Floods, fires and extreme heat: Is it climate change or just bad weather?

Twenty years ago, in his groundbreaking book The End of Nature, Bill McKibben was one of the first to sound the alarm about the potential dangers of global warming. His warnings were largely ignored and now, in his new book, the oddly titled Eaarth, he says we need to acknowledge that we’ve waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way.

Recent weather events would seem to support McKibben’s contentions. Extreme flooding in Pakistan, record-breaking heat waves in Russia, deadly mudslides in China, uncontrollable forest fires in B.C. – the list goes on. In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that, so far, 2010 is the hottest year since records began in 1880. Seventeen nations have reached new temperature highs, another record. Pakistan hit (129F) 54C, a new record for all of Asia. The current flooding there is the worst in that country’s history, with two million people homeless, 20 million affected, more than a million acres of croplands flooded, and signs of an incipient cholera epidemic. Six million people are without assistance in severely affected areas. The UN has rated the floods in Pakistan as the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent history, with 13.8 million people affected and 1,600 dead.

Meanwhile, Russia is locked in the worst heat wave and drought in its documented history, with unprecedented high temperatures in Moscow and hundreds of wildfires burning out of control. Moscow had never hit 100F (38C) before this year; this summer such temperatures have been commonplace in Russia’s capital. The combination of extreme heat and thick smoke and smog from the fires doubled the city’s death rate at the peak of the heat wave last week, which reached 700 deaths per day at one stage due to heat-related causes. The drought and fires have destroyed a quarter of Russia’s crops, prompting the government to ban grain exports for the rest of this year in hopes of keeping domestic food prices under control. Since Russia is one of the biggest grain exporters, this move contributed to a spike in the price of wheat on the global market.

Flooding and mudslides in China have killed more than 1,100 people this year and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage across 28 provinces and regions. And back in Canada, the forest fire season in B.C. is the worst in 12 years, having already charred more than 300,000 hectares of forest, an area larger than Metro Vancouver. Only 2 days ago, an ice chunk the size of Bermuda (50 square kilometres) broke off Ellesmere Island, rudely disrupting our Prime Minister’s intentions of never having to even mention the words climate change on his current Arctic tour.

Taking a cue from the subtitle of this here blog, just what on earth is going on?  What can we say about the connection between these events and climate change? Is there one?

To find out, I spoke with Dr Vladimir Ryabanin, a scientist with the World Climate Research Programme of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. Most scientists say that no single weather event can be attributed to climate change but, at the same time, these kinds of extreme weather events are precisely consistent with the scenarios that climate forecasters have long predicted if we did nothing to reign in carbon emissions (which we haven’t). So can we expect more frequent and more devastating storms in the future? Have a listen to what the good doctor Ryabanin has to say by clicking the audio player below. To download right click here and select ‘Save As’ or ‘Save Target As.’

Final word to Bill McKibben from his recent article in the Guardian. “This is no longer an environmental battle. As this summer demonstrates, if you’re concerned about development, climate change is issue No 1 (how much development is going to go on in Pakistan, now that its bridges are all gone?). If you’re concerned about war and peace, climate change is issue No 1 (when Russia stops sending grain to Egypt and Nigeria, and when wheat prices start to rise, what do you think comes next?). If you’re concerned about the future, then climate change is issue No 1 – because this summer is a tiny taste of what the future is all about. So far we’ve barely raised the earth’s temperature a degree, and that’s caused all that we’ve seen so far. But climatologists assure us there’s four or five degrees more by the century’s end unless we work with incredible speed to end the fossil fuel era.”

Yikes.

Al Gore on earthgauge

Well, he turned me down for a personal interview (WTF?!) but I still managed to catch most of Al Gore’s speech at the 2010 Millenium Summit in Montreal. This presentation was not recorded or broadcast publicly so it is an earthgauge exclusive. You heard it here first! In his speech, the former VP discusses the inextricable link between the climate crisis and the ongoing fight against extreme poverty. Apologies for the poor sound quality and the gap at the 5:45 mark but it was a covert operation after all, which was disrupted on two occasions by event staff.

To download the interview to your computer and/or MP3 player, right click here and select ‘save target as’ or ‘save as’. Don’t forget all earthgauge interviews are available as podcasts on iTunes.

