Focus on What Really Matters Most

Our government has many priorities. The prime minister has said that he wants to be known, first and foremost, as a free trader. He's all about increasing trade, maximizing growth in GDP.

Mr. Trudeau also says he wants real action on climate change. So far that's been stalled on vague statements about carbon pricing that have triggered strong push back from the fossil provinces - especially Alberta and Saskatchewan.

The prime minister is now expected to appease the petro-provinces by approving at least one pipeline to the Pacific, in all probability the Kinder Morgan project that will see an armada of heavily laden supertankers navigating through Vancouver's Coal Harbour and on through the province's southern coastal waters.

This government still has no means, no technical solution to a major dilbit spill in these challenging waters. Once the diluent separates out the remaining bitumen sludge sinks to the bottom at depths that are essentially unreachable. Perhaps hoping to cover its tracks in such a disastrous event, the Environment Minister has approved the chemical nightmare, Corexit, as an oil dispersant even though it merely causes spilled oil to sink, not disperse, which would help deliver its content of toxins, heavy metals, acids and carcinogens to the seabed that anchors the chain of marine life on the coast.

Trudeau knows there's no way to clean up a dilbit spill and yet he's ignoring that troubling fact - and the long term wellbeing of coastal British Columbians - to accede to his political imperative and appease the petro-province premiers.

Is that what really matters most to Canadians? Is exporting the costliest, highest-carbon synthetic petroleum what is best for us and our grandkids? Of course not. It is, however, what the prime minister's handlers see as most politically opportune. Liberal fortunes trump (and I use that word advisedly) the wellbeing of Canadians hands down.

Yet we hear nothing from this government, nary a word, about the "climate emergency" now spreading across the Arctic. The Stockholm Environment Institute, in conjunction with the Arctic Council and other scientific groups, today released a blunt warning in the form of the Arctic Resilience Report which concluded that we're at risk of triggering 19 "tipping points" that could greatly accelerate the onset of runaway global warming not merely in the Arctic but across the globe.

The tipping points are addressed in Chapter 3 beginning at page 64 of the 240-page report. Among other things it notes that all Arctic nations are vulnerable to at least 10 of the 19 identified tipping points while Canada, Russia and the US are exposed to 18.

Regime shifts in the Arctic encompass a broad range of dynamics that typically occur on a time scale of decades to centuries, and a spatial scale from local and landscape dynamics, to subcontinental ones, with consequences that may be felt globally. The rest of this section summarizes the most established regime shifts reviewed in the academic literature. Most (12 out of 16) are difficult to reverse or irreversible on a 100-year time scale. The evidence supporting the existence of these regime shifts comes primarily from contemporary observations, paleo-records and models (13 regime shifts); experimentation has only been possible on six. In fact, the scales at which these regime shifts dynamics occur, both in space and time, make experimentation a rare option. Hence, identifying the mechanism underlying some Arctic regime shifts is a challenging task that relies heavily on modelling and the synthesis of studies of long-term changes in the ecology, hydrology, geology and climate of the Arctic. Most of regime shifts identified occur in marine and polar systems; the others occur in tundra, temperate and boreal forests, and freshwater lakes and rivers.

The report itemizes each of the tipping points with an explanation of the individual regime, the consequences that flow from it and what, if anything, can still be done by way of response. The discussion explains that these regime changes are not linear, it's not a steady state progression, but are subject to abrupt and fairly dramatic change. It also shows how many of the 19 tipping points can combine to create a synergy that can evolve into a cascade effect.

It's a well written, balanced paper that's within the comprehension levels of non-science types like yours truly. It's a pretty easy read for a research report.

The Arctic Resilience Report is ultimately a warning that we don't have the luxury of time to respond to the irreversible changes now underway. Catastrophic runaway global warming could be a matter of years away. We must come to appreciate the speed of the changes underway, how we suddenly became confronted with 19 tipping points. Government institutions, it notes, are moribund and, as currently organized, incapable of keeping up with the pace of change. 

If there was ever a time to go on something akin to a war footing, this is it. This is what matters most to the future of our country, not bloody bitumen pipelines, not half-assed proposals about carbon pricing. It's time for Mr. Trudeau to focus on what really matters most to Canada, not what's best for his political fortunes.

