And That's Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Imagine you have one of those "people movers," a three-row seat mini-van that's advertised to fit seven comfortably. So you put a bum in every one of those seats and then you load another ten people into the van. Then you set out to drive across country, all 17 of you.

Now, substitute humanity for the passengers and Earth for that van. You wind up with close to eight billion people on a planet that has room for about three billion. That's what accounts for most of the predicament we humans and most other lifeforms on this planet are now in.

There are loads of stories coming out exhorting us to change our diet. Meat is out, veggies are in. If you must have creature protein, go for the insect options. Put a little salt on them, a touch of cayenne, lightly fry them up and, voila, dinner.

With everything in short supply, the meat diet has to go. The livestock industry requires too much energy, uses increasingly scarce resources and those farts, don't get me started. That end product, if you get my drift, pure methane.

Why insects? Why not switch to fish?  Same story. Too many mouths, not enough fish to fill them. This leads the industry to "fish down the food chain." We're collapsing fisheries, species by species.  That can't end well.

Even our farmland isn't up to the population challenge. We have tried. We figured that with enough agricultural chemicals (fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides) and enough ground water for irrigation and plenty of energy for mechanization, we could produce bumper crops that would allow our numbers to increase threefold in just a single lifetime.  It was good while it lasted but now much of the world's farmland is seriously degraded, intensively farmed to the point of exhaustion. This brings on a double whammy - desertification and the loss of aquifers drained for irrigation. Think that's a Third World problem? Check out America's Ogallala aquifer.

Energy, you can't do much without it. Over at ourworldindata.org, you'll find a chart that shows how our appetite for energy has grown since 1800 and, especially, since 1950.  In the post-war era, global energy consumption has soared seven fold, about 700 per cent, and the International Energy Agency expects demand will grow another 30 per cent by 2050.  Most of that is fossil fuels, the energy that produces all those awful greenhouse gases. Crazy, man.

The weird part and, I promise, this is really weird, is that we're still all about growth. The planet can't support us. It's tapped out. We don't care.  Just like a malignancy, we cannot stop growing. We may understand the limits but we will not, repeat not, let them get in the way of our pursuit of growth.  We're not going to stop this train until we come to the collapsed bridge over that deep gorge.

And that, kids, is why we can't have nice things any more. There's just not enough to go around. It's becoming a net sum game. Some, a few, will get plenty. Some, a whole lot more, will get just enough or near to it. Some will be left out, left to fend for themselves.  The more we grow the uglier this is going to get but that's a decade or two off, maybe, and, for now, we really don't care.

Canada Grants Asylum to Saudi Teen

Rahaf-al-Qunun has left Thailand aboard a Korean Air jetliner en route to asylum in Canada.

A spokesperson for the UNHCR Canada said they could not talk about her case due to “protection reasons.” 

The Global Affairs Canada also said it had no comment on Qunun’s case.

Qunun arrived in Thailand on Saturday and was initially denied entry. She soon started posting messages on Twitter after barricading herself in a room in Bangkok’s airport hotel saying she had “escaped Kuwait” and her life would be in danger if forced to return to Saudi Arabia.

The 18-year-old has said she was fleeing from her family out of fear they would kill her for renouncing Islam, something that is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia. 

She also said her family abused her physically and psychologically, at one point locking her in her room for six months after she cut her hair and rebelled against wearing the hijab.

Justin Trudeau, to his credit, takes a sharp stick and pokes it right in the eye of the crown prince, Mohammad bin Sultan. Good for him and good on MbS.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that a wave of Saudi women are fleeing the country.

The phenomenon of women trying to flee Saudi Arabia is not new, coming to the world’s attention as early as the 1970s, when a Saudi princess was caught trying to flee the kingdom with her lover. The couple were tried for adultery and executed. 

But the number of young women considering and taking the enormous risk to flee Saudi Arabia appears to have grown in recent years, rights groups say, as women frustrated by social and legal constraints at home turn to social media to help plan, and sometimes document, their efforts to escape. 

For the Sake of Canada and Our Grandkids, Justin, Deal With It.

It's hard to place much stock in the assurances of our prime minister. He says he wants to act on climate change but he's already thrown in the towel. Sure, he's waging what has been billed as a "do or die" battle to implement a carbon tax and that might sound impressive to some but, measured against the changes underway and the threats that our children will face in their lifetime, it's pathetically minuscule.

What exactly are we up against? What is the scope and magnitude of the threats that we're facing? Consider these excerpts from Dahr Jamail's soon to be released book, "The End of Ice."

Our planet is rapidly changing, and what we are witnessing is unlike anything that has occurred in human, or even geological, history. The heat-trapping nature of CO2 and methane, both greenhouse gases, has been scientific fact for decades, and according to Nasa, “no question that increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response”. Evidence shows that greenhouse gas emissions are causing the Earth to warm 10 times faster than it should, and the ramifications of this are being felt, quite literally, throughout the entire biosphere.

Oceans are warming at unprecedented rates, droughts and wildfires of increasing severity and frequency are altering forests around the globe, and the Earth’s cryosphere – the parts of the Earth so cold that water is frozen into ice or snow – is melting at an ever-accelerating rate. The subsea permafrost in the Arctic is thawing, and we could experience a methane “burp” of previously trapped gas at any moment, causing the equivalent of several times the total amount of CO2 humans have emitted to be released into the atmosphere. The results would be catastrophic.

Climate disruption also brings with it extreme weather such as hurricanes and floods. For instance, a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, leading to an increase in the frequency of severe major rain events, such as Hurricane Harvey over Houston in summer 2017, which dropped so much rain that the weight of the water actually caused the Earth’s crust to sink by 2cm. 

Earth has not seen current atmospheric CO2 levels since the Pliocene epoch, some 3m years ago. Three-quarters of that CO2 will still be here in 500 years. It takes a decade to experience the full warming effects of CO2 emissions. Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions, it would take another 25,000 years for most of what is currently in the atmosphere to be absorbed into the oceans

Climate disruption is progressing faster than ever, and faster than predicted. Seventeen of the 18 hottest years ever recorded have occurred since 2001. The distress signals from our overheated planet are all around us, with reports, studies and warnings increasing daily. Worst-case prediction made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change about the rise in temperatures, extreme weather, sea levels and CO2 levels in the atmosphere have fallen short of reality. Countless glaciers, rivers, lakes, forests and species are already vanishing at a pace never seen before, and all of this from increasing the global mean temperature by “only” 1C above the preindustrial baseline. Some scientists predict it could rise by as much as 10C by 2100. A study led by James Hansen, the former director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned that the rise we have seen so far has already caused unstoppable melting in both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.

...Modern life has compressed time and space. You can traverse the globe in a matter of hours, or gain information in nanoseconds. The price for this, along with everything we want, on demand, all the time, is a total disconnection from the planet that sustains our lives. ...The frenetic pace of contemporary life is having a devastating impact on this planet. Humans have transformed more than half the ice-free land on Earth. We have changed the composition of the atmosphere and the chemistry of the oceans from which we came. We now use more than half the planet’s readily accessible freshwater runoff, and the majority of the world’s major rivers have been either dammed or diverted. 