It’s a crude world

Or so says Peter Maass who is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of the new book by the same name, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. Maass is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and he has also written for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside and Slate. His first book, about the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s, was entitled Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War.

Crude World examines how oil has wreaked devastation around the world while enriching the few. He spent 8 years traveling the globe to discover the true costs of oil production both to the planet and to the countless millions living in poverty in rich oil producing regions.

Click the audio player above to hear my interview with Peter Maass or to download the interview, right click here and select ‘Save As’ or ‘Save Target As’. Don’t forget all earthgauge interviews are available as podcasts on iTunes.

Here’s the promo blurb for the book: Every unhappy oil-producing nation is unhappy in its own way, but all are touched by oil’s power to worsen existing problems and create new ones. Crude World explores the troubled world oil has created—from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela and beyond. The book features warlords in the oil-rich Niger Delta, petro-billionaires in Moscow, Americans in Baghdad, the gesticulations as well as the politics of Hugo Chavez, and officials in Riyadh who avoid uncomfortable questions about Saudi reserves. A journey into the violent twilight of oil, Crude World answers the questions of what we do for oil and what oil does to us.

I also recommend checking out Maass’ latest article for Foreign Policy journal, which examines the connection between oil, war and American military spending. A key question the story asks is this one—“To what extent is oil linked to the wars we fight and the more than half-trillion dollars we spend on our military every year?” The quick answer is, it’s strongly linked, and it costs a lot.

Interview with Tim DeChristopher

The May/June 2010 issue of E Magazine features a cover story with Tim DeChristopher – a 28 year-old activist from Utah who is facing a possible sentence of 10 years in federal prison and fines up to $750,000. His crime? In 2008, DeChristopher went to an auction that was leasing more than 100,000 acres of federal (i.e. public) land for oil and gas development. The leases were approved in the dying days of the Bush II administration, despite the fact that the land in question bordered Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and Dinosaur National Monument.

Posing as a bidder, DeChristopher won the right to develop 22,500 acres of land for which, of course, he had neither the capability nor the intention of doing. His goal was simply to take the land out of the hands of oil and gas companies.

Despite the fact that officials in the Obama administration subsequently cancelled leases on 77 parcels from the Utah auction, effectively agreeing that the auction should never have gone ahead, DeChristopher is nonetheless being prosecuted for his actions. His trial date is to begin in September in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City. For his part, DeChristopher (who has subsequently become recognized as something of an environmental cult hero) says he has no desire to go to jail but he would do the same thing again given the chance.

With this action, Bidder 70, as DeChristopher has become known, represents what seems to be a resurgence in direct action environmental protest, which was such a hallmark of the movement in years gone by but seems to have fallen by the wayside for environmental organizations who have chosen negotiation and compromise as their strategy of choice in recent years.

As we careen toward potentially catastrophic climate change, could this and other such actions represent the beginning of a return to a more radical form of environmental activism? Click the audio player below to hear my interview with DeChristopher for CKUT radio. He explains what exactly he did and what motivated him to do it. He also discusses the legal consequences of his protest action and the new organization he has subsequently founded called Peaceful Uprising.

To download the interview, right click here and select ‘Save As’ or ‘Save Target As’.

Interview with Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier

I had the pleasure of speaking with Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier at the 2010 Millenium Summit in Montreal. For a number of years, Watt-Cloutier has been at the forefront of efforts to raise awareness about the impacts of climate change on Canada’s Inuit people.  She is the former President of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and Watt-Cloutier has earned the respect and admiration of her peers and colleagues who commend her for her passionate commitment to northern Aboriginal peoples. She has received numerous awards and recognitions for her tireless efforts on behalf of Arctic indigenous peoples around the world, including a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

In addition to climate change, Watt-Cloutier works to raise awareness about a number of other important environmental issues in the North including sustainable development, education, traditional ecological knowledge and persistent organic pollutants (POPs). These toxic, long-lasting contaminants are carbon-based and are by-products of industrial activities that originate in North America, Europe and Asia. Despite originating in the global south, POPs were detected in alarmingly high rates in the breast milk and blood of Inuit mothers in northern Quebec and southern Baffin Island during the mid-1980s. Recent evidence suggests that consuming these contaminated foods has devastating consequences for human health including neurological, endocrinological, and behavioral disorders.

