Sweltering through a Global Warmaggedon
If you still doubt the reality of climate change or the existential threat it poses to humanity, consider the blistering, blazing summer currently baking the Earth’s Northern Hemisphere.
Since late June, extreme, record-setting high temperatures have struck around the world, from North America to Europe, China and Japan and from just north of the equator to above the Arctic Circle.
In Quebec, at least 54 people died from heat-related complications last month when a humid, high-temperature dome hovered for days above that province, as well as much of Ontario.
England’s normally green and pleasant land turned red-hot as drought-like conditions prevailed. Africa likely witnessed its hottest temperature ever in early July — 51.3 C (124 Fahrenheit) in Algeria. All-time heat records were also set in Montreal, California, New Hampshire, Armenia, south Russia and Tbilisi, Georgia. Spain may sweat through its hottest day ever this weekend.
And as nature turned up the thermostat, forests burned uncontrollably — in Ontario, California and, most tragically, Greece where 91 people died in wildfires.
In the face of what might seriously be called a “Global Warmaggedon,” climate-change skeptics will argue it always gets hot in summertime, that there are always forest fires and that climate patterns shift over the centuries without any human involvement.
Sorry. That doesn’t explain what’s unfolding now. Intense, potentially lethal summer temperatures are more widespread than before. More wildfires are burning than in a typical year. And you know things are positively weird when vegetation north of the Arctic Circle catches flames and scientists say they’ve never seen a heat wave so far north.
The link between human-driven climate change and this long, hot summer which is only halfway over is, according to climate scientists, clear and definite.
In the words of one of the world’s foremost climate scientists, Penn State University’s Michael Mann, “This is the face of climate change.”
To be sure it is imprecise to say climate change caused a specific heat wave or forest fire. According to scientists like Mann, however, climate change has created the conditions that allow these extreme events, and make them happen more often.
Jet-steam patterns have been crazily altered, allowing hot air masses to move where they normally wouldn’t. Warmer springs encourage vegetation growth, while heat and drought dries out that vegetation, fuelling more wildfires.
Of course, if the experts are correct, the world has just started to feel the impact of climate change. The good news is we know what must be done to avert its catastrophic consequences — slash the greenhouse gas emissions that come from, among other human activities, burning fossil fuels.
The bad news is we’re not doing what we must. Under the misguidance of President Donald Trump, the United States pulled out of the Paris agreement on climate change. In Canada, many provincial governments, including Ontario, are resisting the federal government’s push for putting a price on carbon emissions in order to reduce them.
Indeed this week, perhaps buckling under pressure from some provinces as well as the business community, the federal Liberals scaled back their demands for taxing carbon emissions. We know that politicians walk a precarious tightrope as they balance economic and environmental imperatives. But we have to do better. Here in Ontario, where the new Progressive Conservative government has scrapped an earlier initiative to reduce carbon emissions, there is no discernible provincial plan to fight climate change. That’s unacceptable.