As a species, we now hang over the abyss of a geoengineered future we have created for ourselves. At our insistence, our voracious appetite is consuming nature itself. We have refused to heed the warnings Earth has been sending, and there is no rescue team on its way.

...Kanayurak had told me that he was a volunteer gravedigger. The permafrost used to be 10-12 inches below the surface, so it would take three days of chipping with an ice pick to dig a grave. Now the permafrost is several feet below the surface, and softer, so he can dig a grave in a few hours. 

Permafrost is a layer of ground that is continuously frozen for a period of two years or more. It contains dead plants that absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere centuries ago, and then froze before decomposing. When it thaws, microbial activity converts a large portion of that organic material into methane and CO2, which is released back into the atmosphere. According to a Nasa report, over hundreds of millennia, “Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon” – an estimated 1,400-1,850 gigatonnes, compared to 850 gigatonnes of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere.

...The changes in the permafrost happening across Alaska’s North Slope are due to some of the most dramatic temperature increases in the world. In 35 years of measurements here, the temperature at 20 metres below the ground has increased by 3C since Romanovsky’s first measurement, and at the surface of the permafrost one metre below the ground, the average temperature has increased by a staggering 5C since the mid-1980s. Even small increases bring the temperature of the permafrost closer to 0C. Crossing that line means the permafrost will start to thaw. 

Scientists used to believe the permafrost was stable across the North Slope, and that it would not begin to thaw this century. Romanovsky said: “If you look at our records, however, and extrapolate into the future another 30 years, assuming changes continue as they have been for the last 30 years, the permafrost on the North Slope will hit 0C by 2050 or 2060 at the latest. Nobody was expecting this, and most people would be surprised to see this happen so soon.”

...a leaked draft report from US scientists across 13 federal agencies warned of a worst-case scenario of 18F warming over the Arctic between 2071 and 2100. The report also noted that the Arctic was losing more than 3.5% of its sea ice coverage every decade, that the extent of the September sea ice had declined more than 10% per decade, that the land ice was disappearing at an increasingly rapid rate and that the severity of winter storms was increasing because of warming temperatures. 

The grim news seemed endless: the snow-free season on Alaska’s North Slope is lengthening. The year 2016 experienced the longest snow-free season in 115 years of record-keeping – roughly 45% longer than the average snow-free period over the previous four decades. The October temperature at Utqiagvik increased by a staggering 7.2C between 1979 and 2012. 

We are already facing mass extinction. There is no removing the heat we have introduced into the oceans, nor the 40bn tons of CO2 we pump into the atmosphere every single year. There may be no changing what is happening, and far worse things are coming. How, then, shall we meet this?

Like so many people, I have wondered what to do at this time. Each of us now must find our own honest, natural response to the conditions that we have brought upon ourselves.

...While western colonialist culture believes in “rights”, many indigenous cultures teach of “obligations” that we are born into: obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the Earth itself. When I orient myself around the question of what my obligations are, a deeper question immediately arises: from this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?

Some may dismiss this as "disaster porn" but pornography isn't real. It's dark fantasy. There's no fantasy to climate change. It is science, a mountain of science, and it's as real as granite.

It is against this sobering reality that we are to measure the sincerity of our governments' responses to climate change and the threats it poses to us and to those who will follow us.

In the face of these dire threats, the Trudeau government remains unwavering in its pursuit of perpetual exponential growth which it sees, in great part, in the form of flooding world markets with high-carbon bitumen, the filthiest ersatz petroleum on the planet.

Ultimately we have to choose.  Will it be the economy now or the environment now and for generations to come? There are compelling reasons for not acting on climate change beyond gestural responses such as a carbon tax. Many, perhaps most of us will be long dead before life on Earth turns truly harsh, or at least we hope so. Why should we sacrifice our current prosperity for the sake of generations as yet unborn? Besides, would it really do any good?

What is the line? What side are we on? To my mind, the line is the margin of nihilism. You either commit to the present and essentially condemn the future or you accept reasonable measures to cause as little damage and suffering as necessary to those who will inherit this country.

There is one truth that I know. We may not be able to bequeath to future generations a Canada that resembles the nation we have known and enjoyed. They may have to live in a degraded environment in a even more degraded world. Even if that is so, we still have a choice. We must choose how much worse we will make their future, how much worse than necessary.

Our government is making that choice on our behalf every day. This madness of sending an armada of bitumen-laden supertankers to foreign markets is an integral part of that choice.  That same government's failure to marshal resources needed for the Herculean chore of adaptation, especially climate-proofing our essential infrastructure, is part of that choice.

I get accused, in some circles, of being a Trudeau "hater" for making these arguments. Often these same critics find references to science unwelcome, needless and even alarmist.  Yet these aren't my predictions. They aren't my warnings. These are what we're being told by the best scientific minds of our day. What they're saying is being ignored by our governments and that dereliction I do hate.

Is This the Oceanic Time Bomb We've Been Warned About?

Even the Globe and CBC are now reporting that the world's oceans set an all-time heat record in 2018, sending marine life reeling and fleeing for colder waters. Fleeing for their survival.  Out here where I live we're seeing all manner of these climate change refugees. They cover the aquatic gamut - fish, marine mammals, and sea birds. Pelicans resident in Victoria, imagine.

2018 was a record. Guess when the previous record was set. You got it, 2017. And, par for the course, the results were worse than had been predicted by the unreliable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.

“The deep ocean reflects the climate of the deep and uncertain past,” Kevin Trenberth, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research and a co-author of Thursday’s study, told Reuters. 

Among effects, extra warmth can reduce oxygen in the oceans and damages coral reefs that are nurseries for fish, the scientists said. 

Warmer seas release more moisture that can stoke more powerful storms. 

Warmer ocean water also raises sea levels by melting ice, including around the edges of Antarctica and Greenland.

...New measurements, aided by an international network of 3,900 floats deployed in the oceans since 2000, showed more warming since 1971 than calculated by the latest UN assessment of climate change in 2013, they said. 

And “observational records of ocean heat content show that ocean warming is accelerating,” the authors in China and the United States wrote in the journal Science of ocean waters down to a depth of 2,000 metres.

As I wrote on Wednesday, a massive amount of heat energy has been building in the ocean depths. This is heat energy, much of it from man-made greenhouse gas emissions, that the ocean absorbs. It's estimated that 90 per cent of the heat from global warming is stored in our oceans.  Scientists have been warning us for years that this heat energy at some point will be returned to the atmosphere triggering an abrupt spike in surface temperatures.

What an irony. We're charting record temperatures in our oceans across which our federal government, the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, is determined to sail an armada of bitumen-laden supertankers hoping to flood world markets with toxin-laden, high-carbon fossil energy.  He won't be deterred, not by a mountain of scientific research and reports, not even by this ongoing marine migration that he could, if he chose, see with his own eyes.

Unbelievable. Excluding LGBTQ from Anti-Lynching Law

Some people go out of their way to be in-your-face ugly. One such group is the American  evangelical non-profit, Liberty Counsel, a group fiercely opposed to gay rights.

The U.S. Senate last month unanimously passed a bill that would explicitly make lynching a federal crime. Not everyone, however, is pleased with passage of the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act. 

