It's Europe Calling, Justin. You Might Want to Take This. No? Okay.

The EU elections showed that voters are abandoning old school politics and the same old, same old. Small wonder. Right wing populists appear to be the big winners but also rising is the Green Party.

People are worried. They can see what's coming. They can feel what has already arrived.

In Canada we have two "same old" parties. The Conservatives are the Party of Darkness when it comes to climate change. They're the ultimate in Petro-Pimps and they're scrambling to staunch an exodus of radical rightwing populists to Bernier. However, not far behind, is the modern shell of the once great Liberal Party who have also chosen the petro-state over the future of Canada even as they pay unconvincing lip service to the climate crisis.

Make no mistake. Today's LPC is not the party of Laurier, St. Laurent, Pearson or the real Trudeau, Pierre, just as today's Republican Party has nothing to do with the 'party of Lincoln.'

People can sense weakness. They can smell fear. And there's plenty of both emanating from the Liberal leadership. Justin has made his bed and he's sharing it with the petro-economy. "No one would find 173 billion barrels of oil and just leave it there." Even if that was true it was an incredibly stupid thing to say and an even dumber mantra around which to forge a government.

We thought Trudeau had vision from his campaign rhetoric in 2015. He was positively inspirational coming off nearly a decade of the Harper government. Only he wasted no time in reneging on those grand promises much like a snake sheds its skin. The Liberal Party faithful have been straining to downplay that ever since but, today, the best thing they have going for themselves is Andrew Scheer and the grim prospect of another Tory government. That speaks to just how hollow the Liberals have become. "Vote for Us, We're Not Him." Well, in a lot of respects you're pretty close.

The world is changing - rapidly, dangerously and, those determined not to see it excepted, we all know it. We can see where we're headed and what that means for our young people, our grandkids and the children they will have. Greta Thunberg and her army of followers remind us that parties like Canada's Conservatives and Liberals are not on their side. You have to dig pretty deep to deny that.

The world has been given a very narrow time frame to try to avert catastrophic climate change. We have to cut carbon emissions by half by 2030. Andrew Scheer and Justin Trudeau will not even acknowledge that much less commit to the sort of changes we would need to meet that obligation. And, yes, it is an obligation. Any genuine progressive would understand that, Liberals not so much.

The current government has fallen further and further behind even meeting Stephen Harper's emissions cuts targets, even as climate change has worsened considerably.  That's not progress. That's a retreat, a capitulation. Please, don't give me any of that nonsense about minuscule, gestural carbon tax.

The great Liberal leaders of the past worked to make Canada a better place, a greater nation. That vision disappeared from the party well before Justin Trudeau showed up.

Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and many others show what happens when governments fail to respond to popular discontent. These people are right there in the wings just waiting to pounce. They take that discontent, the fuel, and put the match of fear and anger to it. It works. It won't last long. Climate change is worsening. It's now a climate crisis. Climate deniers like Trump and Orban can't outrun it.

You may have noticed that the American mid-west is entering its second week of continuous severe weather events - high winds, heavy flooding rains, tornadoes. In large swathes of America's bread basket this year's crop is in peril.  In the west, the wildfire season is here, perhaps fittingly hitting Alberta hardest. Meanwhile their newly minted premier dismisses climate change as the "flavour of the month." That is a man holding his province and his people hostage to a dead end ideology.  Well, they chose him, they deserve no better. Canada, however, does deserve better. 'Same old, same old' has run its course.

Two weeks ago the Washington Post reported that temperatures in the Russian Arctic had hit 84 degrees F.  while atmospheric carbon dioxide hit 415 ppm. for the first time in human history. The next four years are predicted to be unduly hot which takes on a strange context given that the past many years have been record setting. I think that means we're in for "really, really hot weather."

Climate departure, now sometimes called "climate catastrophe" is predicted to begin setting in around 2023.  Back in 2013 Camilo Mora's climate team at the University of Hawaii released a paper on this troubling phenomenon that will hammer economies in affected nations and likely trigger mass migrations.  In the ensuing three years other studies corroborated what's coming.

