Backyard Rinks On Borrowed Time | Episode 21

Full Interview Transcript

Voice Over:

You are listening to the Big Blue Marble Podcast with Anwar Knight.

Anwar Knight:
That sound I'm willing to bet is as well known as is the logo of Tim Hortons. It's the sound of a treasured Canadian pasttime, a part of who we are. The blades carving ice on a frozen pond. Yeah. Yeah. I know, I know not every Canadian skates or even owns a pair, but skating is woven into the fabric of our country's culture centuries ago, indigenous peoples using deerskin row tied the shin bones of animals to their footwear. So they could skate across lakes, likely establishing the earliest form of rapid transit. Ice hockey is Canada's national game. It was conceived over a century ago on frozen ponds, rivers and lakes. Wayne Gretzky , the Great One scores, owned his skills on a rink his father built for him behind their little home in Brantford, Ontario.

But those were the days when we had a pure winter season, when you could count on old man winter. Yeah, hang on. You're right. Let me qualify that. I mean, to say, when our winters were normal before the impacts of our prolific burning of fossil fuels, like coal, gas and oil, which has now produced over time, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that have skyrocketed to their highest levels in hundreds of thousands of years.

Our warmer winters are self-inflicted. And guess what? It's now eroding a uniquely Canadian experience by limiting the number of days that our family, your kids, my kids can enjoy on a homemade ice rink. You know from the late 1950s to the early 80's, many parts of Southern Ontario could count on average between 35 and 42 skateable days each season.
But that number has fallen dramatically. I'm actually staring right now at my rink in a box kit I bought this two years ago. So this is the second winter now I've not been able to set it up for my kids. My guest today has been tracking the number of skateable days each winter through a crowd source program called Rink Watch. Robert McLeman is an environmental scientist at Wilfrid Laurier University and the co-director of Rink Watch, a citizen scientists initiative that compiles ice conditions on naturally frozen rinks across the country. Is a part of our heritage one of Canada's great pleasures now threatened with extinction. Are backyard rinks on borrowed time? We'll find out next.

Voice Over:
For the latest stories on our changing planet plus show updates and an exclusive look behind the scenes with Anwar Knight in studio visit big blue marble dot earth.

Anwar Knight:
Good of you to join us today, Robert and welcome to the Big Blue Marble Podcast.

Robert McLeman:
Thank you it's my pleasure.

Anwar Knight:
You know, I think you and your team may have found one of the best ways to engage people when it comes to bringing awareness of our warming world and all through the love of skating.

Robert McLeman:
Well, you're right. If there's a couple of things that Canadians in particular love to talk about it, skating in the weather. So why not try to bring them together in a science project?

Anwar Knight:
So how did Rink Watch get its start.

Robert McLeman:
Back in 2013, my colleague, Colin Robertson, and I were trying to figure out how to make our environmental science work accessible to the general public. And so we had that very thought that we just discussed, which is well, the public in Canada loves to talk hockey, loves to talk skating, loves to talk about the weather is there a way that we can engage them in collecting and submitting data about outdoor skating and weather and use that to generate some scientific research. So to cut a long story short, we created a website called rinkwatch.org.

We invited people who had outdoor skating rinks in their backyard or neighborhood parks to come onto the website to pin the location on an interactive map. And then simply to let us know throughout the winter, whether or not they could skate on that rink, given the weather conditions and lo and behold, it became super popular. And you know, it's still running today.

Anwar Knight:
And this is not exclusively for Canadian locations. Right?

Robert McLeman:
When we first thought about it, we thought it would appeal to Canadians, but actually about 20% of our users are in the United States where we found out there's also a very popular culture around outdoor skating.
And we've even over the years had rinks popup on our map from places like Estonia and China and Norway. So, but most of them come from Canada. Still about 75, 80% are Canadian rinks.

Anwar Knight:
And obviously geographically speaking in the U S it's really just the Northern portions that would experience cold enough values to permit freezing. But I say that because I want to go on record by stating at the heartbeat of ice hockey it's all Canadian. It has been for centuries for those who don't know Montreal hosted the world's first organized game of ice hockey dating back more than 150 years. But I sometimes wonder Robert. That, because our winters now seem to be milder overall that some may have actually forgotten what our Canadian winter season used to be like. Do you think that's possible?