Liberty Counsel, an evangelical nonprofit that opposes gay rights, and its chairman, Mat Staver, are taking issue with the bill’s inclusion of LGBTQ people. 

"The old saying is once that camel gets the nose in the tent, you can't stop them from coming the rest of the way in," Staver said in an interview with conservative Christian news outlet OneNewsNow. “This is a way to slip it in under a so-called anti-lynching bill, and to then to sort of circle the wagon and then go for the juggler [sic] at some time in the future."

Staver told OneNewsNow that his organization, which has been labeled an anti-LGBTQ “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is lobbying lawmakers in the House to have them remove the bill’s “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” language before taking a vote. 

Similarly, the group encouraged Congress in November to remove language about "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" discrimination from a trade agreement with Mexico and Canada.

In 2016 Ass-hat Mat and his gang pulled their support from the First Amendment Defense Act when they realized it not only protected their bigotry but also the rights of the LGBTQ community.  The bill was just not hateful enough for Liberty Counsel.

Liberty Counsel explained why it abruptly stopped supporting the sweeping federal legislation. As it turns out, the anti-LGBT legal nonprofit that represented antigay Kentucky clerk Kim Davis and a host of other right-wing dissenters wasn’t all that worried about religious freedom. It appears the group was instead primarily concerned with making sure individuals, businesses, and federal contractors could discriminate against LGBT people without “punishment” from the government.

“For the first time, the federal government under the proposed FADA will formerly [sic] recognize and condone same-sex marriage on par with the natural marriage,” read Wednesday’s press release. “Liberty Counsel can no longer support FADA unless the proposed amendment is abandoned and FADA returns to its original language of marriage being between one man and one woman.” 

Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver went on to “urge all members of Congress to reject the proposed amendments to the First Amendment Defense Act that include same-sex marriage,” promising that “pro-family” organizations will not be able to support the legislation unless it singles out same-sex couples for legalized discrimination. The antigay language in FADA is “necessary to protect people of faith,” Staver concluded.

In Canada, Liberty Counsel articles are a staple on Canada Free Press.

Oh, That "National Emergency."

Apparently the Mango Mussolini today proclaimed that he has an "absolute right" to declare a national emergency.  And, in the Great Bloat's mind, the threshold for declaring an emergency is if he can't make a deal with Congress that's to his liking.

Put it another way, Donald Trump is America's "national emergency." If he doesn't get his way that's a national emergency. No one may defy the divine right of Donald Trump to have it his way.

Those Other Tipping Points That Go Unnoticed

It's become customary in climate change reports to mention "tipping points." Anyone who has learned to handle a canoe knows there is a point at which the vessel lists far enough left or right that water begins to pour in over the gunwale at which point the canoe tends to go right over.  In the context of climate change, tipping points usually refer to natural feedback loops that take many forms including the loss of Arctic sea ice, the melting of ice caps and the retreat of the glaciers, the thawing and release of once safely sequestered CO2 and methane. The whole idea about holding man-made global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, 1.5C if possible, is to avoid triggering too many of these feedback loops that could lead to runaway global warming and utter catastrophe.

Rarely do we think of our oceans, that cover 70 per cent of the Earth's surface, in the context of tipping points.  Yet oceans are the repository for much man-made warming and man-made CO2. The oceans absorb half of our greenhouse gas emissions and 90 per cent of the heat they generate.  That leads to two changes - ocean acidification and ocean warming.

Ocean acidification is a tipping point we don't talk about in polite company. We know enough to deeply worry some scientists because the past few decades have taught us that climate changes are not linear. They can be abrupt and very fast in their onset triggering other changes (knock-on effects) that can catch us unprepared.

While ocean warming and the effects that may have on everything from sea level rise to ocean currents and circulation, ENSO (the el nino southern oscillation) and PDO (the Pacific decadal oscillation), the "Blob" of unduly warm water in the North Pacific are far better understood today than they were in the not distant past there's an enormous amount yet to learn.

Atmospheric temperature rise generally mirrors atmospheric greenhouse gas loading. Oceans, however, have a more complex warming pattern. Surface heat energy behaves much differently than the heat that reaches the deep ocean. What we've discovered in recent years is that a lot of the heat the oceans have been absorbing lately has gone to the deep ocean.

The reason global warming has been relatively tame over the past two decades, despite all the severe weather events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration, is because so much of the heating has gone into the ocean depths. It's not gone for good. The first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy, holds that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, merely transformed from one form to another. Put simply, that deep ocean "heat bomb" is waiting for a change in surface wind patterns to come back to the ocean surface and be released back into the atmosphere.

The oceans may be reaching a saturation point. Science has found that the oceans are losing their capacity to absorb atmospheric carbon and heat. They're getting full. That's physics.

A new report finds that, for the past 150 years, the heat energy from global warming absorbed by oceans has been the equivalent of 1.5 nuclear bombs per second. That's averaged out over the last 150 years.

A Guardian calculation found the average heating across that 150-year period was equivalent to about 1.5 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs per second. But the heating has accelerated over that time as carbon emissions have risen, and was now the equivalent of between three and six atomic bombs per second. 

“I try not to make this type of calculation, simply because I find it worrisome,” said Prof Laure Zanna, at the University of Oxford, who led the new research. “We usually try to compare the heating to [human] energy use, to make it less scary.” 

She added: “But obviously, we are putting a lot of excess energy into the climate system and a lot of that ends up in the ocean,. There is no doubt.” The total heat taken up by the oceans over the past 150 years was about 1,000 times the annual energy use of the entire global population.

There are big questions, plenty of them, and few concrete answers, at least at this point.  The heat energy we're putting into the ocean systems is going up while the capacity of the oceans to absorb heat energy is declining.  What happens when the oceans absorb less of our atmospheric heat? What does it mean for the atmosphere if, instead of 90 per cent, the oceans are able to absorb just 80 per cent or 70 per cent of the heat we're pouring into the atmosphere? And what happens to that deep ocean heat energy when/if it is returned to the surface and released into the atmosphere?

Humans, of course, are terrestrial creatures and it is only natural that we tend to see climate change in the context of its terrestrial impacts - tornadoes and hurricanes, sea level rise and coastal erosion/salination, heatwaves, droughts and floods. Yet our wellbeing, even in the most landlocked areas, is more dependent on the health of our oceans than most of us imagine. And so the oceanic tipping points go generally unnoticed and what's out of sight is indeed out of mind and off the political agenda.  Hell, we can't get past our squabbles over a penny ante carbon tax. As Professor Zanna remarks, it's "worrisome."

Too Good Not to Share

The F-35. What Use Will It Be in the Next War?

When the next big scrap comes, as eventually it must, all the high-tech wizardry that we find so beguiling may turn out to be useless.

Our last peer-on-peer war ended in 1945. Yet that's still the model that informs the consciousness of today's military planners.  After a couple decades of fruitlessly raining death and destruction on little brown people wielding Korean-war vintage assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades on behalf of uppity, corrupt and unreliable regimes in the Middle East, the Pentagon figures that All the King's Horses and All the King's Men should return their focus to the Big Nasties, Russia and China.

The United States Air Force has even war-gamed a first-strike, stealth sneak attack on China. The idea seems to be that, by turning China's air defences - it's radar networks, surface to air missile batteries and its airfields - into smoking ruins, the Chinese would cry "uncle" and promptly do America's bidding. Only that's not very likely to ever happen.

