Canada will continue to see more warming than the global average and extreme weather events will be more frequent and more intense, says a full report by a group of the world’s top climate scientists.

There will be stronger hurricanes, longer heat waves and, in some parts of the country, more snow and more hail, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released a 2,216-page assessment on global warming’s regional impact.

“I’m not surprised by that,” said Gordon McBean of the Centre for Environment and Sustainability at Western University in London, Ont.

In Canada, on average, temperatures increased by more than 1.3 degrees Celsius between 1948 and 2007, a rate of warming that was about twice the global average, he pointed out.

Warmer temperatures tend to produce more violent weather patterns.

The IPCC report also says that warming near the Great Lakes, which lost more than 70 per cent of their ice cover between 1973 and 2010, could be 50 per cent higher than what is predicted globally.

The report was released on Monday by the panel, which analyzes previous trends and makes predictions based on climate models.

On Friday, it released a summary report that outlined the impact of climate change across the globe. It reiterated that pollution from burning fossil fuels is changing the Earth’s climate and contributing to rising seas, stronger storms, hotter days and severe droughts.

In Canada, the ramifications are already being felt across the country, and scientists say the symptoms could grow worse with each passing decade:

Changing monsoon patterns will trigger intense tropical cyclones along the western coast of the U.S. and Mexico, and in Atlantic Canada.

Melting glaciers, especially in Alaska and the Arctic, have contributed to rising sea levels and will continue to do so.

The rise in temperatures will be felt more in the Arctic and at higher latitudes in the provinces and territories — more so in the winter.

In Ontario, weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms will likely become more frequent.

Snowfall in Canada has increased in the North but there was a “significant decrease” in the southwestern part of the country — in southern B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan — between 1950 and 2009.

McBean, who authored a report called “Telling the Weather Story” for the Insurance Bureau of Canada, says the debate over the role of climate change in this year’s Alberta and Toronto floods won’t easily be settled, but “we will see more of those kind of events.” More winter precipitation, along with faster melting in the spring, increases the risk of flooding.

People around the world are already seeing the impact of extreme weather, said McBean. “In terms of lost lives and injuries, displacement and devastation . . . the costs of these losses are incalculable,” he said.

The cost of the flooding that hit Toronto in July is still not clear, but recent reports suggest that the earlier floods in Alberta could cost up to $460 million.

Ian Bruce, science and policy manager at the David Suzuki Foundation in Vancouver, said it is clear that Canada is more vulnerable to some of the effects of climate change, and that global warming is amplified at the north and south poles.

That’s the bad news, he said.

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“The good news is that the report shows that our future will not be determined by chance but (by) choices we make,” said Bruce. “So we have a choice to reduce carbon emissions. The report says it is still possible that we can escape the worst impacts of climate change if we make some important changes.”

Recent weather events in Toronto and Calgary “have shown how vulnerable our communities are if we let these problems amplify,” he said, adding that the IPCC report is a call for action.

The IPCC, which came into being in 1988, delivers what are considered the authoritative assessments of global climate risks. An assessment has been released every six or seven years.

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