Robert McLeman:
I think it's more than possible. I think it's actually happening, especially in the Eastern part of Canada. What we're seeing for our research is that there's really a tale of two winters winters out West. So we're looking at Northern Ontario, westward to the Rockies, continued to be cold with long extended periods of subfreezing temperatures.
But here in Eastern North America, from the Great Lakes Region right out to Newfoundland, we're seeing a lot more of yo-yoing conditions in the winter time. So the temperatures go up, they go down and winter starts a little bit later than it ever used to and it, it seems to wrap up earlier in the spring time. So. That's really causing people to forget what it's like to experience a long cold winter. And what skating seasons would have been like 50 or 75 years ago.

Anwar Knight:
And rink wide certainly puts a spotlight on that. So what do the participants need to actually do? What information do they provide you?

Robert McLeman:
We've had two ways of doing so the way that it's been the longest has been simply to go onto the rinkwatch.org website. And create a little account login, pin your rink on to our web map. And then just each day, there's a little calendar function you can drop down and indicate the skating conditions on your rink and add some photos if you wish. And some other data as well. And that's been going on since day one.

Last year we added an extra level, which is the Rink Watch sentinel. These are folks who actually work with one of our research assistants and they provide really detailed information about how they constructed their rink and the slope and the aspect or the sun and things like that. So we can really dig down into more than just temperature, but other factors that determine whether or not a rink will be skateable and that seems to be going strong as well.

Anwar Knight:
And how often then are they submitting a report? Is it, is it nearly daily ?

Robert McLeman:
For the sentinels? Yes, exactly. So from The week before their rink at skating for the, the surface becomes hard enough for skating. They start to submit and they go all the way through till the end of the winter the people who participate just on their own through the website, they can do as much or as little as they want.

So some years we'll have people we'll put in, you know, a few weeks of data, other years they might disappear altogether, but that's okay because we can crowdsource that data and
pool it for particular locations and then extract from it the types of information we want to gather about key temperature thresholds and things like that.

Anwar Knight:
And I gather that the definition of the backyard rink for what you were doing extends to local ponds and that sort of thing too, right?

Robert McLeman:
Yes. Well, in my own neighborhood, that's how people skate. We're in a hilly neighborhood in Cambridge, Ontario. So our skating surface is a natural pond. And so I've been tracking that as part of the website and other people have done so as well. We also get people who not just skating rinks, but we've had outdoor curling rinks participate in the past as well.

Anwar Knight:
I was going over,you mentioned that the central report, I went over last year's data. So I hope I have these numbers, right if I was reading it correctly, that places like Newmarket in Ontario, less than 30 skateable days, Waterloo had 31 to 60 days, but in Western Canada, Fort McMurray, in particular, if I recall correctly, it was 131 days. And this was all last season. Do we know what the days are right now in Fort McMurray?

Robert McLeman:
Yes, we're on actually Fort McMurray is going to have an even longer season this year. They got started out West in October this year, winter came early. So from Saskatchewan, even parts of Western Manitoba, right through, up to Fort Mac. They were skating already by, by Halloween. And it's been going strong. Yeah. Whereas in the Eastern part of North America, there's places that still have not yet had a decent skating day. So especially in the Eastern United States and up into the Maritime provinces, rinks just simply haven't been able to get going yet.

Anwar Knight:
You know, that's interesting when you mentioned parts of Alberta, Fort McMurry, being able to skate by Halloween. I was actually going over some of the current weather observations for this month. So January 2021 in Fort McMurray from Environment Canad and although they have seen temperatures below freezing, it has actually been much warmer than the norm.

Their daily average right now is about minus two and overnight lows of minus 12. That's again for this month, but typically it should be a high of a frigid minus 13 and dipping down to minus 24 overnight. And I mentioned this because not only is it warmer than normal. But it's also occurring during a La Niña episode, which typically creates a pattern when the bitter cold air tends to settle more in the West and a warming trend in the East.

So not only is it warmer than normal, but in fact, it's warmer when it should be actually colder than normal. Is that a red flag for your team or perhaps it's still too early in the
season with, with details to come in the spring.

Robert McLeman:
That's right. Yeah. We try to look retrospectively at the end of the year because there can be a lot of variation yet. We suspect that there will be some more deep freezes to come this particular winter and La Niña winters are always difficult to project because that's one of the fundamental characteristics of them is this. Variability throughout the season and, you know, warm conditions popping up in areas that are not traditionally warm and cold ones in others.

So for example, right now there's snow and ice in parts of Western Europe, even as far South, as Spain and Portugal have seen snow this winter. So yeah, this is going to be an interesting one where we were really excited to see the data that emerges from this particular season.

Anwar Knight:
Is there a region that seems to be struggling the most when it comes to the number of skateable days, because that's at the end of the day, what you're, you're putting out, right? The shrinking skateable days correct?

