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Fires and floods, what's the connection between extreme weather and climate change?

A teenager pours water out of her boot after wading through flood waters in a park in Claresholm, Alta.
A teenager pours water out of her boot after wading through flood waters in a park in Claresholm, Alta.

If you've been following the news about this summer's flooding on the Prairies and forest fires in B.C. and the Yukon, chances are climate change probably came up at some point and if not, it probably went through your mind.

It's almost a reflex now; an unusually heavy flood in Britain, a spate of tornados scouring U.S. towns, a powerful typhoon or hurricane pounding some benighted island. Is climate change responsible?

It's only natural to think so. Scientists have warned alternations in the Earth's climate, due at least in part us pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, will among other things produce more intense weather more frequently.

But just how much should we factor in climate change on individual weather events? Is there something like a climate change "premium" attached to an inundating storm, a deep freeze or a forest-crisping hot spell?

It's a big-picture question, says Andrew Weaver, probably Canada's best known climate-change scientist.

"The problem is what the media do is they phone up and say, is the event because of global warming?" says Weaver, one of the lead authors in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.

"The wrong question is being asked. The question that should be asked is the following: How likely would it be that this event would occur in the absence of global warming?”

The climate-research community has long said climate change will produce an increased likelihood of extreme weather events, such as the rains that supercharged spring runoff in Alberta and flooded downtown Calgary last year. But you can't point to any individual disaster and say it happened strictly because of global warming, says Weaver, now a Green Party member of the B.C. legislature.

“But what you can say is we expect the increased occurrence of such events to go forward," he says.

Human beings tend to live in the here and now, which causes us to latch onto immediate events and look for causation. But the time scale of climate change is much longer, Weaver says. Climate change doesn't mean extreme weather will happen everywhere on the planet.

“But you will see, and the evidence shows that as time continues forward, more and more of the globe in any given year are getting extreme heat or extreme fires or extreme drought, and we’re just moving forward," says Weaver.

“It’s about the change in the statistics, the weather, as we continue on.”

Climate change is weather on steroids. We’ve always had weather, we’ve always had these loss events, but when you factor climate change into it, it just ups the ante that much more.”

— R. Glenn McGillivray, Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction

[ Related: N.W.T. wildfires may threaten Yellowknife ]

But human-caused climate-change doubters challenge the data.

“Humans definitely have some impact, but in our view and based on our literature review of the climate science, the impact is nominal compared to natural forces," says Michelle Stirling, communications manager for the Friends of Science Society.

“CO2 also has an impact, but again human-produced CO2, compared to the natural forces and compared to the natural exchange of CO2, also is a nominal effect.”

The society, founded in 2002 by people skeptical about the science behind the 1997 Kyoto Protocol believes climate change is part of a natural cycle driven largely by the sun.

While it's based in Calgary, the society is not an oil industry front, says Stirling, and is funded by donations from its 300 individual members that includes pensioners, farmers and, yes, oil company executives.

Take last year's flooding in southern Alberta, which devastated the town of High River and submerged much of downtown Calgary.

“Eight of the biggest floods in Calgary’s history were before 1933," says Stirling. "And in the late 1800s there was flooding that was much greater than the flooding we experienced last year. That was before there was any significant fossil fuel use.”

Much of Calgary's centre is built on a flood plain, the society argues.

“Wishful thinking by authorities caused people to believe that floods were a thing of the past," society president Len Maier said in a news release last July.

Likewise, the Philippine city of Tacloban, ravaged last November by Typhoon Haiyan, was nearly destroyed a century earlier by a November typhoon that killed half of its 30,000 people, the society said. When Haiyan hit, Tacloban had a population of 221,000.

History is full of horrific natural disasters, Stirling says, but the advent of 24-hour news, the Internet and social media give them an immediacy they never had in the age of news that travelled at the speed of sailing ships.

Stirling, who is not a scientist, says the society believes the statistical models used to predict climate change are flawed, and that other scientific data refuting the dire forecasts don't get as much ink or air time. The increasing magnitude of damage from weather events such as Superstorm Sandy has more to do with population growth in low-lying cities than with climate change.

“Friends of Science?" scoffs Weaver. "What kind of organization is that?”

The problem with climate doubters, he says, is that they have a point of view, then look for evidence to back it up.

“They’re not constrained by the peer-reviewed literature," says Weaver. “They’re entitled to their opinion but they’re not entitled to their own facts.

“It’s very easy to sway public opinion by throwing out kind of straw-men arguments about things that appeal to common sense, like the climate is always varied, it will continue to vary. That’s true, but that doesn’t mean we can’t affect it.”

So where does that leave you and me? Confused, probably. And confusion creates inertia.

Stirling says people should, in effect, just keep calm and carry on, while Weaver warns public apathy takes the pressure off political leaders to take action on climate change.

“The problem is huge and because it’s so huge, people think it’s overwhelming and they ignore it," says Weaver.

[ Related: Aboriginal communities hit hard by Manitoba floods ]

But here's the thing: Whether you believe climate change is behind flooding, fires, drought and heavy winter snowstorms, you'll likely end up paying for it. If there is a climate change "premium," it's probably buried in your insurance policy.

The insurance industry accepts climate change as one factor that's driven up disaster claims in Canada over the last few years, along with increased urban population density and built infrastructure.

“I would say not. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to pull climate change out of this whole thing as a clean layer of risk that sits on top of everything," says R. Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Toronto-based Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. "It’s intertwined really deeply into things. Some of it’s not very well understood yet.

“I’ve always liked the analogy that climate change is weather on steroids. We’ve always had weather, we’ve always had these loss events, but when you factor climate change into it, it just ups the ante that much more.”

The Insurance Bureau of Canada reported in January that the industry paid out $3.2 billion in severe-weather claims last year, the fifth straight year natural disaster losses have exceeded a billion dollars. More than half was due to the Alberta floods.

“That’s unprecedented," says McGillivray. “It’s not like the numbers have been creeping up steadily and finally hit a billion. It’s just boom.

"So this stuff’s here to stay and we really all have to take action to kind of address this new normal.”

Climate change is just one component of the problem, he stresses. More of us are also living on flood plains, on deforested mountainsides turned into subdivisions.

But another aspect has been the increased frequency of people affected by two major catastrophes within a short time period. For example, McGillivray says, Toronto residents experienced severe flooding last July followed by a damaging ice storm in December that produced $200 million in claims.

So in the end, it probably doesn't matter whether we believe climate change made any single storm or forest fire worse. The practical impact as we pump out our flooded home or stare at the blackened shell of a house torched in a wildfire is the same.

Our views on climate change matter mostly in the long term. If we don't think we're part of the problem, we'll just carry on. If we do, we ought to be doing something about it in hopes of making a difference in years to come.

“If you don’t believe in inter-generational equity, if you don’t think we owe anything to future generations, who cares about this issue of global warming?" says Weaver.