If CO2 Is To Blame, How Do You Explain the Dirty Thirties?

Remarkably few maximum temperature records set in recent decades despite global warming and the heat-island effect

During the Great Depression, CO2 levels were 25 per cent lower than today’s but severe climate change led to the Dirty Thirties

By Gwyn Morgan

The collapse of global commodity prices was sudden and severe. Workers coming off a decade of unprecedented prosperity suddenly found themselves jobless and unable to provide for their beleaguered families. 

For a time, they maintained hope that the downturn would be temporary, but as the first year stretched into the second, many lost hope. Some who had come from provinces of high unemployment to participate in the Alberta boom began their glum journey back. Laidoff workers saw a glimmer of hope when commodity prices appeared to bottom out. At the very least, it seemed, things wouldn’t get worse.

Then nature unleashed a crushing conflagration. Searing winds swept across drought-stricken farms and forests. A young boy comes running breathlessly into the house shouting to his mom, “There’s a big black cloud in the sky.” They hurry outside to behold a terrifying sight in the western sky that would force the family out of their home and into an uncertain future.

This is not, as it may seem, the story of the global oil price collapse combined with the Fort McMurray wildfire. The commodity price collapse in this story was caused by the economic earthquake of 1929 that launched the Great Depression. And the conflagration was the extremely hot and dry weather that turned the fertile prairie “breadbasket” into a drought-stricken wasteland. That black cloud was caused by hundreds of millions of tonnes of topsoil being blown away by the wind.

Impoverished farmers, hoping for an early end to the drought, were encouraged by a couple of years of improved weather. But it was only a temporary respite. The summers of 1936 and 1937 brought an abrupt reversal that proved even hotter, drier and windier. Tens of thousands of farms were abandoned in what is remembered as the Dirty Thirties, displacing 250,000 people whose only skill set was farming.

Inexplicably, the devastatingly hot conditions reversed in 1940, with the arrival of a cooling period that would last until 1975.

Since the Fort McMurray disaster, some have blamed the very product the people work to produce as the cause of the hot, dry weather that nurtured the wildfires. But analysis of temperature data over the past century shows some startling facts. First, the 1930s were by far the hottest period. Of the 10 highest temperature days ever recorded in Canada, seven occurred in the 1930s. And none of those top 10 temperature records were set during the past decade. Yet the atmospheric concentration of CO2 in the 1930s was some 25 per cent lower than today’s levels.

While theories abound, scientists have not been able to explain why, during a period of such low CO2 levels, such an abrupt shift from a long period of moderate temperatures and ample rainfall to devastatingly hot and dry conditions could occur. Likewise, scientists struggle to explain the equally sudden shift in 1940 that saw a 35-year-long cooling period even as greenhouse gas emissions rapidly increased.

See my theory on 30 year temperature cycles. It may help to explain this.

But whatever the answer to that question, one thing is crystal clear: Tying any single extreme weather event to atmospheric CO2 concentrations simply isn’t historically or scientifically credible.

The Fort McMurray fires took about one million barrels per day out of production. But did that reduce global consumption of fossil fuels? Of course not. Countries including Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Angola and Ivory Coast quickly filled the void.

Not only do these countries have appalling human rights records but, as we have become painfully aware, some of the proceeds from their sales are funnelled to extremist groups who shatter the lives of people throughout the Middle East and North African region and foment terror across the west.

Those who celebrated the Fort McMurray disaster as divine environmental justice need to know this: Shutting down the Canadian oilsands altogether would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by a minuscule one-10th of a per cent, only to be replaced by oil from countries whose environmental and human rights records are vastly inferior to Canada’s.

My vote goes to the made-in-Canada oil produced by those resilient, hard-working Canadians who have been forced to endure job loses, destructive wildfires and environmental extremist schadenfreude as they proudly anchor a crucial economic cornerstone of our country.

I’ll take the values contained in their made-in-Canada oil over that Middle Eastern and North African stuff any day.

Gwyn Morgan is a retired Canadian business leader who has been a director of five global corporations. He was the founding president and chief executive officer of Encana. 

Not being one to take someone else's claims without first checking their veracity, I list below the Record Maximum daily temperatures for each month for several stations across Canada. These are actual data, not massaged and they are very interesting. All stations have data going back to at least 1928.

These temperatures are in degrees Celcius

Agassiz CDA, B.C.

