It’s January 2024 and my sneakers are wet. The rubber soles gave up months ago, meaning the three inches of mud and puddle water underfoot is seeping right into my socks as I clomp toward Susies Lake on a blue-grey morning that feels like it could be April. My feet, I imagine, have already taken on the colour and quality of the moss I’ve been schlup-schlup-schluping through for the past hour. Which is to say, brown, sullen and waterlogged. Soup forgotten at the back of the fridge.
My guides on this hike, Gable and Emily Goulet, came prepared: Both wear waterproof hiking boots. Fitting, given the two grew up in the Maritimes—Gable in Middle Sackville and Beaver Bank; Emily all over New Brunswick, before her family moved to Sackville too. The couple met in high school. But the chilly childhood winters they remember feel worlds away from the spring-like ones of late.
“When I was a kid, we were four-wheeling across the lakes,” Gable says, speaking with The Coast. From December until spring, from the age of five until he was a pre-teenager, he recalls whipping through the snow-covered trails around—and over—frozen Wilson Lake, Fenerty Lake, First Lake and Third Lake. Ice thickness wasn’t a concern.
“We never really worried about it,” says Gable, now 33 years old. “We would check the ice at the beginning of the season, and then once you were good, you were good until spring.”
Which brings us back to Susies Lake: We could be canoeing on this January day, but Gable remembers skating on the lake into his twenties, trekking in with a shovel to clear the snow off the ice. That’s not an uncommon story in Halifax, where, as recently as the 1950s, ice harvesters cut and sold blocks of ice from Lake Banook, cars raced on Lewis Lake and there were still those living who remembered the last time Halifax Harbour froze over. But it is becoming an increasingly rare one.
According to a recent report from Climate Central, a US-based nonprofit group of climate scientists and researchers, Halifax has lost an average of eight winter days of freezing temperatures annually due to climate change since 2014. (That amount of warming is the third-most of any provincial capital, after Toronto and Victoria.)
And those warmer winters—while easier on the heating bill—come with a raft of knock-on effects far more troublesome for Nova Scotians than a muddy pair of shoes, from a greater risk of tick-borne diseases, to toxic blooms in Nova Scotia’s watershed, to increasing threats of spring and summer forest fires. Which raises the questions: What’s next? And is it too late to change?
Brace for warmer Nova Scotia winters
Surrounded by ocean on three sides, Nova Scotia has always come with a disclaimer: If you don’t like the weather, wait 10 minutes. That goes for our winters, too, which—thanks to the Atlantic Ocean’s moderating influence—come with more freeze-thaw cycles than most of our provincial peers. But the gap between us and the rest of Canada is growing, Climate Central’s report warns.
The nonprofit science group made a model that imagines the recent climate without the effects of global heating—finding what’s called the counterfactual temperature—to compare the actual and modeled temperatures for every winter from 2014 through 2023. In the past 10 years, according to the report’s data, our province has averaged more winter days above freezing—20 a year, to be exact—than any other Canadian province or territory. Seven of those annual above-freezing winter days, the model squarely attributes to climate change. (Prince Edward Island tied with Nova Scotia for the most sub-zero days lost in Canada.)
Climate Central’s report is staggering not just for its findings, but for its scope: Researchers analyzed winter temperatures in 901 cities in 123 countries and territories across the Northern Hemisphere. Compared to its global peers, Halifax falls somewhere in the meaty middle—well below the likes of Fuji, Japan, with an average of 35 below-freezing days lost each year to climate change, and well above the likes of Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California, with—no surprise—no sub-zero days at all. The story is similar for much of Nova Scotia. Per the report’s findings, Digby has lost an average of 10 days of freezing weather annually to climate change. Yarmouth, Shelburne and Queens County have each lost nine.
“We often hear people say things like, ‘Growing up, we didn’t have these large wildfires … or ‘growing up, I was able to ice skate on the pond all winter.’ … And we can use this attribution approach to say, ‘Yes, that’s a real trend. And here’s how much of that trend was being caused by climate change.’”
Some of that isn’t necessarily a surprise: In temperate coastal regions like Nova Scotia, “you’re naturally closer to that threshold,” says climate scientist Kristina Dahl, who serves as Climate Central’s vice president and edited the report. But the changes it forecasts—absent intervention—are anything but natural. The report’s aim, says Dahl, is to put real, measurable data to what cities have been experiencing around the globe.
