Artwork by Gennadiy Ivanov
At present, we have become the most dominant and most dangerous species on Earth. We have only one serious competitor – and that one happens to have been around for more than 2 ½ billion years before the appearance of multi-cellular life and that is the virus and, but for vaccines, it could still win.
But this is not our only problem. Presently we are doubly infected globally. Not only is the virus killing us, we have also made the planet sick with fever. That planetary fever is no longer just causing us headaches. Planetary temperatures are so high and rising so fast that they threaten the fundamental function of the biogeochemistry that permits human presence on Earth.
Let’s begin with the known climate and related risks that a high planetary fever poses now and will pose in the future. In other words, let’s take a look at what is backed up behind the COVID dam and is waiting for us as we wait for a vaccine against the virus to be perfected and distributed.
The first thing that awaits us behind the COVID dam is the effect of warming atmospheric temperatures on how much water the global atmosphere can transport. More water vapour in the atmosphere is making storms more powerful; heat waves more intense and drought deeper and more persistent. The rate and manner in which water moves through the global hydrological cycle is also accelerating.
Warming atmospheric temperatures have caused a cascade of impacts including rapid Arctic warming, disappearing sea ice, changes in jet stream behaviour and destabilization of the global climate, all of which are beginning to take a big toll. We are already seeing the mounting economic costs of that destabilization in Canada.
It is now estimated that the total indexed cost to this country of damage caused by extreme weather events from Confederation in 1867 to the year 2000 – a period of 133 years – was $1 billion. The cost of extreme weather damage to from 2000 to 2020 – that is to say the last two decades – was $32 billion.
We continue year after year to tempt fate with respect to global climate disruption. We have yet, for example, come to fully appreciate the link between a rising planetary fever and food production.
We know what food shortages do. They incite involuntary human migration. When food production decreases in the face of lost hydrological stability, it isn’t long before you can lose social and political stability as well. That is happening, but we ain’t seen anything yet. The UN expects there will be 200 million refugees globally by 2050.
There is already growing involuntary climate related human migration even on this continent. The habitable zone in the United States is already shrinking northward toward Canada. Much of south Florida, the Carolina’s, the American west and Southwest are projected to soon be barely habitable. Where will these people go? Many of them will want to come to Canada. This movement northward will occur globally. They are coming. Get ready.
COVID is bad and it is going to get worse – but hopefully there will soon be a vaccine. Climate change and its symptoms will also get worse.
There is an interim vaccine for climate change, too, but for it to work, we have to take it and there are a lot of anti-vaccers who don’t want to and many who won’t.
Has enough had been done to make carbon neutrality a reality? There has been some preliminary testing of carbon neutrality as a vaccine already. One of these tests was accidental. Earth Overshoot Day is the date each year when humanity will have used all of the biological resources that Earth can renew during the entire year. Fifty years ago, the planet could sustain our population and provide for its needs for just over the entire year.
In 2017 it fell on August 2nd. That year it was calculated that we needed the equivalent of 1.7 Earths to sustain our population at current levels of need and demand. It looked like we were on our way to plundering ourselves out of house and home. But this year, something very different happened. Earth Overshoot Day this year fell on August 22nd, more than three weeks later than it did in 2019.
The later day reflects the 9.3% reduction in humanity’s ecological footprint from January 1st to Earth Overshoot Day compared to the same period last year. This of course, is a direct consequence of the unfortunate, painful and completely unplanned economic and other costs associated with coronavirus-induced lockdowns around the world. But even that painful reduction is not enough.
Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise despite our unplanned and abrupt reductions in carbon emissions which suggests feedbacks have been initiated that will result in increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere unless we are able to get ahead of rising global temperatures now.
One such feedback has been identified right here in Canada; and that is the greenhouse release feedback caused by permafrost thaw in our Arctic. In Canada alone there are an estimated 1500 billion tonnes of carbon sequestered in Arctic permafrost. There are a thousand billion tonnes in near-surface sediments which is about the same amount of carbon that we now have floating in our ever-hotter atmosphere. Let that much carbon loose and we are done.
Because of unprecedented warming in the past two decades, the staggering scale of thawing of permafrost has turned the Arctic into a carbon source instead of a carbon sink. As one scientist put it, because of permafrost thaw, the Arctic has become an enormous carbon chimney.
Though you can’t see it, the carbon chimneys that thawing permafrost has created, have in effect “industrialized the Arctic.” The same amount of carbon is escaping unseen into the atmosphere as would escape from an industrial park in a southern city. By way of global warming have turned the tundra into the equivalent of a planetary internal combustion engine.
The only way this problem has a hope of being addressed is if the eight Arctic countries can press for full Russian, American and Canadian cooperation to address the climate threat in time to halt catastrophic permafrost thaw to prevent runaway global heating. That cooperation, however, doesn’t yet exist.
As it happens, however, art is playing a role in bringing Russia and Canada together on the permafrost thaw issue. Gennadiy Ivanov, who participated in two of the webinars in this series and provided the art at the top of this post, recently held an exhibition on climate change in the Arctic at the Russian Embassy in London, England. The exhibition brought Russian and Canadian diplomats into the same sphere over the climate change threat, especially as it relates to the potential for runaway methane releases brought about permafrost thaw. We live in hope.
Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go even in Canada to fully understand the threat. In direct response to the latest science which was put forward in a webinar organized by Massey College, Canada’s Minister of Environment said that he acknowledged that “Canada has the largest store of carbon in all of nature, and that the federal government has some responsibility here.”
So, if carbon neutrality is to climate change as a vaccine is to the pandemic, how are we doing with the development of the climate vaccine? Well, on a federal level not so good. The Liberal’s recently announced climate emergency plan does not have any penalties for failing to meet targets. It is voluntary, which makes it meaningless. The federal climate action plan does not come into effect in 2023 with the first report on progress in 2025.
When we can’t even get the provinces to get on board with any climate plan let along a Liberal Plan, tell me really what you think the chances are that we will be on top of the climate problem by 2030 and be totally carbon neutral by 2050? Federally, all we have done is kick the can down the road.
What they have offered is an absence of political accountability and an admission that cooperative federalism isn’t working in this country because the provinces have the option always to do whatever is in their immediate interests rather than what is good for the country or for the world.
So, what are the consequences of this? Former Yukon Premier Tony Pennikett offered a response to the federal Environment Minister’s Massey College remarks on the government’s responsibility to deal with the growing climate threat.
Pennikett pointed out that if permafrost thaw continues to occur at even current rates, the national goals for carbon emissions reductions will continue to be moving targets. Because of permafrost thaw and other feedback releases, Canada’s stated goal of exceeding our 2030 emissions reductions target and net zero carbon emission by 2050 will recede continually beyond our grasp. Stated bluntly, we are at – and perhaps past – the climate tipping point beyond which the option of carbon neutrality is no longer available to Canadians.
So here is where we stand. You notice you have got a fever. You discover it is getting worse. How long can you go before you go to the doctor? How sick do you have to become before you do something about it? How sick do you have to become before you can’t do anything about it?
So, where do we go from here? You can’t defeat a global disease with local responses; but if there are enough appropriate local responses you can slow and moderate its local effects until a global vaccine is available and universally distributed.