As I Stare at My Smoke-Clouded Sky, a Thought or Two About Tipping Points

A tipping point isn't that instant when water begins pouring over the canoe's gunwale.  The tipping point is actually before that, when the canoe is heeling over and can't be stopped.  It's summer time. Get in a canoe and try it.  There's a brief moment, perhaps not more than a second or two, when the outcome is both obvious and inescapable - the center of gravity has shifted and your momentum is going to carry you over.  At that point you're just along for a rather wet ride.

Climate change, anthropogenic global warming tipping points are very similar to what happens in a canoe.  The environment begins to heel over until it reaches a critical point at which there's no turning back.

The international community has set 2 degrees Celsius as the point at which we still have a reasonable chance of not rolling over.  No guarantees, just a reasonable chance.  That's based on a best guess from what we knew of climate change many years ago.  Many scientists are now telling us that 2C target is way, way too high.  That's discouraging because we've already loaded the atmosphere with enough greenhouse gases that we have locked in at least 1.5C of warming over the course of this century.

We need to remember, very clearly, what these targets are all about.  They're an attempt to reach a goal for arresting warming before all those emissions from our smoke stacks and our tail pipes and our cow farts trip natural feedback mechanisms that we cannot control and that will drive runaway global warming.

What do these natural feedback mechanisms look like?  We have a pretty good idea, a list, but it's not necessarily exhaustive.  One example is the pine beetle infestation that has devastated hundreds of thousands of square miles of forest across the west, turning those once verdant pine forests into rust-coloured, high-resin kindling, all dried out and waiting for a careless hiker or a lightning strike. When it comes to wildfire fuel, it just doesn't come any better than that.

In case you haven't heard, the West is on fire from northern Alaska all the way down into Mexico.  Step outside and you can't see the CO2 emissions but you sure can see and smell the heat absorbing soot in the air. It builds up on your window sills, it gets all over your furniture and your floors. Suddenly forests that, while alive, were powerful carbon sinks sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere for photosynthesis have now become carbon bombs. There's a natural feedback mechanism for you right there. Come out this way, you can't miss it. Although, from what I've read this is one time the West has come to you.  Sort of like that Mount St. Helen's thing.

Arctic sea ice is vanishing and quite rapidly to boot.  The ice cover that once reflected solar radiation, heat, back into space has walked off the job. No brilliant white ice means dark green ocean that is a heat sink.  That warming Arctic ocean warms the atmosphere that causes the tundra to dry out and catch fire.  As the tundra burns it creates black soot that winds up turning the Greenland Ice Sheet a dirty colour and that accelerates the melting of the ice sheet and sea level rise.

The thawing, burning tundra also exposes the permafrost underneath that, as it thaws, releases massive amounts of once safely sequestered, formerly frozen methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas.  As the Arctic ocean warms it also triggers the thawing of ancient, frozen seabed methane clathrates - methane ice if you like - that bubbles to the surface and then onward to the atmosphere.

From rampaging wildfires to tundra fires to ice caps covered in black soot to the release of ancient stores of methane from the permafrost and seabed clathrates these are all the feedback mechanisms your mother those scientists warned you about.  They're happening now, not forty years from now, not even twenty years from now.

Have we passed the point of no return.  The good news is that's a conversation we're not really having right now.  We're still proceeding - although not very quickly and not very well - with talks that assume we're not there yet and can, if we just try hard enough dammit, avoid the worst - maybe.

Today we're at just 0.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.  We're not at the 1.5C mark yet because that persistent atmospheric greenhouse gas needs time to work its magic.  It will and as it does our children and grandchildren will experience the changes in creates.

There are two things that we must understand, and that includes you.

First off. That 1.5C is something we've already bequeathed our kids and theirs. What we need to realize is that emissions are cumulative which means our greenhouse gas emissions from today onward add to that 1.5C.  Every tonne of CO2 we emit goes on top of that 1.5C pile.  We're experiencing the impacts of barely 0.8C of warming (and it's a real bitch). As today's warming keeps getting hotter, those who follow us will endure a variety of impacts that are even greater, more dangerous, and demanding of new adaptation responses.

