I don’t want to get into a climate change debate, but one thing is for sure. Climate change is happening and it can not be reversed by humankind. It’s just the way it is and has been since the Big Bang, some 14 billion years ago. It’s been “expanding, cooling and evolving” ever since. Can it be slowed? According to most, yes it can. But stopped or reversed, no. Our earth has been fluctuating from ‘super green house to an ice house’ many times since life began. Some semblance of records, we are told, began only in the 19th century. That’s not very long ago. In fact, it’s a grain of sand considering the period we stopped climbing trees and eventually began to walk upright three to six million years ago. So, what did really happen?
Do you believe in Noah’s Ark? The Bible says he did build it, but that’s not enough to convince everyone. The fact is, evidence indicates massive floods in then called Mesopotamia, today known as Iraq, were prevalent, with heavy and continuous periods of rain flooding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Egyptian archeologists among others, have found evidence of fossiliferous “flood deposits”, in Iraq.
According to The National Center for Science Education, over hundreds of thousands and millions of years have resulted in “changing configuration of continents and oceans, changes in the Sun’s intensity, variations in the orbit of Earth, and volcanic eruptions.” This is climate change.
A Saskatchewan farmer once told me overlooking his field of golden wheat, “It’s hard to imagine all this was underwater long ago. Yup, that’s Mother Nature”. Today it’s called climate change.
Which brings us to the BC ‘flood of the century’. We now say, and especially those directly impacted “we’ve never seen anything like this”. Of course not. It doesn’t mean it never happened. It did. So, one has to wonder why politicians did not heed the warning signs. Yes, there were warning signs. This could have been avoided. In the 1920’s one huge B.C. Lake called Sumas, was actually drained and the water that naturally flowed into it was stopped, diked, and voilà, there was suddenly one very fertile prairie where just about anything and everything could grow. It was hailed as a great engineering feat.
But this has to be underlined. As early as three years ago, 2018, a B.C. historian had a warning. Chad Reimer wrote a book, Before We Lost the Lake: A Natural and Human History of Sumas Valley. Author Reimer warns of the evidence of flooding every 45 to 100 years that “should not lull us in a false sense of security. This complacency has been unfounded”. Reimer was spot on! Oh yes, politicians from every level had been commissioning reports and studies, but let’s face it, spending taxpayers’ money on solidifying infrastructure does not attract votes. And today, Canada is paying for it. Yes Canada, not just BC, because we were literally cut off from the Port of Vancouver for a week. Yes, the folks in BC had to ration gasoline, because the Alberta pipelines of oil and gas were shut, but a lot leaves and arrives from the west coast that serves all of Canada, and parts of the U.S. And with roads and rail snapped like uncooked spaghetti, the gateway of goods from around the world stopped. I’m referring to the Port of Vancouver which handles everything from “clothes and candy, to electronics, grain and produce, canola oil, chemicals, fuels, lumber products, machinery, and automobiles.”
In fact, the Vancouver Port handles $1 of every $3 of Canada’s trade in goods outside of North America. It has 120,000 employees, compared to the much smaller 19,000 at the Port of Montréal. This life-line is a federal jurisdiction, so the onus is clearly on Ottawa to stop the focus on carbon taxes and more on floods. Implement measures with immediate results, to assure this destruction does not happen again in Newfoundland Labrador, and on the ‘wet coast’.
Notes: Omicron and other variants will occur as long as the other half of the world is not vaccinated.
In Saskatchewan, if you own an EV, there is now a $150.00 yearly tax on your car because owners don’t pay the 15 cents per liter gasoline tax. Fair is fair.
Shamefully, no one in the Trudeau cabinet condemned self-proclaimed environment king David Suzuki for suggesting domestic terrorism, pipelines will be blown up if more is not done on climate change.
Joe Biden is importing 844,000 barrels of oil a day, from Russia. He killed the Canadian XL Keystone pipeline, (no objection from our P.M.) which would have delivered the same amount of Canadian oil to the U.S.
After stopping our oil exports, Biden’s EV tax credits to Americans could kill Ontario’s auto industry. Thanks so much, smiling Joe.
Comedian Rick Gervais: “I hope the next generation cancels the ‘cancel culture’ generation.”
That’s what I’m Thinking.
Robert Vairo
robert@newsfirst.ca
