Canada's Outlier Status

Well, this is bauble budget day, the day the Harper regime makes its big pre-election push to convince us that all is right with the world, and that our natural selfishness is something we should revel in, not revolt against. It is a day in which further plundering of the federal coffers is presented as a triumph of respect for all "hardworking Canadians" who deserve to keep more of their "hard-earned money." It is a day in which the collective needs of the country and the world are ignored.

Fortunately, not everyone is so easily distracted by the promise of shiny new things. One such individual is Omar Aziz, who, writing about climate change, says that Canada, under Stephen Harper,

is an international pariah. Among rich world countries, Canada is the largest per-capita emitter of GHGs, according to the World Resources Institute. The advocacy group Climate Action Network ranks Canada’s climate strategy as the fourth-worst in the world, ahead of only Iran, Kazakhstan, and Saudi Arabia.

There seems to be no prospect of improvement on this sorry record:

Ottawa will fail to meet the emission targets it pledged at the Copenhagen conference in 2009, just as it failed to meet the UN’s March 31 deadline to submit its emission targets ahead of the upcoming climate change conference in December.

Increasingly, our country is becoming an international pariah:

Having met U.S. President Barack Obama’s Envoy for Climate Change, I am certain that Washington is taking the Paris negotiations very seriously. Canada, meanwhile, looks like it will show up to the Paris conference with almost nothing to offer but talking points, despite the fact that Canadians consume more energy per capita than Indians, Chinese or Americans. This is both a shame and a sham.

Compounding Canada's inexcusable inaction is the heavy hand of Harper censorship:

Ninety per cent of government scientists feel that they are not allowed to speak to the media about their research; almost as many fear retaliation if they do. If you are wondering why climate change reporting in Canada has been so vacuous over the last few years, it is because new rules put in place by Stephen Harper in 2007 limit what Environment Canada scientists can say. The position of National Science Advisor was eliminated in 2008. It should come as no surprise then that media coverage of climate change has been reduced by 80 per cent. If the brilliant government scientists working on this issue are muzzled, the public has little access to the very people it should be hearing from.

Mind you, that hardly excuses the ignorance that many embrace on this subject, given the wealth of information that is available literally at our fingertips. If we are oblivious to the coming peril, it is by our own choice.

The heavy lifting being done by other provinces and countries puts the Harper inaction to shame:

British Columbia has put in place a carbon tax, Quebec has a cap-and-trade system, Ontario announced a similar policy earlier this month, and Alberta has an imperfect but necessary regulatory scheme. The European Union has an ambitious emissions trading program and the United States and China signed a major climate accord last year. China is also piloting seven cap-and-trade programs, including one in Shanghai.

Aziz notes the irony of a federal regime so obsessed with security that it ignores the threats posed by climate change:

Climate change is not simply an environmental concern; it is a national security concern, which is precisely what the Pentagon now calls it.

The effects of climate change will permanently damage wildlife, agriculture, oceans, coastal inhabitants, transportation systems, disease prevention efforts, food and water supplies, public health, and nearly every facet of modern life. The poor and disadvantaged will face the harshest consequences, both in rich countries and in developing ones.

Back in 2009, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called climate change the greatest challenge facing the world. Nothing has changed in the intervening six years other than even more egregious contempt for action from a federal government locked in an ideology for which we, our children and our grandchildren will pay a very grievous price.

Climate Change Poll

The Disaffected Lib continues to do stellar work on the climate change file. Visiting his site will arm anyone interested with some solid information about what is, in my view, the most dire threat facing humanity today. Yet I can't escape the dispiriting conviction that despite such invaluable efforts and resources, little is going to change.

Today's Toronto Star reports that 53 per cent of Canadians polled July 23 by Forum Research believe that the recent Alberta flooding and the torrential storms in Central Ontario were the result of climate change attributable to human activity. That conclusion in itself is problematic, given that no specific weather event can be attributed to climate change, given the historic natural vagaries of weather. As well, drawing one's belief in human-caused climate change from such spectacular and destructive weather events suggests a very shallow conviction. If, for example, the rest of the summer proceeds in a more conventional way, with no more such storms and no more sustained and debilitating heat waves as afflicted Ontario last week, isn't it most likely that many of the newly converted will just dismiss those events as merely atypical weather and once more put climate change on the back shelves of their thinking? The attention span of our species can, at times, be deplorably short.

Some other interesting numbers emerged from the poll as well:

- A belief in human-caused climate change is more common among women (59 per cent) than men and the least wealthy (63 per cent).

- Conservative voters are least likely to believe human activities are causing climate change (38 per cent), compared with Liberals (66 per cent) and New Democrats (71 per cent.)

- Many Conservatives polled (71 per cent) don’t believe climate change even exists, while New Democrats are the most likely to believe it does (92 per cent.)

With statistics like this, and the fact that none of the three major political parties is led by people with the courage and integrity to confront the dire threat we are all facing, leaves me with the steadily-growing pessimism about the prospects of our long-term survival as a species.

The Evidence And The Explanation

One of the big differences I have noticed between Canadian and American news is that while the former frequently addresses and uses the term climate change in their coverage of 'natural' disasters,' the latter almost never employs the phrase nor attempts any meaningful analysis of the underlying causes of catastrophes they commonly report on.

Last night, Global National addressed climate change head-on in relation to Hurricane Harvey. However, if you watch to the end of the report, you will see how deeply and shockingly ingrained denialism is in the psyches of many, many people.



Meanwhile, Matthew Hoffmann writes that the time is long past when we can think of climate change as something separate from our everyday lives:

The gulf between the enormity of the climate change challenge and our readiness to undertake it is staggering. This is painfully obvious when climate change is visible, when we are faced with the evidence that the impacts of climate change are happening now with devastating consequences. But this gulf is also evident in society’s failure to internalize climate awareness and concern. As a society we are simply not fully “woke” to the idea that climate change is not some discrete problem to solve; it is, as characterized by climate scientist Mike Hulme, a part of the modern condition. Addressing and living with climate change requires serious transformation of society. We have a lot of work to do and it will not be easy.

Unless and until we are able to honestly confront climate change and the role we all play in its ever-worsening effects, we can expect ever-more frequent reports of its increasingly devastating consequences for the entire world.

A Call For Leadership

Jason Kenney's UCP has achieved a majority in Alberta. Proclaiming that Alberta is open for business and that “[h]ope is on the horizon,” he joins Ontario's Doug Ford both in identical sloganeering and rabid contempt for all measures related to carbon taxes or anything else that would discourage the consumption of fossil fuels.

The failure of the political class to confront the world's greatest crisis, climate change, is manifest. It therefore seems an apt time to reproduce the thoughts of a Star letter-writer about our predicament, to which I have added emphasis to underscore key points:

After the last five years of two serious droughts, a spring and summer with twice the normal annual rainfall and this unprecedented winter with wild swings in temperature and weather virtually every week, I’ve become a believer that climate change is largely man-made and very real. While some say that it’s just the vagaries of weather, I suggest that these past five years represent a serious shift in climate trend. I took up farming when I retired from a business career and the last five years have been completely uneconomic. In the farming community, there is an old saying: If it swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a safe assumption to say it is a duck! Why can’t Conservatives see this?

