Editorial

Lesser Slave Lakes

The debate used to be about whether or not global warming was really happening. But the doubters are disappearing.
Now we’re talking about when, and how much, and how bad.
In dry southern Alberta, agriculture depends on water that rises in the mountains. Warmer winters mean less snow, earlier snowmelt and less water for irrigation or other industrial uses. Guaranteed, people will start talking about how to move northern water south. Expect it. And where there are votes, politicians will jump on the bandwagon.
That aside, we’re not out of the woods ourselves in the matter of future water shortages. The way the oil industry is going, northern Alberta will see a large industrial and population growth over the next couple of decades. Maybe longer.
Demands on water grow along with the industrial and population boom. It takes something like two to five barrels of water to produce a barrel of bitumen from oil sands. No problem if the rivers are full, but definitely a problem if they aren’t.
If the winters continue to be warmer than normal, a lot of the snowfall will run off over frozen ground and not get absorbed. Spring runoff will therefore be less, and there’ll be less water in the muskegs and small lakes and streams that feed into the big reservoirs like Lesser Slave Lake. It shrank big time this past summer and if the trend continues, it won’t last as one big lake. It’ll be two smaller ones, separated by Swan Hills silt at the narrows. Lesser Slave Lakes.
With the lake currently low, the local municipal district is talking again about siphoning water out of the lake in order to keep the Lesser Slave River at adequate levels to service downstream industry. This happened before, and it wasn’t popular with people upstream, to say the least. But it may be a sign of the times.
Meanwhile, the warm winters are causing other types of imbalance in nature. It is precisely the absence of really cold temperatures in the past few years that has allowed the mountain pine beetle to prosper the way it has in central B.C. It has wiped out pine forests there in an area about the size of New Brunswick and is now looking over the mountains for a new breeding ground.
Expect a beetle infestation in Alberta much sooner than previously forecast, the experts now say. And what about all those towns and cities in B.C. that won’t have any trees to process? The forestry workers can follow the pine beetles into Alberta and get jobs in the booming oilpatch. They’ll be part of a worldwide migration of what are called ‘environmental refugees’, that number around 30 million. The Worldwatch Institute estimates the figure could grow to 150 million in the next 40 years.
So, people in large numbers moving from scarce resources – principally water – to areas of relative abundance. It’s happening everywhere, and Alberta is not exempt. We can expect big growth in northern Alberta, and we’re going to have to deal with the consequences. Even without over-warm winters, it was going to be a challenge.
Some planning is definitely in order.