I'll Bet You Didn't Know That...

They don't have a clue. Your federal government and our various provincial governments are in the same boat. None of them has assessed the risks we face from climate change or what we need to do to adapt to it.

This is kicking the can down the road and whistling past the graveyard at the very same time.

They don't want to know. If they knew they might have to tell us what's coming. If we knew what's coming we then might ask them what in hell they're doing about it. And if they had to tell us what they're doing about it - essentially squat - then we might scorn them or, worse, compel them to do something about it and there's no room in their plans for that sort of Herculean undertaking.

It's so much easier if we all gaze out over the stern and pretend that iceberg off the bow isn't there at all.

This isn't misfeasance any more. It's full blown malfeasance. It's not just doing something wrongfully, carelessly, perhaps negligently.  It's deliberate wrongdoing.

They don't want to deal with this on their watch. It's too big, too scary, too fraught with political risk.

Back in June, 2014, large parts of Calgary were underwater as The World Council on Disaster Management held its annual conference in Toronto, which itself had recently experienced a freak flood.  The message was that Canada's outdated and decaying essential infrastructure was vulnerable to natural disasters.

Dr. Saeed Mirza, emeritus professor at Montreal’s McGill University specializing in structural engineering, added that the monumental infrastructure costs accumulated over decades of negligence have left Canada particularly vulnerable to catastrophic events.

“The frequency and intensity of these events has been increasing at an escalating rate and what was a one-in-100-year event at one time may become the norm,” he said. 

“When we look at Calgary, we had a flood there in 2005 and they called it a one-in-100-year flood, while this one according to some descriptions in the news has been three times as bad.” 

Mirza estimated that Canada’s infrastructure requirements have reached a cost of about $1 trillion, while a recent survey by the McKinsey Global Institute earlier this year stated that worldwide infrastructure needs are about $57 trillion. 

“In terms of funding, the amounts of money are truly frightening and there’s no government in the world that can find the kind of money necessary to bring existing infrastructure up to par,” Gordon said. 

The lack of political will is one of the biggest obstacles to infrastructure funding, which is why Mirza proposed that Canada adopt a best practices solution to addressing our climbing infrastructure costs.

"No government in the world can find that kind of money." Okay, but what if we don't? What if we don't replace essential infrastructure,what then? Have you ever been to a Third World country?

What we do know is that the costs of not acting, the costs of waiting until that essential infrastructure fails, will be substantially greater. That's because there will be economic loss atop the costs of replacing the infrastructure. And then you'll see "trickle down" in action with the velocity and power of a sledgehammer in freefall.

The taxes our parents' and grandparents' generations invested in that infrastructure was integral to the prosperity that their descendants, us, enjoyed. Only we also liked the idea of "everyday low taxes" which meant we didn't want to pay for those same things when it came our turn. We didn't pay for routine maintenance. We didn't pay for replacement. We haven't built for the next generations as those before ours freely did for us.

Which allows me to segue into a book I'm about to read, John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Affluent Society." First published in 1958 I've picked up the 1984 4th edition. I got  hooked by this passage from The Times Literary Supplement.

Why worship work and productivity if many of the goods we produce are superfluous - advertising 'needs' created by high-pressure advertising? Why grudge expenditure on vital public works while ignoring waste and extravagance in the private sector of the economy. Classical economics was born in a harsh world of mass poverty, and it has left us with a set of preconceptions hard to adapt to the realities of our own richer age. And so, too often, 'the bland lead the bland.' Our unfamiliar problems need a new approach.

It sounds more relevant today than ever. The problems, perhaps novel in the post-war prosperity, are now commonplace and extensive.

The Point of No Return?

A friend sent me a link to a Rolling Stone article, "The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares are Already Here." It's a relatively complete and accurate synopsis of the state of our climate-changed world today.  Fair warning - it's a dismal read that you may find upsetting before you sit down to Sunday dinner (if you still do that sort of thing).  Here's my follow up:


For the first time people in their 30s and younger have to contemplate the possibility that their lives will end not by mishap or natural cause but out of the chaos of climate change.

Some, such as climate scientist and professor, Guy McPherson, who maintains the blog “Nature Bats Last,” have already thrown in the towel. Articles are now appearing about how the main occupational hazard of client science types has become severe depression.

Even in Canada the political response is to talk about vague, “political” targets for reducing emissions by a certain percentage by a certain date in hopes of staying within another “political” number, the 2C target – neither of which is anchored in science.  In the result we’re staying behind the problem, never daring to actually get in front of it even though that’s the only place where we can hope to achieve any effective result.

Because we don't know where the point of no return is (if we haven't already crossed it), the only avenue for effective action on climate change requires that we get ahead of the challenge and do everything necessary to stay there.  Nothing short of that will work. The current approach will buy as bit of extra time but nothing more.