Watt-Cloutier emphasizes that sustainable development is more effectively achieved when projects and policies bring Aboriginal peoples and organizations together to learn from one another. She has urged a bridging of the gap between Western scientific rationalism and the Aboriginal worldview. Watt-Cloutier has recommended that traditional ecological knowledge and other Aboriginal knowledge systems assume a more prominent role in dealing with current issues such as climate change.

In my interview with her, Watt-Cloutier explains how climate change, in changing the consistency of ice and snow in the North, threatens the Inuit way of life and why it should therefore be considered a human rights issue as well as an environmental problem. She also talks about some of the physical and climatological changes that the Inuit have been witnessing in the North recently and she describes what she feels is the best way forward in confronting the climate crisis.

Click here to download the interview. (To download, right click and select “save link as…” or “save target as”)

Catastrophic oil spill continues in the Gulf with no end in sight

Interview with Beverly Wright of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice

What else remains to be said about the worst oil spill in US history and one of the worst the world has ever seen? We know now that BP grossly understated the size of the spill, which some now say may be leaking up to 100,000 barrels of crude a day into the Gulf of Mexico (BP originally pegged the leak at only 1000 barrels a day). There has been speculation that this may put the brakes on further offshore drilling in difficult or dangerous regions such as the Arctic but Rolling Stone is reporting that BP is still planning to start drilling in the Arctic this fall and nothing is being done to stop them. In any case, if this is what it takes for us to realize that the time to break our oil addiction is long overdue,  the Gulf region is paying an enormous ecological and social cost on humanity’s behalf. The threat of catastrophic climate change hasn’t woken us up to the perils of continued fossil fuel extraction and consumption; will an environmental disaster of unprecedented proportions finally do the trick?

And what of the local impacts? There has been much finger-pointing and BP bashing (deservedly) but less has been said about the important environmental justice considerations of the spill. I spoke recently with Beverly Wright of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. She discussed the devastating impact that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is having on the local environment and people of Louisiana. As with many such environmental catastrophes, Dr. Wright explains how those being disproportionately affected by the spill tend to come from lower income communities – who are also the least able to cope.

Right click and select ‘Save file as…’ to download. interview with Beverly Wright of DSCEJ

Interview with Stéphane Dion

Click the audio player to hear my interview with Stéphane Dion from the 2010 Millenium Summit in Montreal.

Stéphane Dion is a Canadian member of Parliament for the riding of Saint-Laurent-Cartierville in Montreal. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2006 to 2008. Dion resigned as Liberal leader after the 2008 election where the party suffered its second worst result ever. Dion is a former professor who served as a cabinet minister under Jean Chretien and Paul Martin.

I caught up with Mr. Dion at the 2010 Millenium Summit, an annual event in Montreal that brings together representatives of government, NGOs and academia to discuss progress on the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs). The 8 MDGs range from cutting the spread of extreme poverty in half and halting the spread of HIV Aids  and providing universal primary education by 2015. These goals were agreed upon in 2000 through the UN Millenium Declaration, which committed nations to a new global partnership. Progress on the MDGs has been slow to date.

This year’s Summit focused on the theme of development and climate change. During his time as leader of the Liberal Party and Minister of the Environment, Stéphane Dion became well known for his efforts to champion the cause of climate change. His Green Shift proposal in the 2008 federal election campaign would have marked a signal shift in ongoing efforts to internalize the price of carbon emissions in Canada – something that economists from across the political spectrum say is necessary to reign in greenhouse gas emissions. Mr. Dion was defeated in the election and the current Conservative government has since done nothing to reduce Canada’s runaway emissions or to implement any form of carbon pricing policy .

Canadian government to change environmental assessment rules

Click on the audio player to hear my report for Groundwire (National Campus and Community Radio Association) on new changes being proposed to environmental assessment rules in Canada.

The federal Conservative government is planning to change the rules that govern the environmental assessments of federal projects. These new rules, introduced in this year’s federal Budget, will now give the federal Minister of the Environment more power to minimize reviews of projects, thereby dramatically reducing the environmental review of any project that is funded by the federal government.

The new rules will gut the environmental review process and would never have been approved had the government not included the changes as part of the Budget Bill. Federal opposition parties oppose the changes but in order to stop them from being implemented, they would have to defeat the entire Budget Bill, thereby bringing down the government and forcing an election – something the Conservatives are betting (correctly) they would never do.

