What If Gerson Is Right? What If Government No Longer Works?

I can be pretty hard on Justin Trudeau. He does deserve credit for the good things he's done but that comes with responsibility for his lapses and willful failures. I prefer Trudeau by a country mile over the Tory party and their leadership, past and present, but that's still not enough to make me think the Liberal prime minister is doing a good job. He's not. He's doing a less worse job than I'm sure we would be getting from his Conservative adversary but that's about it.

Is it Trudeau's fault or is it a systemic failure of our politics? Probably it's some measure of both.

The final paragraph in Michael Gerson's op-ed in today's Washington Post resonates in my mind.

"It is quite possible that moderate conservatism and moderate liberalism are inadequate to explain and tame the convulsive economic and social changes of our time. Which places America’s future — uncertain, maybe unknowable — on the other side of an earthquake."

Could that hold true for Canada? Are moderate conservatism and moderate liberalism no longer adequate to the challenges that we face, "the convulsive economic and social changes of our time"? Is the future of Canada and generations to come consigned to uncertainty "on the other side of an earthquake"? In several ways that seems to be the case and that perception grows stronger with the passage of time as we see Canada, like every other nation, being overtaken by some rather dire events.

What can you say for a government in denial? Trudeau's government certainly fits that bill.  Take climate change, generally accepted as the gravest threat facing mankind.  As nations go, Canada has a much better than average chance of avoiding the very worst impacts. It's not that we're better or brighter or wiser. We're simply latitudinally blessed. We're more distant from the equator than most countries, the one with which we share a border in particular. Our land reaches further beyond the polar circle than most. We have a population density advantage. We have a natural resources advantage. So what is our government doing to ensure we maximize the benefit of our natural advantages to avert or reduce the impacts we will otherwise sustain?

A carbon tax. Really, that's it? A carbon tax. Is that the best they can do? Earlier this week I posted an item about Swedish bomb shelters. The Swedes have a network of 65,000 bomb shelters but they think they need more in this Age of Trump, enough to shelter an additional 3 million people. At first it sounded a bit funny, 65,000 bomb shelters. How many do you imagine our government built during the Cold War? A couple of dozen, maybe? But then humour gave way to wonder at the resolve the Swedish government must have had to build all those shelters in the first place. Plainly they recognized a peril and identified a response and, despite the magnitude, they went ahead and built 65,000 shelters.  Bravo Sweden.

Is the threat we're facing from climate change somehow less certain, less dire than the threat the Swedes perceived faced their people during the Cold War?  Yet little Sweden, about a third the size of our population, mustered the resources and resolve to tackle this Herculean chore. So what have we don't to address an even graver threat that remotely approaches what Sweden did to protect its citizens against Cold War threats? Obviously we haven't done much so far but what are we planning to do? Anything, nothing? No, not nothing, a carbon tax.

There is so much that can be done right now. We can assess what Canada will be like in 20, 30 and 40 years from now, new areas that may open up, low lying coastal areas that might have to be abandoned, populations displaced and needing relocation, especially in the north. We can evaluate what we may need by way of essential infrastructure, communications, transportation and power grids, that sort of thing. We can explore how the future may change ways we're governed and how we're organized and how we'll interact.   We should be identifying all of our options and opportunities and their relative merits.

These are indicative of what Gerson calls the "convulsive economic and social changes of our time" and yet it's becoming increasingly obvious that moderate liberalism and moderate conservatism are inadequate to rise to these challenges.

The worst part is that I suspect Trudeau and Scheer and Singh know they're not up to these challenges. They know that our political apparatus isn't sufficiently robust to meet our uncertain, unknowable future which could also leave us on the "other side of an earthquake."

Global Warming Hasn't Stopped

The latest scam from the global warming denialists is to claim that global warming has actually stopped. It's over they say, keep moving, nothing to see here. In fact, what they're doing is exploiting what's called weather "noise" to distract attention to actual climate change.

Weather noise is the term used to describe the unpredictable variations in the earth's weather that, looked at in short periods, can lead to false conclusions about climate change. Look at the red lines in the graph above. If you narrow your focus from one peak to the following trough you might conclude that, yes, the world is actually cooling. That's weather noise. But look at the overall 30-year chart and you see the actual global warming. From Reuters:

Climate change is still nudging up temperatures in the long term even though the warmest year was back in 1998 and 2008 has begun with unusual weather such as a cool Pacific and Baghdad's first snow in memory, experts said.

"Global warming has not stopped," said Amir Delju, senior scientific coordinator of the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) climate program.

Last year was among the six warmest years since records began in the 1850s and the British Met Office said last week that 2008 will be the coolest year since 2000, partly because of a La Nina event that cuts water temperatures in the Pacific.

"We are in a minor La Nina period which shows a little cooling in the Pacific Ocean," Delju told Reuters. "The decade from 1998 to 2007 is the warmest on record and the whole trend is still continuing."

This year has started with odd weather including the first snows in Baghdad in memory on Friday and a New Year cold snap in India that killed more than 20 people. Frost hit some areas of Florida last week but orange groves escaped mostly unscathed.

Delju said climate change, blamed mainly on human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, would bring bigger swings in the weather alongside a warming trend that will mean more heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising seas.

"The more frequent occurrence of extreme events all over the world -- floods in Australia, heavy snowfall in the Middle East -- can also be signs of warming," he said.

The Alchemist's Prize

Global warming skeptics always claim to have a gaggle of credible scientists ready, willing and able to refute the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's conclusions about man-made global warming and the climate change dangers that lie ahead.

Here's the truth - they're full of crap.

First you have to leave out the "usual suspects", the scientists who gravitated to the service of Big Oil after years of lining their pockets fighting the good fight for Big Tobacco by spreading doubt about the link between cigarettes and cancer. Sorry, those people are paid liars and about as reliable as jailhouse informants.

Then, take whatever dregs are left over and come up with any credible studies they have produced that disprove the IPCC findings. The catchword here is "credible" as in "peer-reviewed". All that means is that they have published the hard research behind their conclusions so that it can be tested by other scientists and shown to be valid or bogus. That's not too much to ask, is it? We ask that of the scientists whose research, thousands of pages of it, is used by the IPCC in its work.

Now, don't be giving us the old saw about how these skeptic scientists can't come up with the funding that the pampered global warming people enjoy. Think about how stupid that sounds.

Can even you hardened skeptics believe, even for a minute, that Big Oil and Big Coal wouldn't heap immeasurable money onto any scientist able to refute the IPCC and show that global warming isn't a man-made problem arising out of greenhouse gas emissions? No one has a more immediate and direct financial interest in this than the fossil fuel industry and, if you've read any of the reports about their latest quarterly earnings, these companies are literally awash in profits lately.

Big Oil and Big Coal would pay anything to the alchemist who could allow them to get the global warming and climate change and greenhouse gas emissions problems off their backs. The only thing is that coming up with any credible rebuttal is as hard as turning lead into gold.