Robert McLeman:
Absolutely. Yes. And so we've done a variety of studies using our data and we're really seeing, for example, in Southern and especially Southwestern Ontario, close to the lakes, we're seeing a real shrinkage in the length of outdoor skating seasons and the number of really high quality days.

So essentially everywhere from Toronto, all the way down to Windsor, along the lakes Atlantic Canada, except for sort of those interior areas in New Brunswick, sort of the more coastal areas. They've really had difficult winters lately in terms of building a skating rink. And then of course, going down into the Northeastern United States they've had a number of really mild winters in a row.

So so it's, again, as I mentioned earlier in the interview where we're seeing a tale of two winters, we're seeing good strong skating seasons in Western Canada. And really alternating seasons in the East.

Anwar Knight:
So what would be, I mean, I think we can see from the numbers, I was reading on your website over 90 days, that would be exceptional. And anything above that. Wow. Canadiana at its finest is, is the benchmark 30 days or less where we really, you know, have some problems.

Robert McLeman:
That's a really good point is that you know, it's a lot of effort to build a backyard skating rink. There's a lot of energy that goes into it in terms of putting up the the boards and often the plastic liner that goes with it.

There's some expenses. And of course, then standing outside to flood it every night. What we see is if you're right, that if people can not be guaranteed any more than a month or so of skating they might not build a rink the following year. And we we've actually seen that just in our own participants over the last seven years is that some people have dropped out of making a rink. Specifically because it's, it's more difficult, especially here in the Great Lakes region where I am to keep a good rink going all winter.

Anwar Knight:
I get it. I get it. So where does this leave us Robert? Is a part of our heritage one of Canada's great pleasures now threatened with extinction. Are we going to say goodbye to shinny?

Robert McLeman:
I sure. Hope not. We've looked at, we've taken our data and we've put it into climate models to sort of forecast out to the end of this century to see what skating seasons might be like. In places like Southern Ontario, we're going to see a shrinkage of at least a third in terms of the number of high quality skating days.

Maybe more than that Montreal, you mentioned earlier in the interview about how it's the home of hockey. It's also the home of outdoor skating. They're going to see some shrinkage as well, essentially Eastern North America, that the seasons are going to shrink from right now. They start, you know, typically around Christmas time and work until the end of February in Southern Ontario.

We're probably gonna see it much later start a much later, start into January and an earlier thaw. So we'll be right at that four to six week kind of window that we talked about earlier. Where people will have to make, you know, decisions of whether they want to invest the time and energy to do it. So looping back to your original question, it could very well become endangered, especially in the Eastern part of the country.

Anwar Knight:
You know, the, the Rideau Canal just to opened up I guess about a week ago now, but here in Toronto, we still have not dipped below minus 10. And, and normally for the month of January, we have about 14 occasions of that and in December we get about seven. We haven't seen that, that might change later this week and there's going to be colder air moving in, but we're towards the end of January. And it really makes you wonder you know, where did winters go? And I'm kind of curious is that this is not only about, you know, pleasure skating. I mean it goes much deeper than that. I know some may embrace with happiness, the opportunity of leaving the scarves, hats and boots packed away. But this is not just about a backyard ice rink it's causing a cascade of unpredictable impacts in communities across our country, but also you can extend it to other parts of the world.

And I'm just wondering what is your take and when it comes to, you know, there's a huge economic engine, certainly in Canada, when it comes to winter activities, what do you see in the future when it comes to something like that?

Robert McLeman:
You raise a great point. It isn't just a backyard skating. When you think in Canada, the ski industry, both downhill skiing and cross country skiing, you think about snowmobiling. There's a lot of winter activities that depends upon a nice cold winter and a lot of these communities that are focused on outdoor recreation. So you think about the ski hill communities, the rural communities where snowmobilers come in and they stay in hotels and they spend money in local restaurants and so on.

And all the employment opportunities to go with them. It is considerable and there's been a lot of research to show that for example, downhill ski resorts in Eastern North America are increasingly going to struggle in coming decades because of the changing climate. Especially when you lose the skiing or the skating or the outdoor activity during key holiday periods. So during the Christmas holidays, during the March break, when the kids are off school, if you don't have cold weather during those particular weeks the, the communities lose those visitors. And so they lose that economic engine. And so that's just one example. If you want to look beyond recreation one of the biggest expenditures for many governments, local governments in Canada is road repairs and a very cold freezing winter is actually easy on the road budget because you know the roads freeze solid, you scrape the snow off and that's it. Whereas these milder winters with freeze, thaw conditions with a lot of melting, snow and ice are super expensive. And so it places an increased burden on, on the taxpayer to for the road budget. So there's a lot of implications to milder winters that we may not think about.

