OTTAWA - Canada's claim to be The Great White North may be in jeopardy, says a report to be released Friday by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In the second of a series of four reports it is releasing this year, the IPCC paints a picture of a Canada that will be, by and large, increasingly milder and wetter this century.
The report, a copy of which was obtained by Â鶹´«Ã½, assesses the impacts of climate change that is already happening and provides an analysis of how governments around the world, including Canada, are preparing to adapt their citizens to the new environmental reality.
"We know the effects of climate change are happening now and they're only going to get worse," said Nathan Cullen, the NDP MP for Skeena-Bulkley Valley and his party's environment critic.
More than 2,000 scientists from around the world contributed to the report. A group of scientists are meeting in Brussels, Belgium this week ahead the report's release on Friday.
The scientists are not publishing any new work but are reviewing more than 29,000 studies that have been completed over the last five years.
Some of those studies are depressing news for fans of Canada's most popular winter activities.
"By the 2050s, a reliable snowmobile season disappears from most regions of eastern North America that currently have developed trail networks," the report says.
Ski seasons could be drastically shortened, possibly by as many as six weeks by the middle of this century.
And fewer and fewer lakes and ponds will freeze or stay frozen long enough for skaters.
"While the North American tourism industry acknowledges the important influence, its impacts have not been analyzed comprehensively," the report says.
Climate change is likely to significantly affect the health of many Canadians.
For example, the report notes that Canada's population is going to age early in this century and that seniors are particularly vulnerable to health problems caused by heatwaves and air pollution.
A warming climate is going increase the number of heatwave days in Canada's major cities and intensify problems of pollution.
"Climate change could more than double the potential for increased heat wave deaths in urban areas," the report says.
Lyme disease is a painful affliction caused by the bite of a tick that, until now, exists only in the United States and Canada's most southern extremities. Scientists say the northern range for this tick could move 200 kilometres north by the 2020s and 1,000 kilometres north by the 2080s.
Climate change will likely transform North American flora and fauna.
The report warns that as many as a third of all plant and wildlife species indigenous to the continent could be on a path to extinction by the middle of the century.
The report gives a host of other examples of wildlife changes. Red squirrels, for example, are now breeding 18 days earlier than 10 years ago. Red foxes are now found in the northern reaches of the country, "leading to a retreat of the competitively subordinate arctic foxes."
The report says much more of Canada's forest is already being consumed by forest fire each year - an average of 6,500 square kilometres a year in the 1960s to an average of nearly 30,000 square kilometres a year through the 1990s - but Canada's forest is growing, as warmer temperatures let the boreal forest extend further into the north.
