Anyone wondering why we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a climate crisis, here is how it happened.
Just over three decades ago, climatologists around the world began to share their observations on the warming of the planet in the development of a scientific evidence base for decision-makers. It happened under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, aka the IPCC.
The IPCC described how carbon dioxide and methane, among other gases, let solar radiation into the atmosphere while preventing the resultant heat from escaping, much like the glass panes of a greenhouse. It described how the increasing production of greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution has been slowly warming the planet and would continue to do so by several degrees Celsius within 50 to 100 years.
Anyone who thought a few degrees Celsius didn’t sound like much was invited to consider that it was a similar temperature increase of just a few degrees that brought the last ice age to an end. The difference was that that warming event took place over the course of thousands of years, not within just a few decades.
Governments appeared to heed the warning, immediately sending delegations to the U.N. to negotiate an agreement to address the common threat. Of course, the whole process of trying to reduce humanity’s reliance on cheap and abundant fossil fuels met with overwhelming opposition. Taking a page out of the big tobacco playbook, powerful organizations with interests in preserving the status quo funded research and published disinformation designed to raise enough doubt about the IPCC findings as to undercut public buy-in and political will for change. Media profited and political careers were built pandering to climate deniers. Governments were reluctant to agree to binding commitments internationally that might generate hardships back home for industries and citizens alike, and not least for themselves at the hands of the electorate.
When presidents and prime ministers met in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to pledge their commitment to seeing the climate agreement through, the largest media contingent in history was there to transmit the event to the world. As hopeful as it all appeared, the agreement was based on voluntary actions and had no real enforcement mechanisms or penalties for non-compliance. This has persisted as a fatal flaw in ongoing negotiations over the three decades since.
So here we are in 2021. An early warning signal we could have taken seriously has, for all intents and purposes, been ignored. Three decades of potential progress have been squandered. One Canadian prime minister pulled Canada out of the Kyoto agreement. Another bought a multi-billion dollar oil pipeline. We are now well down the road towards an irreversibly hotter planet, with extreme heat, drought, forest fires and terrible air quality – only this month’s examples – to show for it.
Of course, we continue to hear from people who see the warnings of climate scientists as fake or as a hoax. Or who concede things are warming up, but see it as good news for cold Canada. Or who agree it is a problem but oppose every idea anyone comes up with for how to solve it.
As many are observing, the parallels between COVID and climate are striking, with some seeing the pandemic as a cautionary tale we ought to take to heart.
In the case of the pandemic, denying the science, ignoring the early warnings of epidemiologists, refusing the modest inconveniences and marginal infringements on personal liberties implied by wearing masks and getting vaccinated, humanity has now logged 4.4 million deaths worldwide, including almost 27,000 in our own small country, and we are now looking at the real possibility of a fourth wave.
We might like to see ourselves as a superior life form on this planet by virtue of our ability to think, learn and imagine, but it’s a claim for which there sometimes seems to be very little supporting evidence.
So, what is the way forward?
One option might be to sharpen our faculties in discerning the difference between fact and fiction, and to realize that we might each have to do something inconvenient, perhaps even difficult, to as our part in helping humanity find its way onto a sustainable path.
In the process, we might want to take a moment to be grateful that we are not so far into this crisis that we don’t have some options left. We have several, but none of them is to do nothing.
Ultimately, it is on us, the voters. We thought we might be passengers on this ship, but it appears to be up to us to steer it clear of the iceberg ahead.
So, perhaps most critical, and offering by far the greatest return on our investment of effort, would be to show up at the voting booth in just under four weeks from now, or mail in a ballot, and elect someone ready, willing and able to make the tough decisions required to put us on a sensible trajectory while it is still possible to do so.
Charles Dickson