The fall edition of Foreign Policy focuses on "the future of war."  It observes that we're being overtaken by technology so rapidly that the strategy of dropping weapons from stealth bombers or stealth strike fighters may already be obsolete.

The purpose of warfare is to achieve a political end by breaking an adversary's will to resist. It's about forcing the other guy to capitulate.  Nuclear weapons are one way but there's too much risk of both sides obliterating each other. Conventional weapons just drag everything out and lead to the risk of nuclear escalation.  The opponent's civilian population may be far more useful to you alive than dead.

Who needs mass slaughter when you can wage cyber-war against your adversary's economy and essential infrastructure?

Anxious discussions about the future of war and the destabilizing impact of novel weapons are hardly new. So why would Foreign Policy wade into the debate again now? The reason is that this is one of those moments when technology is moving so fast that the old, settled ways of fighting wars are rapidly being overturned. And nobody knows what, exactly, will follow. 

But we can start by asking the right questions. That’s what Tarah Wheeler of Splunk and New America does in “In Cyberwar, There Are No Rules.” Her sweeping overview of the rising threat of cyber conflicts shows where the real dangers lie: not in cutting-edge technology but in badly maintained infrastructure that’s so outdated it can’t be hardened against even primitive cyberattacks. 

Of course, cutting-edge technologies also pose new dangers. In “A Million Mistakes a Second,” Paul Scharre—a former U.S. Army Ranger who now works at the Center for a New American Security—looks at the race to build autonomous weapons systems and warns that as we cede authority to machines that can act and react far faster than we can, we increase the risks that accidental conflicts could spin out of control. 

But artificial intelligence is just one reason emerging technologies are hard to constrain (as Pope Innocent II learned back in the 12th century). Wheeler points out that countries today can’t even agree on what, exactly, constitutes an act of cyberwar. Hard as it is to get governments to behave, private actors are even harder to wrangle. Yet as the Israeli journalist Neri Zilber (“The Rise of the Cyber Mercenaries”) and the University of Pennsylvania’s Michael C. Horowitz (“The Algorithms of August”) bring up, that’s just the problem we now face with cybersecurity and AI, since both involve general purpose technologies largely developed by corporations—with their own private agendas.

The changes, and problems, aren’t just limited to high-tech. In “Food Fight,” Kate Higgins-Bloom of the U.S. Coast Guard argues that the explosive growth of the global middle class is creating an insatiable demand for middle-class food—namely protein—which is why the next great-power war is likely to be waged not for territory or treasure but for fish. And FP’s Robbie Gramer travels north to the Arctic, where disappearing sea ice has opened up a vast new territory primed for accidents and conflict.

Keep these things in mind if you're looking harshly on the Trudeau government's reluctance to empty the federal treasury for a few dozen costly yet less than reliable and unproven stealth light bombers. Under what scenarios would we ever use them that might justify the costs and other sacrifices these stealth vehicles demand?

Another issue about cyber warfare is that it breaks the states' monopoly on martial-grade violence. Warfare has traditionally been the exclusive preserve of nation states because they alone could afford battleships and bombers and armies of troops and machines in the field. Who needs any of that when there are new, much less lethal means of compelling a civilian population to demand their political leadership sue for peace?

Why bomb a nuclear power plant when a few lines of malicious code can cause it to self-destruct? What happens to a major city that one morning finds itself without functioning sewers or water?  How long does society function without satellite communications, GPS, etc.? How much good will those squadrons of F-35s be, their critical software scrambled, unable to leave the hangar?

Terraform Mars, What Then?

Ever wonder if you're a pessimist? I spotted this on the innerwebs the other day.

To hear Elon Musk tell it, he might even be among the first to emigrate to Mars within the next decade or so.  It's hard to think of Mars travel as emigration but, if you realize the odds of ever making it back to Earth are stacked against you, it's emigration.  You would become, for all intents and purposes, a Martian.

As I read the sardonic quip about being miserable on multiple planets I wondered what would happen if human beings did manage to terraform a planet like Mars?  How would the Martian population view the exploitation of their resources by Earthlings? How would they like taking orders from their distant relations 40 million miles removed?

Then the big question hit:  how long before Earth and Mars would be at war?  After all, isn't that what humans do? Since we figured out how to tie a rock to a stick, pillage and plunder is what we've always done. If the Martians wanted dominion over their planet, it's a safe bet we'd damn well make them fight for it.

Yeah, okay, I suppose I am a pessimist.

Take It From Katherine.

She's possibly Canada's best known climate scientist even if she is from Texas.  I have mentioned Katherine Hayhoe a number of times over the years. She's quite intriguing. For starters she's a devout evangelical. Even married an evangelical preacher.  The Toronto-born Hayhoe proves that her Christian faith and climate science are not mutually contradictory, inconsistent or irreconcilable.  She is the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University.

Hayhoe prudently hedges her bets when it comes to what awaits humanity as we wrestle with climate change.  Logic suggests there will come a moment, a relatively brief period, where we "get it," where we understand that climate change must be our priority eclipsing all others.  Here's her take:

I’d put my money on a gradual bend away from a higher scenario, which is where we are now, until accumulating and worsening climate disasters eventually lead to a collective “oh shit!” moment, when people finally realise climate impacts do pose a far greater threat than the solutions. At that point, I would hope the world would suddenly ramp up its carbon reduction to the scale of a Manhattan Project or a moon race and we would finally be able to make serious progress. The multitrillion-dollar question is simply when that tipping point in opinion will come, and whether it will be too late for civilisation as we know it. I hope with all my heart that we stay under 1.5C, but my cynical brain says 3C. Perhaps the reality will be somewhere between my head and my heart at 2C.

On the media and how it impedes action on climate change or Katherine Hayhoe disses Rex Murphy.

There was significant coverage [of the latest IPCC report and the US National Climate Assessment] but a lot of media survive by generating controversy so they bring on opposing voices rather than explaining the scientific facts. Climate change shouldn’t be fodder for commentators who represent the interests of the fossil fuel industry by muddying the science. As a human and a scientist, this focus on controversy is frustrating. A thermometer is not liberal or conservative.

On wresting power from the fossil fuel industry.

The most important thing is to accelerate the realisation that we have to act. This means connecting the dots to show that the impacts are not distant any more: they are here and they affect our lives. It also means talking about solutions. The technology and knowledge are there. The economics already make sense. ...And finally, it means weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, which is challenged by the fact that the majority of the world’s richest companies have made their money from the fossil fuel economy – so the majority of the wealth and power remains in their hands.

On treating the patient, Earth.

Climate change is a long-term trend superimposed over natural variability. There’ll be good and bad years, just like there are for a patient with a long-term illness, but it isn’t going away. To stabilise climate change, we have to eliminate our carbon emissions. And we’re still a long way away from that

Here's a Term We've Come to Ignore - "Proportionality"

Why does Canada support war criminals? Why does Ottawa support regimes that routinely commit war crimes and crimes against humanity?