Which brings me to my point in this letter, as a lifelong fiscal conservative, I am gob struck by the Conservative party (Progressive in Ontario and God knows what federally) who simply spout “anti” everything when it comes to climate change. At the federal level, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer plays politics on the issue and still has not provided a single shred of a positive, credible climate change plan. Further, Scheer continues to endorse a party-sanctioned candidate right here in Ontario, Cheryl Gallant, who proudly insists that climate change is a hoax. I might add that Gallant was the only MP out of over 300 to vote against the Canadian Parliament sanctioning the Paris climate accord.

Climate change is the issue of our generation and those of our children. Surely, some politicians have sufficient moral integrity to recognize the seriousness of the situation. There are real economic costs to climate change and a price on carbon is the least among these. It’s past time for Conservatives to show some genuine leadership on climate change, otherwise I’ll be supporting the only real agenda for climate change and voting Liberal for the first time in my life.

J. Hugh Brownlee, White Lake, Ont.

Over 300 years before the Common Era, Diogenes said he was looking for an honest man. More than 2300 years later, it seems he is yet to be found.

UPDATE: Rosy Rhetoric Won't Get The Job Done

Those of us who pay even a modest amount of attention to the ever-increasing toll that climate change is exacting on the world know or sense that we have reached a reckoning point. People living in the Western Hemisphere see all too clearly the havoc being wrought by ever-more powerful storms hitting the Caribbean and the southern U.S. Looking farther afield, many parts of the world are afflicted by severe drought, raging wildfires, heat waves and monsoon floods of extraordinary dimensions. Yet to listen to Justin Trudeau and his sunny band of brothers and sisters, things are looking up.

Unfortunately, their rosy rhetoric will not save the day.

Several months ago Bill McKibben offered this piercing observation about our selfie-loving prime minister:

... when it comes to the defining issue of our day, climate change, he’s a brother to the old orange guy in Washington.

Not rhetorically: Trudeau says all the right things, over and over. He’s got no Scott Pruitts in his cabinet: everyone who works for him says the right things. Indeed, they specialize in getting others to say them too – it was Canadian diplomats, and the country’s environment minister, Catherine McKenna, who pushed at the Paris climate talks for a tougher-than-expected goal: holding the planet’s rise in temperature to 1.5C (2.7F).

But those words are meaningless if you keep digging up more carbon and selling it to people to burn, and that’s exactly what Trudeau is doing.

Ross Belot, writing about Trudeau's recent UN address, echoed similar sentiments:

”There is no country on the planet that can walk away from the challenge and reality of climate change. And for our part, Canada will continue to fight for the global plan that has a realistic chance of countering it,” Trudeau told the UN. “We have a responsibility to future generations and we will uphold it.”

Good words — until you notice what they’re not saying. Nowhere in his speech does Trudeau say Canada will hit its commitments under the Paris climate change accord. He says that Canada will “fight for the global plan.” He can’t say he’ll fight for the Canadian plan since … there isn’t one. Not one that suggests Canada can actually meet its targets, at any rate.

The most damning indictment of federal inaction comes from Canada's Environment Commissioner, Julie Gelfand, who leaves no doubt that the Trudeau government is whistling past the graveyard when it comes to mitigation efforts and preparations for an increasingly inhospitable climate:

In a blunt fall audit report tabled in the House of Commons on Tuesday, Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development Julie Gelfand said the government has failed to implement successive emissions-reduction plans, and is not prepared to adapt to the life-threatening, economically devastating impacts of a changing climate.

The government released the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change in December 2016, which was endorsed by all provinces and territories except Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

But instead of presenting a detailed action plan to reach the 2020 target for reducing emissions, Gelfand said the government changed its focus to a new 2030 target.

The government has also failed to adopt regulations to reduce greenhouse gases that could help limit the risks of pollution, natural disasters, forest fires and floods, the audit finds.

This is a damning audit, one that puts to the lie all of the social media and other propaganda efforts our government has engaged in to give us a sense of false security as disaster comes barreling toward us. It is a catastrophe that our increasingly vulnerable infrastructure will not be able to withstand:

In her report, Gelfand said measures to adapt to climate change can save lives, minimize damage and strengthen the economy, yet a 2011 adaptation policy framework was never implemented.

The federal government has not provided its departments and agencies with the critical tools and guidance to identify and respond to risks.

Only five of 19 departments and agencies examined by Gelfand's audit team had fully assessed risks and taken steps to address climate change. The other 14, including Environment and Climate Change Canada, Public Safety and National Defence, had taken "little or no action" to address the risks.

The following interview with Julie Gelfand is most instructive:


We are long past the time when soothing words and platitudes are of any utility whatsoever; it is only the woefully under-informed and those slavishly devoted to Mr. Trudeau who will find something to celebrate under this increasingly hollow administration. For the rest of us, if things continue on as they are, those dark clouds on the horizon will become ever-more threatening and ever-more destructive.

UPDATE: Many thanks to The Salamander for reminding me of a video many of you have probably seen that shows the ripple effect any change to the environment sets in motion. As you will see, the very deliberate reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park has a largely beneficial effect. The trophic cascade that ensues is fascinating, but, more pertinently, it underscores how sensitive our natural world is to alterations.

As The Salamander wrote, in response to the Trudeau government's pallid efforts to combat climate change:

.. I'm left wondering what happens when politicians allow keychain species such as wild salmon or boreal caribou to be extirpated..

.. yes.. yes .. jobs jobs jobs.. the economy stupid.. we must grow the economy.. but what happens (forever) to the land, the water, the air ?

Climate Change - Much Worse Than We thought

James E. Hansen has some very impressive credentials. Not only has he headed the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies for 31 years, he is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.

But wait, there's more:

Hansen is best known for his research in the field of climatology, his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in 1988 that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. In recent years, Hansen has become an activist for action to mitigate the effects of climate change, which on a few occasions has led to his arrest.

In other words, here is a man eminently qualified to pronounce on the environmental catastrophes currently overtaking the earth. He is also the bane of the benighted, a.k.a., climate-change deniers.

In a piece appearing in The Washington Post entitled Climate change is here — and worse than we thought, Hansen offers some startling conclusions about his1988 Congressional testimony:

I was too optimistic.

My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.

In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

He goes on to detail some very alarming truths about the speed with which climate change has taken hold:

... the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.

I hope you will take the time to read the entire article, and peruse some of the many responses to it that also show there is no convincing some of our present peril, including these nuggets:

Climate-Change is voodoo science and Ronal [sic] Reagan proved it....except Bill Clinton and A Gore destroyed the evidence.

All these Leftist-Marxist Climate-Changers are just trying to shut down more and more American industries to "re-distribute" the wealth to their favorite "poor countries"....Climate Change is as serious as collecting "beanie-babies"....

And here's my personal favourite:

It was warmer in the world during the time of Christ, 2000 years ago. How do you account for that?

H/t Alex Himelfarb

UPDATED: Not A Hopeful Sign

As much as I have long been an advocate for the development and honing of critical thinking skills (while readily admitting that I often fall short of the mark - for me, it is always a work in progress), I regret to report, via the CBC, that there is much, much work still to be done. In fact, many Canadians are having a great deal of difficulty distinguishing between facts and opinion, fake news and science fact. In our fraught times, that is surely a recipe for disaster.

