The amount of scientific information about climate change is immense and growing, yet there are many who believe that is simply fiction. And most governments seem to be in support of that position, opting to do little or nothing.
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Here in Canada, the leader of the Conservative party is proudly advocating eliminating the tax on carbon associated with burning oil and natural gas and carefully avoiding indicating any replacement measure.
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I am puzzled by the apparent unwillingness of most governments to tackle the problem. They may assert that the carbon tax is unfair, that it is focusing on consumers while corporate polluters are not paying their fair share. Or they argue that the fear of adverse impact from climate change is unjustified, that technology will in the near future provide solutions without requiring any change in our behaviour. Such optimism is not just plain wrong, it is a denial of reality.
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Three factors are considered as primary cause of the recent surge in heat.
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First, melting ice and snow are uncovering open water and dark rocks that absorb more sunlight. Second, cleaning up the emissions from 60,000 giant merchant ships has eliminated the 鈥榮hip wakes鈥 that used to reflect much incoming sunlight. Further, the huge forest fires of the last few years may constitute a much more significant feedback loop than we thought.
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As Gwynne Dyer recently pointed out, we breached 鈥 this past year and perhaps permanently 鈥 the aspirational goal of never allowing the average global temperature to rise more that 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial norm
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Never is a long time. When the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change set that target in 2018, it actually said it should remain achievable until at least 2050. Notice that we hit that target in 2024, some 26 years early.
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There was a scramble to cover this up which took two forms. One was to argue it was just a temporary 鈥渂lip鈥 in temperatures reflecting the impact of El Nino, a cyclical ocean event that occasionally raises the average global temperature for nine to 12 months and then subsides again. The only problem with this rationale is that the increase in global temperature was twice the size of any previous El Nino event and did not reverse when El Nino died out in April.
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As an alternative to blaming El Nino, the IPCC suggested that, until the higher rate levels prevailed for 20 years, the previous temperature levels should be considered the valid ones. That made sense when global temperature was essentially stable but those days are long gone. The trend has been relentlessly upward for decades now.
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All these arguments do is demonstrate how governments can twist the conclusions of scientists around the world when putting together the summary of all that scientific research. It seems that governments who participate in the summary document always want to avoid the large spending commitments that the research advocates.
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We need to get governments to agree to tell the truth and to face the fact that saving the planet will be costly - and ever more so if we continue to avoid the required expenditures while hoping for miracles.
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What can we do about this?
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The stock answer is 鈥渃ut greenhouse emissions鈥. But it is delusional to go on pretending that this is all we can and must do. After 30 years of trying to cut our emissions, they are still growing almost every year.
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We need to hold the heat down while the emission-reduction work proceeds, or the growing chaos, damage and violence will make further progress on any mitigation front impossible. The way to do this is called geoengineering or climate engineering, and for a long time it was taboo. But, this never made sense and prejudice against it is fading fast.
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