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

Extreme Maximum (°C)

17.2

21.7

25

32.2

36

36.7

38.3

39.4

35.6

28.3

21.1

17.2

Date (yyyy/dd)

1974/ 15

1906/ 10

1900/ 31

1900/ 29

1983/ 29

1925/ 25

1958/ 27

1898/ 10

1898/ 08

1923/ 01

1949/ 04

1935/ 01

Notice 8 of the 12 records occur before 1936. None occur after 1983.

Calgary A, Alta

Extreme Maximum (°C)

17.6

22.6

25.4

29.4

32.4

35

36.1

35.6

33.3

29.4

22.8

19.5

Date (yyyy/dd)

2003/ 07

1992/ 27

2004/ 30

1926/ 29

1986/ 30

1926/ 26

1919/ 15

1914/ 03

1967/ 01

1889/ 05

1975/ 04

1999/ 27

Notice: 6 records occur before 1927 incl 4 of 5 between Apr - Aug. Recent records are almost all wintertime.

Regina A, Sask

Extreme Maximum (°C)

10.4

15.6

24.4

32.8

37.2

40.6

43.3

40.6

37.2

32

23.6

15

Date (yyyy/dd)

2002/ 08

1932/ 28

1910/ 23

1952/ 28

1900/ 28

1988/ 05

1937/ 05

1949/ 06

1940/ 03

1992/ 01

1999/ 07

1939/ 08

Notice: 8 of 12 records before 1953, again most recent in winter

Toronto, Ont

Extreme Maximum (°C)

16.1

14.4

26.7

32.2

34.4

36.7

40.6

38.9

37.8

30

23.9

19.9

Date (yyyy/dd)

1967/ 25

1976/ 25

1946/ 28

1842/ 22

1962/ 18

1964/ 30

1936/ 08

1918/ 13

1953/ 02

1963/ 07

1950/ 01

1982/ 03

Notice: only 3 records before 1937, but all 9 remaining between 1946 -1982. This is a clear example of the heat-island effect in big cities

Montreal/St Hubert, Que

Extreme Maximum (°C)

13.9

15.3

23.7

30.6

33.3

35

35.6

35.6

33.8

28.9

22.8

17.1

Date (yyyy/dd) Notice: another heat-island effect here. Even so, only 2 records after 1981.

1995/ 15

1981/ 22

1977/ 30

1976/ 18

1962/ 19

1933/ 28

1955/ 10

1955/ 04

2002/ 09

1949/ 11

1938/ 07

2001/ 06

As a climate specialist, I would have expected many more record maximum temperatures to have occurred between the 1980s and 2010. Instead, only 15 record temperatures out of 60 occurred since 1979 and only 4 of them were in the 21st century - 3 of those 4 occurred in winter.

Any records that might have been set in the past year are solely the responsibility of the record strong El Nino.

The heat-island effect is the obvious rise in temperatures in a city because of the expansion of that city. Concrete, cement, and glass raise temperatures considerably more than grass and trees. The few records in Montreal and Toronto going back to the early nineteen hundreds are a testimony to that effect in Canada's two largest cities. The effect is still occurring and should have resulted in many more records in recent decades, but in fact, there are very few. 

Curious, huh?

Fort McMurray - A Miracle No-one Was Killed in the Fire

Why wasn't the evacuation ordered

at least 24 hours earlier?

After escaping Fort McMurray with little more than the clothes on their backs, some evacuees are questioning when outside officials stepped in to help.

“I feel like the municipality can try but we only have so much,” Crystal Mercredi, who lives in the Thickwood neighbourhood, said. “We’re not close to anything. They can’t send in things right away and I understand that, but this was day three!”


On Sunday, residents of Gregoire were told to be ready to evacuate on short notice due to a wildfire southwest of Fort McMurray. On Monday, evacuation orders were issued for Prairie Creek and the Centennial Trailer Park. Shelter-in-place orders were issued for other communities. The fire doubled in size Monday. Tuesday evening, the entire city was ordered out.

“This didn’t happen until day three! Why was there still no help from the province and still no help from the country?

“They knew there were problems,” Mercredi said. “They evacuated a community where my sister-in-law lives the day before and then they let them go back to their house knowing it was going the other way. The fire chief said, ‘it’s going to be 30 degrees, there’s going to be wind and it’s going to get worse,’ and they still chose to tell us not to evacuate.”

Mercredi also thinks the evacuation order should have been given earlier.

