How Do You Like Your Frog Legs? Boiled?

Proof that the Boiling Frog Syndrome is as powerful as ever was plentiful from the release, yesterday, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's report on the state of climate change in 2012.   The 260-page, peer reviewed report, was compiled by a global team of 384 scientists who digested and analyzed masses of data accumulated last year.

“It’s critically important to compile a big picture,” National Climatic Data Center director Tom Karl says. “The signs that we see are of a warming world.”

Sullivan says what is noticeable “are remarkable changes in key climate indicators,” mentioning dramatic spikes in ocean heat content, a record melt of Arctic sea ice in the summer, and whopping temporary melts of ice in most of Greenland last year. The data also shows a record-high sea level.

The most noticeable and startling changes seen were in the Arctic, says report co-editor Deke Arndt, climate monitoring chief at the data center. Breaking records in the Arctic is so common that it is becoming the new normal, says study co-author Jackie Richter-Menge of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H.

And there's the problem, the Boiling Frog Syndrome.  Shattering Arctic records is becoming the "new normal."  We have grown so accustomed to it that successive reports become indistinguishable to the point we no longer pay them any heed.

The data flow is becoming too much to absorb and sort and arrange in some meaningful, coherent framework.   Across society there is an extremely broad range of knowledge and understanding of science and statistics.  To a good many even base information is incomprehensible.  The "tune out" factor is virtually immediate.

This is compounded by a lack of a common language, a clearly understood lexicon.   I read a recent article published in Scientific American on the subject of runaway global warming.   I was pleased to learn that even if we burned every last scrap of fossil fuels it wouldn't be nearly enough to trigger runaway global warming.  I found that puzzling until, reading on, I discovered the runaway global warming the article was discussing was the sort that warmed the Earth to the point the oceans evaporated and our atmosphere vanished into space.   That was where they set the bar for apocalyptic global warming - a point at which all life on Earth would have been extinct for many millions of years.

The Sci-Am article was an extreme illustration of how difficult it is to establish context in the discussion of climate change.   A lack of precision is part of it.   Many forecasts are vague to the point of obscurity.  This contributes to overlap which generates fatigue and disinterest.  

We also rarely get useful information on our vulnerability to climate change.   We know Louisiana is in a jam with sea level rise, land subsidence, the loss of coastal wetlands and the prediction of major hurricanes of increasing severity and frequency.  New Orleans is doomed, got it.  But what about Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg or Saskatoon?  We're still familiar with the massive flooding of Calgary and Toronto recently.  Will that matter to us next year?

We're one of those societies fortunate enough that our central government picks up the tab for disaster relief, socializing most of the loss.   But we implemented that notion back when "once a century" storms really happened once a century.   Calgary received two, once-a-century floods in the span of just 8-years, the second once-a-century flood being three times worse than the first once-a-century flood.   I wonder if Calgary being a Conservative bastion made it easier for Calgarian Harper to loosen Ottawa's purse strings?  How many more floods can Ottawa underwrite?  Shouldn't we be talking about this?

I don't know about you but nobody is talking to me about the need to repair and reinforce Canada's essential infrastructure to meet even the most probable climate change impacts coming our way.  The tab for that has been estimated to come in at one trillion dollars or one thousand billion dollars.   When is that going to get underway?  Where is that money going to come from; who is going to get stuck with that tab?  Who will be lining their pockets?

Even if we keep the roads from buckling and the bridges from collapsing, what about our communities?  Most of us live in relative proximity to some body of water be it a river, a lake or an ocean.   Based on the climate of the time, usually back in the 1800s or early 1900s, we identified ideal locations, set down roots and began expanding.  A landing grew into a village to become a town and then a city, sometimes even a metropolis and it was all based on a prevailing climate of the Holocene.  Now we're moving into a new epoch, the Anthropocene in which the climate will be human-driven.

Around the world, populations are settling in to this new epoch.  In most cases that takes the form of displacement.  People leave places that a changing climate will no longer allow them to inhabit.  Usually the culprits are severe droughts and floods.  In places like the Sahel a nomadic herder might save his cattle from floods only to see them die of thirst the next year while another might find enough water to keep his herd alive through a drought only to see them drown in the next great flood.  It doesn't make much difference how they die, if you can't keep your herd alive you have to go somewhere else, find some other way to feed yourself and your family.

Parts of Europe, including the UK, are settling in to this new epoch.  They're looking at a future of severe flooding extending from Britain through into central and eastern Europe.   Europe is littered with beautiful, historic towns built over the centuries along its waterways.  Now a lot of those tranquil waterways are becoming floodplains incapable of withstanding the winter deluges climate change is inflicting on that region.   Some British villages have already warned that one more flood, two at the outside, and they'll have to be abandoned.   Their tough luck to be calling for help to a government that is obsessed with wielding the hammer of austerity.

In the petro-state of Canada, despite everything that's going on in our vast, far north, we don't recognize the arrival of the Anthropocene.  We still treat flooding in Calgary as a fluke event.  We still ignore the threats facing our essential infrastructure.  Our government would rather build pipelines than floodways.  It would rather build new stuff that we don't need than rebuild the core infrastructure that we absolutely depend upon.  And a government so perverted as that has no time to sit down and talk about these things with the like of you or me.