Is Anybody Listening?

The Achilles Heel of Canada's and other governments' climate change plans is that they're working with political numbers, a failure that guarantees gestural responses at best.

Trudeau can read. He can hear. He was a school marm after all. He knows the deal is that we have to start making significant reductions in carbon emissions every year, without fail.

Trudeau, like Harper before him, is looking to provincial and municipal governments to do the heavy lifting while his contribution is largely lofty rhetoric - hot air. And Trudeau's idea of slashing carbon emissions is to ship diluted bitumen offshore where the emissions associated with the world's filthiest, highest carbon ersatz petroleum can be buried on some other country's books.

They keep talking, promising a better day to come, and the emissions keep rising. Oh, somebody will fix it, some day, surely.

We're not going to fix anything with political numbers and gestural responses. Even the targets these elected charlatans say they hope to meet, maybe, are not going to prevent civilization-destroying runaway global warming. A new report, from the best minds in the field, finds that their 2 degree Celsius target will still trigger several "tipping points." In other words our leaders are waking Mother Nature and natural feedback loops that will eclipse man-made or anthropogenic carbon emissions.

The world is at risk of entering "hothouse" conditions with average temperatures 4-5 C higher even if emissions reduction targets under a global climate deal are met, scientists say in a new study.

The report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes amid a heatwave that has pushed temperatures above 40 C in Europe this summer, causing drought and strengthening wildfires, including blazes in Greece in July that killed 91 people. It is suspected that the Greek blazes resulted from arson.

...Scientists from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the University of Copenhagen, Australian National University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said it is likely that if a critical threshold is crossed, several tipping points would lead to abrupt change.

Such processes include permafrost thaw; the loss of methane hydrates from the ocean floor; weaker land and ocean carbon sinks; the loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the reduction of Antarctic sea ice and polar ice sheets. 

"These tipping elements can potentially act like a row of dominoes. Once one is pushed over, it pushes Earth towards another," said Johan Rockström​, co-author of the report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. 

"It may be very difficult or impossible to stop the whole row of dominoes from tumbling over. Places on Earth will become uninhabitable if 'Hothouse Earth' becomes the reality," he said.

In my view, the offshoring of diluted bitumen is a crime against humanity. The Petro-Pimps of Parliament Hill, from the prime minister to the backbenchers and on both sides of the aisle are complicit.

Global heating and climate change are already killing people. We're losing scores from heatwaves but the real carnage is among the most vulnerable people of the poorest nations. They're already taking it in the neck.

There's no going back. Our government, in collaboration with the Fossil Fuelers, is making the future worse, not better. They're writing off our grandkids' future for a short-term windfall that, history shows repeatedly, they simply piss away.