Anwar Knight:
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I remember doing a story in that the city of Toronto alone repairs over 200,000 potholes every year. And it's about 25 bucks a pothole. So this is big bucks. But I want to go back to the skiing industry. It certainly, it has already hit close to home about a decade ago, a snowless and warm winter here in Ontario. It forced Blue Mountain ski resort to close. They had to lay off more than 1300 employees. So there are a lot of people that depend on the winter season to earn a living and adding to that as you inferred one report that was done by the national snow and ice data center says that if climate continues to change at the current rate, warmer winters will mean that ski season will be cut by half in about 30 years. So that's not a long time, 30 years. And that's millions of dollars of economic benefit that could be gone. So hats off to the rink watch team because this initiative is now I think another tool that provides additional information alongside, and I say this in quotes here alongside conventional science. And I would think that would be quite rewarding.

Robert McLeman:
Well, thank you for that. And that is one of the deliberate intentions of this project is that the data that we use for our research is provided by the citizens by the participants. And it's the first people who get the results are the participants as well. Before we go ahead and publish the data in peer reviewed journals, which we do we've had three publications in scientific journals that have come out of this project. And so that is the idea behind this citizen science type approach, which is to, yes, we want to study climate change and how it's affecting winter conditions, but we also want the general public to be actively involved in understanding what the implications of these changes are for things that they love to do, whether it's skiing or skating or, or other things.

Anwar Knight:
Do you have any idea on who these citizen scientists are and you may not have that data, but have you connected with them over the phone or maybe through a, you know, Facebook? Cause I know you have a Facebook page as well. I'm just curious. Are they typical families? Are they nature lovers? Who are these people who want to be a part of this?

Robert McLeman:
A couple of years ago, we had a graduate student in kinesiology actually do her thesis on who are the Rink Watchers. And so she surveyed them and interviewed them. And what she found is they're kind of people like you and me their families who have kids who want the kids to be outside and active during the winter time.
It, you know, that deep, dark part of the year when the kids are tempted to be in the rooms or in the basement on their video games, playing hockey. So the people who build these rinks they do so as a labor of love for their family, some of them, you know, inherited the tradition from their own parents. Other people have come from backgrounds where they never had outdoor skating as a kid, but they want to adopt that. And often it's a community meeting place. So you'll find that many of the friends and neighbors also share the rink. And it becomes almost like a, a neighborhood asset when it's going. And you know, some people do build it because they hope their kid will be the next Wayne Gretzky or Hayley
Wickenheiser.

Anwar Knight:
Why not?

Robert McLeman:
But why not? And, you know, if you do want your kid to become a great hockey player, there's no better place to practice skills than on the, the, the, the wonderful experience of a small outdoor rink where the, the ice is not perfect. And, and, you know, you get, you get lots of outdoor activity, but, but most people do it just because they love their kids. They love the neighbor's kids, and they just want a fun place to spend the winter.

Anwar Knight:
So what's the magic formula then. The variables that are needed to make the perfect backyard rink.

Robert McLeman:
Well, I've been that you got to start with cold temperatures, like you said earlier, if you can get a few nights that are minus 10 degrees Celsius or colder, that's, that's a wonderful ingredient. You can still do it with milder temperatures, but it becomes more of an art form at that point. In the Eastern part of Canada in particular, it's good to have a plastic liner. So that when you do get these inevitable freeze thaw events during the winter your, your, your water doesn't drain out of your rink and into your basement or your neighbor's basement. And but the key thing is level, a level site and it sounds very obvious but at the same time, even a couple inches of change in grade can require gallons and gallons of extra water to to make the surface. So I do know of people who've actually gone to the trouble of getting a landscaper in to level their backyard to a dead level, so that the rink pad is always, you know, it's always in maximum condition. And it's always good if you can have like a shady, sheltered spot as well, but there's never any perfect conditions. It's, you know, you're dependent on nature. But the key thing is give it a shot. It's, it's a heck of a lot of fun to even just try and do it.

Anwar Knight:
Now you're also studying climate trends in urban areas, and there's a real correlation between temperature variables in a city environment phrased as the heat island effect, cities generate their own heat off rooftops, buildings, and you know, residential heating sources. Is there anything that startled you with that information with that area of study?

