WILD WINTER JUST TIP OF MELTING ICEBERG, PROUD ‘CLIMATOLOGIST’ DAVID PHILLIPS TELLS ROTARIANS, FRIENDS
Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com
GRAVENHURST — Gardens, wetlands and a bit optimism will help Dave Phillips get through climate change and his admittedly “scary” forecast for 40 years.
The popular — and proud to say — Canadian “climatologist and environmental scientist” said after a bleak winter and spring, he remains “optimistic” with a healthy dose of scepticism for the future.
“Gardeners should be given a tax break” and municipalities should protect their wetlands at all costs he said in a passionate, straightforward and impactful speech last week.
Ed. note: Here is his story. A gripping — if lengthy piece of Local Journalism reportage — but an important and compelling read that’ll be your best spent half hour and truly worthwhile sharing.
Also listen to lecture here:
In his six decades as a trusted “weatherman” talking and now preaching about sunshine and rain, the Barrie resident said “I’ve tried to explain meteorology along the way.”
He says he’s heard a lot of complaints about his forecasts — a lot of those”
“But what I like to do is tell stories” when he’s out of the lecture circuit after retiring last September at age 80. But he’s never retired from the love of working life.
“And I’ve got about 35,000 of them. When I go to Ecum Secum, Nova Scotia, and Manyberries, Alberta, I tell their stories. They want to tell how they survived the weather and shunned blizzards and avoided frostbite. They don’t want to hear about Toronto stories.”
Thursday at the Opera House he shared a few of them about Muskoka with humour and seriousness in an informative noon hour-long talk hosted by the Rotary Club of Gravenhurst.
Such as that men are hit by lightning five times more than women, but female named hurricanes kill twice as many as those named after men.
Many of his tales he made famous with his popular weather calendar he created for Environment Canada where he worked for 58 years before officially retiring between summer and fall. Though he hangs around there in an emeritus capacity.
First he assured the older crowd — of more than 125 — that “hopefully winter is over” — before warning a “third of May could still have a trace or more of snow.”
However he said the coming weeks do look promising.
‘Everybody was hearing about snow here’
Calling winter “the elephant in the room,” he then got in to recent local weather results, including the ice storm and of course snow-ma-geddon last November/December.
But he started with the 2023-’24 winter he called “cancelled” as it was on average 5 degrees warmer than normal — before getting to this winter which was, well, you know.
Two years ago when a normal winter would have seen 23 days at below 20 degrees, that year there were only three. With just 73 per cent of the normal snowfall — which was still high compared to others part in southern Ontario. For some areas it was less than a quarter their annual number, he said.
And the rain was two and a half times more. Typically it’s three times more snow than rain.
“It was more like a Vancouver winter than a Gravenhurst winter.
“But then this winter. Typically an average is 300-400 cms. This time it was about 30 per cent more than you’d normally get. The lake effect was turned on from the get-go.”
Toronto got two-thirds of its annual snowfall in 10 days in February.
“But everybody was hearing about the snow here and in Muskoka. One of the reasons was the very warm Great Lakes that saw four of the five lakes the warmest they’d ever been in the fall and December.
“Canadians woke up the last weekend of November and learned that, my gosh, three weeks before winter that Gravenhurst got a metre and a half of snow. … And that 140 cms average is not exaggerated” based on local weather collectors, damage and radar images.
He said “it started snowing at 6 o’clock that Thursday night (Nov. 28) and didn’t end until Sunday morning. Sixty-four hours of continuous snow.
“The visibility often was down to less than half a kilometre, which tells you the intensity of the snow. It didn’t just come and go. It was intense right from the get-go.
“And then there was a two-day lull and then you got about half that amount the rest of the first week of December.”
Adding more misery were air temperatures that were “anywhere from minus-3 to minus-13. With the water temperature being 9 degrees, the warmest it has ever been at that time of year — a differential of 12-22 degrees. That lake effect was going full blast.”
