Will nations survive climate change?
Climate change may eventually relegate national sovereignty to the ash heap of history where it belongs.
When Syria came aboard in November, America was the only nation on earth outside the Paris Climate Accord.
The U.S. is the world’s second worst polluter, behind China in volume, and the worst by more meaningful measures, like crudper-consumer. Greenhouse gases don’t respect borders, even those with walls, so if the U.S. is out, as promised by President Donald Trump, the people of the world’s other 194 nation-states suffer.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a shadow of its former self under Trump-appointed administrator Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma attorney general sued the EPA 14 times to overturn stuff like the regulation of toxic mercury, carbon emissions and protection of wetlands.
A tidy chunk of the deregulation Trump trumpets has undone restrictions on polluters, and he intends to shrink national parks to allow mineral exploration on some of the continent’s most awe-inspiring landscapes. Visionary naturalist and former Republican president Teddy Roosevelt would walk softly up to the current president and smack him with a big stick.
California caught fire, great swaths of heavily populated turf in the east spent weeks under water and Puerto Rico was levelled in 2017. Up here, hurricaneforce winds in March ripped Newfoundland, culminating in the Brier Blast with 190 km/h gusts. The hottest week of the summer was the first week of fall, when more than 1,000 heat records fell across Atlantic Canada.
These extreme weather events — global weirding is the current description — are consistent with what climate change will bring.
Failure to reduce carbon emissions is “loading the dice” for ever more extreme floods, heat waves, droughts and hurricanes, Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, recently told The Verge.
Mother Nature is fighting back, and the old girl packs more than enough wallop to take out anything mere mortals can erect against her.
Scientific certainty that human differences are more apparent than real won’t open the minds of blind nationalists, jingoistic patriots or theocratic dictators. Nor is the risk posed by climate change sufficient persuasion to erase national borders in common cause. But what about the reality?
When the million refugees nations are unable to take in today become hundreds of millions or a billion displaced by flood and famine, what becomes of national borders?
The potential consequences of climate change are not dystopian imaginings, but predictions modelled by academics who spend their working lives, and lend their agile minds to, figuring out what’s in store for Earth as it gets hotter.
These scientists are not driven by morbid curiosity. They are trying to warn their fellow creatures what to avoid. Their revelations do not include four horsemen, but these prophets see Armageddon descending during the present century.
Fortress America’s military might can repel a human onslaught seeking her higher ground. Indeed, more than three million Americans will be flooded out by 2099 if current carbon emission levels keep warming the place up, so the U.S. may well hold firm to its present course and look out for number one.
But somewhere on the globe room must be found for at least half of Holland, much of southeast Asia, great masses of humanity currently living on the Indian subcontinent, and the populations of several oil-rich Middle Eastern sandlots. And that’s merely the flood-prone. Drought and famine will displace that many more.
Global warming is real, although the phrase is misleading. It does not result in more warmth for all, but in more severe and unpredictable climates everywhere. So northern Manitoba still won’t be hospitable to Bangladeshi families uprooted by water that never recedes.
Today, common humanity is insufficient to overcome more powerful nationalist forces — habit, fear, greed, prejudice and religion — as global wealth distribution and national immigration policies prove. Will so-called developed nations retreat behind national walls when hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion, fellow humans are about to be swept away on tides or by dry winds?
The future may remove the luxury of largesse and force hard choices, including whether common humanity is a greater force than nationalism.