All smoke, no mirrors Ian's Rural Ramblings

As the disastrous wildfire season in Alberta continues I’m going to go off the wall a bit. I’m one of the, I think majority now, that thinks that the climate is changing. I’m not going to go into the how and why but the evidence seems pretty overwhelming to me.

What I am going to go into though is the IS. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions when one can, seems to make pretty good sense as a workable policy to me. Going completely over the top and cutting greenhouse emissions at the detriment of something else seems to me like kicking yourself in the proverbial nuts.

Bottom line. I’ve been writing about climate change since well into the last century and I don’t really think much has changed except there has been a lot more talk. The only difference about this talk is that it hasn’t come cheap. Conferences, seminars, argument and many people pledging to endeavour to persevere to save the planet.

Of all of that I would invoke the last word that my grandmother jokingly said to me before she passed suddenly the next day, bol---ks, ”she said. You can work out the word yourselves without too much difficulty. I thought back in the 1990s that it was too late to do anything about climate change and I’m even more of that opinion now.

I believe that our long suffering planet has one or a series of natural trip switches to shift the climate. I also believe that those switches have been or are at a point of no return towards being tripped.

I’ve read more than is healthy for my poor mind about emission targets and carbon trading. Some of it is well meant and thoughtful, a great deal of it in my opinion is rhetoric to meet an agenda. Yes, it makes sense to stop or minimise pollution when we can. No one wants to breathe that stuff if there is a workable alternative. The trouble is that those emission calculations are incomplete.

A great many people in Alberta right now can take the air and breathe the smoke from the infernos that are raging. A lot of poor souls can see the smoke too. I’ve read that one hectare of wildfire can put 170 tonnes of carbon equivalent into the atmosphere. At the time of writing the Fort McMurray wildfire was at 355,000 hectares.

Forgive my math but I’m reckoning that the Fort McMurray fire alone has already contributed over 61 megatonnes of emissions. I’ve read that emissions for the whole of Canada, excluding wildfires, in 2014 totalled 731 megatonnes. Nearly ten per cent of man attributed emissions for the whole of 2014 has already been emitted by just one wildfire in Alberta in a couple of weeks.

I’m reckoning that the data our scientists and governments are working with is flawed, big time. What’s the point of going crazy over meeting a self imposed target when other factors aren’t in the equations?

Now I’m going to go further. The tundra is thawing and releasing massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Going further still the shallow Arctic sea beds are thawing too and methane filled bubbles are bursting at the surface releasing even more greenhouse gasses. Methane is 200 times more potent than CO2. I don’t think we can even come close to the extent of what’s happening up there. Or if we can it’s under the carpet somewhere.

I think the chances of us winning this battle against climate change/global warming are slim to none and Slim has just left the building. I think we have to buckle up, suck it up and do what we can to mitigate. And, I don’t think that means doing economic harm to meet a target that is at best wrong and at worst meaningless.