Phillips said “the reason for all that snow was the winds from the south and southwest which originated in Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron — crossed Lake Huron, a little bit of land in the Bruce Peninsula and then across Georgian Bay, 675 kms of open air water and then slammed right in to the community. Barrie that weekend got a trace of snow because its winds were from the south.
“The trajectory zeroed right in to your community.”
He said “the impacts were of course incredible. Highways closed, drivers trapped 18 hours on Hwy. 400. And the great people of Gravenhurst and area tried to help out as good as they could. Power outages for 170,000 customers. States of emergency declared.
‘Hardest ice nature could produce’ 20-30 mms
“And then the ice storm came. Late in March (Saturday the 29th). How much misery, hardship and misfortune can one deal with?”
He said those recent last days of March saw a “devastating ice storm. From kind of east of Muskoka to the Kawarthas, from Penetanguishene, Barrie, Orillia, Lindsay into Peterborough. Central Ontario took the hit.
“The ice secretion deposited some of the hardest ice that nature could produce. With moderate winds, which would add much more strength to those trees and those the lines.
“Muskoka Airport that weekend had 16 hours of freezing rain, 18 hours of snow, and 20 hours of rain. And you’ve got that congealed mixture of glue that just makes this mess. The thickness of the ice was 20-30mm from over of 25-35 hours of freezing rain.”
A million people were powerless provincewide — some locally more than a week — as 5,000 Ontario and small power hydro workers restoring power and partly rebuilding Ontario’s grid. Ten days later 48,000 Ontarians still had no hydro.
In the 28 days since spring’s start 21 have seen rain or freezing rain, and snow.
“You can count on your hand the number of days when the temperature was above normal. It’s been one of the toughest bouts of whether that any Canadian has had to deal with. And you’re right in the centre of it usually.”
Careful what you wish for — the growing threat of climate change
According to Phillips, “Believe it or not Canadians are talking about the weather more than ever. They’re writing, reading and gabbing about it. Weather is our soap opera, our lore, our rumour, our obsession,” morning, noon and night.
“We’re a nation of weather junkies. We need our weather fix.”
He said “the world can thank Canada — the snowiest and second coldest country in the world for an impressive array of snow devices: like the snow shovel, snow plow, indoor shopping malls, snow blowers, snow rake and snow blower and snowmobiles all Canadian inventions.
“We don’t have a gentle climate. Our climate and geography tell us we’re going to have our share of killer weather.”
Projections have it that by the middle of this century, 2060-65, “we will inherit the climate of 700 kms south.
“People say ‘Ooh, that means we’ll have the weather of Kentucky.’ And I say you may get it, but that Kentucky gets more EF5 tornadoes per square km than any other state in the union. …
“One of the main reasons we wouldn’t want to become the 51st state.”
Phillips said Canada is “just not keeping up with all the wild weather.”
He told the rapt audience: “I didn’t come here today to just tell stories and review the seasons. I came to try and raise concerns about the growing threat of climate change.
“Ninety-eight per cent of scientists believe that the world is warming faster than it ever has. And human DNA is all over this. Climate change science is solid and strong. What we know now we knew 30 years ago. We’re only fine-tuning it. Temperature trends are up everywhere from the tips of mountains to the depths of boreholes. The world is warming like it never has.”
Yet he said “there is no convincing argument why.” It’s not natural, he said. In fact “Mother Nature should have made us cooler,” the outspoken environmentalist agrued.
“The changing agent is people. What we do. What comes out of our tail pipes and smoke stacks. We have warmed the world. The United Nations said that in January of last year, 2024, it was the warmest year in 150 years since the pre-industrial period when there was very little greenhouse gasses emitted. And that land use had not changed planet earth if very little.
“In the last 100 years we’ve changed over 50 per cent of how it looks.”