Our leadership can’t think beyond the notional emissions reduction scenarios. They see this in the context of atmospherics. The equally existential challenge of ocean acidification isn’t even on their horizon.

The most lethal mistake they’re making is to take climate change in isolation, de-linking it from the companion threats of over-population and over-consumption.

At my birth the world’s population stood at the entirely sustainable 2.5 to 2.8-billion level.  Now, in just one lifetime, we’re nearing 7.5-billion and heading to 9 by 2050 or earlier. At my birth society, from the developed world to the Third World, had far lower per-capita consumption.  Today there are ever more mouths to feed and they are likewise growing ever more voracious in their consumption of resources far beyond our planet’s carrying capacity.  Just a decade ago World Overshoot Day fell in mid-October.  This year it arrived on August 13.

Natural feedback loops evidence tipping points already crossed.  Dr. McPherson, as of last month, has catalogued about 60 of them so far. He concludes that we’ve woken the sleeping giant, nature, and from here on in, our feeble efforts to reduce future emissions are a hollow gesture. I hope he’s not right but I don’t see where he’s wrong.

We debate the rate of climate change onset and the severity of its impacts but rarely in the context of our global civilization’s resilience to endure or even survive them. We’re doing next to nothing on adaptation. While Calgary was flooded, much of the city underwater, an annual symposium of an engineering group dealing with natural disasters was held in Toronto (which had itself been flooded weeks earlier).  One of the leading experts, a professor emeritus from McGill, suggested Canada is in dire need of new and reinforced infrastructure that he estimated would cost upwards of a trillion dollars.  Instead our federal government is budgeting a meaningless $50-million a year which doesn’t keep up to the ongoing decay.

The simple fact is we’re not resilient.  To the contrary, the rise of today’s global civilization over the past 30-years has been built on defying the need for resilience, rejecting posterity. Ours has become a world of maximized production/maximized consumption in which the guiding philosophy has become “I can so I will” and rejects any notion of whether we “should.”  We institutionalize people who think that way - some are criminals, some are lunatics. Some we elect to Parliament.

In March, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), released a study that found most of the planet’s arable farmland will be gone in just 60-years, the victim of the intensive, industrial agriculture we practice in order to feed today’s 7+ billion people.  I had read about this in an online course I’d taken on global food supply a month or two earlier. Even good farmland, as in Europe and North America, is already somewhat degraded and the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides is stripping the soil ever faster.

Sure, food production is at record levels but that's obscuring the important part. We're producing this volume of food through intensive agriculture and chemical conjuring tricks associated with industrial agriculture that are depleting the very soil growing this bounty.  And we're utterly dependent on that. It's not like we can quit and let nature recover. That's not an option until we're prepared to allow an enormous percentage of our global population simply die (with the proviso that we'll somehow manage to survive the world war(s) that this triggers).

I have no doubt that this is going to be on us far sooner than we imagined and we’re facing a fairly sudden collapse. Our societies, that collectively constitute our global civilization, are already astonishingly unbalanced and it won’t take much to tip us over.  When Iran records a “wet bulb” temperature of 74C and the dry temp in Baghdad hits 53C where do you imagine this is going. And, of course, this year we’re in store for a super El Nino which causes global temperatures to spike even higher. These are impacts that can destabilize countries, exacerbate old tensions - ethnic, social, religious - triggering unrest and conflict.  The devastating war in Syria arose out of the impacts of severe drought.

Several years ago it was found that, as we eject ourselves from the Holocene and get sucked into the Anthropocene, we would embark on a temperature regime in which every year would be hotter than the hottest year experienced in the previous 150-years. Every year. It's predicted to begin around 2020, first in the Caribbean, and overtaking every other nation by 2047. That may have already begun.  That will, of course, result in a super-heated atmosphere which, with ever greater surface evaporation and transpiration, will sharply increase atmospheric water vapour, the most powerful greenhouse gas of them all and usher in a new paradigm of severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration.  And yet we are and apparently intend to remain mortally dependent on infrastructure that is aged, rapidly deteriorating and, in any event, designed to meet the needs of a climatic age that’s long gone.

It would be nice to believe that we're finally playing catch up but we're not. We haven't even identified where we have to be and by when in order to catch up and, without that, the idea of ever getting ahead of these challenges before we get overtaken by devastating events is a grand and dangerous delusion. 

Hey, Think You're Resilient?

"Resilience."  It's the new climate change buzz word.  It applies to individuals, communities, institutions, and infrastructure.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from repeated climate change impacts. It's the ability to withstand repeated floods, for example.  That might require making your home resilient by having it mounted on stilts well above ground level.  It might entail constructing new floodways to channel flash floods away from communities.

