https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-climate-crisis-these-are-canadas-worst-case-scenarios/
The climate crisis: These are Canada’s worst-case scenarios
What will it take for popular opinion to catch up with the terrifying
science? We talk to Canada’s top climate change experts.
by John Geddes
Jul 11, 2019
At first there’s only the blue of the sea divided from the green of the
countryside by an emblematic stripe of red sand beach. Then, right on
cue, a lobster boat moseys into the frame, heading homeward to nearby
Savage Harbour, P.E.I., with the morning’s haul. It’s just Prince Edward
Island doing its job—delivering the sweet illusion that here, at least,
everything remains just the way it’s always been.
Taking in the postcard scene is Adam Fenech, director of the University
of Prince Edward Island Climate Lab, in shorts and sunglasses, nursing
his Tim Hortons. He recognizes the boat as belonging to Roy Coffin, a
fisherman who has agreed to meet us here. No hurry, naturally. The
island lulls more than a million visitors a year into briefly believing
that their smartphone alerts matter less than the timeless rhythms of
fishing, farming and another summer run of Anne of Green Gables: The
Musical in Charlottetown.
Yet Fenech is here precisely to obsess over change. Since he took up his
post at UPEI seven years ago, after a long career studying climate in
the federal government, he has drawn increasing attention to our tiniest
province as a sort of laboratory for what the planet’s warming, rising
oceans portend.
For instance, the sea ice, which has always buffered P.E.I.’s soft
sandstone against rough winter weather, has shifted to arriving months
later, and lasting not as long, thus exposing the coast more often to
the full brunt of seasonal storms. Fenech’s team guides camera-equipped
drones over the island’s perimeter, meticulously monitoring the
vulnerable shorelines being chomped away by the waves.
At the very spot he’s standing, enough dry land has been lost to erase
cherished cottage lots. Red boulders were recently dumped along the
shore as a bulwark against further theft of vacation property. Fenech
nods toward the red dirt road that skirts the beach. “That road has been
wiped out once, wiped out twice, then a few more times—we better do
something about that,” he says. “Nature is convincing people who haven’t
thought about climate change that they need to plan for the future.”
Coffin, 55, doesn’t need persuading. Having tied up his boat, he drives
over our way for a matter-of-fact chat out the window of his pickup
about the unease fishermen feel about changing waters. They all
recognize it, Coffin says, and he gladly co-operates with Fenech’s
researchers. “With today’s technology,” he adds, “it would be negligent
for us to not look into what’s going on, to just say, ‘It’s cyclic.’ ”
He knows it’s not. Coffin has been fishing full-time for 25 years. Sure,
the island has been enjoying bumper lobster harvests. In fact, Fenech
predicted as much a few years ago: the crustaceans favour warmer waters,
up to a point. But he warns that still more warming—which is inexorably
happening—will likely push their prime habitat further north.
Variations on that story abound in P.E.I., and elsewhere in Canada, too.
A notch warmer isn’t unwelcome, but where does it all end? Tourists have
flocked here in record numbers during recent hotter, drier summers. The
changing growing season is better for certain crops, like vinifera
grapes that didn’t used to thrive on the island.
Still, farmers are worried. Rising average temperatures and less rain in
July and August aren’t ideal for P.E.I.’s famous potatoes, and the need
to conserve groundwater makes irrigating an untenable solution. At the
same time, wetter falls have made harvesting harder, at times
impossible, as heavy machines bog down in soggy fields.
Ray Keenan, 69, is a big-time potato grower who carries himself with an
air of pragmatism. “Climate change were two words that came into our
vocabulary in the last few years that could be not very well
understood,” Keenan says. “We can’t change the weather, but we can
change the way we deal with the weather.” So he welcomes Fenech’s
students flying their drones over his farm and studying how his fields
respond to heavier autumn rains. “We had acres we could not harvest last
fall because they were too wet,” he says. “Never were before—never
happened.”
The island’s historic lighthouses have become almost literal beacons of
climate change danger. Fenech says 28 of them, perched on crumbling
shores, are at risk. The lighthouse at Wood Islands had to be moved in
2009, the one at Cape Bear in 2014. A recent federal report projects up
to a one-metre rise in sea levels this century, which Fenech says would
make many P.E.I. roads, bridges, causeways and buildings just as
vulnerable. A two-metre rise—not at all far-fetched unless the world
somehow comes to grips with climate change—slices P.E.I. into three islands.
