Congratulations, Campbell’s Bay, for taking steps to improve your town’s resilience to climate change, as described in our story on page three. All municipalities need to follow your lead and, with the support offered by the provincial government, there should be nothing stopping them from doing so.
Evidence for the need is abundant. Fires in southern California that killed some 28 people and destroyed thousands of homes are still burning. Winds up to 160 km/h blew through Northern Ireland and Scotland over the weekend. Unusually powerful hurricanes rose out of the overheated Gulf of Mexico and ravaged central Florida last fall. Remember the deep freezes from polar vortexes, the floods from atmospheric rivers, and the coastal damage from rising sea levels of which we receive news almost weekly.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Our failure to reduce human sources of greenhouse gases is pushing the process of climate change toward a tipping point beyond which things will get much worse.
When the Arctic is covered in snow and ice, for example, it plays an important role in keeping the planet cool by reflecting the warming rays of the sun back into the atmosphere. But as rising global temperatures melt its white reflective covering, the Arctic is transformed to dark, heat-absorbing browns and grays. This makes the Arctic even warmer, which melts more snow and ice and accelerates the process of global warming.
Locked in the Arctic permafrost are vast amounts of methane and carbon dioxide, estimated to be about four times the volume of greenhouse gases emitted by humans over the past two and a half centuries. As the Arctic thaws, it is releasing these planet-warming gases, which also accelerates the process of global warming.
As the climate warms and forests become dryer, and severe storms involving lightning strikes and strong winds occur more frequently, the number of wildfires increases. In 2023, Canadian wildfires released more carbon than was produced the previous year by seven of the world’s largest carbon emitting countries. Fires on this scale amplify the process of global warming which, in turn, produces more forest fires.
These natural phenomena are among the feedback loops that are catalysed by human-induced global warming but which themselves release such massive quantities of greenhouse gases as to cause runaway heating of the planet in their own right.
What we are talking about is crossing a tipping point beyond which no amount of reduction in human greenhouse gas emissions will make any significant difference. We will be passengers on a runaway train that we can’t stop. Human emissions will be dwarfed by what the planet generates on its own. We could stop all air travel, all oil extraction and refining, all use of internal combustion engines, all making of newsprint from trees, and all cattle farming, and it would not come close to stopping runaway climate change.
By that point, the forest fires, melting polar ice caps, thawing permafrost, and any number of other positive feedback loops will be feeding the process of global warming all on their own, without any help from the planet’s human inhabitants.
We were warned by climate scientists four decades ago of what was coming and what we could do about it. We have done nothing significant since. We have debated whether this is real or a hoax. We have argued about whether this is human-induced or part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling. We have dithered over what reasonable reduction targets might look like, and what mechanisms would be best-suited to reaching them. We have made political hay by appealing to the inevitable reluctance among most of us to do anything. We seem to have decided not to do anything to help avert global disaster unless we can grow our economy and generate increased job opportunities in the process.
Meanwhile, the majority of the human population that lives in relative poverty has not contributed to global warming in any significant way, and has very little prospect of being able to protect itself from its effects, is suffering the consequences of our inaction. The stresses, deprivations, hardships and increasing conflict over scarcer resources they are experiencing promise to produce many millions of refugees seeking a safer place to live and raise their families in other parts of the world. And we can expect that it will be the most strenuous of climate deniers who will also put up the strongest resistance to receiving those refugees.
In the face of all of this, how have we as a species failed to do anything that will actually reduce the causes of global warming that are on track to trigger runaway global warming?
One of the problems is that internationally-agreed plans have no teeth, they include no penalties for non-compliance, they are unenforceable. This means that some emitters can gain competitive advantage in global markets by doing nothing, which serves as a disincentive for everyone to do anything helpful.
Another is that national political systems are geared to four- or five-year terms, which means all politicians are constantly in re-election mode and are unable to secure a mandate that would enable them to make any reasonable, long-term progress on this file as long as there is a significant portion of the population that is disinclined to shoulder any portion of the burden, even to protect the livability of the planet.
One thing seems likely. When our societies are immersed in climate mayhem, when desperate people from climate-ravaged areas come across our borders looking for somewhere safer to live, when food, water and shelter shortages sow conflict and worsen inequities, there will be many who will welcome the arrival of authoritarian leaders to impose some form of order amid the chaos.
We would all be wise to follow the example of Campbell’s Bay and develop plans to protect our communities from the now unavoidable effects of climate change. But, as with any threat, the best approach is to stop it at source. To fail to address the causes of climate change is to play with fire on so many levels.
Is it not possible for us, allegedly the smartest of all living creatures, living in the most advanced of civilizations ever to grace the face of the Earth, to insist that the planet’s leaders change course before we find ourselves in a complete train wreck?