My concern as I watched the horror develop on Sunday and Monday was that they evacuate the city before Hwy 63 was cut-off.  They didn't, and people had to literally drive through the fire to get out of town. When you are close enough to feel the heat from the fire - you're too close! When showers of burning embers are falling on your vehicle - you're too close. 

Hwy 63 south was the only real exit for the 88,000 citizens of Fort McMurray. The road north goes only to the oil fields and could not support more than a few thousand people at best. Consequently, authorities had to know that moving 88,000 people on a two-lane highway was going to take considerable time, and they should have factored that into the equation for when they called for evacuation. 

Waiting for the last minute to evacuate Fort Mac was a grievous error. It gave few people time to fill their gas tanks or gather important items from their homes. It caused excessive and unnecessary stress; people had to abandon cars, hundreds of them, because they ran out of gas; and it is nothing short of a miracle that people weren't killed by the fire.

The first responders, the police, the firefighters, etc., did an amazing job of getting people out of the city and of keeping the downtown core and vital services like water and sewer from destruction.

You guys are my heroes this week, God bless you!

“We’re the last street on Thickwood. We border on where Wood Buffalo neighbourhood is,” she said. “That street had just been told they were on mandatory evacuation and so they were putting us on voluntary evacuation, which we kind of thought was crazy.

“If they’re mandatory and we’re one block away, we should probably be mandatory too,” Mercredi said. “We started packing up. Obviously we were going to get out of there too.”

Tim Eaton is also displaced by the wildfire. He was evacuated twice.

“It was there. It was right there. And it was like, gee, why wasn’t there some notification before this?”

“I didn’t know where to go,” Eaton said. “On the radio, they weren’t telling you where to go. First they say ‘go north’ and then, ‘you can’t go north…go south’…we were herded.”

“I was listening to the radio on my drive to Fort McKay,” Mercredi said. “One of our local DJs… he was saying, ‘tell the police to help get the traffic out. We’re all sitting ducks sitting on this road and the fire is coming.'”

These concerns were raised with the premier and the emergency management officials Thursday. They say, considering the unpredictable nature of the wildfire, they’re happy with how the municipality responded.

“When you consider what needed to be done to convince people to get in their vehicles and start driving south – and of course the absolutely understandable stress that would occur when you get on the road and find that you can’t move – these are scary stories and everyone would be scared to hear those stories, but I think the public officials and the emergency responders have done a truly heroic job, they’re still doing it,” Premier Rachel Notley said.

“I think what we have to understand is,

within the space of 48 hours over 80,000

people were evacuated from a town that

essentially has two roads out of it.”

Scott Long, 

with the Alberta Emergency Management Agency

Yes, and one of those roads doesn't go anywhere.



“I thought that the evacuation notices and the mandatory evacuation notices were done as efficiently and as effectively as possible given the changing, dynamic nature of that wildfire. As you can see, it can turn on a dime and it can move relatively rapidly.”

That is precisely the reason why it should have been done at least 24 hours earlier. Knowing that the forest was as dry as it could possibly be and therefore explosive in nature should have caused an earlier evacuation order. 

Also, the sudden wind shift and increase should have been predictable. Was it predicted? If it was you knew about it? Was it shared with other managers? If it wasn't predicted, why wasn't it? 

And then, who was in charge? There were provincial fire fighters, the Mayor, the fire chief, the police chief all in some degree of control. Was Emergency Management there? When did they get involved? 

Was there communication between the various managers? Were there meetings? Phone calls? 

It seems to me that as soon as the city was in any real danger, that Emergency Management should have gotten involved and coordinated all information, including wind forecasts. Was that done? When? Apparently, not soon enough. That may not be very practical, but someone has to assume responsibility.

There is much to learn from this disaster, and there is a need for a major inquiry into how it was handled and how it could have been handled better.

Alberta declared a provincial state of emergency on Wednesday. Notley said the process begins with deferring to emergency responders in the affected municipality. She said Wood Buffalo did an excellent job and that the province was working alongside them. The premier said when people began evacuating to other regions, that’s when provincial emergency coordination experts stepped in.

Other evacuees understand why things went the way they did.

“I think it was organized to a certain degree, but I think they just did not realize just how bad this was,” Michel Godin said. “It was piecemeal.”

“I don’t think they had the big enough picture for what was going on,” he added. “I think now that they know, in the future, they better have something for a catastrophe.”