Still, all the islanders Fenech introduced me to were can-do sorts,
talking up possible adaptations. He is much the same. Fenech grew up in
Toronto, studied and built his climatologist credentials there, moving
only in middle age to accept his current university post. Clearly
besotted with P.E.I., he says he’s here to stay.
There’s another level to his patter, though, like a treacherous current
beneath gentle waves. It surfaces when he widens his field of vision
from P.E.I. to polar sea ice receding, ice over Greenland melting. More
destructive hurricanes, more intense forest fires. Punishing drought
this spring in India, another heat wave baking Europe.
Asked what message he aims to convey, he laughs and says, “I really am a
positive person, but I have been called Dr. Doom recently.” He adds that
“every single scientific journal” he’s assigned his students to read
lately points to a coming climate catastrophe, generally by around the
year 2050.
All of the troubling developments he rattles off were predicted by
researchers in his field, he says, although they’re often coming to pass
sooner than expected. “All of these things point in the ‘I told you so’
direction,” he says. “But we don’t like to be right.”
The climate change debate is often cast as a clash between alarmist
experts and skeptical average folks. That’s not how it feels in P.E.I.,
where local experience and peer-reviewed research are mutually
reinforcing. But is that convergence unique to a low sandstone island
exposed to the elements, or is the perspective an early indicator of how
public awareness might scale up all over?
With climate change emerging as a possible defining issue for this
fall’s federal election campaign, Maclean’s sought out some of the most
committed experts—a climate modeller, a doctor, an economist, even an
election strategist. They’re all desperately hoping that a willingness
to face this challenge—the attitude Fenech claims he finds all over
P.E.I.—is about to spread across the country.
For the basics on how we really understand climate change, Greg Flato, a
senior scientist at the federal Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling
and Analysis at the University of Victoria, is a good guy to ask. Flato,
58, started out more than a quarter-century ago studying Arctic ice. His
initial interest was in what he calls “operational issues,” like
shipping in far northern sea lanes.
But worry about global warming was taking hold back then. In 1988, NASA
climatologist James Hansen delivered his wake-up-call testimony on the
greenhouse effect to a U.S. senate committee. By the early 1990s, Flato
was helping build the Canadian government’s model for simulating past
climate variations and projecting future change, then one of only a
handful like it scattered around North American and European research
institutes.
In those pioneering years, he says, the models were only about the
atmosphere. A typical experiment might try to test how much the planet
would warm if carbon dioxide levels, mainly from burning fossil fuels,
doubled over a given period. That now looks simplistic. The models have
grown progressively more elaborate. Crucially, they allow for the
capacity of oceans to sequester carbon.
Then there’s Flato’s specialty, ice. Models must account for how, as
polar ice recedes, darker seas and land masses are exposed, which
amplifies warming. Flato says the mechanism is familiar to any Canadian
who’s watched backyard snow shrink in spring. “The snow starts to melt,
exposing dark ground underneath it, that dark ground underneath it
absorbs sunlight, warms up, causes more snow to melt, which exposes more
dark ground, which causes more warming, which causes more melting,” he
explains.
Today’s climate models—including the huge program Flato’s centre puts
through its paces on a federal supercomputer just outside
Montreal—encompass the atmosphere and oceans, land masses and living
systems. Flato is a vice-chair of Working Group 1 of the United Nations’
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group tasked with
assessing the physical science behind the IPCC’s authoritative findings.
That includes the IPCC’s latest report, released last October. In case
you missed it, a brief review: terrifying. It warns that unless humanity
cuts back drastically on burning fossil fuels—what’s being called “deep
decarbonization”—coasts will be inundated, forest fires will grow more
insatiable, droughts and the resulting hunger will spread dangerously,
coral reefs will fade to white, and much more.
All this will happen by 2040, which is, when you think about it,
tomorrow. Some warming is already irreversible. To avoid far worse,
serious steps must be taken—fast. For example, the IPCC says coal-fired
generation needs to all but cease by mid-century; it now accounts for
about 40 per cent of the world’s electricity.
Despite all this, Flato resists being prodded by a reporter into
apocalyptic talk, maintaining a contemplative tone. Skeptics scoff at
models like his. Some vilify the IPCC as a sort of leftist scheme.