Saudi Arabia is a blatant example with its slaughter of Houthi civilians in Yemen who now have two choices of premature death - bombs or starvation.  It's easy to pick on the Saudis. Nobody really likes them. We do, however, very much like their money especially when it comes to selling them a shitload of armoured death wagons.  It seems you can overlook an even bigger shitload of war crimes when there's 15-billion dollars worth of weapons trade in the balance. (Remember when Justin called those armoured vehicles "Jeeps"?)

But, in fairness, maybe the Saudis figured we were okay with their butchery in Yemen. After all, aren't we very, very accommodating when Saudi's neighbour, Israel, lays waste to the Palestinian citizenry? Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.

You don't believe we're backing Israel? All you need do is look at our voting record in the UN General Assembly on any motion to sanction Israel or support the Palestinians. That's when you'll realize that Justin Trudeau, just like Stephen Harper, is in the bag for Benjamin Netanyahu.

What Israeli war crimes? What crimes against humanity? I'm glad you asked.

This came to mind whilst I was paying my New Year respects to Chatham House, the prestigious British think tank more properly known as The Royal Institute of International Affairs. There I stumbled across a very good research paper by Emanuela-Chiara Gillard on "Proportionality in the Conduct of Hostilities."

Gillard's paper provides the context by which we are to measure Israel's periodic slaughter of the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza. The Israeli policy has been given the name of the Beirut neighbourhood that, in 2006, Israeli jets bombed into rubble, Dahiyeh.

The focus of the Israeli policy is to target civilian populations and their essential infrastructure with intentionally disproportionate devastation.

What you see above is late-stage Dahiyeh. The opening attacks targeted Beirut's infrastructure - the power stations, the water system and, that all-time favourite, the sewer system. The second stage is to go after schools and hospitals. Then, with your leftover ordinance, you carpet bomb the areas where the civilian population lives.  Think of it as Guernica revisited.  Or, as Picasso rendered it:

Israel, doing pretty much what the Nazis did? You're damn straight. Only we didn't look the other way when that scrap ended.

It was WikiLeaks that outed the Israelis in a leaked US government cable referencing a conversation with general Gadi Eisenkot, then Chief of General Staff of the Israeli Defence Force.

6. (8) Eisenkot labelled any Israeli response to resumed conflict the "Dahiya Doctrine" in reference to the leveled Dahiya quarter in Beirut during the Second Lebanon War in 2006. He said Israel will use disproportionate force against any village that fires on Israel, "causing great damage and destruction." Eisenkot made very clear: this is not a recommendation, but an already approved plan.

In Gaza, as in Beirut, Israeli jets have destroyed the sewage system, the water system and the power grid.  The Lebanese managed to rebuild Beirut. No such luck for the Gaza Palestinians. Their homeland is a prison camp. Nothing gets in unless Israeli forces allow it in. And, for the people of Gaza, that's a death sentence.  It's not accidental, it's not inadvertent, it is deliberately and intentionally disproportionate. That's the very point of it. It is barbarism at its finest.

In 2010, former Supreme Court of Canada justice, war crimes prosecutor at the ICJ, and then chief of the International Crisis Group, Louise Arbour, slammed the international community for turning a blind eye to the brutal suppression of Gaza.

For years, many in the international community have been complicit in a policy that aimed at isolating Gaza in the hope of weakening Hamas. This policy is morally appalling and politically self-defeating. It has harmed the people of Gaza without loosening Hamas's control. Yet it has persisted regardless of evident failure.

That, of course, was back when Ignatieff joined Harper in pre-absolving Israel for flattening Gaza on the "they had it coming" rule of international law.  We weren't just ignoring these war crimes, we were supporting them. We were complicit. We remain complicit.

Slow motion genocide or will it be ethnic cleansing instead?

There's something uniquely abominable in destroying a society's water supply.

Ten years ago we were warned that Gaza was on a death watch.

The Gazans too are surrounded, cut off - by Israel - and the siege is strangling the public's access to drinking water. From the United Nations Humanitarian Affairs office: 

Unless urgent action is taken, the supply of water fit for human use in the Gaza Strip will be depleted in 5-10 years, according to the Gaza Coastal Municipal Water Utility (CMWU) and UN agencies working there. Only 5-10 percent of groundwater - the most important supply source for human use (domestic, agricultural and industrial) in Gaza - yields potable water, according to CMWU. 

...The poor quality of groundwater is due to over-extraction from the aquifer and this has allowed seawater intrusion - hence the high salinity of Gaza’s groundwater. Much of it is unfit for human use.

Tap water in Gaza is known to be very salty and undrinkable. Poor groundwater quality can also be attributed to pollution from wastewater seepage and the infiltration of agricultural fertilizers, according to a World Bank report released in April.

Over-extraction, there's your problem. Only there's more to it than that. A significant factor in the depletion of Gaza's aquifer are the 28 "trap wells" Israel established along the Gaza border that drew freshwater out, allowing sea water to be drawn into the aquifer.

That terrorist sympathizer, the World Bank, issued a pretty thorough report.

Israel has Gaza by the throat and has prevented the Palestinians from getting the equipment and materials needed to repair and rehabilitate the water and sewage systems. As a result sewage flows into lagoons from which it seeps into the water supply. It's the Kiss of Death.

In 2015 the UN warned that Gaza would become uninhabitable by 2020.  Three days ago PBS ran a feature of Gaza's water crisis that supports the UN assessment five years ago. There's an interesting video if you can stomach it.

The following day, January 2nd, PressTV reported that the Israeli navy has "almost completed" its sea barrier off Gaza.

The situation has severely restricted fishing activities off Gaza, where staples are scarce. The overall blockade also threatens to render the territory uninhabitable by 2020, according to the United Nations. 

The Israeli navy has blocked all attempts at bringing humanitarian aid to the territory by international activists. One such confrontation led to the death of 10 activists on board a Turkish-flagged ship in 2010.

This is a humanitarian crisis, one of Benjamin Netanyahu's calculated making. That's the same guy Canada backs every time something to do with Palestine comes up for a vote in the General Assembly.

2020, Gaza's death knell, is pretty close only our general election is just a little bit closer and demanding that our "ally" promptly lift the siege of Gaza isn't a great priority for our Liberal government or its Tory rival.

How will Gaza end? What happens to civilians living in a place that has become uninhabitable, a place where they're confined, ringed by lethal force and an enemy unhesitant to put civilians to the sword?  Some believe we're about to witness the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their Gaza homeland.

Louise Arbour was right. A succession of craven federal governments, Liberal and Conservative, has made Canada complicit in this.  This is not the Canada of Laurier, St. Laurent, Lester Bowles Pearson or Pierre Trudeau. This is the Canada of Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau. It is not the Canada that I once loved.

Why Doesn't Trudeau Take a Page From His Father's Book?

Justin Trudeau has been promising a carbon tax for ages. For the past several months a gaggle of provincial leaders, sitting and soon to be sitting, has been raising a stink, claiming such a move would be unconstitutional.  Trudeau, they claim, is stepping on their toes, meddling where he's not welcome.

There's an easy way to sort this out, one that doesn't depend on Jason Kenney bumping off Rachel Notley. It's the same option the real Trudeau, Pierre, used in 1976 - a reference to the Supreme Court of Canada.

1976 was the year that Pierre Trudeau quelled the troubled waters over his government's Anti-Inflation Act.

