Are we ready for really bad weather?

Climate change is going to get worse because we didn’t put the break on carbon emissions fast enough

The topic has finally caught up with our alleged obsession.

And so, we need to chat a bit more about the subject Nova Scotians are accused of talking to death. The weather.

The internet is a wonderful thing, sometimes. Like when it allows you to look back at weather forecasts, after the fact.

Sunday, at Halifax’s Stanfield International Airport between six and 7 p.m., Environment Canada predicted light rain and, to its credit, left that forecast for all – including the drivers who went into the ditch during the blinding supper-hour torrent – to see afterwards.

There was a story last week about the centuries old dykes that keep Nova Scotia from becoming the island nature seems intent on creating. Apparently, without attention nature will win, she always does, and the land bridge between Nova Scotia and the rest of the continent will be replaced by the Strait of Chignecto.

Sunday afternoon the matter was almost resolved in nature’s favour. It rained tigers and mastiffs from Mount A. to point B somewhere this side of Amherst. Environment Canada had expected light rain there and then, too.

Really crazy weather is predictable. Pick a hurricane – Harvey, Irma, Maria – and the weather seers saw them all.

It is also completely unpredictable.

As night fell Sunday, traffic on 102 Highway near the airport was moving at 70 or fewer kilometres an hour. Drivers switched on four-way flashers. At least one car was way off the road, many others pulled over.

Visibility was excellent, unless you wanted to see what was going on outside your car.

A freak downpour, some would say. Except, if you happened to drive from Bangor, Maine to Halifax on Sunday, beginning the trek at around 10 a.m., EST you encountered four such freaks, some stretching for 60 to 70 kilometres. Only the downpour around Saint John was forecast as heavy rain, an understatement.

The scientific community, once it stops bristling at the catch-all generalization, will say these events, like other singular weather events, can’t be blamed on climate change.

They say that because it is so, and scientists are scrupulous about evidence to the point of refusing to venture an outcome until it has come out.

No individual weather event can be said to be a result of climate change, and yet there is no doubt that the weather is more eventful because of climate change.

Scientists also hope people hear them say nasty weather is more severe, more frequent, and more dangerous because the climate is changing, and not for the better.

The next time you want to “thank” climate change for an unseasonably nice day, remember that more than half of the people in Puerto Rico still had no power Monday, two months to the day after Maria.

Deniers are waiting for all the evidence to get in and, because one of them lives in the White House, the evidence will eventually ensure somebody’s kids are swimming for their lives.

Climate change isn’t just real. It’s here and it is going to get worse because we didn’t put the break on carbon emissions fast enough. Some still haven’t.

Politicians here and there are quite willing to court votes where jobs are scarce by letting coal miners risk their lives digging for a fuel that, when burned, risks more lives.

Folks with a habit of looking on the bright side note that most of the world is party to the Paris Agreement and that the signed documents are being kept well above sea-level. They also point out that carbon emissions have levelled off.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is “levelled off” won’t do the trick.

The science journal Nature says we – humanity – have until 2020, 25 months if you’re counting, to turn down the heat, or surrender any realistic chance of capping global warming below the two degrees centigrade benchmark needed to avoid global catastrophe.

Global CO2 emissions need to go down, not level off, or the planet will warm by the two deadly degrees within a couple of decades.

Nova Scotia will become an unrecognizable island, but still won’t make the top-500 list of global disasters wrought by warming.

Credible academic research contends that climate change at current levels will create more refugees in the next 100 years than war created in the last 100. The one big difference between climate change and war refugees is that the former can’t go home again.

Are we ready for that?

“The next time you want to ‘thank’ climate change for an unseasonably nice day, remember that more than half of the people in Puerto Rico still had no power Monday, two months to the day after Maria.”