Others might claim to accept the science, yet wave off pleas for deep
decarbonization as crazy talk.
Flato knows all this, but the closest he comes to agitated is to muse on
inadequate public education, saying, “I don’t think we—and I don’t even
know who the ‘we’ is, whether it’s the scientific community, the
scientific community plus the media, the scientific community plus the
educational system—but we somehow have not done a very good job of
educating the general public.”
Sheila Watt-Cloutier agrees that educating the public has far lagged
mounting evidence of the danger at hand. She can’t be faulted for not
trying. Back in the mid-1990s, around the time Flato’s modelling was
taking off, Watt-Cloutier was starting a long run as president of the
Inuit Circumpolar Council. At first, she campaigned to ban persistent
pollutants like PCBs, which had found their way into the traditional
Inuit diet.
But she soon turned to global warming, an even more fundamental threat
to the old ways based on hunting on the sea ice (now alarmingly
diminished) and a landscape defined by permafrost (not so perma, it
turns out). She called her 2015 book, a combination of memoir and
manifesto, The Right to Be Cold—the title capturing her argument that
combatting climate change should be recast as a human rights imperative.
Watt-Cloutier is in demand. She recently addressed a hipster crowd in
Paris on climate change before a techno concert. When she spoke to me by
phone, though, it was from her two-bedroom house in Kuujjuaq, in
Quebec’s far north, near where she was born in 1953 into a family that
still travelled by dogsled. Asked about the place, she emails a phone
picture taken from her front window. The black spruces and tamaracks
along the Kuujjuaq River are lusher than when she was a kid. “The roots
are able to go deeper,” she explains, “because of the permafrost melting.”
Stories about the Arctic have disproportionately dominated the climate
change conversation. Warming is happening faster there, and the
immediate implications are more apparent. It’s amplified Watt-Cloutier’s
voice. Yet she has misgivings about the way her home latitudes have been
used, especially those iconic images of polar bears on
precarious-looking floes. “It’s really raw, deep human issues that we’re
dealing with here,” she says. “It’s not just about polar bears, it’s not
just about the ice, although those are really important, of course.”
She contends that focusing on how climate change threatens the Inuit way
of life now is a better way of hammering home the warning that it will
menace the rest of us later. Or sooner. Recent years of awful forest
fires, floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornados seem to be doing what
polar bear images couldn’t for public opinion. “They’re starting to see
a human, personal connection to the breakdown of the cooling system,
which is the Arctic’s ice and Greenland’s ice sheet,” Watt-Cloutier says.
Connections don’t get more human and personal than at a kid’s birthday
party. Dr. Courtney Howard will never forget her daughter’s first. It
was during 2014’s “Summer of Smoke” in Yellowknife, where she is an
emergency doctor, when a staggering 3.4 million hectares of forest
burned across the Northwest Territories.
Howard and her husband, a pediatrician, had planned the party for kids
and parents in a park. When the day rolled around, however, the Air
Quality Health Index, a 1-10 scale, rated Yellowknife’s air at 10, the
level deemed a “high health risk” by the federal government.
They went ahead and threw the party outside anyway, despite the smoke
and fine particulate. “We’d been inside for almost a month and a half by
that point,” Howard says, adding that “cabin fever” brought on by weeks
of avoiding the smoky air outside had grown oppressive. Not that she
took the decision lightly. Over eight years practising in Yellowknife,
Howard, 40, who grew up in Vancouver, has made the health hazards
brought by climate change her cause.
She has researched the risks associated with forest fires made more
frequent and ferocious by hotter, drier weather. She credits Indigenous
patients and advisers to her hospital with teaching her about how
warming means declining caribou herds to hunt, less reliable winter ice
roads to drive on. She mentions that Yellowknife’s annual Snowking
Winter Festival, which runs through March, had to be cancelled mid-month
this year when the king’s snow castle melted.
Howard was the lead author of a 2018 climate change briefing for
Canadian policy-makers produced by The Lancet, the prestigious British
medical journal. As president of the Canadian Association of Physicians
for the Environment, she aims to leverage the credibility edge that
health professionals enjoy over, say, politicians and economists.
The bedside manner she brings to the issue isn’t exactly calming.
