Climate

“We are really wanting to make sure this is a community effort when it comes to being as energy efficient and water efficient as possible,” said Mayor Corrie DiManno.

“It’s really about the spirit of being a national park community and we probably should have never gotten to the place where we were generating waste at the rate we currently are.”

BANFF – Hot on the heels of well above normal temperatures, snow is dumping at higher elevations in Kananaskis Country and the Bow Valley and forcing a rare June snowstorm warning for the Icefields Parkway.

“It was the fastest snow melt I've ever seen…I’ve never seen anything like this," said John Pomeroy, director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Hydrology in Canmore and the Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change.

EDITORIAL: Climate change is largely in the hands of people and organizations. For an actual decisive impact to be made, all levels of government and countries need to be rowing in the same direction. It can’t simply be a directionless boat floundering in the water.

Canada has a fever. Our north is already warming at two to three times the mean global average. Even in the increasingly unlikely event that the world does manage to come together to keep mean temperature increases to below 2 Celsius, Canada is rapidly on its way to being at least 3 C hotter later in this century.

“It’s not easy. There’s a lot of moving parts. … If anyone were to ask me do you think we got a project? I’d say yes, we got a project. We have a multi-national corporation that wants to partner with us. We’re developing memorandums of understanding and it’s moving forward.”

“Grasslands are particularly valuable because they sequester carbon from the atmosphere and sink it into the soil where it's going to be there for a long time. There's hardly anything better than grasslands as a sink for carbon,” said Mark Mark Boyce, a professor of ecology at the University of Alberta.

“Our climate is changing and if we are not ahead of it, then we are behind it. We need to make sure we are planning for the future and we have provisions in place to help reduce our impact on climate change and then to consider how different our climate might be in the Bow Valley.”

“Obviously, with males, the ones with bigger horns are more likely to win male fights and then get access to the females to reproduce,” said Deakin. “But no one’s really looked at the females and how horn size affects their reproductive success.”