“We often hear people say things like, ‘Growing up, we didn’t have these large wildfires that brought tons of smoke into the San Francisco Bay Area.’ Or ‘growing up, I was able to ice skate on the pond all winter.’ … And we can use this attribution approach to say, ‘Yes, that’s a real trend. And here’s how much of that trend was being caused by climate change.’”
The cold truth? Warmer winters are here. So how does that affect Nova Scotia?
With warmer winters come longer tick seasons
Vett Lloyd has been watching the warming Maritime winters with interest. (And, she would likely admit, some degree of trepidation.) One of Canada’s leading tick researchers, she heads the Lloyd Tick Lab at Mount Allison University, where she has studied the tiny parasites and the pathogens they carry for more than a decade. Her interest took root more than 10 years ago after she was bit while gardening and contracted Lyme disease, a rare occurrence in New Brunswick at the time. Infection rates from ticks were still low for our provincial neighbours—less than one percent of blood samples from dogs bitten by ticks in New Brunswick showed evidence of the disease—and the common perception was that ticks weren’t an issue like they had already become in Nova Scotia.
“And so that was just a policy thing,” Lloyd joked with The Coast in 2022. “The ticks were unaware that there was a provincial boundary there and that they were supposed to stop at the border.”
After she got sick, Lloyd converted her lab—which used to study cancer—to one that studies the far-less-researched tick-borne diseases. She’s been at it ever since. And warmer Maritime winters come with their risks, she tells The Coast from her home near the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick border.
“They’re definitely easier on the ticks,” Lloyd says.
There are 14 species of ticks in Nova Scotia. Not all can survive the cold, Lloyd says. Some species are “really cold hardy,” she adds, “but we don’t worry about them in terms of human health, because they don’t really have a taste for human blood.” The ones that are more concerning are the “generalist feeders” like blacklegged ticks, because “blood is blood for them, whether it’s a human, a dog, a cat, a mouse or rabbit, whatever. They’ll take anything.” That means those blacklegged ticks are far likelier to spread bacteria picked up from another host—like a deer or mouse—to us. Cue sickness.
In the past, Lloyd tells The Coast, those ticks would go dormant for the winter. Blacklegged ticks can survive freezing temperatures as low as -10°C—and in some cases, down to -21°C—but they aren’t known to feed unless it’s four degrees or warmer. For most of Nova Scotia’s history, that meant winters—and the spring and fall seasons around them—were relatively tick-free. But not anymore, Lloyd says. The reality of milder winters means that “more ticks are feeding later,” she adds, “so you have more females laying thousands of eggs, and more of those eggs will survive the winter and hatch.”
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If there is a silver lining to our warming planet, it is that Nova Scotia’s hotter and drier summers are increasingly inhospitable to ticks, which thrive in cool and moist climates. (“When we get a dry spell in August, typically, that’s a safe season from ticks,” Lloyd explains.) But the rainy spring and fall—what Lloyd calls “peak tick seasons,” when temperatures are often in the mid-single digits or teens—are only getting longer.
Even my Susies Lake guide, Gable Goulet—an outdoors enthusiast who, along with (sensibly) packing waterproof boots for a hike, also has a well-practiced habit of checking for ticks—says he’s “never experienced” a tick season like the one last fall. “It got to the point where [it seemed like] every night I’d be falling asleep, and then I’d find a tick [crawling] on me or biting me,” he tells The Coast. “And that was for like, a week straight.”
And while Nova Scotia saw relatively few cases of Lyme disease 20 years ago—between 2002 and 2010, 18 or fewer cases were reported annually, according to the province—today, the risk has multiplied: As many as 40% of blacklegged ticks in large parts of the province are carrying the bacteria that causes Lyme, says Lloyd. Nova Scotia reported more than 2,000 “confirmed or probable” cases in 2023 alone. From 18 cases per year to 2,000 is an increase of more than 11,000%. Yes, eleven thousand percent. Even accounting for the province’s population boom—Nova Scotia has added roughly 150,000 people since 2005, a 16% increase—it’s a staggering figure.
Lyme isn’t the only tick-borne disease that worries Lloyd, either. Instead, she’s concerned about the unknown and lesser-discussed pathogens.
“Anaplasma is still a rare tick-borne disease,” she says, “but we’re starting to [see] people getting very, very sick with it. It started on the South Shore—where most of these things do—but they have so many ticks that it’s now crept up to central and northern New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.”