Are scientific findings a matter of opinion? Forty-three per cent of Canadians agree that they are, suggests a new poll.

47 per cent (up from 40 per cent last year) agreed that "the science behind global warming is still unclear," despite what scientists have been calling for years "unequivocal" evidence.

19 per cent agree "there is a link between vaccinations and autism," even though the study that made the link was found years ago to be "an elaborate fraud."

The poll, commissioned by Ontario Science Centre, has results that should worry all of us. Maurice Bitran, chief executive officer of the Ontario Science Centre, had this to say:

"If you think that climate change is one of the main issues that we face as a society, and almost half of us think that the science is still unclear when there's a pretty broad scientific consensus about it, this affects the chances that we have to act in a unified way about it."

He is concerned about some of the findings that suggest a lack of trust in science and media coverage of scientific issues such as:

68 per cent agree that media coverage of scientific issues is "reported selectively to support news media objectives."

59 per cent agree that media coverage of scientific issues is "presented to support a political position."

Such conspiratorial views of the media when it comes to fact-based science should give us all pause to consider, among other things, the role media themselves play in this perception:

Kelly Bronson, a University of Ottawa professor who has studied and written about science communication, said people are confused about where to go for reliable information and how to tell facts from beliefs.

She thinks the media are partly to blame for focusing too much on telling both sides of the story: "It doesn't help the public learn how to distinguish true knowledge from mere opinion, if both are given equal weight in a news story."

An excellent illustration of this is to be found in a recent Hamilton Spectator letter to the editor:

RE: Republicans in denial (Sept. 13)

This article calls climate change skeptics "deniers", but is itself a denier. To accomplish this clever trick of contradicting itself, the Washington Post (WAPO) cunningly suppresses the huge hidden assumption behind their "denier" pejorative, which is that man-made climate change is settled science, which it isn't.

An example of the bad science behind "man-made climate change" is CO2, an essential component of all life including ours. In fact we likely need more of it. Reduce pollution, yes, but reduce CO2, no. We emphatically do not have a link between climate change and human-generated CO2.

Pedlars of bad science like Michael Mann are quoted supporting this unproven man-made climate change hypothesis. Natural phenomena like sea level rise are dragged in as proof of it, when actually the sea level is simply rising as it has been for thousands of years. Further, we should note that the climate change industry yields nice personal profits for its promoters, such as writers of columns like "Republicans in denial?"

It is difficult to connect these dots into a picture that warrants calling skeptics of man-made climate change "deniers", particularly when WAPO itself denies much.

Frank Gue, Burlington

Mr. Gue, and all others of his ilk, try to peddle the opinion that the science of climate change is not settled. The fact that it has been settled is but an inconvenience people like Gue circumvent by exploiting people's ignorance and prejudices. Are newspapers doing anyone a service by publishing such arrant nonsense?

Ignorance, sloppy thinking, mindless chatter and misdirection continue apace, but here is an incontrovertible fact: The time is growing very late, and the window to mitigation is rapidly closing.

UPDATE: Pursuant to the comments about online polls (one was used in the above Leger poll,) made by Jay and UU4077, it was not a poll in which just anyone could contribute. Here is an excerpt detailing its methodology:

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH INSTRUMENT

A survey of 1,514 Canadians was completed online between August 15th to 16th, 2017 using Leger’s online panel, LegerWeb.

A probability sample of the same size would yield a margin of error of +/-2.5%, 19 times out of 20.

ABOUT LEGER’S ONLINE PANEL

Leger’s online panel has approximately 475,000 members nationally – with between 10,000 and 20,000 new members added each month, and has a retention rate of 90%.

QUALITY CONTROL

Stringent quality assurance measures allow Leger to achieve the high-quality standards set by the company. As a result, its methods of data collection and storage outperform the norms set by WAPOR (The World Association for Public Opinion Research). These measures are applied at every stage of the project: from data collection to processing, through to analysis. We aim to answer our clients’ needs with honesty, total confidentiality, and integrity.

My wife is part of a large online polling group. Originally responding to a telephone poll by EKOS, she was later contacted by the pollster asking her to become part of an online polling panel, as they needed someone in her demographic. My understanding is that such groups are meant to represent a large cross-section of Canadians, and therefore does not have the notorious self-selection and skewing that open online polls do.

But A Brief Reprieve

If our thoughts have been able, even briefly, to break out of their ongoing obsession with Covid-19 and death, we will have realized a couple of things:

One, that we really aren't masters of the universe, our supposed natural supremacy just a cruel delusion that has led us to this particular juncture in history. An invisible presence has sent us scurrying to our basements. How truly humbling.

And two, that our forced confinement has been extraordinarily beneficial to the environment, with a reported global average drop of 6% in greenhouse gas emissions; it is an improvement, however, that isn't nearly enough to mitigate climate change and will likely prove ephemeral.

But I fear these realizations will prove to be short-lived. Forced contemplation and reflection are uncomfortable. Teachable moments pass; lessons learned are quickly forgotten. Already, we passionately pine for a return to a normal that was never normal: getting and spending, overpopulating the earth, plundering the world's pantry with barely a second thought.

Yet some are hopeful that we can mend our ways, and that current hard-won environmental benefits can be retained:

...climate scientists and activists hope this moment can be a turning point, when our efforts to combat one global crisis inspire action against another, and governments use their unprecedented spending on economic recovery to accelerate a transition away from fossil fuels and toward a green economy.

Robin Edger, executive director and CEO of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, sees this as our last, best chance:

Even before the pandemic it was going to take a massive investment and radical change to meet these targets, Edger said. “We were already talking about a public mobilization along the lines of nothing we’d seen since the Second World War. So now we’ve had this economic collapse as a result of a health crisis and the government has a choice to make: Are we going to make investments in line with our country’s stated climate goals and set ourselves up for the future, or are we going to try to cling to the past and pour money into shovel-ready but unsustainable projects?”

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres used the occasion of Earth Day earlier this week to draw a parallel between the global efforts to fight COVID-19 and climate change, calling the climate crisis an “even deeper emergency” and urging governments to target their economic recoveries toward a more sustainable future. “The current crisis is an unprecedented wake-up call,” he said. “We need to turn the recovery into a real opportunity to do things right for the future.”

Chantal Hebert, on the other hand, is dubious of the prospects for progress as she recalls what happened to Stephan Dion's Green Shift platform in the midst of the 2008 world financial crisis:

The 2008 storm hit as voters were headed to the polls in a federal election.

One of its immediate consequences was to sweep the campaign carpet from under then-Liberal leader Stéphane Dion and his climate-change platform.

As attention shifted to the quickly deteriorating economic scene, Dion came to look as if he had brought the wrong lines to the electoral audition. A plurality of voters opted to keep Stephen Harper in the role of prime minister.

Only a few months before the federal campaign, the climate-change issue had legs. It faltered quickly in the face of a looming recession.

Will history repeat itself under the Covid-19 scourge?

Back in October, an overwhelming majority of voters supported parties that promised more proactive measures to mitigate climate change.

An equally high proportion of Canadians also told pollsters that strong environmental credentials — in the shape of a credible climate change plan — should be a must for any party aspiring to power.