Phillips went on to say that by examining ice cores, sediments of oceans and tree rings “right now the earth has probably not been this warm in 120,000 years. Since human beings occupied the planet earth.”
Indeed as recent this past year in 2024 “every month was either the warmest, or second warmest, on earth. The last time the earth had a colder than normal month was 100 years ago. …
“And the primary reason is carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane that have been released into the atmosphere. It’s like putting a blanket over the earth. It traps all the heat in. So that’s why we’re seeing the runaway warming.”
Meanwhile, “the oceans have never been hotter” when “over the years the oceans have saved us,” because “90 per cent of the heat emitted into the atmosphere was absorbed by the oceans.”
Scientists warn “we’re getting near the tipping point.” That if oceans warm up they will stop absorbing heat “and so we will have more of the heat produced by humans trapped in the atmosphere.”
Climate change “is not just something that affects the other side of the world in Bangladesh, Botswana and Bolivia. Now it’s happening in Burlington, Brandon and Burnaby. No region has been left out in the cold,” he said.
Phillips said even in just his own lifetime since he started studying climate “it used to be stable, static and dependable. Summers were hot and winters were cold. Hundred-year storms occurred every 100 years. But it’s undependable. There are surprises that occur. So what we have seen is that no longer is climate entirely the work of natural forces it is really the product of our economy, our way of life and our habits.
‘For me the beginning was 2021 out west’
“I think the best illustration is what is happened in our own country in the last five years.
“In 2021, for me, that was the beginning when we saw B.C. ripped apart by weather from searing heat and scorching wildfires, draught then floods at the end of the year and was finally frozen out.”
He said it was caused by this “incredible heat dome, this juggernaut of a high pressure area that stacked from the Arctic Circle to California and centred right on B.C. and Alberta. And we broke records for the number of records we broke.
“A new record for Canada. It use to be 45 degrees in Yellow Grass, Saskatchewan, in 1937. Now in early July 2021 it was Lytton, B.C., at 49.6 degrees. Warmer than any place in the U.S. outside the desert of the southwest. Warmer than even any city Europe in centuries, Phillips said. And more than any place in South America.”
(Compare that to “Canada’s coldest temperature in Snag, Yukon, in 1947 of minus 63.”)
“The sad thing was the deadly toll. If three people die from a heat wave in Canada you set up a Royal Commission. There, 600 in B.C. succumbed to heat and 80 in Alberta. It was numbing.
“And a lot of these people were elderly, living alone and living with pre-conditioned health issues. But it was a real eye opener, a new game changer. And people responsible for it still can’t get over it.”
The years since have been almost as bad.
Remember 2022 in Ontario, “a warm, sunny, humid long weekend, May 24 a Saturday, when people were putting in boats, opening cottages, going to the garden centre and you couldn’t get a tee time at the golf course.
“Then about noon this nasty squall line came out from Sarnia, up the 401 from Windsor to Ottawa and to Quebec City. And it was what we call a ‘derecho,’ something not seen too often before.
“A straight line wind compared to a tornado where the damage is all over the place. It was like a line of soldiers had mowed down property right across Ontario. Everything leaning in the same direction. The corn stocks, the trees, a the wind 145 km/h. It cost $1B in property damage and killed 11 people from trees falling on them. A three-hour event that took out power to a million people across Ontario and Quebec for two weeks.
Phillips said that doesn’t include tens of thousands of trees, a value you can’t place a figure on.
The billion-dollar number, he said, represent up to a third of the cost as people either don’t have insurance, don’t make a claim or report damage including uninsured government buildings and infrastructure.
“You can’t put a value on trees at grandma’s house that provide shade and comfort.”
In 2023 more “weather misery” when the
Canadian landscape took a real hit from fires.
“You had burnt out tree stumps, charred building, scorched earth, dried up riverbeds. This is what climate change looks like. It isn’t pretty.
Phillips said what struck him was the number of evacuations including 250,000 who had to leave their homes due smoke, fire and floods, sometimes both for the same reason.
