Year after year, Renald Guignard watches as more and more of his backyard slides away into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
“It’s happening faster because the sea is rising,” said the 83-year-old Lamèque resident, seated at a small table near the back of the house. “The sea level is higher.”
Once upon a time, the gulf froze over here from November to May.
The ice absorbed most of the force of the waves during fierce late-autumn and winter storms.
“Today, there’s no ice,” Guignard said.
A tour of his shrinking backyard illustrates the impact.
WATCH | ‘We’re living it’: Lamèque is losing shoreline every year :
1 family’s losing battle with a warming climate
The Guignards have lived in the same house since the mid 1800s. Now climate change is closing in.
He estimates that when he grew up here, the house was at least 150 metres from the shoreline. He has documentation showing 91 metres in 1968.
Today, the distance is less than seven metres — and seven metres is the amount washed away during one particularly violent storm in 2000.
The narrow space between the house and the cliff is a vivid illustration of a changing climate.
Marion Tétégan Simon, the research director at the Valores Research Institute in Shippagan, said the biggest storms in the area happen in late fall and winter.
This story was brought to Nouzie by RSS. The original post can be found on https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/renald-guignard-house-climate-change-9.7282876?cmp=rss
