Canadian Pacific was building what would eventually become the Chateau Lake Louise that people know today: first as a cabin sleeping two, then a chalet sleeping 15. Swiss Guides became part of the experience, leading novice and skilled climbers on excursions.In 1922, the guides and the CPR undertook the construction of a stone hut shelter.Along the way, climbers left their mark, a record of their trips jotted into a register in a stone-built refuge known as Abbot Hut.These drawings, songs and scribbles are personal — proof that thousands of people made it to the same slice of the Rockies. But these entries provide more than just cultural and historical value. They’ve helped complete a picture of how the mountains surrounding Lake Louise are transforming in a warming climate.

New research from the University of Calgary examined the two most common approaches to Abbot Pass, and how a warming climate has changed access and safety. The paper relies on data from Environment and Climate Change Canada’s weather station at Banff and is complemented by 100 years of summit register entries.  Mountaineers documented their trips and choices on the Swiss Guide route, more commonly known today as the “Death Trap” and Lake O’Hara Gully.  The result is a unique piece of research that centres the local experience in climate science. Kate Hanly is a PhD candidate in the U of C’s department of geography and the lead author of the research paper. She says the trend, reflected in the climate data and the summit registers of generations of climbers, is clear: “We’re seeing less glaciers, less snow, faster melting snow. “Climbers are climbing increasingly on rock or on loose scree, the material that was underlying the ice, and they're seeing more rockfall.” But these historical notes logged over time also have another story to tell: one of adaptation to the climate reality that mountaineers are facing. "It just reminds us of what we have to lose,” Hanly said. “It's so much more than a hike, Hanly spent only one night in Abbot Hut. In 2012, she made the journey with her father, guided by Albi Sole, a well-known mountaineer who taught at the University of Calgary’s Outdoor Centre. The view and the experience left an impression. +It was the first glacier we walked on together and the first kind of bigger hike for [my dad] and he was so proud of himself, as he should be,” Hanly said.  At that time, Hanly was just beginning to spend more time in the mountains — and the more she visited the landscape, the more she thought about how it was changing. For those who live in the Bow Valley west of Calgary, this is a universal experience and part of daily conversations. Locals wonder if the experiences that drew them to live in the Bow Valley are in danger of becoming extinct, a loss for the next generation.......read on- stunning photos and also videos https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/old-notes-penned-at-bygone-alpine-hut-provide-glimpse-of-changing-peaks-beyond-that-famous-lake-louise-view

The Guardian- George Monbiot We need to talk about water– and the fact that the world is running out of it.On a planet getting hotter and drier by the year, governments are wilfully ignoring a looming crisis Guardian 8 March 2024 There’s a flaw in the plan. It’s not a small one: it is an Earth-sized hole in our calculations. To keep pace with the global demand for food, crop production needs to grow by at least 50% by 2050. In principle, if nothing else changes, this is feasible, thanks mostly to improvements in crop breeding and farming techniques. But everything else is going to change.Even if we set aside all other issues – heat impacts, soil degradation, epidemic plant diseases accelerated by the loss of genetic diversity – there is one which, without help from any other cause, could prevent the world’s people from being fed. Water.A paper published in 2017 estimated that to match crop production to expected demand, water use for irrigation would have to increase by 146% by the middle of this century. One minor problem. Water is already maxed out. In general, the dry parts of the world are becoming drier, partly through reduced rainfall; partly through declining river flow as mountain ice and snow retreats; and partly through rising temperatures causing increased evaporation and increased transpiration by plants. Many of the world’s major growing regions are now threatened by “flash droughts”, in which hot and dry weather sucks moisture from the soil at frightening speed. Some places, such as the southwest of the US, now in its 24th year of drought, may have switched permanently to a drier state. Rivers fail to reach the sea, lakes and aquifers are shrinking, species living in freshwater are becoming extinct at roughly five times the rate of species that live on land and major cities are threatened by extreme water stress.

Already, agriculture accounts for 90% of the world’s freshwater use. We have pumped so much out of the ground that we’ve changed the Earth’s spin. The water required to meet growing food demand simply does not exist.