But whether the public and political commitment to addressing climate change will remain strong as minds shift to repairing the damage of the pandemic remains an open question.

Already, polls are showing a shift in voters’ priorities, with climate change taking more of a back seat not only to the economy but also to health care.

Will cash-strapped governments, under the gun to restore some sense of normalcy to the daily lives of Canadians in time for their next electoral appointments, be in a good place to walk the talk of a green big picture?

Will we prove to be apt students as we move forward? My three decades as a teacher require a less than definitive answer.

And the greatest teacher of all, history, unfortunately renders a far less ambiguous answer.

Looking Toward Liberation

I have regular telephone conversations with my friend Dave, who lives in Winnipeg. Like me, he has a very jaundiced view of those elected to 'serve' us, and part of our routine is to compare and bemoan the atrocities committed by our respective provincial governments. While things are bad under the 'leadership' of Brian Pallister, I always maintain that our suffering under the Ford government is more acute and embarrassing. Ontario's shame in electing a bully and blowhard ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of life today is one we must collectively bear, at least until the next election.

The latest cause for cringing comes from our Energy Minister, Greg Rickford, who recently had a very peculiar justification for the cancellation of almost 800 green energy project in the province, a cancellation that could ultimately cost the taxpayer well in excess of $231 million (with some suggesting it could top $1 billion).

Ontario Energy Minister Greg Rickford is taking heat for quoting from an online magazine — which denies the scientific consensus on climate change — to justify scrapping more than 750 renewable energy projects at a cost to taxpayers of $231 million.

For the second day in a row, Rickford referred Tuesday to an article in the U.S.-based Climate Change Dispatch headlined “Germany pulls plug on wind energy as industry suffers severe crisis,” as the NDP raised concerns about the Ontario government’s cancellation of wind turbine and solar projects.

Rickford claimed the periodical is one of his favourities, and that as a well-educated person, it is incumbent upon him to always look at both sides of an issue, an assertion that drew derision from the Opposition:

Opposition parties jumped on Rickford for relying on the magazine, whose website says it “does not believe in consensus science” and describes “global warming alarmists” as “those who believe man is wholly or largely responsible for any fluctuation in the planet’s overall surface temperature.”

“It’s shocking,” said New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath, slamming the Ford government for cancelling the Liberal cap-and-trade program aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, firing the independent environmental commissioner and scrapping programs to promote electric vehicles.

“Everything they’re doing is falling in line with people who would be denying climate change.”

Happily, outrage is not confined to the legislature, as the following letter to the editor make abundantly clear:

Ontario’s minister of energy, Greg Rickford, characterizes himself as a “well-studied man” and a lawyer, yet he quotes from a fringe climate change denier website. Perhaps Rickford is not as well studied as he purports to be.

Neither is he employing logic, a mode of thinking which is to be expected of a lawyer. While it is commendable to hear both sides of any issue, sometimes, when there is overwhelming scientific proof, as is the case with the anthropogenic climate change position, the “other side” does not stand up to scrutiny at all. Climate change is not a matter of opinion any more than the fact that gravity is keeping us from flying off into space is an opinion. Perhaps the minister would seriously entertain arguments from flat-earthers, anti-vaxers and Creationists as well, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding? Science is evidence based, not opinion based. Facts are facts. No amount of posturing or proselytizing can change that. To paraphrase astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson, it’s your prerogative to think what you like about the world around you, but that doesn’t change the facts. Climate change is cited as the single most urgent issue facing our planet.

While Minister Rickford claims he is not a climate change denier, his behaviour says just the opposite. To have a minister of energy who rolls back green energy initiatives, tries to stop the federal carbon levy and quotes from fringe websites is just beyond the pale and highly irresponsible.

Pandering to his voter base, rather than pursuing positive action to reduce greenhouse gases, does all of us a huge disservice. We should all expect better from our elected officials.

Jonathan O’Mara, Whitby

I, and I am sure countless others, look forward to the day we will be liberated from this rambling, ridiculous and retrograde regime. It cannot come quickly enough.

When It Serves Economic Interests, Ignorance Is A National Policy

Burying their heads in rapidly disappearing sand is something of a national characteristic of Americans when it comes to climate change. However, when it is aided, abetted and promoted by monied interests, all should be concerned.

I think it is reasonably well-known that several states have banned any references to climate change or global warming in official government documents. Florida, recently pummeled by monster Hurricane Irma, was one of the first to take such measures back in 2011, when current governor Rick Scott took office. Earlier this year, the state of Idaho stripped any references to it in its revised K-12 science standards. In 2012, North Carolina banned the state from basing coastal policies on the latest scientific predictions of how much the sea level will rise.

Of course, on the federal level, since Trump took office, intensive scrubbing worthy of Mr. Clean has taken place on the White House website. Predictably, that ardour has infected many federal departments. Even those researchers seeking grants from the US Department of Energy are being asked (?} to excise references to 'climate change' and 'global warming' from their proposals.

The mechanism behind this censorship is fascinating and worthy of deep study, but I will offer only a brief overview of the influence being wielded by powerful interests to suppress scientific fact. Not surprisingly, lobbyists for the real estate and housing development industries are leading the charge, striving to keep as quiet as possible some very, very inconvenient truths:

... a storm of scientific information about sea-level rise that threatens the most lucrative, commission-boosting properties ... warn[s] that Florida, the Carolinas and other southeastern states face the nation’s fastest-growing rates of sea-level rise and coastal erosion — as much as three feet by the year 2100, depending on how quickly Antarctic ice sheets melt. In a recent report, researchers for Zillow estimated that nearly two million U.S. homes could be literally underwater by 2100.

Given the rapid progression of climate change, I suspect the 2100 date is far too optimistic. I believe I may see some of the worst within my own lifetime, even though I am admittedly getting a tad long in the tooth.

Truth is frequently unpalatable, and realtors and developers are proving especially resistant to it:

Some are teaming up with climate-change skeptics and small government advocates to block public release of sea-level rise predictions and ensure that coastal planning is not based on them.

And they are getting some assistance from the top:

Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump rescinded an Obama-era executive order that required the federal government to account for climate change and sea-level rise when building infrastructure, such as highways, levees and floodwalls. Trump’s move came after lobbying from the National Association of Home Builders, which called the Obama directive “an overreaching environmental rule that needlessly hurt housing affordability.”

Back in North Carolina, Willo Kelly, who represents both the Outer Banks Home Builders Association and the Outer Banks Association of Realtors

... teamed up with homebuilders and realtors to pass state legislation in 2012 that prevented coastal planners from basing policies on a benchmark of a 39-inch sea-level rise by 2100.

The legislation, authored by Republican Rep. Pat McElraft, a coastal realtor, banned the state from using scientific projections of future sea-level rise for a period of four years. It resulted in the state later adopting a 30-year forecast, which projects the sea rising a mere eight inches.

In South Carolina, the state Department of Natural Resources in 2013 was accused of keeping secret a draft report on climate-change impacts. In Texas, the 2016 platform of the state Republican Party states that climate change “is a political agenda promoted to control every aspect of our lives.”