“Whole cities, like Yellowknife sent to Winnipeg. … The stress is just too much.”
Massive fires and record numbers of fires in five provinces and one territory. Six per cent of precious boreal forests consumed that year.
“All the C02 emitted that year would have been something that we would have used in four years of industry, cars and manufacturing. It was an enormous loss. If you took all the fires in the U.S., they would have not equated to what we burned in Canada in 2023.”
Then there was the toxic smoke and haze that blew into eastern Canada and U.S. and down the western states to California. Even in Europe. This from a country renowned for its fresh air.
A New York Post headline dubbed it an ‘Eh-pocalypse.’
“It was something that really woke people up,” said Phillips.
“In 2024 the Insurance Bureau of Canada said it was the most expensive year ever in Canadian history for wildfires at $8B in July and August claims alone,” he said noting as earlier that only a quarter to a third of claims are registered.
Jasper couldn’t even withstand raging fires, which for a town built and designed to do so is unthinkable. A third of the iconic Alberta mountain town was lost with 5,000 residents and 22,000 tourists forced to flee the national park in 12 hours and “run for their lives.”
On August 5 that year a hail storm rained grapefruit-sized hail balls on the cowboy capital damaging one in five homes and 77,000 cars were write-offs all caused by a 20-minute storm and strong winds.
B.C. vineyards were plowed under after an earlier January warm spell caused by a polar vortex that will take five years to regrow.
It’s now “both ends of the thermometer that Canadians have to worry about. That’s what makes it difficult and taxing,” Phillips intoned.
Add on floods last years in Montreal and Toronto where streets were turned in to canals.
In Toronto they broke records for the wettest summer, wettest month July and wettest day Aug. 17 with 128 mm of rain — which was even more than Hurricane Hazel left its wet wake in 1954.
Phillips said “what we’ve seen in the past few years we can’t ignore and forget.”
Previously changes have been “relentless and gradual,” said Phillips. “A bit of a sneak attack. It’s like going in to a coma for 30 years and you wake up and there’s more green Christmases than white Christmases. And you don’t skate on the Rideau Canal as much now. Or that I’m spending more money on my air conditioning than heating bill.
Weather extremes more extreme
“But now it’s about the spectacular and the dramatic. When you change the climate you change the weather. We’re seeing rarer events become more frequent, the exceptional becoming the ordinary. What we’re seeing is the weather extremes more extreme.
“It’s also variable. I’ve had farmers telling me “David, I remember when the wettest growing season ever was and then about two decades later I saw the driest one. Now it’s like back to back to back.” They said ‘I could have bought flood and drought insurance in the same growing season.”
Another story Phillips recalled was five years ago in southern Manitoba in a place where there were three growing seasons of precipitation that were normal.
“Gold for a farmer. But dig down and two of them were the driest years on record followed by the wettest. The average was normal, but how do you harvest extremes like that. That variability. That joker in the weather deck, that almost 180 weather whiplash that we’re seeing, that is very much part of the signature that we’re seeing.
“And to think that all this misery we’re seeing is because the world warmed up 1.5 degrees in 150 years. What’s going to happen when it warms up by 3 degrees in 30 years? It’s a bit scary.
Scientists like Phillips warned this in 1995
“But what scientists warned about 30 years ago has come to pass. I know, I was there,” the grey-haired Order of Canada recipient said. “What will Canada look like in 2025?
“And we got it right except for one thing. We didn’t get the ocean levels right. The sea levels. Nobody could have predicted the disappearance of snow and ice in Greenland and Antarctica. So the oceans are much higher now than were first modelled 20 some years ago.
