Keeping Tabs on Climate Change - a Three Dimensional Chore

It's happening all around you - in front of you, behind you, on both sides, above your head, beneath your feet. It's happening on land, in our seas and in the atmosphere. It extends from the North Pole to the South Pole and everywhere in between. Climate change is omnipresent.

Humanity, being essentially a terrestrial species, focuses on terrestrial aspects of climate change - floods, droughts, heatwaves, and a range of severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration. We fret about sea level rise, coastal inundation, wild fires.  The atmosphere comes a distant second in priority and the oceans, what's going on there is out of sight/out of mind.

Climate change impacts matter but mainly in the context of economic loss and disruption. Sure it's killing people, loads of them, and displacing people driven from their traditional homelands but, hey, that's also out of sight/out of mind for most of us. After all, if we were to acknowledge that, our fossil fuel fetish would become indefensible. We are, when it comes right down to it, a full-fledged petro-state behaving with all the sincerity, integrity and compassion of a petro-state. This is not the Canada of St. Laurent, Mike Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. It is the much different Canada of Harper, Justin Trudeau and Kenney. But, I digress.

One of my main sources of climate news is the environmental section of The Guardian. Think of it as pre-digested climate science. It's a good starting point. I have some 40+ bookmarks of climate science sites, mainly government agencies (NASA, NOAA, NCAR, the WHO and WMO, the Met Office, etc.) and NGOs such as the Global Footprint Network, Pembina, the Nature Conservancy, etc.). Then there's a gaggle of peer-reviewed journals such as the Lancet, the various Nature publications and so on. Every day brings a week's worth of reading and more. It's a daunting task to which, if I'm very lucky, I can spare perhaps two hours a day, often less.

A real problem in blogging about this subject is that many of the studies seem, at first glance, repetitive. Sometimes they are. More often they're corroborative rather than repetitive. Climate science is a very broad field. It is a mix of hard sciences such as physics and chemistry and the gamut of Earth sciences, the Gaia stuff, from hydrology, geology, glaciology, meteorology, atmospherics, biology, botany, agronomy, epidemiology, medicine, the list can seem endless. These sciences are often closely linked. For example, a study that comes out of the field of physics can be tested and confirmed or refuted by studies in other disciplines. Global warming is foundationally physics but it can be confirmed through studies in a variety of other disciplines. That's not going to prevent subsequent studies from sounding like "old news" to a general audience. There's a real "broken record" problem with this stuff.

I sometimes wonder how many of us have a good grasp on how much and in what ways we're already affected by climate change. It varies from region to region, whether you're coastal or landlocked, whether you live in an urban or rural setting, your latitude.

If your homeland is equatorial, well, you're pretty much screwed and you probably know that already. If you come from a milder, temperate clime you're more likely to be wealthy enough and selfish enough to ignore climate change and, through your indifference, let your best remaining options for mitigation and adaptation slip through your fingers just as we've been doing for the past 30 years. Our Day of Reckoning will come but we're too damned busy to worry about that.

I've seen all the proof that I need that climate change has arrived in my region.

First there's the steady migration of marine life - fish, marine mammals, sea birds - into local waters from the warming waters to the south.  There are no fences, no highways, no mountains impeding marine life. When they choose to move, they move and they're moving.

Then there's the spreading infestation of pests such as the pine beetles moving through our forests. These are insects whose numbers were once held in check by winter cold snaps that we just don't get any longer.  They've savaged the pine forests of western states and British Columbia and now they've crossed the Rockies and are working their way through the boreal forests en route to Labrador eventually.

A third marker is the change in our wild fire season. Wild fires are now a massive problem from Mexico all the way into Alaska. In Sweden this year the fires spread into the Arctic Circle. There are more fires, deadlier fires like the blaze that rampaged through the town of Paradise, California.

And who can forget the Blob, this area of unduly warm water that shows up in the north Pacific that nobody yet really understands.  Not sure if that phenomenon has anything to do with the uptick in the frequency and severity of winter storms we've been experiencing.

Climate change is here and it is changing how we live in little but significant ways. Wild fire smoke can confine us to our homes. This year the air inside got bad enough that I forked out for air purifiers that do a terrific job of removing the fine particulate matter from the air inside my home.

Yesterday I scored one of these babies, the Streamlight Siege. It's the highest rated, battery powered, LED lantern and I found it for half price.

These wind storms can leave people out here without electricity for days.  Flashlights are okay for moving through the house but ultimately they're no substitute for a good, versatile lantern.  This one will provide illumination for 12 days on three D batteries. I'm not yet ready for a back-up generator because they're expensive and they're gasoline powered and I don't have room for one.

In essence, I'm learning to live with climate change, finding small, affordable ways to adapt. It would be great if our governments at all levels would be a bit more pro-active on adaptation strategies but this is, after all, the era of "everyday low taxes." We don't want to pay and we don't want them spending and they want our votes.

I have to remind myself that this is still "early onset" climate change, impacts that, for now, lend themselves to modest adaptation strategies. In most other corners of the world the people aren't so lucky. Their future is much more precarious than our own.