That 2017 paper should have sent everyone scrambling. But as usual, it was ignored by policymakers and the media. Only when the problem arrives in Europe do we acknowledge that there’s a crisis. But while there is understandable panic about the drought in Catalonia and Andalusia, there’s an almost total failure among powerful interests to acknowledge that this is just one instance of a global problem, a problem that should feature at the top of the political agenda.Though drought measures have triggered protests in Spain, this is far from the most dangerous flashpoint. The catchment of the Indus river is shared by three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – and several highly unstable and divided regions already afflicted by hunger and extreme poverty. Today, 95% of the river’s dry season flowis extracted, mostly for irrigation. But water demand in both Pakistan and India is growing rapidly. Supply – temporarily boosted by the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush – will, before long, peak and then go into decline. Even under the most optimistic climate scenario, runoff from Asian glaciers is expected to peak before mid-century, and glacier mass will shrink by about 46% by 2100. Some analysts see water competition between India and Pakistan as a major cause of the repeated conflicts in Kashmir. But unless a new Indus waters treaty is struck, taking falling supplies into account, this fighting could be a mere prelude for something much worse.There’s a widespread belief that these problems can be solved simply by enhancing the efficiency of irrigation: huge amounts of water are wasted in agriculture. So let me introduce you to the irrigation efficiency paradox. As better techniques ensure that less water is required to grow a given volume of crops, irrigation becomes cheaper. As a result, it attracts more investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier, more profitable plants, and expands across a wider area. This is what happened, for instance, in the Guadiana river basin in Spain, where a €600m investment to reduce water use by improving the efficiency of irrigation has instead increased it. You can overcome the paradox through regulation: laws to limit both total and individual water consumption. But governments prefer to rely on technology alone. Without political and economic measures, it doesn’t work. Nor are other technofixes likely to solve the problem. Governments are planning massive engineering schemes to pipe water from one place to another. But climate breakdown and rising demand ensure that many of the donor regions are also likely to run dry. Water from desalination plants typically costs five or 10 times as much as water from the ground or the sky, while the process requires masses of energy and generates great volumes of toxic brine.

Above all, we need to change our diets. Those of us with dietary choices (in other words, the richer half of the world’s population) should seek to minimise the water footprint of our food. With apologies for harping on about it, this is yet another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water use. The water demand of certain plant products, especially almonds and pistachios in California, has become a major theme in the culture wars, as rightwing influencers attack plant-based diets....read on and act!    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/04/water-world-run-out-planet-hotter-looming-crisis   

Airports, subway tunnels, and nuclear plants are at risk along the U.S. East Coast as the ground sinks and sea levels rise Weather Network May. 17, 2024,   A recent study found that land subsidence—the ground sinking in elevation—is a growing hazard along the U.S. East Coast, and it’s one that puts millions of people at risk in some of the continent’s most densely populated cities. Flooding is an ever-present hazard for communities along the coast. Every major storm serves as a constant reminder that living near the ocean is a precarious balancing act. While most folks are prepared to deal with rising waters rushing inland, few are ready for the consequences of the land sinking beneath our feet. 

Subsidence compounds the effects of sea level rise........Scientists have long warned about the dangerous effects of sea level rise. It’s already a problem in Charleston, South Carolina, which routinely experiences coastal flooding during both storms and high tides. It’s likely that sea level rise plays a significant factor in this tidal flooding on otherwise calm days. Over time, that elevation loss could expose more areas to the effects of sea level rise, storm surge flooding, and infrastructure damage from the stress of the changing land itself.

Some cities are sinking faster than others.......Researchers from Virginia Tech and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) analyzed satellite data from 2007 and 2020 to measure how much the land sank or rose along the East Coast from Maine all the way to the southern tip of Florida. The analysis found that most coastal cities are subsiding at a rate of 1 mm per year. That may not seem like much, but some communities are subsiding at a rate of 5+ mm per year.  A few high-population cities are subsiding at a sharp clip. Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, are each home to about 150,000 people. Each of these low-lying cities on the southeastern coast are sinking at more than 4 mm per year—a particularly harrowing prospect for flood-stricken Charleston.
Atlantic City, New Jersey, is also sinking at the same rate. This popular tourist destination is particularly vulnerable to landfalling storms, and parts of the area are still recovering from Hurricane Sandy more than a decade later.  Much of North America remains depressed from the weight of glaciers that covered the continentmore than 10,000 years ago. The land is still bouncing back from the weight of those glaciers. This pattern on its own should lead to an overall net rise in elevations over time.  However, widespread subsidence is working against the land adjusting from the last ice age. Researchers worked to identify several factors driving this sinking trend along the East Coast....read on and watch the Videos......    https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/science/earth-science/millions-at-risk-as-land-sinks-beneath-major-us-east-coast-cities-study-finds 

 The world has witnessed a tenfold increase in the number of natural disasters since the 1960s, the 2020 Ecological Threat RegisterETR) shows. Increase in Natural Disasters on a Global Scale by Ten Times