“Canadians have always felt climate change is an issue especially in the last four years. More so than the Americans. The majority of Canadians believe so, even if about 20 per cent of them think it’s hot air. But most feel it is a concern and they’ve seen more extremes because of it. The last few years climate change for most Canadians was about the Arctic. They read, saw documentaries or read tabletop books on Inuit people being the first victims of climate change. Now instead of seeing icebreakers in the Arctic they’re seeing cruise ships. You’re seeing that buildings are falling into permafrost. You are seeing skinnier polar bears rummaging through garbage at the entrance to small towns, causing a real concern for small children, as they become predators.
“Now it’s in your own front and backyards. It’s locally. Nobody’s left out.
Wait five minutes and it will change
“But what’s important to realize is that what we’re not seeing is any new weather like, OMG, you’re seeing typhoons in Toronto, monsoons in Montreal and sandstorms in Saskatoon. No it’s still our grandparents weather. What’s different is the statistics of that weather have changed. Extreme weather has gotten more frequent. It’s larger, out of season and out of place. We’re seeing it slow down. I use to say the best thing about the Canadian weather was it hits and runs. It doesn’t stand around and clobber you like other parts of the world. Storms take their sweet time. So what you’re getting is rain storms that use to be six hours are now 10-12 hours. Time to spread its misery on you; the same weather with a greater impact. They’re cascading events.”
The same at sea. “It’s not that storms are stormier, but because of higher sea levels there’s more of that water coming inland and flooding more areas.
“Another tragedy is that we have re-engineered and degraded our environment. One of the big concerns I have is the loss of wetlands. Wetlands, they’re seen now as, ‘ah, well they’re just mosquito-infested cesspools, let’s drain them and build condos and get more tax base from it.’ But they’re the kidneys and lungs of the earth. In the past when we had flooding the wetlands saved you. When you had drought you could get some of that water you needed. And yet 75 to 90 per cent of major cities in Ontario have drained the wetlands. And I think that is just coming to bear.”
Forecast for Muskoka ‘wetter, wetter, wilder’
Bringing out his forecast, he said based on “science we know, high quality models and a business as usual scenario, “we think the forecast for Muskoka and area is going to going to be warmer, wetter and wilder. Pretty simple. Warmer: Take the warmest period you remember and in 50 years that’ll be the coldest. … Heat waves will be weeks long, not days long.
“Take Gravenhurst for example. You get on average two, three or four days where it gets above 30 degrees. Toronto gets 16 — that’s why you live here. But in 2040 it’s predicted that Gravenhurst will have something like 22 days above 30 degrees. And by 2075 it’ll be 45 days. … So we’re going to see more heat days in summer. But the deaths from heat are the real concern I have.
“We will see wetter than normal days. Too much rain sometimes and not enough rain most of the time. The Great Lakes may not be as great. Sea levels go up, but fresh water will vary, and because of the greater evaporation we’re going to have more precipitation maybe 15-18 per cent the models say. But it will be less effective precipitation because higher temperatures means more evaporation. So ground water, wells and wetlands will have less water.
“Also wilder weather is more of a concern. Storms will be stormier and turbo charged. Here’s something we’ve known for 200 years and nobody can argue. When you warm up the world by 1 degree your atmosphere can hold 7-12 per cent more moisture. So those garden variety thunderstorms you witnessed as a child are going to contain 30-40 per cent more precipitation because the temperature got warmed up by 3 degrees.
“Nobody argues about that. And people think OMG winters are going to be shorter. They’re not going to be as intensely cold. They’re right. But they’re not going to be zero either. We’re not going to be the Miami of the north. And one of the concerns is the ice storms you see is going to be in the cards. When you go from minus 8 to minus 2 you’re near that sweet zone of not knowing if it’s going to be rain, snow, freezing rain, ice pellets or congealed mixture of all of the above.”
Phillips added that with monsoons it suggests we’re going to see more ice storms, about a 45-70 per cent increase, and longer bouts of freezing rains because we’ll get to the point where it will be so warm that you just get rain and warmer winters.
“But that’s a long ways to come.”
Hope and discouragement
“So what do we do about it?
