RAINFALL RECORDS SMASHED IN VANCOUVER AREA
People are pictured during a period of rain in Vancouver, B.C, on Friday, August 15, 2025. In the neighbouring city of Richmond, B.C., the Vancouver International Airport broke a 113-year-old record for the most rain recorded on Aug. 15 amid a major downpour for B.C.'s South Coast, meteorologists say. (Ben Nelms/CBC)
August 19, 2025: Rainfall records were completely smashed in the Vancouver area on Aug. 15. Breaking records is one thing, but smashing them by double or triple is another thing altogether. In a serious society - in a real nation that was trying to be honest with itself, then an event like this would be taken seriously. But in Canada, because of the tremendous power of the oil and gas industries, and the car-makers and the banks and etc... this remarkable record-breaking event barely got a mention in terms of something we should 'maybe be concerned about', and maybe DO something about.
Old records tripled: Abbotsford, a city of about 160,000 just outside of Vancouver, got 55.8 mm. of rain compared to the old record of 18 mm in 1999. This is a tripling of the old record. This is perhaps not a joke to be ignored. Maybe mother nature is trying to tell us something. But if so, nobody is listening. Squamish got 36.8 mm., breaking a record of 14.4 mm from 1988. And a whopping 80.6 mm fell in West Vancouver, after a previous high of 38.4 mm in 1999.
This kind of record-breaking rain is really something. And yet the story - and its possible ramifications - was pretty much ignored by the corporate media and all of Canada's top politicians. They were too busy telling us that we have to put more greenhouse gases into the air with more pipelines, more oil, more LNG, more fracking, more chemicals, and more etc.
As far as I know, not one senior politician or one corporate media outlet used this rain event to say ...Hey, maybe we have to start consuming LESS. Because that's the real story here I think. Climate change is now out of our control. No matter what we do, a major disaster is beginning to unfold and we can't stop it. But still, we have to at least TRY to do our best so we can minimize the disaster that is coming.
But the problem is that in Canada, our big media are owned by big business, and our politicians and governments are also owned by big business. And big business does not want to stop the use of fossil fuels because so much of their business and so much of their profit comes from the society we live in that is completely dependent on burning fossil fuels and have virtually unlimited access to power and energy and anything else we might happen to want. So even though we are destroying the environment maybe faster than ever, very little is being done to fix things up - and instead we are destroying everything perhaps faster than ever. .
And just a quick re-cap of what is going on. The Arctic experienced record-breaking melting in 2024 and 2025. Canada is having the second worst fire season on record. A severe and prolonged drought continues to grip much of Africa. And there is drought throughout North America as well. The Amazon is drying, burning, and in trouble. We just saw huge floods in Texas that killed over 130 people. And as usual, California has had major fires this year with thousands of evacuations. And Australia too is being hammered.
So ... what can we do. Well I think the first thing we have to do is to end the corporate control of our governments. As long as the corporations control our governments, we Canadians will be unable to protect ourselves from the corporations, and remember that big business does not care about you and your family. They will happily see you destroyed if it means more profit and more power for them. So we have to democratize our governments. And we need to build a free press in Canada that is independent of corporate control and can tell us the truth about what is going on.
We have to build a less wasteful transportation system. We need a lot fewer cars, and a lot better public transportation. We can do that. We need to reduce flying by maybe 80 or 90%. And we can do that too. Everybody loves to fly, but we are destroying the planet, so if given a chance to vote on less flying, what would you do? We have to stop allowing mall food courts and a lot of coffee shops to keep using throw-away dishes and cutlery and cups; it's just too wasteful and we CAN do better.
We have to reduce the food packaging in our supermarkets by about 90%. Food packaging is a hugely wasteful and poisonous industry, and we have to get rid of it. We also have to stop destroying the world's fisheries and forests. We simply have to take LESS.
So there are a lot of things we can do, and I think we would end up with better lives if we did these things. Less cars, including less EVs. Less flying. Less waste overall. Less mining. Less use of poisonous chemicals. Less fishing. Less cutting down of our forests. Less computers and the use of computers, because that entire industry is extremely toxic and uses huge amounts of power. Smaller homes. To me, these kinds of things are the only way forward. I'm not sure if people really want to go there. But if we don't, I feel fairly confident predicting a growing number of health and environmental disasters. And in the end, we are still going to be using less, because our societies and industries are going to collapse anyways. We REALLY need to get onto a better path.
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