What Does This Say to You About that Bitumen Business?

There's not a politician in Alberta who gives a tinker's dam about this. Neither does your favourite prime minister or the Tory seeking to unseat him.

A new report out of the UN warns the Arctic is screwed and so are we and you owe it all to these fossil fuelers and the politicians doing their bidding.

Dramatic temperature increases in the globe’s northernmost region, which is typically covered by permafrost, is unavoidable, according to the report released at the United Nations Environment Assembly. 

Even if countries were to meet the original goals of the Paris climate agreement, it would do nothing to stop Arctic winter temperatures from increasing 3 to 5 degrees Celsius by 2050 and 5 to 9 degrees Celsius by 2080, according to the report. 

The resulting sea level rises worldwide would be devastating. 

The report also warned that the rapid thawing of permafrost in the region could likely accelerate the effects of climate change, which could completely negate any long-term international pacts and goals to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius compared to 1986-2005 levels.

Here's what you need to understand. These dire findings are a baseline. That's what is in store if we meet the goals set at the 2015 Paris climate summit. These catastrophic impacts are now a "best possible" outcome.

What that means is that we can still make this catastrophe vastly worse. We can do that by remaining a petro-state, by expanding pipeline capacity, by flooding world markets with dirt-cheap, high-carbon, climate-killing bitumen. We'll be f#@king our kids and their future but, hey, that's their lookout, eh?

Last fall the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report that warned of irreversible damage to the globe if temperature increases were not limited to 2 degrees of warming. The report found that the U.S. had 12 years to act to remediate the effects of global warming. 

Wednesday’s report indicates the timeline could be even shorter.

That's not much time, especially when your greaseball prime minister has new pipelines to build.

...even if all countries were to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement — which the U.S. has vowed to pull out of — permafrost in the Arctic is still anticipated to shrink by 45 percent from today’s levels. 

The thawing will create an avalanche effect. As permafrost melts, it’s expected to release trapped carbon and methane into the atmosphere, resulting in more thawing — an effect known as “positive feedback.”

And so it's fair to say that the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and his government and the opposition are death-dealing monsters. It'll be slow-motion carnage over a few decades, a century or two, but the dislocation, the destabilizing impacts of climate catastrophe, the deaths will be preordained by these leaders and their cohorts in other petro-states.

The science is clear. The warnings are stark. We know today what is going to happen and we know what will happen is catastrophic. That is what we are choosing to cause to people here and people all around the world.

You might also want to check out today's UN Global Environment Outlook, a 28 page summary for policy-makers. If you support the mainstream political parties you should at least have the courage to read this report and think very hard on what you're backing.