The carbon tax is still going to be a political football. Hey, it's an election year. That can't be helped. What Trudeau could do is remove a major arrow from his opponents' quiver.

"More Mad Than People Think."

Why, with Trump, is it always the Russians?  His latest stunt - absolving the Russians/Soviets of any wrongdoing for staging a military intervention in Afghanistan in support of its then Communist regime.  From The Washington Post:

Afghan officials on Thursday denounced President Trump’s praise of the 1979 Soviet invasion and occupation of their country, which he described this week as a fight against terrorism, breaking with decades of Republican anti-communist tenets.

According to the revisionist historical account Trump delivered during a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, “the reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia.” He added: “They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight.”

The comments marked a surprising split with U.S. conservatives dating back to President Ronald Reagan, who saw the invasion as an attempt to spread communism and aided insurgent forces fighting Soviet troops.

The remarks also raised eyebrows among officials in Afghanistan at a time when Kabul has voiced frustration with Trump’s sudden announcement of a plan to withdraw up to half of U.S. troops as peace talks with Taliban insurgents continue without Afghan government involvement.

A statement from President Ashraf Ghani’s office described the battle against the Soviets as a “national uprising for gaining freedom” and noted that the Soviet invasion was condemned by the United Nations and the United States at the time.

“All presidents of America not only denounced this invasion but remained supporters of this holy jihad of the Afghans,” read the statement, which added that the government would be seeking clarity from the United States.

Foreign Affairs Minister Salahuddin Rabbani said the Soviet occupation violated Afghanistan’s national sovereignty.

...Saleh Mohammad Saleh, a lawmaker representing Konar province, also noted that the United States funded the rebels fighting the Soviets. To now hear Trump justifying the invasion was “really strange,” he said. 

“Our war against the Soviets was righteous. The international community stood by us. We gave more than enough sacrifices,” Saleh told The Washington Post. “This man proves to be more mad than people think.”

...Sayed Ikramuddin Masoomi, a lawmaker representing Takhar province who also fought the Soviets, said their occupation “was crystal clear and was specifically for supporting [Moscow’s] puppet communists in Afghanistan.” 

Trump’s invitation for Russia and India to join the fight against the Taliban — along with Pakistan, where the militants have enjoyed safe haven — further complicated matters, Masoomi told The Post. 

Rahmatullah Nabil, a former head of the Afghan intelligence agency, blasted Trump in a string of tweets. 

“Even Russia no longer says that or tries to justify it,” he said about the invasion and occupation. “Those that fail to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it; hopefully you are smart enough not to make the same mistake when it comes to abandoning [Afghanistan].”

So the most ignorant president in American history now thinks that Russia and India - plus Pakistan - should enter the war against the Taliban.  Trump displays a near total lack of understanding of the deep enmity and simmering conflict between Pakistan and India and how Afghanistan could become as dangerous as their standoff over Kashmir ever was.

As usual, there is someone cheering Trump's words - his pal, Vlad Putin.

Meanwhile, the Post's Jennifer Rubin confirms that, after two years in the Oval Office saddle, Trump is indeed more ignorant on foreign policy than ever.

The result of Trump’s inanities and the world view it represents will be more aggressive foes (both nation states and terrorist groups); the decline of friendly, liberal democracies as belligerent authoritarian regimes emerge; a world economic system dominated by China; a less dynamic American economy; the re-creation of ungovernable havens for terrorists (as was the case before 9/11); nuclear proliferation; and unabated climate change. It’s not a world any of us should want to live in.

What, the Toronto Sun? A Sun Columnist Says "a Pox on Both Their Houses."

Toronto Sun columnist, Lorrie Goldstein, says, when it comes to climate change, Justin Trudeau and Andrew Scheer are on the same page. Both leaders, he says, are trying to blow smoke up Canadians' backsides.  Goldstein's take is that the only party leader being honest with Canadians is the Green Party's Elizabeth May.

Unlike the Liberals and Conservatives, she has a consistent position that makes sense if you believe, as she does, that man-made climate change is the most important issue facing voters in the Oct. 21 election, because it’s the most important issue facing humanity. 

“The other parties are immersed in conventional wisdom that wants to come up with election slogans that have to do with lying to people as effectively as possible,” May said in a speech last year, cited by the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt in a recent column.

She’s right. 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna are misleading Canadians when they claim Trudeau’s national carbon price/tax and his other schemes have us on track to meet the commitments Trudeau made to reduce our emissions under the United Nations’ Paris climate accord he signed in 2015. 

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer misled Canadians when he said he could meet Canada’s Paris targets without a carbon tax. 

Recently, he’s dropped this commitment, which is at least more honest than what the Liberals are claiming. 

But until Scheer releases his plan, we don’t know how far he’s willing to go in telling the truth.

Enter the Challenger

May is clear that, given that belief, she is committed to decarbonizing Canadian industry as rapidly as possible and transitioning to a clean energy economy, while keeping most of our reserves of oil, natural gas and coal in the ground. 

While she would increase Canada’s capacity to refine its own oil, May opposes using pipelines to get it from Alberta’s oilsands to tidewater, and using oil tankers to deliver it to global markets.

...Unique among the mainstream party leaders, May says, honestly, that meeting Canada’s current emission reduction targets — much less the steeper ones advocated by the Greens — would require significant sacrifices from Canadians. 

She compares it to the evacuation of Dunkirk during the Second World War when, as she put it, in humanity’s “darkest hour” ordinary citizens put aside their political differences and united to fight a common enemy that was, for that generation, another global, man-made threat to humanity. 

May and the Greens would cancel all subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and institute a revenue neutral carbon pricing system called carbon fee and dividend, returning all money raised by a carbon tax to the public. 

Their carbon price would be significantly higher than the $20 per tonne of emissions Trudeau set for 2019, rising to $50 per tonne in 2022.
May and the Greens have said they would increase Canada’s carbon price to $50 per tonne immediately, rising to $200 per tonne by 2030, to meet their emission reduction targets. 

I think May’s plan is flawed because it underestimates the economic damage what she is proposing would do to a big, cold, sparsely populated, industrialized country with significant fossil fuel resources, like Canada. 

But I respect that, unlike Trudeau, McKenna and Scheer, she isn’t blowing smoke up our behinds.

Of course this could all be a sinister plot by Goldstein to undermine Trudeau's cred with the climate change voter. It's pretty obvious that Scheer isn't seriously contending for that constituency. And chipping away potential Liberal supporters to the Greens might give aid and comfort to the trailing Tories.

However I carry no brief for the Liberals and certainly none for the Tories. I'm a committed Green voter, federally and provincially. From that perspective there's little to challenge in Goldstein's take on the two front-runners. Neither of them is to be trusted.

Think of Climate as a Finely-Tuned Engine Gone Screwy.

There was a time, we called it the Holocene, when the climate worked for us. A gentle, relatively predictable climate allowed humanity, over the course of 12-thousand years, to grow to one billion in number.  That was somewhere around 1814.

Here we are, a scant two centuries later, at almost 7.7 billion and we're on a roll.  It's projected we'll add another billion (the entirety of humanity in 1814) in about 12-years, roughly the same point by which we're told we'll have to cut our carbon emissions by half. Good luck with that.