Fortunately, not everyone is wallowing in, and extolling, ignorance:

In eastern North Carolina, geologist Riggs resigned from the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission’s science panel in 2016, citing legislative interference. He has since teamed up with local governments on the Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds to address problems of flooding, windblown tides and saltwater intrusion, a threat to local farming.

Further east, the Hyde County town of Swan Quarter has built a 27-kilometre dike around homes and farms to protect $62 million in flood-threatened property. The dike helped prevent windblown flooding during recent storms, but county officials have some concerns about the future.

Climate change is growing increasingly dire, and it is clearly not the time for citizens to cede control and authority to those whose only interest seems to be squeezing out as much profit as possible in the finite time ahead.

Indeed, some might call such massive venality a massive crime against humanity.

UPDATED: The Crux Of The Problem

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

- Mark Twain (possibly)

The above quotation, often attributed to Mark Twain, seems more relevant than ever, especially if we substitute climate change for weather.

The ever-increasing toll exacted by 'weather events' that are only growing in intensity is impossible to ignore, as is the warning that we have only about 11 years left before the changes become irreversible. Despite that doomsday scenario, people are, to say the least, ambivalent about paying the cost necessary to avert total disaster. A survey commissioned by CBC News in which 4,500 Canadians were interviewed

found that while nearly two-thirds of Canadians see fighting climate change as a top priority, half of those surveyed would not shell out more than $100 per year in taxes to prevent climate change, the equivalent of less than $9 a month.

... 38 per cent of respondents said that "our survival depends on addressing" climate change and 25 per cent said it is a top priority. Another 20 per cent said "it's important, but not a top priority," while 11 per cent said it wasn't a priority.

The good news is that many Canadians are willing to take some measures to combat climate change, as long as they are not too painful:

The most popular options were buying local (75 per cent) and reducing the thermostat (66 per cent), while 55 per cent said they were willing to purchase fewer things in general. Just under half, or 47 per cent, said they would be willing to drive less, while 37 per cent would take public transit or use a bicycle more often.

The bad news is that people are less enthused about measures that require more 'heavy lifting.'

Just 34 per cent said they would go without air conditioning, 30 per cent would purchase a vehicle with an energy-saving mode and 25 per cent would fly less frequently. Fewer than one in five respondents who were willing to make changes to their lives said they would purchase an electric car (20 per cent), move to a smaller house or apartment (19 per cent) or give up eating meat (17 per cent).

Respondents were asked how much they would be willing to pay to combat climate change,

Nearly one-third, or 32 per cent, said they were unwilling to pay anything at all, while 17 per cent said they would be willing to pay less than $100 in taxes every year. Netflix's most basic plan comes in at a yearly price tag of $120.

Another 16 per cent of respondents were willing to pay between $100 and $500 per year — the equivalent of between $8.33 and $41.67 per month. Just seven per cent were willing to pay between $500 and $1,000 per year, while only three per cent would pay more than $1,000 per year in taxes to help prevent climate change.

First-time voters were a notable exception. They were half as likely as the general population to want to pay nothing and markedly more willing to pay extra taxes.

I have said it before: people are their own worst enemies. Coupled with a craven political class all to happy to exploit the electorate, it is surely a recipe for disaster that will grow even greater as the years unfold.

UPDATE: For those climate-change scofflaws who believe we still have time to debate mitigation, a little something for your consideration:

Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.

A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia.

“What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.“

In The Service Of Truth

There are many truths today that, thanks to the almost reflexive, visceral response of an often vitriolic social media, few dare to speak. Most recently, linking the terrible fires in Fort McMurray with climate change has been one of them. Is it insensitive and opportunistic to draw such a connection, or is it only stating the obvious?

In a recent column, Thomas Walkom did just that:

If the world’s leading climate scientists are correct, global warming raises the probability of extreme weather conditions occurring – from drought to ice storms to floods to the kind of unseasonably high temperatures experienced this spring in Fort McMurray.

To say that the inhabitants of Fort McMurray brought this disaster on themselves is dead wrong. But to say that climate change played a role is not.

The Fort McMurray wildfire is not just a freak accident. Neither was the 2013 ice storm that crippled much of Toronto.

True, these things can happen without global warming. But climate change dramatically increases the probability of their occurring.

So perhaps the politicians should get over their squeamishness and begin to ask the tough questions.

Fortunately, Toronto Star readers show no such squeamishness, as the following letters amply demonstrate:

I’ve been accused of being insensitive for talking about the climate irony of the Fort McMurray wildfire, which continues to dominate the news in Canada. Many people have argued that now is not the time to discuss global warming and climate change.

I insist that now is precisely the right time to make the link between epic wildfires and climate change. Once the fire is over it will be too late. People will move on with their lives and the Fort McMurray climate disaster will be remembered as just another freak of nature as were the 2013 floods in Calgary.

Experts believe that the Fort McMurray blaze could be the new norm for wildfires as global warming continues to heat up the planet causing earlier and longer fire seasons with more severe and destructive fires. A warming climate has extended the duration of fire seasons – now 78 days longer than in 1970 according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Fort McMurray exists because of the tar sands, which produce a carbon-intensive bitumen that is adding to the world’s carbon problem. We are all consumers of oil products. This means we are all responsible for this raging inferno that has produced 88,000 climate refugees.

The climate irony continues to build. Premier Rachel Notley is now calling for the fastest possible return to full oil production by oil companies that have temporarily suspended operations. The circle is complete.

Rolly Montpellier, Ottawa

Congratulations of the highest order are due to Thomas Walkom for this column. At last we have a prominent journalist acknowledging that climate change “played a role” in this disaster.

Why political leaders, Elizabeth May excepted, have failed to admit the link is best known to themselves, but one wonders if Justin Trudeau fears that pressure may be brought to bear on him to get on quickly with transitioning from fossil fuels to electricity. This would put him at odds with the “international community,” which has, against common sense, agreed to delay action on climate change until after 2020.

What we must, regrettably, bear in mind is that the Fort McMurray fire is not a unique incident. It is part of a chain of disasters, some past, with many more to come. It seems that we cannot reduce the global temperature.

Even if the entire world switched to sustainable electricity at once (impossible), the Earth would go on warming for two more decades, then remain at the elevated temperature for 1,000 years, according to the Australian Academy of Scientists.

That’s all the more reason for drastic action, right now!

Ken Ranney, Peterborough

This discussion also begs the question of whether tar sands oil production is causing the temperature in that region to soar so high in the spring. I bet native groups would have an interesting opinion on this.

Rather than spending billions to rebuild Fort McMurray, so tar sands oil production can start up again, perhaps the federal government should be investing that money in renewable energy, wind and solar power.

Max Moore, Toronto

Prognosis: Grim

Kevin Farmer, the lead letter-writer in today's Star, captures nicely, I think, the irrational nature of humanity that does not bode well for our collective future:

Re: Antarctic melt greatest in 1,000 years, May 16

As humanity continues to avoid meaningful action on climate change, an unavoidable future of climate catastrophe continues to take shape. In that regard, it has been morbidly fascinating to watch people simultaneously over- and under-react to reports that the West Antarctic ice sheet is destined to collapse, committing spaceship Earth and all of its passengers to a rise in sea levels of up to four meters from this impact alone.