According to this study, the tropics, which are the near-equatorial region of this planet that’s almost 100% impoverished, and that has thus contributed virtually nothing to global warming, will begin the period of permanent catastrophe starting in approximately 2020; but the (cooler) moderate-latitude countries, such as in North America and Europe, will begin this catastrophic period in or around 2047.

This isn’t to say that things won’t continue to get worse after then; it’s only to say that this is, as the article will be titled, “The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability.”
This landmark article was co-authored by a team of 14 climate-scientists. It says: “Unprecedented climates will occur earliest in the tropics and among low-income countries.” It explains that the reason for this is that the countries near the equator have far less variability in their weather than do the moderate-climate countries, and so the species that constitute the ecosystems there cannot tolerate temperatures outside their narrow range, which has existed within that narrow range for thousands of years. Consequently, species-extinctions will soar there much faster and earlier than here. The existing impoverished economies, within around 2,500 miles of the equator (where average per-capita incomes are less than 10% of the average in the moderate-latitude countries such as ours), will become unlivable.

This study notes the “obvious disparity between those who benefit from the process leading to climate change and those who will have to pay for most of the environmental and social costs.” Of course, “those who benefit from the process leading to climate change” are the oil companies, and the coal companies, and the natural gas companies, and the pipeline and service companies, and ultimately their owners: especially the aristocratic families who control them. It would be false to assume that any poor people, even in countries such as the United States, will benefit from continuation of “the process leading to climate change.” However, some of the chief financial backers of the Republican Party and of other conservative political parties in the moderate-latitude countries benefit enormously from that “process.” Thus, many people who will not benefit from climate change end up voting for climate change; and, of course, their children and subsequent descendants will suffer greatly from their votes.

The Colombia-born Dr. Mora, in an interview with Yale360,  tried to make the people of the developed world, that's us, understand  what we're doing to the weakest and most vulnerable people.

I grew up in a country where there has been a long history of violence. We have been in war for 50 years, and one thing people don’t realize is what it means to be in a place where anyone can get shot at any moment, where people are starved to death, where there is not enough food to feed people. In the first world, people don’t know how rich they are, and they don’t realize what is happening in the rest of the world. And for me that’s a driving force. It’s scary to think about climate change because when we start damaging physical systems and the carrying capacity of physical systems to produce food, people will react to this in a terrible way. I’m telling you, I have seen it in my own country. It’s very negative the way in which people react to hunger. And that’s one of the things that’s most frightening to me with this large-scale analysis — the fact that I know we’re on our way to some very disturbing scenarios if we go down this pathway of damaging physical systems in the ways that we are today.

We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 for us, not for them. Those little brown people with their already precarious lives and their devastated homelands, they're hooped.  And yet Liberals and Tories alike think it's entirely reasonable to flood world markets with high-carbon, high-cost, low value bitumen. That's what it means to be a Liberal on the cusp of this next decade.

We're just a few months away from choosing our next government. It will pit Andrew Scheer, a man whose promises, odious as they are, can probably be trusted versus the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, a man who has shown his solemn promises to be thoroughly unreliable. Great choice.

This year will be our last chance to make a difference. Four years from now, catastrophic climate change will be locked in.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road - Climate Migration - Central America

Imagine Central America empty. Not exactly empty but heavily depopulated. Think of it as climate change for the Americas.

It's been coming for a while, several years in fact. A variety of plagues from gang violence to devastating severe weather events and food shortages has resulted in Central Americans in their hundreds trying to find refuge in the United States.

Heat waves, droughts, crop failures and worse have left Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua particularly hard hit. Governments in those countries have urged their people to fight famine by eating iguanas, creatures that are sometimes the family pet. That was four years ago. Recent reports indicate even the iguana are now depleted.

What to do, what to do? Central America is one region expected to be among the first to be hit by "climate departure."

2020 - 2023 that's the predicted arrival date of what's being called "climate departure." Think of it as the abrupt transition from "old climate" - the climate you've known all your life - into a "new climate." One of the hallmarks of this new climate is that every year of the new climate will be hotter than the hottest year ever experienced in the old climate. There won't be any cool years, only very hot years.