The Holocene, by the way, is gone. We now have a new geological epoch, a man-made one, the first of its kind, that we're calling the Anthropocene.  It doesn't have that gentle, relatively predictable climate we enjoyed during the Holocene. A good, albeit sad, example of what we've dished up for ourselves is to be found in the Texas fishing ports on the Gulf of Mexico where the traditional oyster and shrimp fisheries are in peril.

"This is just a dying industry, is what it is," says fourth generation shrimper and oysterman, Scooter Machacek.

He might be right. The sleepy ports along the Gulf Coast of Texas are shadows of what they were just 25 years ago. Then, thousands of smaller bay boats like Scooter's, around 40 feet long, plied the shallow waters around the barrier islands that form the fringed coast. 

Thousands more of the larger gulf boats, at least twice the size of bay boats with double outriggers that stretch out like wings, disappeared into the deeper, federally controlled waters of the Gulf of Mexico itself, at least nine nautical miles out to sea, for weeks on end.

...Everything is different now. The decline of the American shellfishing industry is inextricably linked to global systems both economic and environmental. From cheap food imports to hurricanes fueled by a warming planet, these systems support, or strain, the tapestry of what it takes to get seafood to the dinner plates of diners.

...Shrimp constitute the biggest haul along this part of the Texas coast, followed by blue crab and oyster, all of which begin their life cycles in the bays and estuaries that serve as the Gulf of Mexico's nurseries. But those ecosystems are changing. According to the latest National Climate Assessment, the Texas coastline is particularly vulnerable to such climate catastrophes as flooding, drought, increasing storm intensity and sea level rise. These climate change effects can be seen as a "threat multiplier" as they play out in the lives of men like Scooter—bay shrimping from May to November and oystering through the winter—who struggle to keep an industry alive. 

Consider, for example, the single factor of rain. Scooter has felt the impact of increasing heavy rainfall. 

"We're getting drowned in freshwater," he says. "The rain is crazy. That weather just comes and dumps and dumps and dumps. You used to get these little rains, now it just pours on." This influx of rain leads to a domino effect that's being felt up and down the Gulf coast.

Scooter's sure he'll be one of the downed dominoes. The long line of the family business, he says, it is "going to end with me."

...The Lone Star is a large state, and heavy rains in just about any river drainage can eventually be felt along the Gulf Coast. Excess freshwater comes from too much rain—or, as John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas's state climatologist, puts it, "the same amount of rain, but in more concentrated episodes." In every region of the United States, extreme precipitation events—when it just "dumps and dumps," as Scooter said—are rising along with human carbon emissions. If we can radically reel in emissions by century's end, they'll merely go up by half or maybe double compared to historical averages. If we don't, Americans could get "dumped" up to three times as frequently as they once did. 

It makes annual rainfall averages misleading. The Texas coast might still be getting around 45 inches of rain each year. But for oysters—and humans—a deluge can be destructive in ways that steady rains are not.

... The arrival of freshwater can initially be beneficial, bringing nutrients that nourish coastal ecosystems. But too much can easily wreak havoc. Oysters are especially vulnerable. Contained within their rock-hard shells, oysters are powerful filtration systems, but they depend on a certain level of salinity to function. When too much freshwater enters the system, the salinity plummets. The oysters can die, the shells yawning open, empty of life. 

Heavy springtime rains can also affect the shrimping industry. They can flush juvenile shrimp out to deep waters prematurely, where they're vulnerable to predation, because, as one biologist explained, "Everything eats shrimp." Flooding also brings a host of hazards in its wake. Storm debris can knock out ship propellers and tear up shrimp nets. Polluting effluents come from the region's prodigious petrochemical industries along with fertilizers from farm blitzes upstream. "When they spray the cotton to defoliate it," Scooter says, "and you get a rain after that, it wipes everything out, kills everything." And those who seek wild shrimp look askance at the growing number of shrimp farms, worried about exotic species and disease outbreaks.

The oceans are the poster boy of climate change. Aquatic species seem to be more temperature sensitive and most of them have the option of migrating to cooler waters, something that we're experiencing on both our Atlantic and Pacific coasts.  It's hard to know what to make of the arrival of these new species in our local waters but they're here.

It's Complicated. The Polar Vortex Fractures.

I would guess you're not a meteorologist. Same here. The way climate change is unfolding, however, that would certainly be an asset.

Most of us can understand that a warmer atmosphere is a wetter atmosphere because, as a matter of physics, warmer air holds more water vapour. A good many of us can understand that a warmer, wetter atmosphere provides the energy that fuels severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration. Here on the island EnviroCan tells us that an "intense Pacific frontal system" is currently stalled overhead. Who knew?

It's when you get to the Arctic that your high school physics knowledge breaks down. There are indeed strange things done in the land of the midnight sun even when it's plunged into darkness.

A case in point is that Polar Vortex thing that we out here read about but you, way out east, have to live with.  Now the atmospherics types tell us it appears ready to split into three vortices. How?

How it works: The possible changes are being triggered by a sudden and drastic warming of the air in the stratosphere, some 100,000 feet above the Arctic, and by a resulting disruption of the polar vortex — an area of low pressure at high altitudes near the pole that, when disrupted, can wobble like a spinning top and send cold air to the south. In this case, it could split into three pieces, and those pieces would determine who gets hit the hardest.
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The big picture: Studies show that what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic, and rapid Arctic warming may paradoxically be leading to more frequent cold weather outbreaks in Europe, Asia and North America, particularly later in the winter.
During the past 2 weeks, a sudden stratospheric warming event has taken place, showing up first in the Siberian Arctic, and then spreading over the North Pole. 

Such events occur when large atmospheric waves surge beyond the troposphere and into the layer of air above it. Such a vertical transport of energy can rapidly warm the stratosphere, and set in motion a chain reaction that disrupts the stratospheric polar vortex. 

Sudden stratospheric warming events are known to affect the weather in the U.S. and Europe on a time delay — typically on the order of a week to several weeks later, and their effects may persist for more than a month. 

"In general, we see colder than normal temperatures over much of the U.S. and Europe/Northern Asia, and warmer than normal temperatures over Greenland and subtropical Africa/Asia" in the 60 days following sudden stratospheric warming events, Amy Butler, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, told Axios in an email.

What's next: Polar vortex projections show it's likely to split into possibly as many as 3 "sister vortices," spilling cold air out of the Arctic and concentrating it in spots across Eurasia and North America.
In the past, polar vortex splits have been associated with major snowstorms, including 2010, when the Mid-Atlantic region was buried by blizzards. 

A sudden stratospheric warming event and polar vortex disruption was associated with several March snowstorms in the Northeast last winter, as well as the "Beast from the East" cold spell in Europe. 

Such events can have major ramifications for energy markets, leading to natural gas price spikes, for example. 

What they're saying: “Arctic change has increased the frequency of these polar vortex disruption events and following these polar vortex disruption events you get more severe winter weather," says Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at AER, a Verisk company, who studies the connections between Arctic climate change and altered weather patterns.

Cohen and Michael Ventrice, a meteorologist at The Weather Company, told Axios that there are increasing signs of high pressure forming over the North Atlantic near Greenland as well as close to the North Pole in late January, which can block the progress of weather systems moving from west to east. 