I spoke with John Bennett, the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and William Amos, a staff lawyer with EcoJustice.

The Battle for the Atmosphere

Just published – check out my new article in the latest edition of Briarpatch magazine (May/June 2010). Entitled ‘The Battle for the Atmosphere‘, the article analyzes the highly obstructionist stance of the current Canadian government in international climate change negotiations.

Some in the developing South have accused the position adopted by countries such as Canada as being tantamount to neo-colonialism. I take a closer look at this accusation by considering what would constitute an equitable distribution of the world’s remaining carbon budget. In order to avoid catastrophic climate change, scientists say there is a limited amount of atmospheric space available for global carbon emissions.  How can the global South (which comprises 80% of the world’s population) realize their development aspirations within the world’s limited remaining carbon budget if developed countries such as Canada are unwilling to make deep emissions cuts?

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

North American media have for the most part utterly failed to recognize the ethical dimensions of climate change, and consequently most Canadians see little problem with judging our government’s climate change policies solely on the basis of our national economic interest. Today, the only proven routes out of poverty still involve an expanded use of energy and, consequently, a seemingly inevitable increase in fossil fuel use and carbon emissions – unless more expensive alternative energies can rapidly be deployed.

Poverty alleviation and equitable forms of development are possible within the world’s small remaining carbon budget with existing clean energy technologies. But this will only become a reality if rich nations like Canada are willing to accept their historical responsibilities by implementing stringent domestic reductions that will free up atmospheric space for the rest of the world, and by paying developing countries to leapfrog fossil fuels and make the transition directly to cleaner energy.

Warmest winter on record in Canada

Interview with Gwynne Dyer – author of ‘Climate Wars’

It’s official. Canada has just experienced it’s warmest and driest winter on record. Environment Canada scientists report that winter 2009/10 was 4 C above normal, making it the warmest since nationwide records were first kept in 1948. David Philips, a senior climatologist with Environment Canada said “It’s beyond shocking.” Records have been shattered from “coast to coast to coast.”

Here in Montreal, things are no different. At least 2 days last week set records for the warmest ever recorded for those dates. 

This has, of course, all resulted in a deafening silence from climate change skeptics who are still screaming about the record snowfalls in the northeastern U.S. and the deep freeze across some of Europe this winter as proof that climate change is a hoax. Trouble is, it’s not just in Canada where temperatures are high. It turns out the winter of 2009/10 could be the warmest on record globally as well.

To be fair, we can’t say for sure that the unseasonably warm temperatures across the country and the paucity of snowfall (including at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver) are the result of human-caused global warming. No single weather event can either prove or disprove climate change. To suggest otherwise, as skeptics (and some environmentalists) are wont to do, betrays a cynical inability to distinguish between climate and weather. 

What we can say, however, is that scientific models have long-predicted exactly this kind of variability: more hot and cold extremes, more precipitation in some areas, more drought in others, and so on. So in fact, the recent cold temperatures in Europe and the snowstorms in Washington D.C. are exactly consistent with climate change modeling and may even make a stronger case for the reality of anthropogenic climate change. 

As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.

In any case, what is important to keep in mind is the long-term climatic trends, not single weather events; and the long-term trends point to consistent but gradual warming. The past decade was the warmest on record and 8 of the warmest 10 years ever recorded have all occurred since 2001. Arctic sea ice is melting at a rate that is surpassing even scientists’ worse case scenarios. We’ve seen worsening droughts across the globe; the pine beetle has been ravaging forests in B.C because winters are no longer cold enough to kill it off; the list goes on. Yet we still debate and argue over whether climate change is happening and, even if it is, whether we should do anything about it or if mitigation action will be too expensive.

Gwynne Dyer has a particularly interesting take on this subject. For his recent book, Climate Wars, he travelled the world speaking with military leaders, scientists and politicians about the geopolitical and security implications of climate change and he says he returned “very worried”. Climate Wars offers a rather terrifying glimpse of the future, when climate change forces countries into desperate struggles for resources and perhaps even survival. 

In our interview, Gwynne discusses the current state of climate change negotiations and the position of the Canadian government in the wake of the failed Copenhagen climate summit. 

[Click here to hear Gwynne Dyer's book presentation at McGill University from last year.]