Second.  These numbers don't include the natural feedback mechanisms we already seem to have triggered.  The greenhouse gas emissions they create - CO2 from forest fires, methane released from the permafrost and seabed clathrates - also go atop that 1.5C we have already locked in.

What more incentive do we need to rapidly decarbonize our economies and our societies?  What conceivable justification do we have to continue to dither and squabble? This is a moral imperative, a fundamental obligation we owe not just our kids and theirs but to the very future of our country. It's time to sweep denialism and those behind it out of our path for they are immensely more dangerous than any terrorist group or tinpot tyrant that has ever beset our world.

Oh yeah, one other thing.  While we're decarbonizing and sorting out the climate change business, we have to realize that any real solution also must address two related challenges without which we don't stand a chance - over-consumption and overpopulation.  They're all tied up together and you have to solve them all if you're to solve any of them.  Bear in mind that if we don't come up with solutions that address all three of these existential challenges, they'll come up with their own solutions and we won't be very happy when they arrive.

Two Plus Two Equals = You Really Don't Want to Know.

Let's do the math.  Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution our greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the atmosphere by 0.8 degrees Celsius. Emissions to date, even if we turned emissions-free tomorrow, have already locked in 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.  Our leaders have designated 2 degrees Celsius as the "never exceed" point if we're to have a better than even chance of avoiding runaway global warming, i.e. a major extinction event.

So, how are we doing?  Lousy.

The latest research concludes that it's going to get a lot hotter and lot faster over the next few decades.  How much?  About 0.25 degrees Celsius each and every decade.

For the record, the Industrial Revolution is generally thought to have begun around 1790.  In other words, in two and a quarter centuries we've seen warming of 0.8 degrees Celsius.  Soon we'll be seeing that much warming again over the span of just three decades.  That's not good, not good at all.

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) study, “Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change,” finds that by 2020, human-caused warming will move the Earth’s climate system “into a regime in terms of multi-decadal rates of change that are unprecedented for at least the past 1,000 years.”

In the best-case scenario PNNL modeled, with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations stabilizing at about 525 parts per million (theRCP4.5 scenario), the four-decade warming trend hits 0.45°F (0.25°C) per decade. That means over a 4-decade period, the Earth would warm 1.8°F (4 x 0.45) or 1°C (4 x 0.25). This is a faster multi-decadal rate than the Earth has seen in at least a millennium.

Because of Arctic amplification, the most northern latitudes warm two times faster (or more) than the globe as a whole does. As this figure from the study shows, the rate of warming for the Arctic is projected to quickly exceed 1.0°F (0.55°C) per decade.

Such rapid Arctic warming would be ominous for several reasons. First, it would likely speed up the already staggering rate of loss of Arctic sea ice. Second, if, as considerable recent research suggests, Arctic amplification has already contributed to the recent jump in extreme weather, then the next few decades are going to be utterly off the charts.

Third, such rapid Arctic warming implies that the rapidly-melting Greenland ice sheet — already made unstable by human-caused warming — is likely to start disintegrating even faster, which in turn will push sea level rise higher than previously estimated, upwards of six feet this century.

Fourth, such rapid warming would serve to accelerate the release of vast amounts of carbon from defrosting permafrost — the dangerous amplifying carbon cycle which has already been projected to add up to 1.5°F to total global warming by 2100.

This sounds an awful lot like that 'runaway global warming' mom warned us about. 2020.  Hmmm, not very far off, is it.

Tundra is Fuel and It Will Burn Us

We hear a lot about the tundra that blankets the far north thawing due to global warming.   As it thaws it releases previously trapped methane and CO2.

Well it does more than that.   As tundra thaws it turns into fuel for wildfires.  And let's put it this way, fire fighting isn't very effective up there.

In 2007, a tundra fire on the Anaktuvuk river in Alaska showed what's at stake.

"'Fire has been largely absent from tundra for the past 11,000 or so years, but the frequency of tundra fires is increasing, probably as a response to climate warming,' said co-author Syndonia "Donie" Bret-Harte, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology.

"The Anaktuvuk River fire burned 1,039 square kilometers (401 square miles), an area roughly the size of Cape Cod and visible from space, and released more than 2.1 teragrams (2.3 million tons) of carbon into the atmosphere. Radiocarbon dating of the soils revealed the maximum age of the soil carbon emitted from the fire was 50 years."