“Take a big yoga breath and hope for the best. But hope is not a plan and yet it’s current policy. We continue to live in flood plains and avalanche zones and by the sea. These are graveyards in the waiting. And we just say, ‘well, it is what it is.’ And we get ready every year and we say we’re gonna have a flood season. And bail and evacuate and clean up. And we bury the dead. And we go back to living in a flood plain.
“Our tendency has been to spend billions in cleaning up rather than millions of dollars in preventing the disaster. And I think the primary responsibly will be on you and small communities. You’re going to find that the federal government is going to lose interest when Mother Nature misbehaves. And provinces, too; they already have. So it will be up to us and individuals to weather-proof their communities. To build more resilient communities. To make their communities more weather-proof for the kind of wild weather ahead. You can’t prevent it. All the blowing you do doesn’t stop that storm coming your way. But by properly planning and preparing for it you can prevent that disaster by building back better, by increasing the building code to strength.
Not encouraged by some of the news
“Of course we need to de-carbonize. But I’m not going to focus on that because I’ve seen enough. Not a lot of good news. I’m encouraged by some of the news. We see more renewables now. And that’s good. This is the last year that fossil fuels will — they’ve peaked and now the evidence suggests that they will go downhill. We’re seeing that this year the renewables around the world will generate more electricity than coal — which is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. That’s encouraging.
“We’re seeing that solar panels are 90 per cent cheaper than they were 10 years ago. But they’re not doing it to save the world, but because it makes economic sense. But that’s what I’m encouraged by.
“But here is the most depressing thing I can tell you. Let us say as Canadians we started doing the right thing and we’re not going to drive another kilometre, board another plane, turn down the thermostat to really low and we’re going to eat tofu for the rest of our lives. The reality is it’s not going to save the world. What the goal is to prevent it from becoming worst. All the C02 we’ve spent driving to this talk today will still be in the atmosphere in 200 years from now. We haven’t learned how to scrub it out. That is why the C02, the greenhouse gases, are baked into the system. And so by doing the right thing we can just maybe manage it and not restore it. Even COVID with the cutbacks in industry and driving didn’t change anything to the reservoir of gases in the atmosphere. So that is what we need to do.
“I think we need to invest. Not because I come from a science organization, we need to invest in science and engineering and technology to help us solve the human condition and get the right apparatus to decarbonize. Not just trade it and bury it, but to really scrub it, to make sure we can see that reservoir either staying still or maybe even going down. So I am hopeful that that could be the case.
In the meantime, said Phillips, “We have to do something that people don’t like me to say. We have to adapt. The climate has changed. But we haven’t changed. We need to do things differently to take advantage or prevent it from becoming worse. People think I’m telling them we should cut back. We should be mitigating, cutting back on our fossil fuels. Yeah, but it’s not going anywhere. It’s still burn baby burn.”
Phillips goes on: “Adaptation means so much to me. It’s all about coping with the change you see. Recognizing that maybe your parents in the 1950s and ’60s spent their hard-earned money on building the infrastructure that we’re still sucking off. But we need to build stronger and invest in better infrastructure. To build back our communities to make them more resilient. It’s a win-win situation to make our properties and communities more desirable. If people realize they understand climate change and they’ve done things to cushion the blow.”
‘Gardeners should be given a tax break’
Phillips focused on two local solutions municipalities can easily adapt.
“My sense is that, you know one of the things is, vegetation, greenery. I think people who have gardens should be given a tax break. Because that green space is absolutely great for the environment. It’s great for the impacts of climate change. It really represents a large portion of the greenery. So I think we need to encourage that.
“We need to strengthen and update our building code. It doesn’t cost a lot. I was there in Angus when the tornado took down all those neighbourhood streets and I was appalled at looking at those roof trusses laying on the ground not built to code. Somebody was deceitful. And that should not have been allowed. And it doesn’t cost a lot.