Climate departure is supposed to set in first in areas such as the Caribbean, Central America and in equatorial regions elsewhere. Insufferable heat will be one problem but heat brings any number of knock-on effects - severe weather events of increasing intensity, frequency and duration; disease and pest problems; disruption of freshwater resources, on and on and on. If you haven't been following conditions across Central America you should know that they're already on the ropes, have been for years. Here, here, and here.

Recently The Guardian reported that environmental degradation is pushing Central American migrants to Donald Trump's border.

The average temperature in Central America has increased by 0.5C since 1950; it is projected to rise another 1-2 degrees before 2050. This has a dramatic impact on weather patterns, on rainfall, on soil quality, on crops’ susceptibility to disease, and thus on farmers and local economies. Meanwhile, incidences of storms, floods and droughts on are the rise in the region. In coming years, according to the US Agency for International Development, countries in the northern triangle will see decreased rainfall and prolonged drought, writ large. In Honduras, rainfall will be sparse in areas where it is needed, yet in other areas, floods will increase by 60%. In Guatemala, the arid regions will creep further and further into current agricultural areas, leaving farmers out to dry. And El Salvador is projected to lose 10-28% of its coastline before the end of the century. How will all those people survive, and where will they go?

...Violence and environmental degradation are inextricably linked, and both lead to mass migration. An unstable planet and ecosystem lends itself to an unstable society, to divisions, to economic insecurity, to human brutality. When someone’s home becomes less and less livable, they move elsewhere. Wouldn’t each and every one of us do the same? 

This week, the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer published a series of pieces about the impacts of climate change in the Guatemalan highlands, where farmers are struggling to grow crops that they have been farming there for centuries. “In most of the western highlands,” Blitzer wrote, “the question is no longer whether someone will emigrate but when.” A few years ago, I reported from Guatemala’s dry corridor, several hours away from where Blitzer was reporting, where persistent drought had decimated the region’s agriculture, and particularly the coffee crop, on which roughly 90% of local farmers relied. It was a wildly different landscape from the one Blitzer described, but it faced the same problem: if you live in an agricultural zone, come from a long line of farmers and can’t reliably harvest your crops any more, what else is there to do but leave? 

Camilo Mora, who heads the climate science team at the University of Hawaii that formulated the "climate departure" theory, understands from first-hand experience the link between hunger and violence. Born in Columbia he lived through it.

In the first world, people don’t know how rich they are, and they don’t realize what is happening in the rest of the world.And for me that’s a driving force. It’s scary to think about climate change because when we start damaging physical systems and the carrying capacity of physical systems to produce food, people will react to this in a terrible way. I’m telling you, I have seen it in my own country. It’s very negative the way in which people react to hunger. And that’s one of the things that’s most frightening to me with this large-scale analysis — the fact that I know we’re on our way to some very disturbing scenarios if we go down this pathway of damaging physical systems in the ways that we are today.

Donald Trump, as is his bent, is determined to worsen the plight of these climate migrants and those who haven't yet fled their homelands. His knee-jerk response to the flood of asylum seekers at the US border is to cut humanitarian aid to the countries these refugees were compelled, for the sake of survival, to flee. What do we expect them to do, stay at home and watch their kids die? Who would do that? Would you? I wouldn't.

What makes this all the more outrageous is the behaviour of the petro-states to the catastrophe that greenhouse gases are inflicting on these "little brown people" who, to us, don't matter.  Their lives are already precarious, even hellish, but we, in pursuit of ever more carbon fuel revenue can and will make it fiendishly worse.   Fiendish - that's a fitting appellation for Rachel and Jason; Ford, Moe and Horgan, and the leaders of all three major federal parties.

This migration could reach a breaking point by the early to mid-2020s as climate departure hits the stay-behind Hondurans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans and Salvadoreans.

UPDATE: Canada closes door on asylum seekers.

It those Central Americans are looking for asylum in Canada, they had better invest in airline tickets. The federal government is changing Canadian asylum law to disqualify migrants who have already applied for asylum in another country. If you somehow make it into the States and claim asylum, you won't be able to travel to Canada for a better shot at being allowed to stay.

It Sounds Radical But It's Not, Not Really.

There's been no end of weirdness over the past couple of decades but, being the most adaptable species of complex life on Earth, the only creature able to inhabit every part of our land and ice mass, we've done what man has always done - we've tolerated change until we came to see it as our new normal. Maybe if we were less adaptable, more vulnerable... oh well.