Robert McLeman:
Our research was consistent with exactly what you've described. So for example, we did a couple of years ago, look at Metro Toronto and looked at where the rinks were skateable on a given day. And we really did see an example of where rinks were not skateable in, you know, the downtown part of the city. But when you get out to the suburbs they were and it, you know, especially in times, like right now, when we're speaking today, where the temperatures are hovering around the freezing mark you know, even a one degree difference in temperature across town can have a big impact on the skatability of a rink surface.

So we definitely see that, but at the same time, we do see people still in downtown Toronto on very small backyards, still making skating pads for their kids and really enjoying it. So we're glad to see that it's not just a suburban experience.

Anwar Knight:
And as I mentioned earlier, this is something that many people can easily relate to especially if you happen to you know, take the initiative to build a rink, then you really have an understanding when it comes to you know, whether you have a handful or a whole season's worth of skateable days. But you're an environmental researche so you see this and have a deeper understanding.

Are there things that are coming out now, when you start putting the data together, you talk amongst your colleagues. Is it shocking you, or maybe it's not because you have been studying it so long. You know where this is going?

Robert McLeman:
Yeah, I, I hate to say it, but our research on the skating rinks is pretty consistent with research that's being done on other you know, trends in winter conditions. So for example, scientists who take cores out of trees to look at the dendro chronology to see tree growth and the length of the tree growing season, people who have studied the ski industry, people who've studied the Great Lakes and the hydrological patterns and so on the ice, on the lakes. It's all pointing in the same direction which is essentially that winters are becoming shorte milder and a much more variable, both in terms of, from one year to the next and within a given winter you'll see variable temperature conditions and that's essentially becoming the new norm. And we'll be we'll be seeing more of that in the future. So the types of winters we've seen the last couple of years, these La Niña winters where there's a lot of variability. I'm afraid that that is that is our future.

Anwar Knight:
Yeah, but it doesn't mean we can't change it. Yes. It will take a monumental effort, but Hey, this is just another call to action, right? On the importance of being a part of the change that needs to happen. Now, before we wrap up, Robert, I have to ask you this. I know each year on your Facebook pag you conduct a search for the first outdoor rink that opens up in North America each season. So I'm just curious, who claimed that title this year?

Robert McLeman:
This year we had, it was pretty close to a tie. We had a community rink in Saskatchewan another one in Three Hills, Alberta, and then the Fort McMurray rink actually came in a week later, not because, and they always seem to win in the past. It wasn't because the temperatures weren't cold enough, but they were just a little bit slow getting their, their boards up this year.

They didn't realize how early the cold weather was coming. So I'd have to say that we're looking at central Alberta Three Hills region. And then over, I think it's towards Lloydminster in Saskatchewan.

Anwar Knight:
Well, good for them. Good for them. And I guess once all this COVID chaos is over there's a road trip, you know, I'll, I'll visit all the backyard pond rinks in Western Canada.

Robert McLeman:
There's a reality TV show in there. I think.

Anwar Knight:
I love it. I love it. Robert, thank you so much for this. We look forward to following along as you continue you and your team to collect reports.

Robert McLeman:
Thank you very much. It's been great talking to you.

Anwar Knight:
Robert McCleman has been my guest. He is a professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and co-director of RinkWatch. To connect with his team log online to www.rinkwatch.org.

Their website's pretty cool because they have a global map there with all the locations pinned on where they're getting rink reports from, and you can join anytime by the way, even mid season. If you're interested again, the website is www.rinkwatch.org. Hey, a quick shout out to Dennis Pasquali. Susan Bot, Gabrielle Davis and Carol Pertap. Thanks so much for signing up for my Big Blue Marble newsletter. We just sent out our January edition first one of the new year. And it's absolutely free by the way, and feature some fascinating stories about our changing planet, including the world's first satellite made entirely out of wood.

Yeah. This would be coming out of Japan. And the idea is to prevent sending up any more space junk. This satellite would just eventually burn up leaving no debris. Get this it's estimated there are more than a half a million pieces of fragment zipping around our planet at any given time ranging in size from just little specks to, to pieces that over four inches in size.

Anyway, that's one of the stories. And another one was how birds make us happy. They really do. In fact, a study reveals that depending on the species in your neighborhood, the number of species, it could bring you as much happiness on par as a significant raise in your monthly income. Yeah, well, you'll have to read it to find out just how much again, that's in our newsletter, you can subscribe at big blue marble dot earth. We send it to your inbox once a month and we don't sell your email addresses or anything like that. And if you sign up this week, I'll be sure to get you January's edition as soon as possible as it officially has already gone out. But I would be more than happy to send it to you.

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