“If you just look at the building code of Ontario: ‘Every foot a nail.’ If you change it to every six inches you double the strength of that roof. And why not say it’s the law now that we put in battery-operated sump pumps? Or backwater valves that will prevent in many cases floods. The Insurance Bureau of Canada said all you have to do is go to Home Hardware for maybe four weekends in the summer and you could help reduce the risk of flooding in your home by 45 per cent. So we need to be more common sensible about it to give people incentives. We should say to insurance companies ‘if I weather-proof my house give me a break on my premium, so you aren’t paying $44,000 when my basement floods. “So let’s be fair about this.”
Young person, teacher, parent letters
Phillips concluded: “I think climate change is the defining issue of our times. And the evidence of runaway climate change is everywhere. It’s in every sector, every season, every place. Nobody’s been left out. Everybody has their own horror stories. They can point to this is different now than it was not too long ago. Climate change is not hypothetical. It’s not about a murky forecast. It’s not about skinny polar bears. It’s not about fake news.
“There’s not a month where I don’t get letter from a young person, a teacher or parent who says ‘I have interest,’ or child or student or person themselves, says ‘I’d like to learn more about environmental science. And I think that’s so encouraging. And I try to encourage the young person.
“But I have colleagues and friends in the United States who don’t call themselves climatologists anymore or environmental scientists because they would get fired. And documents they spent decades on have been removed from the internet. And all they are doing is seeking the truth.
“Donald Trump’s science is about when you’re dealing with a hurricane he’d nuke it. Or spread vegetable oil on the water to defuse it. That’s the state of his understanding.
“I tend to be an optimistic person, even though I’ve been a crepe hanger in this talk I’ve given you. But I think there is some light at the end of the tunnel. And I think our motivation about doing something about climate change is not based on what we’ve seen, but what we’re going to see in the next 40 years. It’s not a fight against climate change, rather it’s showing us how we can do better with the climate we’ve got. And the climate we’re going to get.”
Trump, Canadian election and Green Party?
In a Q&A after, I asked Phillips about the real elephant in the room being Trump and his U.S. approach to climate change. And what he has heard from Mark Carney and other party leaders running for prime minister and where they will take Canada the next four years.
Phillips responded saying: “The other elephant in the room is the lack of talk from our politicians about the environment. And we saw what happened to the Green Party yesterday and tonight (it leaders not being included in the debates). That’s rather sad.
“Anyways there are lot of issues that people bring front and centre. I’m not discouraged the fact that the environment has taken a back seat in the election. I would certainly like to see more discussion about it. But I mean, you’re right, the Trump elephant is so huge it really just dominated the issues in this particular campaign.
“But I think I’m an optimist because I believe in young people and what we’re seeing and what’s being done around the world in other areas. … My sense is, yes, I think this is unfortunate we’re not hearing more about it. We don’t know what the agenda is and you know I have found with politics, it doesn’t matter what party it is they still treat the environment the same way. I’m not blaming Liberals, Conservatives or NDP. And I really believe that when you give them a chance they come to realize that it’s a tough issue. I always think science is easy, it’s decision-making from that science that’s hard. And that’s a lot of issues you have to juggle.
“But it is noteworthy that there is absence of talk about the environment at this time. But I don’t think it makes it a dead issue. And I think it will be proven people will do it because it makes economic sense to deal with it. It will become where fossil fuel will become so expensive that you’ve got to look at the long-term of fuel. And so my sense is I don’t even dismiss nuclear fuel, all kinds of energy options and alternatives we can look at. Because we can’t just keep burning. And I think there are other good reasons to go there from economics and lifestyle, from cleanliness and health. All these things make sense.
Another audience question was about whether the weather calendar would ever come back.
He did it for 34 years and it made “millions” for the government.
“It was love for me, but I kind of moved on to other things.”
Let us know what you think. Email [email protected] and we’ll share those comments.
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