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.

The Smoked-Out Coast

What does it mean to live in America's Pacific states? Smoke, a lot of smoke, enough that it is changing the way of life, perhaps unalterably. That's discussed in an essay/book review by McKenzie Funk in The London Review of Books.

The author, his wife, two young boys and their middle-age dog left Seattle for the town of Ashland, Oregon, just north of the California border. It was a watery-eye opener.  Here are a few excerpts you might find thought provoking.

The town we were moving to is called Ashland. It’s beautiful, a surprise cluster of civilisation just north of Oregon’s border with California, where restaurants and shops and stately wooden houses sit at the foot of a forested mountain range called the Siskiyous. It has twenty thousand residents but swells during the academic year with students and in warmer months with tourists, many of them here for the summer-long Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There are flower-filled parks, excellent schools, people riding carbon-fibre mountain bikes, retirees driving luxury cars, travellers with dreadlocks, nice dogs reliably on leashes. Restaurants and real estate agencies line Main Street. People in Ashland are often from somewhere else, and they pay good money to be here. The town’s economy relies, above everything else, on its quality of life.

...Jenny liked the old house we ended up with. We moved her in one June weekend, the boys crawling in and out of the doors of the secret closet in their new bedroom. She would live here alone for the first month, riding her bike to and from the university, eating at the grocery co-op, revelling in the fact that in a small town everything is ten minutes from everything else. The boys and I returned to Seattle, and wrapped up our existence there. ‘We’re going to need new sunglasses for the boys,’ Jenny told me early on. It was always sunny. The air was so crisp. It was so easy to get around. We’d be spending a lot of time outside. Then, a week before we were to drive the nine hours down Interstate 5 and finally join her, bad news: ‘The smoke started,’ she said. ‘It came early this year.’ Although there was little imminent danger of its spreading to Ashland, the nearest fire – the result of a lightning strike near Hells Peak – was just nine miles from our new home.

... Disasters like the conflagration that consumed Paradise, California, in November, killing 81 people – the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history – do happen. But the climate disaster facing millions of other residents of the American West is more insidious. In a town like Ashland, the smoke blots out the colour of the houses and the hills, rendering everything in grayscale, a slow-burn diminution of the way life here used to be. 

On the afternoon the boys and I arrived the town and the Rogue Valley where it sits were surrounded by nine separate wildfires. The next day, Ashland registered the worst air quality in the United States: 321 on the Air Quality Index. The AQI scale is colour-coded – green-yellow-orange-red-purple-maroon – to denote health risk, and we were well into maroon, or ‘hazardous’. Outside, the air was totally still and the temperature had hit 100°F. It looked like dusk in the middle of the day. Inside, the boys’ upstairs room was like a furnace, but we couldn’t open the skylights for fear of letting the smoke in. We rushed out to buy an air-conditioning unit. At the hardware store down the road, we got the last child-size smoke masks on the shelves, the ones rated N95 for the particulate matter the internet said we really needed to keep out of their lungs. Prepping for the unknown, we ordered a dozen more masks from China on Amazon.

...I tried to walk the dog whenever the air looked best, helped by the AQI app I’d downloaded to my phone, and I grew used to wearing my smoke mask in public, grunting muffled hellos to other pedestrians in masks of their own, fellow travellers in the apocalypse. It began to feel normal. In the café where I went to work on my laptop, I noticed how routine this existence was becoming for others, too. Walk in, take off mask, order coffee. Put mask back on, walk out. In Seattle, I had always taken my rain jacket when I went outside. Here, one had to remember the smoke mask. Your baselines shift. You adapt. 

By the end of the week, however, our younger son, then three, had developed a rough cough. I took him to a clinic, and the next day we decided to get him and his brother out of Ashland until the smoke had gone. I loaded up the car again and drove the boys and the dog four hours north-east to the other side of the Cascade Mountains, where my extended family had a cabin. We were climate refugees, I joked, escaping to higher elevations and latitudes in search of a more hospitable environment. The six-year-old asked me what ‘refugee’ meant, and I had to explain, but told him I didn’t really mean it. All we could honestly claim was a new-found feeling of dislocation, of being stuck between lives.

One of the author's assignments, while in refuge, was to write a review of Eric Struzik's book, "Firestorm," about the megafire that hit Fort Mac.