Longer forest fire seasons in store
Venture north along Hammonds Plains Road from where it meets Highway 103, and you’ll notice the change almost as soon as you’ve passed through Highland Park: Green-tipped conifers give way to blackened trunks, so alike and innumerable that they begin to resemble headstones in a graveyard. Two years on from Nova Scotia’s worst wildfire season on record, the scars are still visible. So, too, are the rebuilding efforts. Tyvek wrap and bundles of lumber sit in lots where homes once stood, as their owners await insurance payouts that may never come—or if they do, won’t replace what was lost. At the time, the 900-hectare blaze displaced more than 16,000 Haligonians and destroyed 151 homes. An even bigger fire in Shelburne County burned through 235 square kilometres, displacing half the county’s population.
The fires were unlike anything seen before in Nova Scotia. But unprecedented as that summer was, the conditions had been ripe for one like it. The fires arrived in late May during the season that wilderness firefighters refer to as the “spring dip”: A brief window when the snow has melted and the trees have lost their moisture, but the new leaves aren’t out yet so the forest floor—with its dried leaves, dry soil and hurricane-blown deadfall—is exposed to the harsh glare of the sun.
In John Vaillant’s Fire Weather, a bestselling account of how flames engulfed Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016, the Vancouver-based author and journalist refers to the dip as a “critical moment” when the forest’s detritus begins to “take on the characteristics of kindling, and last summer’s grass will burn like newspaper.”
Nova Scotia’s hellish fire season also arrived amid the backdrop of a provincial forestry policy that had, for some years, left environmentalists underwhelmed. University of King’s College president William Lahey’s 2018 report, an “Independent Review of Forestry Practices,” had aims to “protect and enhance” Nova Scotia’s ecosystems—including its old-growth forests—through a “triad approach” that would see the province’s forests divided into three categories: Protected parks and nature reserves; “high-production” woodlots open to clearcuts; and an ill-defined third category Lahey called “forestry with a lighter touch.” The reality has been messier. (Susies Lake would perhaps fall under the first category, given Parks Canada is considering a national urban park designation for the surrounding Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lakes region, but then again, the province also seems determined to build a highway through it.)
Lahey recommended drastically reducing clearcutting on Crown land and shifting the industry to privately-owned lots, which the Ecology Action Centre’s Raymond Plourde warned The Coast could ironically lead to more trees felled than before, with the “worst of the worst” behaviour falling under less regulatory control.
Nature Nova Scotia president Bob Bancroft warned that Nova Scotia’s softwood lots would “leave too little forest for wildlife to survive.” In a 2020 op-ed, he wrote in the Chronicle-Herald that the province’s plans would “perpetuate all the major deleterious clearcut effects, which include sun-exposed soils, dryness, increased temperatures with tree shade removed, hit-and-run rains in brooks, causing wildly fluctuating water levels in streams and major nutrient losses in soils.”
Enter the warmer winters forecast by Climate Central’s report, and Bancroft’s warnings seem eerily prophetic. In years past, Climate Central’s Kristina Dahl tells The Coast, we could more reliably count on winter snowfall to protect against the kind of spring wildfire conditions seen in 2023.
“If you are building up snow in the winter time,” she says, “and that snow is gradually releasing moisture over the course of the spring and summer, that gradual release of moisture helps to keep the vegetation moist, rather than having it dry out and become like fuel for wildfires.”
What happens when the snow melts earlier—or doesn’t fall at all? The answer is what some climate researchers are calling a “vicious cycle,” where faster snowmelts can spur longer fire seasons, which, due to burning through a forest’s protective canopy, set the table for even faster snowmelts in following winters. In 2019, researchers in western United States estimated a four-fold increase in snowmelt in US forests that had burned since 1999.
“Climate change is already melting snowpack and increasing forest fires,” that study’s co-author Kelly Gleason told Scientific American. “But then there’s this feedback, which could amplify that impact earlier.”
“The ice is almost never safe”
If ticks and forest fires are obvious concerns, then a warming winter’s threat to Nova Scotia’s cultural identity is a murkier one to measure—but no less real, either. It’s not for nothing that, for years, Canada’s five-dollar bill showed children playing hockey on a frozen pond and tobogganing. Stereotype or not—more Canadians swim, cycle and run than play hockey, per Statistics Canada—what happens when those ponds don’t freeze over anymore? What happens to a people’s culture when the seasons they knew, the seasons their parents and grandparents knew, aren’t the same ones that their children and grandchildren will inherit?
