after starting and destroyed a third of the community’s structures in July 2024. It forced 25,000 residents and visitors to flee and displaced an estimated 2,000 people.
The reports, commissioned by Parks Canada, say efforts to reduce fuel for wildfires, including prescribed burns, helped mitigate the blaze.
But one of the reports, which looks at how the fire formed and developed, says more burns and other attempts to reduce fuel would have been beneficial, since the fire began in an area south of town that had not burned or been treated in over a century.
“This provided a nearly unbroken corridor for fire spread — excepting the river and highways — that was also aligned to enable wind flow channelling down the (Athabasca River) valley,” it says.
The favourable fire weather stemmed from minimal rainfall in the weeks leading up to the blaze, combined with “record-high” temperatures in the proceeding days, the report says.
—The Canadian Press
With trade threats from President Donald Trump, the U.S. derailed the world’s first global carbon fee on shipping as an international maritime meeting adjourned Friday without adopting regulations.
Earlier this year, amid much fanfare, the world’s largest maritime nations agreed on the regulations, which would impose a fee on carbon pollution to clean up shipping. The next step of the process — adopting the regulations — during the International Maritime Organization meeting in London this week was widely expected to be a formality.
Instead, after much pressure from Trump, along with Saudi Arabia and a handful of other countries, delegates decided to postpone the decision by a year and adjourn. In the interim, nations will continue to negotiate and work toward consensus.
The development underscored how the influence of Trump, who recently called climate change a “con job,” extends globally to policies aimed at combating climate change.
“Faced with pressure, too many governments chose political compromise over climate justice, and in doing so, abandoned the countries bearing the brunt of the climate crisis,” said Emma Fenton, senior director for climate diplomacy at a U.K.-based climate change non-profit, Opportunity Green.
—The Associated Press