Such blocking patterns may be a manifestation of the polar vortex disruption, and favor colder and stormier weather in the eastern U.S. and parts of Europe. 

“Eventually we do think this blocking will set up,” Ventrice said. “I would not give up on winter.”

So you folks back east shouldn't "give up" on winter. It may not be up to the groundhog this year.  We'd really like to commiserate but there's just so much to do before the start of forest fire season, 2019.

Think of It as Climate Change Adaptation for the Wet Coast

It looks like a trip to the woodshed is in order. No, not metaphorically. It's time to bring in another load of firewood, just in case.  When that's done it would probably be prudent to distribute my now considerable cache of LED flashlights and lanterns where I'll be able to locate at least one if the lights go out.

EnviroCan just issued two warnings: a heavy rainfall warning and a high winds warning. "A vigorous Pacific frontal system will stall across Vancouver Island this afternoon..."  Gee, that sounds familiar.

The latest warning comes as B.C. Hydro reports that last week's storm was the most damaging in the provincial utility's history.  The good news is that BCH is calling for improvements to its infrastructure.

A report from the Crown corporation says the Dec. 20 storm was unlike any previous weather event BC Hydro had encountered. 

The report boosts the total number of customers who lost power to 750,000, an increase of 50,000, as winds topping 100 kilometres per hour came from multiple directions. 

It says more than 400,000 customers on the Lower Mainland, and nearly 350,000 or about 80 per cent of all customers on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands were in the dark, although everyone had their lights back on by Dec. 31. 

...A BC Hydro report issued in November warned that storms and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent across the province, and that the number of individual storm events the Crown utility has handled in the last five years has tripled. 

“For example, this storm generated more than twice the number of storm-related outages than BC Hydro experienced in all of 2013,” the latest report says.

You see, the problem is that our existing electrical grid and support infrastructure were not designed for today's climate reality. When the storm hits on the 20th and some are left without power until the 31st, something is very wrong. Something needs fixing and soon.

Really, Chuckles, Really?

Conservative leader, Andrew Scheer, seems intent on fighting this year's federal election on the destruction of our planet and the ruin of Canadian society. By that I mean, Scheer is on a climate change rampage, one that will be sold on expanding a high-carbon future for Canada.

I'm no fan of Trudeau's paltry carbon price initiative. Too little, much too late, and a lot of the damage he claims to want to avert will be subverted by his very own bitumen and pipeline policies and his government's ongoing multi-billion dollar subsidies to the Bitumen Barons. Think of it as cognitive dissonance at its best. That said, a minuscule carbon tax is better than no carbon tax.

Scheer, the member from Regina-Qu'Appelle, is going for the low-hanging fruit of rightwing populism. Part of that includes worshiping at the altar of 'everyday low taxes' and that means stoking up fears among the voting public over Trudeau's carbon price regime.

These rightwing populists are all the same whether they're named Duterte, Orban, Erdogan or Trump. They don't seek to unite their people but to divide them. It's an ugly tool that they use, not against their adversaries, but to intimidate and manipulate their own base.  They seek to corral their dupes, hoping that with just enough undecideds, they can eek out yet another false majority government of the sort that has served Canada so well in recent decades.

And Scheer intends to follow their playbook that, incidentally, is really quite similar to his own predecessor, Stephen Harper's. He will lie his ass off, stoke fears, and appeal to dark and base instincts.  He will inflate the paltry carbon tax as a monster that Trudeau is hiding behind the curtain to spring on the already impoverished public upon re-election.

Had Trudeau not betrayed the Canadian people on his promise of electoral reform, a guy like Scheer would be far less menacing to the future of Canada and our people, you and me.  Governance in Canada is decided by slightly less than two out of five voters.  Even Trump's numbers (46.4%) against Clinton
(48.5%) were far better than that.  When you score a majority win with less than 40 per cent of the vote, that's not democracy because you haven't garnered the informed consent of the electorate. You don't govern legitimately. You merely rule.

To me, a Scheer win will be even more disappointing than a Trudeau win but, ultimately, they're both on the wrong side of the issues that matter to me.  I hope that those leaning toward the Conservatives will somehow see through Scheer and how destructive he would be to our society but, then again, the other guy has taught me not to trust him either.

"A Raging, Howling Signal"

That's now the Washington Post summed up 2018 in climate change news. A raging, howling signal.




As if to emphasize the state of this looming environmental catastrophe, hundreds of scientists from 13 federal agencies produced a 1,600 page National Climate Assessment that, by law, had to be released by the White House.  Trump's response to this massive professional assessment? "No, no I don't believe it."  Those are the words of a lunatic. As if whatever he chose to believe was what mattered, not what science foretold. This coming from the man who never takes responsibility, who never admits when he's wrong, who always summons up a scapegoat to wear the blame for his massive blunders.

Just off the top of his head, climate scientist Kevin Trenberth can recount many of the weather disasters that hit the planet in 2018. Record rainfall and flooding in Japan, followed by a heat wave that sent tens of thousands of people to the hospital. Astonishing temperature records set across the planet, including sweltering weather above the Arctic Circle. Historic, lethal wildfires in Greece, Sweden and California, terrible flooding in India, a super typhoon with 165-mph winds in the Philippines, and two record-setting hurricanes that slammed the Southeast United States. 

“Climate change is adding to what’s going on naturally, and it’s that extra stress that causes things to break,” said Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “It takes the experience well outside anything that’s been experienced before. It crosses thresholds. As a result, things break, people die, and things burn.”

... But it was definitely a hot and perilous year. Perhaps most striking were the temperature extremes. It was not the hottest year on record in terms of overall global temperature — the three previous years were slightly warmer — but many places around the planet set high-temperature records. 

Africa may have endured the hottest temperature ever reliably measured since record-keeping began: 124.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the Sahara Desert city of Ouargla, Algeria, on July 5. 

That same day, temperatures may have reached 90 degrees F. on the coast of the Arctic Ocean in northern Siberia. And in the Middle East, the low temperature of the day in Quriyat, Oman, on June 28 was 109 degrees F.

...Trenberth believes that major reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. National Climate Assessment have been too conservative in estimating the costs of changing climate. 

“Climate change is here, and it’s already costing tens of billions of dollars a year. I think the climate costs in the future are greatly underestimated,” Trenberth said.

Will 2019 be worse than 2018, even 2017? Who knows? Climate change, if it's taught us anything, is not linear. It shows up in spikes, peaks and troughs. Those highs and lows, averaged out, give us a year by year, climate picture.

My wish for the New Year is that we somehow manage to close off the Memory Hole where every major climate report of the last decade and more has vanished from public consciousness within a matter of days.  There's a stacatto rhythm to these reports as they come and just as quickly go and, by losing sight of them, we lose our ability to clearly hear that "raging, howling signal."

We have unwittingly become masters of "creeping normalcy," a form of mass amnesia where the past is rapidly forgotten and the present, whatever it may be, is accepted as normal. We lose the signal and so momentum for change stalls even as the climate challenges grow rapidly and the window of opportunity to deal with them narrows.

As for what 2019 holds in store for us, all I can say is - brace yourself.