...In Canada, the average area affected annually has doubled since global temperatures began their abrupt rise in the 1970s, and it is likely to double again by 2050. Quoting a favourite scientist, Mike Flannigan, Struzik lays out the three simple reasons for this. First, warmer temperatures mean drier forests. Second, warmer temperatures mean more lightning strikes. Third, warmer temperatures mean longer fire seasons. Struzik centres his story on the Horse River Fire, also known as the ‘Beast’, which struck Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada’s tar-sands capital, in 2016. It spread across 1.5 million acres, destroyed 2500 homes and 12,000 vehicles, and forced 88,000 residents to flee. The firestorm was of such ferocity it created its own weather patterns, including lightning strikes that set off smaller fires to herald its approach. The irony of the fire’s location wasn’t lost on Struzik. ‘Behind us glowed the lights of fossil fuel-driven human activity,’ he wrote of a night spent in the burned-out forest not far from the site of the $7.3 billion tar-sands project, ‘emitting greenhouse gases that are warming the climate and triggering atmospheric disturbances, driving wildfire to burn bigger, faster, hotter, and more often.’

Struzik describes how Fort McMurray residents escaped from the Beast while bureaucrats were still fighting over how to respond; dives into the scientific mystery of the fire’s lightning-producing pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs...

Expanding the extraction, transportation and export of bitumen suddenly sounds a bit less brilliant, doesn't it? Pyrocumulonimbus - there's your new word for the day.

Then he moved to another book, Ashley Dawson's "Extreme Cities."

We have built our megacities – 13 of the largest twenty are ports – in sinking river deltas. Half of the world’s population already lives close to the sea, and now more people, fleeing rural drought or poverty, are moving there. ‘Two great tides are converging on the world’s cities,’ Dawson writes. ‘The first of these is a human tide. In 2007, humanity became a predominantly city-dwelling species.’ The second tide, of course, is the literal one: the rising seas, which may be metres higher by the end of the century.

Meanwhile, back at home in Ashland:

Jenny was still stuck in class in Ashland in the smoke. Now she drove an air-conditioned car to and from the university with the windows rolled up, and her bike sat idle. I kept checking my AQI app. Smoke was still choking the Rogue Valley, and haze spread from other fires to the rest of the Pacific Northwest as the summer dragged on. The boys and I stayed away from Ashland until the end of August, when the AQI edged more frequently into the yellow zone and their school year began and I dressed them in smoke masks and new shoes and took them to meet their teachers. 

There was no distinct moment when the smoke stopped. But in September it was more often the case that when the wind blew it away, it didn’t get blown right back again. We went outside with sunglasses on. We kept waiting for the hills to disappear again, for our fragile string of yellow and green days to turn orange, but eventually we realised it was over. Now we could assess the damage. That month, regional vineyards got a letter from a major buyer, a California winery, saying that their contracts were cancelled due to ‘smoke taint’. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, engine of the local economy, announced that the smoke had cost it at least $2 million in lost ticket revenue. The knock-on effects on hotels, shops and restaurants amounted to many millions more, and a few businesses closed down. For me, it hadn’t been nearly that bad. I’d lost some savings and some time, but suddenly the air was crisp and the boys were at school and I could sit and type for uninterrupted hours.

... In Ashland, the mountain lion disappeared from town and the Shakespeare festival laid off a few dozen employees. State and federal fire officials traded barbs in the local newspaper, which started running a countdown clock to the 2019 fire season. A local lawmaker proposed that college students should take a year off to work on tree-thinning projects. The bookstore I frequented was put up for sale, but I overheard two long-time patrons predicting that there would be no serious bids. ‘Ashland’s not what it used to be,’ one said. My younger son learned to ride a bike in the sun in the park just down the block. My older son started playing soccer, and by the pitch one morning another parent told me about a campsite near the Pacific that filled with local families every summer once the smoke began. ‘Maybe we’ll be like Europeans,’ he said. ‘Everyone will just leave every August.’ It almost sounded reasonable.

This essay describes conditions common to the people of the Pacific coast from Mexico all the way north into Alaska. Even out here on this island in the Pacific, fronts of smoke come from mainland wildfires to blanket our homes. I had to invest in air purification this year so that I could have air fit to breathe indoors. Like the author's wife, Jenny, there are months where you don't go outside because this particulate matter, PM 2.5, gets into your tissues, embeds in your lungs.

And yet those death-dealing banshees in Alberta rage like madmen, threatening us if we dare block their pipelines to our, not theirs but ours, tidewater.