And a tundra fire is more complex than an ordinary forest fire.


"Smoke from the fire pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but that's just one part of a tundra fire's potential impact. The fire also consumed up to 30 percent of the insulating layer of organic matter that protects the permafrost beneath the tundra's shrub- and moss-covered landscape.

"In a pine forest, fire would burn up leaf litter on the ground, but not the soil beneath. Because the Arctic tundra has a carbon-rich, peaty soil, however, the ground itself is combustible, and when the fire recedes, some of the soil is gone. In a double whammy, the vulnerable permafrost is not only more exposed, but also covered by blackened ground, which absorbs more of the sun's heat and could accelerate thawing.

"'When the permafrost warms, microbes will begin to decompose that organic matter and could release even more carbon that's been stored in the permafrost for hundreds or thousands of years into the atmosphere,' Mack said. 'If that huge stock of carbon is released, it could increase atmospheric carbon dioxide drastically.'"

Smoke and soot from tundra fires in Labrador also caused dramatic melting of the Greenland ice sheet in July.

Satellite imaging on 8 July showed surface thawing on about 40 per cent of the ice sheet.   Four days later - just four days - that had grown to 97 per cent of the ice sheet thawing.

This is an excellent example of how everything in our biosphere is connected and contained in a remarkably delicate balance.   The tundra is circumpolar and it blankets the permafrost beneath it.   As we warm that tundra we're turning it into fuel - the trees and shrubs
and the carbon-rich soil beneath.

Is this one of those "tipping points" the climate scientists have been warning us about?   It sure seems to check all the boxes, ring all the bells.  We could be witnessing the early onset of runaway global warming.   Fortunately we're much too busy figuring out ways to increase our extraction and export of high-carbon fossil fuels to have time to worry about stuff like the tundra.   Where's the money in that?  Sheesh.

There's Still a Chance

 Here's what you need to know.   Today there is 25 per cent more atmospheric CO2 than there was in 2000.

On the books right now are plans for the construction of 1,200 more coal-fired power plants that will create emissions equal to another China, today's greatest greenhouse gas emitter ahead even of the United States.

The world is straying further away from commitments to combat climate change, bringing the prospect of catastrophic global warming a step closer, a UN report said on Wednesday. The warning came as nearly 200 governments prepare to meet in Qatar for international climate negotiations starting next Monday.

The warning of increasing emissions came as fresh evidence was published showing the last decade was the warmest on record for Europe. The European Environment Agency (EEA) said all parts of the region had been affected, with higher rainfall in northern Europe and a drying out in the south, bringing flooding to northern countries including the UK, and droughts to the Mediterranean.

According to the United Nations report, drawing on research from more than 50 scientists, the widening gap between countries' plans and scientific estimates means that governments must step up their ambitions as a matter of urgency to avoid even worse effects from warming. "The transition to a low-carbon, inclusive green economy is happening far too slowly and the opportunity for meeting [scientific advice on emissions targets] is narrowing annually," said Achim Steiner, executive director of Unep.

This gap between the cuts needed and the cuts planned brings the prospect of dangerous levels of climate change - entailing more extreme weather including floods, droughts and fiercer storms, such as those witnessed this year - much closer.

Even if countries manage to change direction in time and meet the emissions-cutting targets they have committed to in the past three years, the gap will still be large - about 8 Gt by 2020. To meet scientific advice, countries would have to agree to much bigger curbs on emissions than they have yet done - and there is little chance of that happening at the next round of annual climate negotiations, which begin on Monday in Doha, Qatar. At the fortnight-long talks, ministers are expected to set out a few more details of how they will work towards their agreed plan of drawing up a new global climate change treaty by 2015, to come into effect from 2020.

Steiner put on his optimistic face and said "there's still a chance" that world governments could prevent the worst but only if governments avoid becoming "locked in" to high-carbon infrastructure (can you say Tar Sands?).

And what are Canadian leaders going to do with our remaining "chance"?   Well, from Mulcair to Trudeau to Harper, they're all going to support the expansion of the Athabasca Tar Sands production several times over.   They're all on the very same page when it comes to ensuring Canada is indeed "locked in" to a high-carbon economy.