The funny thing is that danger or risk is something we countenance especially in the face of significant cost or inconvenience for doing anything effective to deal with it. We want something done about it provided that something is free or really cheap. We want something done that won't put us out. We're all for change provided we don't have to change. We don't want to see the consequences and thus there's no need to put a price on future events.

One measure of selfishness is the frequency of responses from people of my age who say, "I'll be dead by then. Yes, it's a pity, but that's none of my concern and, besides, Oprah's on in a few minutes."

Climate change. Despite all the ongoing denialism and campaign of distraction, it's probably the best researched scientific theory of all time. The central theory has been tested against one scientific discipline, or specialty, after another. For example, a geologist might say, "If the central theory is right, there ought to be this sort or that form of geological evidence, corroboration. Let's have a look. Let's see." And so a mountain of research has been amassed - covering a gamut of scientific disciplines including geology, geography, hydrology, oceanography, atmospherics, glaciology, physics, biology, botany, marine biology, epidemiology, paleontology, and many more.

One discipline after another, the research poured in corroborating the central theory of anthropogenic global warming, AGW. There isn't a single scientific discipline that refutes the theory. Not one disproves AGW or calls it into question. Likewise in the developed world there's not one national academy of sciences that does not endorse the theory of AGW.

None of this puts off the denialists or their corporate backers. They're still free to attack climate change as an ideology, a belief. They don't engage the scientific fact of climate change. They don't refute the mountain of research and analysis. It's too conclusive, too sound to be challenged on any factual basis. And so they seize the narrative and transform it into a belief because nothing is easier to challenge and undermine than a belief. That's been the stock in trade of organized religion since it was invented. All you have to do is present an opposing belief especially if it's a belief that a lot of people find preferable to scientific fact.

(BTW - National Geographic has posted DiCaprio's climate change documentary, "Before the Flood," online.)

We've seen plenty of proof of the reality of climate change over the past twenty years. Severe storm events of increasing frequency, duration and intensity; floods and droughts on a scale we haven't known before; disease and pest migration (destructive beetle infestations, the spread of viruses - West Nile, Zika and Lyme disease, etc.); species migration, especially marine species moving poleward as their traditional waters turn too warm; the retreat of glaciers and melting of ice caps; accelerating sea level rise; a steady progression of record hot years.

The next ten years will see the onset of something completely unknown to human civilization. It's called "climate departure." It marks a transition from the climate we've known for the past 12,000 years to a new climate in which, past the point of "departure" even the coolest year will be hotter than the hottest year experienced in the pre-departure era.

When it comes to climate departure, the closer you are to the equator the sooner it will set in. It's predicted to manifest within 10-years in parts of the Caribbean and Asia Pacific, spreading poleward until it engulfs most of the populated regions by mid-century. The Middle East will be hit in about 20 years. The populace in these areas impacted will find it very challenging to remain. Heat kills and it also wreaks havoc on agriculture and freshwater resources. Most of the cities of the world will have reached departure by 2047.

That sounds sufficiently dire that rational people would be spurred to action, immediately. Perhaps the problem is an even more dire paucity of rational people. They're practically an endangered species.

You see, you can't deal with climate change without also tackling its companion crises - overpopulation and over-consumption. You won't have a hope of fixing any of them unless you fix them all. So, what exactly have we got in mind for Existential Crisis B and Existential Crisis C? Nothing good.

Science has now figured that we, mankind, reached our Earth's carrying capacity when our numbers reached the low 3-billions sometime in the early 70s. That's an important date, do keep it in mind.

For several years the World Wildlife Fund, in conjunction with the Zoological Society of London and in collaboration with other groups including the Global Footprint Network have been producing annual Living Planet reports. One subject of focus has been our rapidly dwindling wildlife. Not the number of species but the overall tally of plants and animals - the totality of the other life forms with which we share Earth.

What they have found is that we, mankind, are squeezing out other species, plant and animal. Since 1970 their numbers have declined by more than half. The Living Planet 2016 report estimates that the decline could hit 67% by 2020, just a few years from now. We are constantly pushing back their habitat to make room for our burgeoning global population and we're consuming ever more of the resources without which their numbers collapse. This is real "uncharted waters" stuff.