Some people are receiving this news as proof of the urgency of climate change. Others are dismissing it as an unstoppable phenomenon the impacts of which will be felt only over a long period of time. They are resigned to climate change that is out of our hands and a problem for future generations. Ironically, it is the former who are under-reacting and the latter who are over-reacting.

The collapse of this ice sheet was set in motion years ago, perhaps decades. This event is not an indication of how urgent climate change is today, but rather how urgent climate change was before the collapse was triggered. To “take the temperature” of the climate crisis today according to this particular news is to under-react to the implications of this event.

We are setting future climate catastrophes in motion today. The urgency of climate change today is properly measured against those outcomes. To consign future generations to the consequences of inaction in the present, because we are already consigned to the consequences of inaction in the past, is to over-react to the implications of this event.

As long as we wait for catastrophes to inform our environmental awareness, these catastrophes will likely be permanent features of a new normal. By all credible accounts, the future impacts of climate change will continuously accelerate and worsen.

The collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is part of the new normal. What else are we waiting for? Whatever it is, do we really want it?

Kevin Farmer, Toronto

The Climate Change Debate Lives On

The science on the theory of climate change is not settled. There is a powerful, scientific consensus that anthropogenic or man-made climate change is real, here now and worsening. There is a powerful, scientific consensus that man-made climate change is already triggering natural feedback mechanisms that eventually can become "tipping points" beyond which we will have runaway global warming. Runaway as in all the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to stop it.

For all of that, the science isn't settled. That much is obvious from the tsunami of research studies that keep pouring in from a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines such as geology, glaciology, hydrology, oceanography, atmospherics, physics and chemistry, biology and marine biology, epidemiology, botany, meteorology, climatology and others. The science isn't settled because we're constantly uncovering new information, new pieces of a puzzle that give us a clearer picture of what we're up against. It may not be good news and it usually isn't but it's all important information that we ignore at our increasing peril.

Now, having said that, what about this climate change "debate"? It does exist but the important point is not that it exists but where it exists. It lingers on amidst the far right in magazines such as Forbes, in papers such as the Washington Post and Times, on TV networks like FOX and on open-mouth radio shows that appeal to the slack jawed, tea party crowd such as Limbaugh. It exists within any media outlet owned by Aussie news mogul, reptilian Rupert Murdoch.

What they're debating, however, isn't the reality of anthropogenic global warming. They can read the science as well as anyone or at least they can pay people to give them that information. What they're debating is the question of how much longer they can get away with sowing doubt and outright denialism before their pants burst into flame and their audience walks.

And then there's the debate among the political crowd, the sort-termer "Friends of Rupert Society." That would be people like Stephen Harper, Tony Abbott and David Cameron, most of the Republican caucus and an unseemly segment of the Democrats too, and camp followers such as Sarah Palin. Yeah, that's right. Sarah Palin and Steve Harper are on the same page. These types debate how much longer they can fudge and obscure and block any meaningful action.

Maybe the worst, though, are the pols who say they accept the reality of global warming but continue to act as though the debate was real and the science wasn't settled. Here I'm talking about the closet neoliberals who lead our opposition parties - Trudeau and Mulcair. Just like Harper, they're all for ramping up bitumen production and export. They're merely quibbling about transportation options which creates the false impression that there are any good options. They'll cajole you out of your vote on the promise that they'll be "less worse" than Harper and they'll dress up that claim with a tweaked policy here and there and then, if they convince enough of you to let them in, it'll be business pretty much as usual.

How can you tell they're closet neoliberals? Easy. Just like anyone else in a closet, unwilling to reveal themselves for who they are, they tread very lightly. They avoid getting drawn into certain conversations and they're adept at distraction. They bob and weave away from discussions that link things like the highest carbon oil on the planet and climate change tipping points. Much as Harper is vulnerable on it, they won't attack him for establishing Canada as a global pariah on climate change lest they find themselves hoisted on the petard of their own hypocrisy.

Look at it this way. Their foreign policy is neoliberal. Their policy on Israel is neoliberal. Their energy policy is neoliberal. Their economic policy is neoliberal. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck and lays duck eggs - it's a f__king duck! Makes no difference if it's labeled Liberal or New Democrat. Names simply don't mean much any more. They're false flags.

And now understand this. Fighting climate change is progressivism at its very best. Fighting inequality lies at the heart of progressivism. Leaving a better world for our grandkids is progressivism. Neoliberalism, however, is antithetical to progressivism. Neoliberalism is the grease on which corporatism quietly slides into our lives. Neoliberalism, no matter what sort of happy face you slap on it, eventually smothers progressivism.

It could be fairly argued that the 2015 general election will actually be a referendum on what form of neoliberalism we prefer. Some like it hot, hard and spicy. Most of us just hold our noses and swallow, hoping we don't gag. As for me, I'll be voting progressive and in this fetid milieu that can mean only one party, Green.


MoS, the Disaffected Lib

It's Not Either/Or

Those who have more than a passing acquaintance with federal politics are likely aware of the false premises and logical fallacies Stephen Harper and his wrecking crew regularly use to advance their mad agenda. There was, of course, the famous Vic Toews' declaration about either standing with the government or with the child pornographers. Of course that kind of absolutism, the assertion that choices are black and white, no nuanced thinking required, betrays a deep contempt for the electorate, clearly an indicator the regime views us as simpletons fit only for the manipulation that such reductionist thinking cultivates.

It was recently on display once again when Stephen Harper met with his climate soul mate, Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Both agreed they would take no action against climate change that would imperil their respective economies, implying, of course, that the choices are stark.

Fortunately, as is regularly the case, there was ample criticism of this fallacious approach to the world's most pressing and dire crisis; and as usual, Star readers weighed in with their acerbic and insightful comments on Harper's nonsense. All of the letters are excellent, and I hope you will have an opportunity to read each one. Below, I reproduce just a few of them:

Re: PM lauds Australia for fighting carbon tax, June 10

Our prime minister seems to think that jobs and economic growth will trump any serious attempt to tackle climate change. This is a great example of no leadership and a complete dismissal of job creation and growth in new technologies that will happen as we move to a more sustainable situation.
One thing is certain: there will be job creation in casket making if we do not get serious soon about carbon emissions. Where are the leaders who will stop living in the past and embrace the future!

J.B. Ross, Orangeville

It’s a shame that our prime minister believes that a carbon tax will hurt the economy and cost jobs. B.C.’s carbon tax has clearly shown that this is not the case. And the U.S. Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that a carbon tax could benefit the U.S. economy.

But even if the government has an aversion to a carbon tax, from building renewable energy to increasing energy efficiency to building modern transit systems, there are so many ways to cut emissions and create jobs.

The prime minister is setting up a false choice. We do not need to choose between action on carbon and a strong economy. We need to choose both and get on with it.

Keith Brooks, Toronto

The Conservative lack of action on climate change will hurt jobs and the economy. When discussing climate change, Harper said that no country is going to take actions that will deliberately destroy jobs and growth. He, like Tim Hudak in Ontario, has his head in the sand.

Look at Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe. Its fight against climate change has increased its renewable electrical energy from about 6 per cent in 2000 to 25 per cent in 2012, with 370,000 jobs in that sector. Two-thirds of these are due to government legislation on renewables.