Resilience planning was one topic of discussion at the 2014 World Climate Week summit in New York.

It's not just the Third World that is taking up the issue of resilience.  In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security is exploring ways of protecting the infrastructure of American cities from climate change impacts.

"Increasingly, we've moved ...from a security focus to a resiliency focus," said Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at Homeland Security, an agency better known for its fight to curb terrorist threats.

Durkovich spoke Thursday on a panel at the Rising Seas Summit, a three-day conference organized by the U.S.-based Association of Climate Change Officers to discuss tools and ideas on building resiliency, particularly against rising sea levels.

In the aftermath of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, which devastated large swathes of the Northeastern U.S and caused over $60 billion in damages, Durkovich said her department reviewed the task of rebuilding with a new focus on "how to think about baking in resilience from the get-go."

To that end, she said, she has assembled a team of specialists, including city planners, in conjunction with the National Academy of Science to develop better tools for planning.

...the Portland, Maine area is being looked at in terms of risks from rising sea level, how floods might be mitigated and how to deal with saltwater intrusion into what had been bodies of fresh water. The results will then be shared with other coastal communities, she said.

California, which has the country's second longest coastline after that of Alaska, also is looking increasingly at climate change adaptation and resilience, said fellow panelist Ken Alex, senior policy advisor and director of the California Governor's Office of Planning and Research. 

He said California derives about $1 billion annually from its emissions cap-and-trade program, which sells greenhouse gas emissions permits, and the state has decided that all that revenue must be spent in ways "linked to resilience."

You'll find no comparable effort underway in Canada.  Ottawa could care less.  It doesn't want to discuss climate change impacts or resilience planning.   That costs money, potentially up to a trillion dollars or more, and the Harper regime, having defunded the federal government, now quests for a balanced budget.  

Which means the problem devolves to the provinces.  At least that's what I had expected when I contacted my own town's municipal engineer.  We're a seaside resort town.  We depend on summer tourism revenue.  We have these amazing, shallow beaches where kids can frolic safely in the salt water.  Parents love it.  It brings them here in droves.  

So what, I asked, is being done to prepare for sea level rise?  I fully expected to hear of some provincial task force underway to guide all the coastal communities, including Vancouver and Victoria, on what to expect and preparations for meeting the impacts - resilience.  No, sorry, nothing of the sort.

Our provincial government is standing idle, leaving it to our municipalities to do their own studies and planning.  Apparently the none-too-liberal Liberal government doesn't want to find itself in a spot where it's asked to help fund resilience initiatives for coastal communities.  

It's this "head in the sand" approach that is going to backfire on us and it's not just a coastal problem.  Across the country, long-neglected infrastructure is failing.  Much of it is old and in poor upkeep and now it has to withstand climate change impacts for which it was never designed.  It's a looming, trillion dollar nightmare.

We're not a society that remains capable of raising that kind of money.  We won't accept the tax burden.  The idea that infrastructure spending is an investment in our communities, our safety and our prosperity into the future is too ethereal for us, an affront to our need for instant gratification.  Let someone else do it, at some other time.  Kick it down the road.  

Unless we manage to kick this selfish mentality, we have already become part of a dying society.  Go to the Third World.  See what happens when infrastructure collapses.  Watch torrents of freshwater erupt from the streets while there's nothing to be had from the taps.  Encounter washed out bridges that don't get repaired.  Experience rotating power outages, streets plunged into darkness.  

We're left to repair an overpass or to fix a broken water main when one fails but that does nothing to overhaul an entire system that is in decay.  That is merely putting out fires, not preparing for the future.

You're Paying for Those Pot Holes Whether They're Fixed or Not

It's no secret that essential infrastructure in North America is in a bad way. Neglect driven by tax cutting has led to deterioration in everything from roadways to overpasses, bridges, sewers and water mains.  The end result is essential infrastructure in immediate need of repair and replacement.

An illustration of the problem comes from a forced retreat of the "just in time" manufacturing sector.

Companies like Whirlpool and Caterpillar are making costly additions to their otherwise sinewy supply chains to compensate for aging U.S. roads that are too potholed and congested for "just in time" delivery.

Some opt to keep more trucks and inventory on the road. Others are leasing huge "just in case" warehouses and guarded parking lots on the edges of big cities. All that activity raises costs, which are expected to increase even more if roads are allowed to deteriorate further and an improving economy boosts traffic.

Whirlpool, for instance, has set up a network of secure drop lots outside Chicago, Milwaukee and Minneapolis. A washing machine that used to go from regional distribution center to local distribution center to customer in one day now sits overnight in a parking lot.