In just one lifetime, my own, mankind's population has tripled. It took us 11,000 years of civilization to grow to just one billion. We doubled that in a century. In under 70-years we tripled that again to over 7-billion. What grows like that? Not much - bacteria in a petri dish, cancer cells - oh yeah, and us. Now Africa and Asia have developed huge population bombs - with hundreds of millions about to enter reproductive age. Hang onto your hat. We're going to hit 9+ billion before you know it.

Then there's the business of over-consumption. The Earth, as you might have heard, is finite. It's about the same size it was when multi-cellular life first appeared way back when. Yet, starting in the early 70s, we began to exceed our biosphere's carrying capacity. By "we" I mean humankind. When it comes to natural resources, everything from fresh water to biomass, there's only so much the Earth can replenish in a given time, say a year. Right now we've exceeded that replenishment rate by a factor of 1.7. It's the equivalent of taking home a thousand dollars a month but spending 17 hundred. Not good.

Part of our quandary arises out of sheer numbers. The other part comes from how much each of us consumes. Here's the thing. Take per capita energy consumption, for example. In 1820 that stood at a steady 20 gigajoules of energy per person per year. By 1970 (there it is again) that had grown to 50 gigajoules per person per year. Half a century later, today, it's 80 gigajoules.

So we've gone from one billion people, each using 20 gigajoules of energy per year, to more than seven billion people, each using 80 gigajoules of energy per year in a little under two centuries, a blip in mankind's 12,000 year history. Do the math and you go from 20 billion gigajoules in 1820 to 560 billion gigajoules today.  Can you get a sense of the enormity of what we're doing?

If you can get a sense of the enormity of what we're doing, if you grasp how our population is burgeoning even as our consumption levels skyrocket, if you appreciate how we're gutting pretty much every other life form on the planet - if you get all this, then I'm proud to include you in the "rational" group I spoke of earlier on. You're in a decided minority.

Can you guess who is not in that minority with you? That would be those holding the reins of power, our political leadership. Not just Canada but globally. Here's the giveaway. They are absolutely obsessed with the pursuit of perpetual, exponential growth in GDP. They are devout adherents to a world of ever growing extraction, production and consumption. The International Energy Agency believes them. It predicts overall energy demand will grow by upwards of an additional 40% by 2050.

So, you see, despite the fact that the Earth is essentially finite, despite the fact that we're now utterly dependent on continuing to deplete its resources ever faster than they can be replenished, despite the fact that we have wantonly exceeded our biosphere's environmental carrying capacity, despite the fact that our specie's numbers are more than twice what our planet can support, despite all this and more:

Our political leadership, in conjunction with our economic leadership (you don't understand that?), are so utterly irrational that they ignore everything that's been happening since the early 70s, all the signs, all the science to continue their pursuit of perpetual, exponential growth, the very foundation of what's predicted to be the 6th major extinction event.

Stopping this, breaking this bleak and self-destructive pursuit, sounds radical but it's not, not really. When you've got a three pack a day habit, there's nothing radical about quitting.

And the Band Played On

It's generally accepted in the scientific community that it takes one to several centuries, on average, for species to truly adapt to a 1 degree Celsius shift in temperature, up or down.

Look around today and you'll see species "running" for their lives, continually migrating ever further away from the equatorial zone.  Some species, particularly those that swim or fly, have a big advantage when it comes to migration.  Plants aren't quite so lucky yet it's calculated that, in totality, they too are migrating at about 8-inches every year.

From my perch out here on the Pacific we see lots of signs of this migration out of the south.  Humpbacks have returned to our waters in big numbers.  Large schools of white sided dolphins have arrived bringing pods of transient orca with them.  California has lost its once abundant anchovies which might be the same populations that have recently shown up here.  Victoria now even has a resident flock of brown pelicans that have taken up residence between the provincial capital and Race Rocks.

This may be a case where the race goes to the swiftest in which event there'll be plenty of losers.