Nearer home, B.C. reduced CO2 emissions by 17 per cent in five years, through a carbon tax that returned the money to the taxpayers, without hurting jobs or growth.

The National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy has stated that if nothing is done immediately to address climate change, a Canadian family of four will be paying up to $10,000 per year in weather damage by 2050. This will cause enormous human suffering and take money and jobs away from productive employment.

All parties except the Conservatives have policies to address climate change. The economy cannot afford a Conservative government in either Ontario or Canada.

Linda and Alan Slavin, Otonabee

A Guest Post From The Mound Of Sound

Steve Harper and his chums have transformed cognitive dissonance from an affliction into an art form. Harper’s prime directive, his overarching quest, is to get as much Athabasca bitumen as possible to foreign buyers as quickly as pipelines and tanker ports can be built. Now square that single-minded purpose with the report just released by Beelzebub’s own government that “Canada faces greater frequency and intensity of extreme weather as a result of climate change, as well as increased risks to human health from pollution and the spread of disease-carrying insects.”

“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is necessary to lessen the magnitude and rate of climate change, but additional impacts are unavoidable, even with aggressive global mitigation efforts, due to inertia in the climate system” the report said. “Therefore, we also need to adapt – make adjustments in our activities and decisions in order to reduce risks, moderate harm or take advantage of new opportunities.”

It may strike you as odd, this dire warning coming from a government intent on increasing Canadian emissions through a targeted five fold expansion of the Tar Sands while spending next to nothing on adaptation initiatives and risk reduction. As Calgary languished underwater last summer, the World Council on Disaster Management held its annual conference in Toronto. One speaker was Dr. Saeed Mirza, professor emeritus at McGill University. Focusing on what he called decades of neglect of Canadian infrastructure, Dr. Mirza said that Canada needs to invest hundreds of billions of dollars, possibly upwards of a trillion dollars, on repair and replacement of our essential infrastructure. Like most of these warnings, it comes with the added caution that, if we don’t overhaul our core infrastructure soon, we will pay dearly for our neglect later.

It’s important to bear in mind that, while early onset climate change is already here, as even the Harper government’s report admits, it is going to worsen through the remainder of this century and, quite probably, for a good era past that. The extreme weather we’re seeing today is expected to become more extreme – in frequency, duration and intensity – with each passing decade. A report released Tuesday by Risky Business, a climate change research initiative established by Michael Bloomberg, Hank Paulson and Tom Steyer, put a physiological dimension on what we’re facing. “As temperatures rise, towards the end of the century, less than an hour of activity outdoors in the shade could cause a moderately fit individual to suffer heat stroke,” said climatologist Robert Kopp of Rutgers University, lead scientific author of the report. “That’s something that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world today.”

The body’s capacity to cool down in hot weather depends on the evaporation of sweat. That keeps skin temperature below 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius). Above that, core temperature rises past 98.6F. But if humidity is also high, sweat cannot evaporate and core temperatures can increase until the person collapses from heat stroke. “If it’s humid you can’t sweat, and if you can’t sweat you can’t maintain core body temperature in the heat, and you die,” said Dr. Al Sommer, dean emeritus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at John Hopkins University and author of a chapter on health effects in the new report.

While climate change is plainly the greatest threat facing mankind this century, a genuinely existential threat, it’s one that triggers indifference, acquiescence or resignation in far too many of us. The potential enormity of climate change in all its dimensions – environmental, economic, political, societal, military – is almost too much to grasp. This saps us of the collective will needed for timely action on adaptation and mitigation initiatives. We are firmly immersed in the “boiling frog” syndrome. We don’t like to dwell on the future or hear accounts of what we have in store for our grandkids and their children. The burden of rising to the challenge, even if we don’t really know what that burden is, seems inconvenient, something that can surely be deferred for now. Yet if we don’t rise to this challenge, if we don’t begin to understand climate change in all its dimensions, we probably won’t be able to take advantage of the best remaining options available to us before they’re foreclosed. And that would be cowardice and an utter betrayal of our grandchildren and the generations to follow. We may have limited powers to make life better for them but we still have enormous powers to make their lives vastly worse.

Time Grows Short

As The Mound of Sound points out, it is getting very late on the climate-change front. The goal of keeping global warming at below 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 seems a fool's errand, given that it is now predicted to be reached by 2030. A bitter truth that too many wish to ignore, some people are facing up to it, as reflected in the following two letters from yesterday's Toronto Star:

Re: Climate change to wilt food supply, March 6

This story makes it clear that those scientists predicting the end of planet Earth in a few hundred years are more accurate than many would believe. Climate change, rising sea levels, deforestation, fishing the oceans bare, the slaughter of our wildlife, the ongoing pollution of air, land and water, new diseases emerging, overpopulation, global terrorism, the real threat of a major world war, etc. should make all those denying the grim reality pull their heads out of the sand.

Sadly, it’s too late. Man’s ignorance has placed this world on the “fast track” to its doom.

I am nearly 70 and can honestly say that I am glad to be “on the way out.” I weep for those now being born.

Planet Earth could have been a paradise. Corporate greed (profits trump the environment) and the lust for power will bring it to an end.

I think of an old saying. “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

Robert Trowell, Ingersoll

Congratulations to the Star for its stand on climate change. In addition to its March 6 editorial (“Going green no time soon”), there were four great letters under the headline: “Feeling hopeless over climate change.” On the previous page, A9, there is yet another article supporting attempts to roll back climate change: “Climate change will wilt food supply.”

One thing we must know is where we should be heading in this struggle. Unless we get our carbon dioxide emissions down to the level that the world’s vegetation can assimilate, we are doomed.

Canada’s part in this process, according to our population, is 42 megatonnes of carbon dioxide annually. In 2014 we produced 699 megatonnes.

We have a long way to go. Let’s make sure that we know the destination. Let’s hope that the Star will continue to guide us.

Ken Ranney, Peterborough

Sadly, these periodic recognitions of climate doom are likely be too little, too late, but at least we will recognize, when the time comes, that we were collectively responsible for our demise.

And as a graphic illustration of our peril, you might want to take a look at this:

This Reality Is Becoming Too Pressing To Ignore

The other day I wrote a post describing how the National Media Council dismissed a complaint from a Toronto Star reader that arose from a New York Times story detailing climate change's impact on the people of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana. The reader objected to the fact that climate change was cited as a reason the residents are facing relocation.

The judgement was that there was no need to provide a counterbalance, as the complainant insisted, on the climate change assertions made in the story; the Council declared that climate change is a fact that has been scientifically established, and hence junk science alternatives were not required for balance.

The fact of climate change is evident for anyone who cares not to indulge in willful ignorance. Increasingly intense storms, floods, droughts, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity and wildfires are attested to in the media almost daily; it seems we have crossed a line, and the changes are happening far more rapidly than predicted by the models.

A case clearly in point is what is happening to the people of Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost municipality in the United States, now facing the prospect of becoming climate-change refugees.

Warming air, melting permafrost and rising sea levels are threatening their coastline, and researchers predict that by midcentury, the homes, schools and land around Barrow and its eight surrounding villages will be underwater. This despite decades of erecting barriers, dredging soil and building berms to hold back the water.