“Essentially,” she says, “the message from the health community is
climate change is the greatest health issue of our time.” That’s not
just about Canada, of course. Like every expert I interviewed, Howard
eventually gets around to pointing out that the implications for the
developing world are far more extreme.
She’s worked with Médecins Sans Frontières on the danger climate change
brings to countries already strained by political instability and
poverty. “When you look at the increased potential for drought and for
famine, and you know when people are hungry or their kids are hungry
they’ll do almost anything, so they may move, and other people might not
like that, there’s potential for conflict and essentially failed states.”
Her prescription? “We need to acknowledge that we can’t adapt to where
we’re going,” she says, her voice getting more insistent the longer she
stays on the phone outside the ER in Yellowknife, “and therefore we need
to mitigate urgently.”
Adaptation means trying to adjust to change, like dumping a load of
boulders along a P.E.I. beach. Mitigation means trying to slow the
change itself, mainly by reducing the fossil-fuel burning that pumps
heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The fiercest battles
on climate change in Canada have been about taxing carbon, and no
Canadian political strategist carries more scars from those fights than
Andrew Bevan.
Back in 2008, Bevan was Stéphane Dion’s chief of staff when the
then-Liberal leader ran on his “Green Shift” platform—a daring pitch to
offset a new carbon tax with equal tax cuts and credits—in that year’s
campaign to oust Stephen Harper’s ruling Conservatives. A decade later,
Bevan was Kathleen Wynne’s chief of staff when the then-Liberal premier
of Ontario ran for re-election, defending her cap-and-trade policy for
pricing carbon against Conservative Doug Ford’s vow to scrap it. Harper
labelled the Green Shift “Dion’s tax on everything.” Ford slammed
Wynne’s carbon-pricing system as “a tax grab that made everything more
expensive.” Dion and Wynne both lost badly. Bevan says pricing carbon
wasn’t the definitive factor in either election. No doubt he’s got a
point. Still, those outcomes—reinforced by a string of other provincial
elections recently won by anti-carbon-tax Conservatives—sure don’t make
it look like an easy sell on the hustings.
Over a morning cup of tea in a downtown Toronto restaurant, Bevan mulls
over the gap between the expert consensus that carbon taxes make sense,
and the uncertainty of political pros about how to sell the idea.
Between Dion and Wynne, he was executive director of an environmental
think tank at the University of Ottawa. “I spent almost three years,
purposely and with intent, trying to figure out, firstly, what the right
policy frameworks are, and, secondly, what the right communication frame
was,” Bevan says. “The first is easier than the second.”
Taxing carbon pushes industry and individuals to figure out the cheapest
ways to burn less fossil fuel, or switch to renewable alternatives. How
high must the tax be to do the trick? The Parliamentary Budget Officer
estimates $102 per tonne of emissions would achieve the cuts Canada
committed to at the UN’s Paris climate conference in 2015. Right now,
Ottawa’s controversial carbon tax stands at $20 per tonne, and is slated
to climb to $50 by 2022.
And Environment Minister Catherine McKenna recently said the Liberals
don’t plan to push it higher, signalling that they’re worried about what
voters will tolerate. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer promises to
scrap the tax and substitute his own suspiciously vague plan to require
big industrial emitters to invest unspecified amounts in green
innovation if their emissions exceed unquantified levels.
It has the makings of a defensive, evasive, unedifying campaign clash.
Bevan is no stranger to tactical, measured messaging. On climate change,
though, he wonders if a less conventional approach might be needed from
parties and governments that genuinely favour action. “Most of those
people—most of us—have been trying to propose sensible solutions in a
pragmatic way,” he says. “Maybe there’s a mistake in saying, ‘Look, we
can get this right if we do X, Y and Z.’ Maybe you actually do have to
instill some more fear and panic.”
All the noisy, divisive attention lavished on carbon taxes drives Mark
Jaccard up the wall. It’s not that the Simon Fraser University professor
doesn’t think they can work. Jaccard, 63, even helped design British
Columbia’s widely praised carbon tax, brought in by then-premier Gordon
Campbell in 2008. It’s often held up internationally as proof carbon
taxes can cut emissions without crimping economic growth.
But Jaccard emphasizes that Campbell’s far less celebrated regulations
on generating electricity delivered three times the emissions cuts of
his carbon tax. And that former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty’s
phase-out of coal generation delivered Canada’s biggest cuts to date.