One of the most prominent experts in this area is the University of Hawaii's Camilo Mora, whose specialties include biogeography, geology and climate data modeling.  Mora and his fellow researchers made headlines a couple of years ago when they produced a study that forecasts 2047 as the year by which every year that follows - every year - will be hotter than the hottest year that area has experienced over the previous century and a half, a phenomenon called "climate departure."  Some places will reach that point long before then:

Mora forecasts that the unprecedented heat starts in 2020 with Manokwari, Indonesia. Then Kingston, Jamaica. Within the next two decades, 59 cities will be living in what is essentially a new climate, including Singapore, Havana, Kuala Lumpur and Mexico City.

In an interview last year with Yale University's e360 Project, Mora touched on the frustration caused researchers by the public's and their leaders' reluctance to respond to the plain science.

You don’t see any action on these things. And the problem is that these things die away pretty quickly. The press coverage of this paper lasted two days. We were in the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN. And next week, people were talking about something else. So as scientists, we are struggling to figure out how we can increase public awareness on this issue.

Pope Francis stirred up a lot of reaction last week to his papal encyclical on climate change in which he focused on climate change and over-consumption, especially by the advantaged countries, that were wrecking the environment. The pope, however, disingenuously gave overpopulation a pass.  Mora disagrees.  To him our population loading is already excessive.

Well, it’s paramount because people need food. And the planet is limited in the amount of resources that it can produce. We already have calculated that the planet has on the order of 11 billion hectares that can be harvested in a sustainable manner. Of course we can increase the number by increasing technology, but that’s been happening for the last three decades. The worldwide population is 7 billion people, and we know that to sustain a human being you need on the order of two hectares per person. That means that the world human population every year consumes on the order of 14 billion hectares. The planet only has eleven to give to us.

This doesn't take into account the more recent research about global soil degradation and the mounting threat to food security.  In March, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization released a report on the ongoing degradation of our stocks of arable land, warning that a lot of our topsoil over the next 60-years will be ruined by intensive agriculture and the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.  Like Mora's research and the Living Planet Report, 2014 finding that we have lost half our wildlife over the past 30 years, the UNFAO study was almost immediately flushed straight down the memory hole, completely forgotten.

Much of Mora's claims about overpopulation is borne out by research conducted by the NGO, Global Footprint Network, which tracks the biomass deficit that has set in around the world (only a handful of countries, Canada being one, remain in a biomass surplus).  From this the GFN issues an annual release to mark "Earth Overshoot Day," the date on which we exhaust a full year's supply of the planet's renewable resources.  Just a few years ago, Overshoot fell in mid October.  Now it has advanced to August.  For the balance of the year we deplete Earth's resource reserves and the rate at which our over-consumption is accelerating is a warning that we're depleting those reserves rapidly too.

In 2014, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 19.  This year it will arrive on August 15.  For more on that and GFN's take on the papal encyclical, you can go here.  

Professor Mora faults the environmental community, including the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for deliberately ducking the overpopulation issue.

Mora: It’s pure fear. It seems amazing, but friends of mine recommended to me not to publish that paper. They said, “This paper is going to be damaging to you. You don’t get it. You don’t need it.” What is remarkable, though, is that after the paper got published, I had multiple people calling me to endorse it.

e360: Did they endorse it publicly?

Mora: No, just to me. This is really the problem. But why we don’t take it on? I have no clue. Because the data are very clear. I guess the problem is that it can backfire. We have seen, historically, situations in which a scientist has taken on an issue and there are people who have been fired, or attacked by interest groups. So I guess the problem is fear of retaliation.

If he's right, if the scientific community is already too intimidated to address the issue of overpopulation, then we're genuinely screwed.  The pope hit two of three - climate change and over-consumption - but if you can't address overpopulation, you have almost completely undermined your chances of effective action on the other two.

We're already seeing the impacts of climate change but doing little to prepare for what those early impacts tell us is coming.  For now we're forestalling the consequences of ever increasing over-consumption by raiding the Earth's diminishing resource reserves. We have no collective will to even begin tackling overpopulation. 

We comfort ourselves by talking in terms of what might happen by 2100.  Oh hell, we'll all be gone by then anyway so, no big deal.  But, if Mora's research is accurate, "climate departure" begins to set in by 2020 and then spreads across the world until every country is hit by 2047.