It’s a thought Gable Goulet has had more often of late. He and Emily became first-time parents last year.
“It makes me a little sad,” he says, when asked about what the future holds in store for Nova Scotia’s winters. “I really enjoyed those moments on the ice.”
Dartmouth councillor Sam Austin shares a similar story. Growing up “in the countryside” on the Eastern Shore, Austin says, skating on its lakes and ponds was a winter rite of passage.
“All through junior high and high school, that was your winter activity,” he tells The Coast. “We’ve always been a Maritime climate, so there’d be rain spells, but in my lifetime this has changed.
“Denying climate change on this when the evidence is staring us straight in the face is just absurd.”
“Denying climate change on this when the evidence is staring us straight in the face is just absurd.”
Last year, Austin and his fellow councillors heeded HRM staff’s recommendation to cancel Halifax’s annual ice-thickness testing program, which had surveyed more than 70 lakes and ponds to assess their safety for skating and snowmobiling. The reason?
“The ice is almost never safe,” Austin says. “We don’t get winters like we used to.”
The decision saved Halifax $24,000 per year, Austin wrote in his monthly newsletter at the time. He added that the HRM’s Parks and Recreation department would spend the money on clearing snow and ice from park paths instead.
“The dollar figure isn’t really the most important thing,” he tells The Coast. The cost of running the service—about six cents per resident—“isn’t all that much. It’s the staff resources, the time.”
The silver lining of red alerts
Time: How do we reverse it? Make the most of the chance we have to prevent the worst effects of climate change? Kristina Dahl spends a lot of her time thinking about those questions. Over the past 20 years, the San Francisco-based climate scientist’s research into sea-level rise, extreme heat and other climate-related risks has put her at the forefront of conversations around our changing planet and what’s in store for us. (TIME—there it is again—has called her “one of the great geographers of our disorienting new world.”)
Dahl doesn’t see her work as activism. (“Our focus is really on doing the science and communicating [it],” she tells The Coast.) But it’s hard not to see the former climate-action campaigner—and her hopes for the future—seep through the scientist’s veneer. Before joining Climate Central, she was the lead climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate and Energy program. It was during her doctoral studies at the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where she was “reconstructing the history of Earth’s climate using geologic records,” that she first found her focus shifting to the present and future, rather than the past.
“The longer we continue to burn coal, oil and gas, and continue to add heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the more we will see our winters shift toward these warmer days,” Dahl tells The Coast.
But there is a silver lining.
“Global temperature is quite responsive to our changes in emissions,” she adds, “and so the latest science suggests that within about a decade of reaching a net-zero emissions world, we would stop seeing warming.”
The Goulets have been trying, for their part. They replaced their last car with an electric one. Last year, they moved from Halifax to a small homestead outside of Bridgewater, where they’ve planted an orchard and begun raising pigs and chickens. It’s part of an effort to cut back on their carbon footprint, they explain. From their new home, they see the rolling hills blanketed in winter snow. There’s a little pond, too, that—with the right winter conditions—one imagines would be just right for skating.
—With files from Matt Stickland, Kaija Jussinoja and Jacob Boon
This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.
Back in the 50s 70s 80s there was a lot of acid rain, we burned a lot of coal, the sulfuric acid dumped into the atmosphere created a cooling effect more snow more cold. We do not have acid rain anymore hence slightly warming which is a good thing. Less burning of fossil fuels to heat in the winter, longer growing seasons for food, the plant life thrives on COs to produce oxygen for clean air, there are CO2 generators for green houses to produce better crops/plants. Carbon Tax & the global warming/climate change new name is just a WEF scheme to tax richer countries to give to the poor ones has been in the makings since 1974 for this idea. Trudeau is a puppet of the WEF, his replacement Carney sits on the board of the WEF. Canada did not vote for the WEF to rule Canada.
This report should be called the climate terrior report. Brought to you by this bought and paid for propaganda source!! The other parts of this are all Likely just the same paid for by the Liberal socialist regime and the research probably has no more time into it that your morning cup of coffee. The coast could do better but then they’d need to actually sell advertising and subscriptions instead of using tax dollars provided by the current regime. Good thing is once the regime is done all of these machines will likely dry up with no subsidies to sustain them.