And that California is leading the way with regulations that require
more zero-emissions vehicles and more renewable power.
In all this, his point is that carbon taxes, even if they make more
sense from the perspective of pure economic theory, are not essential.
As well, they’re an easy target for the politicians he accuses of
“climate-insincere lying.” (He specifically asks for that phrase to be
quoted.)
Jaccard is far more enthusiastic about McKenna’s outward-looking
strategy for getting rid of coal. Most Canadians, who can’t have missed
all the war of words over carbon taxes, haven’t even heard of the
Powering Past Coal Alliance. Launched by Canada and Britain in 2017, the
alliance now has 30 countries signed up to phase out coal power. “It’s
the answer,” Jaccard says, “to the Conservative who says, ‘We’re only a
small part of the solution, so we shouldn’t do anything.’ ”
He’s referring to the familiar argument—among Scheer’s top talking
points—that since Canada accounts for less than two per cent of global
carbon emissions, what we do domestically hardly counts. Jaccard argues
any serious policy should be sold to Canadian voters on its chances of
influencing international action. “I don’t hear enough in our discourse,
whether it’s from Elizabeth May or the NDP or the Liberals or
environmental advocates, of being clear with Canadians: we are doing
this because it has the highest chance of global spillover,” he says.
Once those spillovers start becoming clearer, Jaccard thinks what must
be done, while still daunting, won’t look so intimidatingly complicated.
(He makes that case in his upcoming book, A Citizen’s Guide to Climate
Success, slated for publication late this year by Cambridge University
Press.) “We need to get to an era where the production of electricity is
at very low emissions, and we’re not using gasoline in our cars and
diesel in our trucks,” he sums up. “If I go even a little further, I’d
say and not natural gas in our buildings. And then we’re there.”
But “there” can seem a long way off.
After driving me around P.E.I. to meet locals concerned about the
shoreline, the soil and the sea, Fenech circles back to his cluttered
professor’s office. He opens a presentation on his desktop computer
screen. I take notes. P.E.I.’s shores eroded 28 cm a year on average
from 1968 to 2010. Some 1,000 homes and 126 bridges are at risk.
It’s late in the day, and we’ve gotten a lot of sun. Seeing my attention
waning, he pulls out his phone, finds something, and hands it to me. I
expect more data, maybe an aerial drone photo. But it’s his three adult
children, 19, 23 and 27, dressed up and smiling. They’ve got a lot more
decades of climate change to live through. “Now, the positive side of me
says humans will always adapt,” Fenech says. But for once he doesn’t
sound so positive.
Politicians habitually mention how they’re doing it all for their kids.
It’s not something policy wonks often bring up. Except on climate
change. Howard, of course, has the story about her daughter’s first
birthday. Watt-Cloutier states, rather abruptly while explaining her
advocacy strategy, “I’m a mother and a grandmother,” evidently feeling
that needs saying, and perhaps it does.
In interviews on this topic, I’ve come to await the moment. Occasionally
a nudge is needed, but not more than that. Bevan has a reticent quality,
so I ask outright if fatherhood comes into his thinking on climate
change. “I know my kids are fearful; I talk with them about it,” he
says. “It doesn’t mean I panic, because you have to get this right, here
and globally. But, boy oh boy, yes, we should be scared.”
Flato brings a modeller’s long view to contemplating his 22-year-old
son’s future. “He will potentially see the year 2100. He would be 103
years old, but by 2100 maybe that’s not so unusual,” he says. “Even if
he doesn’t live to be 100, he will live to see near the end of the 21st
century. And when I look at the projected changes in climate associated
with high-emissions scenarios, that is worrisome. It’s a world that
looks very different from the world that I grew up in.”
The official campaign running up to the federal vote scheduled for Oct.
21 will last a mere 50 days at most. The next fixed election date will
be set for just four years later. Any parent’s hopes—for decades of
security at a minimum, maybe a century—extend way beyond those
compressed political timelines. Unless we slow down to squint into the
distance—something like the mental downshifting P.E.I. induces—solving
climate change will remain beyond us. It’s not hard to find teachers
with vital lessons to offer on this extreme challenge from every angle,
but there’s no sign yet that we’re ready to pass the test.
[More climate change headlines and links at the 10n10.ca blog
https://www.10n10.ca/e/CCC-Blog.shtml ;]
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