“The coastline is backing up at rates of 10 to 20 metres per year,” says Robert Anderson, a University of Boulder geomorphologist who has studied Alaska’s landscape evolution since 1985 and who first noticed in the early 2000s how alarming the erosion was becoming. “It’s baffling.”

When the sea ice melts, the coast becomes exposed to waves, wind and storms that slam into the shore, causing erosion. As ice moves farther from shore, waves can be six-metres high when they reach land, Anderson says.

“The only thing we can do, as far as I’m concerned, is move our towns inland,” says Mike Aamodt, the former acting mayor of Barrow and its surrounding villages of the North Slope Borough, which stretches over 230,000 square kilometres, an area larger than Southern Ontario.

Yet another danger the residents face is posed by a thawing permafrost:

As air and sea temperatures have notched up, there has been a warming of the permafrost, the thousands-of-years-old subsurface layer of frozen soil, rocks and water. That layer can be as much as 600 metres deep in parts of this area.

“Sometimes I have that eerie feeling — I’m, like, ‘Oh gosh, we’re on the permafrost,’ ” says Diana Martin, a Barrow-born Inupiaq who works in the town’s museum, over a bowl of caribou soup at her sister’s home a little more than a kilometre from the coast. “What if we start floating away?”

Adaptation has not worked in Barrow, and the remaining alternative, relocation, is fraught with problems, not the least of which are the costs that would be involved in such a migration:

One of Barrow’s nearby villages, Point Lay, “is (a mere) 400 people, 40 houses, big buildings, an underground utility system, pipes,” he says. But it’s “probably $500 million to move that town. Then we have Wainwright: We need to move that town, too. It’s on a bluff right against the ocean. That’s 700 people, so I imagine $700 (million) to $800 million.”

So the grave problems caused by human activity and indulgences are continuing apace, with no real plans for either mitigation or adaptation. It is all well and good, for example, for Barack Obama to call for $10 billion annually to combat climate change, but as you can see in the case of Barrow and surrounding Alaskan communities, that amount will prove a mere pittance in the very near future.

Time For a Pre-Election Climate-Change Debate

Millenials, and those who follow them, are rightfully growing increasingly concerned about climate change. Thanks to the gift of mortality, it is unlikely that my cohort will be around to deal with most of the civil unrest, food shortages, skyrocketing prices, coastal flooding and the hordes of people fleeing their low-lying nations seeking sanctuary on our shores, but they will be.

Dozens of people rallied at CBC stations in Whitehorse and Yellowknife, among other Canadian communities, to demand the public broadcaster host a federal leaders' debate on climate change and a proposed Green New Deal.

"There's lots of questions to ask our federal leaders, and I think that this debate is the perfect opportunity to ask those hard questions and get those hard answers," said Braden Lamoureux, the organizer of the Whitehorse rally.

"Everybody deserves to know which of our leaders has a strategic plan to tackle this climate crisis."

Their concern is proving to be contagious.

A new poll finds that a majority of Canadians

want the government to take action to address climate change, even if the economy suffers....

...61 per cent of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that it’s more important for the government to solve the issue of climate change even if that means that the economy suffers. That number was even higher in Quebec (76.8 per cent), Atlantic Canada (67.3) and B.C. (62), and among women (66.1), 18-35 year olds (64.4) and those aged 65 or older (64).

Other numbers from the poll are equally telling:

Over 85 per cent of respondents agreed that private companies should have to pay to pollute, including 69.1 per cent who strongly agreed. Support was highest in Quebec (89.1 per cent) and lowest in Alberta, though at 75.2 per cent agreeing, opposition to the concept is still rather marginal.

Also, just under 68 per cent of respondents agreed that theres’s a collective moral duty to future generations to not destroy the environment further, even if it means paying more taxes in the short term. As with the other responses, support was highest in Quebec (70.2 per cent), above the national average in B.C. (71.5) and Ontario (69.9), and lowest in Alberta (53).

Will any of this change the disastrous trajectory we are on? I doubt it, unless the major party leaders do agree to a separae debate on climate change during the campaign. This, of course, is highly unlikely, in that the Greens' Elizabeth May would without a doubt mop the floor with people like Trudeau and Scheer.

Nonetheless, it is a worthy pursuit, and for the the sake of their futures, I hope the young succeed in their efforts.

Angry For Good Reason

Every evening at 6:30, I try to take about 10 minutes to watch NBC Nightly News, the object of my interest not American politics but the apocalyptic imagery of the West Coast wildfires. Every night seems to bring reports of new conflagrations and tragedy, and every night my anger grows, not just for the loss of valuable forests and the consequent release of all of their stored carbon, not just for the loss of hundreds of homes that have often been in families for generations, and not just for the loss of the lives of the brave people putting themselves on the front-lines in often futile attempts to contain these raging conflagrations.



No, my greatest anger is reserved for two groups, one of them being the politicians and their well-heeled enablers who facilitate either outright climate-change denial or, even more insidiously, now acknowledge it but doubt that it is caused by human activity. Hence, no need to change our reliance on fossil fuels or anything else about our earth-altering habits - it's out of our hands, goes the messaging.

The second target for my deep anger is the rest of us. Sure, as a society we may express concern, but as soon as measures are proposed that would constitute concrete action against ever-rising temperatures, outrage ensues. Consider the glee with which Conservative MP Michelle Rempel pounced on Linda McQuaig's recent assertion that much of the tarsands oil may have to be left in the ground if we are to keep the rise in global temperatures under two degrees Celsius. Rempel's Dark Lord and Master, Stephen Harper, quickly joined in the pile-on, saying such a statement shows that the NDP will “wreck our economy” and should never come to power.

But why do you think their triumphalism is so nakedly and unapologetically on offer? It's because they know that whatever veneer of noble intent and purpose we have can be easily pierced by raising the spectre of job loss, tax increases, and disruption of our profligate lifestyles, this, of course, despite the fact that those consequences, and much worse, are coming our way as runaway climate change takes hold.

That is also why people like Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau limit their references to climate change to platitudinous generalities.

Said Mr. Mulcair recently:

At a time when world leaders are negotiating new targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Mr. Mulcair said he wants to represent Canada in December when decisions are made in Paris.

“Nothing would make me more proud than to be there in December, as Prime Minister of Canada, to participate in the conference on climate change, to declare loud and clear that Canada will work with the world and not against the planet,” he said.

Note the similar stance taken by Trudeau:

He would take the premiers with him to the Paris climate-change summit in December. By April 2016, he would hold a first minister’s conference to forge a consensus on emissions-reduction targets. He would commit “targeted federal funding” to help provinces reduce their emissions.

Their timidity, of course, is predicated on the same boldness that galvanizes the Harperites: the knowledge that people are all for addressing climate change, as long as it doesn't impinge upon their lifestyle choices and economic statuses.

In the days of widespread church attendance, Sundays were devoted to uplifting messages, and in that regard my post falls far short. However, I will end on a positive note. One of the few things that keeps me from complete despair is the knowledge that there are those among us who are willing to put everything at risk, even their very lives, in service of their fellow humans. The above-mentioned firefighters are sterling proof of that. Now, if only the rest of us could awaken that noble potential ....