It "adds an extra day of lead time, which means extra inventory," said Whirlpool Corp logistics chief Michelle VanderMeer.

Then there are the parking lots and the guards. “That’s real physical infrastructure and security that we have to pay for," she said. "We’d rather be investing our money elsewhere," she added, declining to estimate Whirlpool's expenses.

Last summer, as Calgary flooded, the World Council on Disaster Management held its annual conference in Toronto.

Dr. Saeed Mirza, emeritus professor at Montreal's McGill University specializing in structural engineering, added that the monumental infrastructure costs accumulated over decades of negligence have left Canada particularly vulnerable to catastrophic events.

"The frequency and intensity of these events has been increasing at an escalating rate and what was a one-in-100-year event at one time may become the norm," he said.

Mirza estimated that Canada's infrastructure requirements have reached a cost of about $1-trillion, while a recent survey by the McKinsey Global Institute earlier this year stated that worldwide infrastructure needs are about $57 trillion.

Canada needs a major infrastructure overhaul.  The premiers are trying to engage the federal government but Harper thinks a $50 billion programme spread out over ten years should suffice.  

 Welcome to Third World Canada.

Sometimes In Life, It's the Little Things That Matter

It's really a little thing.  A little worse.  A little more frequent.  A little longer lasting.  A little more severe.  A little more damaging.

That's the face of early onset climate change. It's the face of severe weather events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration.  It's weather made a little worse, a little more often, a little longer.  Yet it is, indeed, the little things that can really matter.

A little heavier rain, an extra day or two, once or twice more often per month. The thing is, all these little things add up and they multiply the overall impact and the long-term damage.  For example, metro Detroit got hit with more flash flooding yesterday.  That, by my count, is the fourth or fifth incident in the past two months.  That might even be something of a record.  That area is just full of records.  They experienced a record cold winter thanks to the Polar Vortex. Record snowfalls too.  Now record floods.  They can't seem to catch a break.

The little things count.  In many urban areas, infrastructure was designed and built for another climate from another time when population demands were a good deal less pressing.  With the passage of time and steady growth, infrastructure systems that were once ideal become old and increasingly inadequate to meet demand. Then you compound that with climate change impacts that were never foreseen by planners even twenty years ago and, quite suddenly, you can find yourself overwhelmed, your infrastructure overtaken by events.

Canada's premiers know we need a major infrastructure programme and it's needed urgently.  They're dealing with a prime minister for whom what the provinces and the Canadian people need doesn't matter much.  Why bother about pressing and costly needs at home when you can get all the press you need by howling at Vlad Putin to the delight of the media's trained seals?

We Need To Do What These Guys Are Doing

"These guys" are the Brits.  What they're doing is taking an inventory of their transportation infrastructure to assess its vulnerability to severe storm events caused by 'early onset' climate change.  The good news is that the Brits get it. They know climate change is real and that they're going to have to adapt or else.  In other words, the Brits have concluded that infrastructure designed for Halocene conditions just can't cut it in the Anthropocene.

Britain's crumbling rail network is not built to "modern standards" and is at risk of a repeat of the severe disruption of last winter unless urgent action is taken, according to a major new report being considered by ministers.

A review of the transport network's resilience was commissioned in the wake of the storms and floods of last winter. Cornwall and much of Devon were cut off and rail services west of Exeter suspended for two months after storms washed away the main line at Dawlish.

The report warns that it is a case of when, not if, disruption happens again. The severe winter of last year will be a regular fixture, it says.

But that sort of thing could never happen here, right?  Right?  Wrong.  This happened in Calgary last summer.

Over the summer we've witnessed how climate change impacts are overwhelming infrastructure across North America.  For example, storm sewer systems we designed and built to handle 19th and 20th century conditions can't handle the heavy downpours we get today and, for some, it's getting very, very expensive.

Jeff and Joanna Stefanek are homeowners in the Chicago suburb of Burbank. They know a thing or two about flash floods.  You might even say that, by now, they're pros.  They knew what to do when floodwater began pouring into their home Friday morning.

The Stefaneks got hit hard, but they were not alone.

Not that that was any solace. They dashed around the house, moving high-priced electronics such as a sound system and TV to higher ground atop sofas and tables. Jeff tried to save improvements such as new doors and woodwork he has installed since the last bout of flooding.

He was unable to “and now we have about $15,000 in damage,” he said.

“It flooded in 2010 and we gutted the house. It flooded again in 2013. It was like taking five steps back. And this is the second time it flooded this year,” he said.

The regional authority in Cook County is working on a flood relief plan that's due in five years.  Five years.  I expect the Stefaneks will be long gone by then.  The US National Weather Service has just issued another flash flooding advisory for their region.