speaking about environmental issues ....
Friday » August 8 » 2003
The climate's too hot to handle
Fire, drought, pine beetles. The evidence of global warming is all around us and it's time to do something about it
Stephen Hume
Special to the Sun
Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun / Premier Gordon Campbell, who saw the devastation caused by forest fires near Kamloops Tuesday, has to stop dismantling the province's environmental programs, says columnist Stephen Hume.
Let's see, whole communities threatened by conflagrations extending from the Crowsnest Pass to the Chilcotin and 7,500 people evacuated -- only our stubborn sense of denial prevents us from calling them what they are, which is environmental refugees.
So, how do you like global climate change? And this summer is just one of the hors d'oeuvres -- the main course is yet to come, to be served hot whether you like it or not.
If much of British Columbia is a tinderbox waiting to erupt into wildfires, I don't find it particularly surprising.
We're only having a replay of 1998, the hottest year on record. And if this fire season seems worse, well, British scientists are predicting that 2003 is on track to become the hottest year, a consistent pattern for 20 years.
Despite loud denials from industries that benefit from adding to the world's inventory of greenhouse gases, common sense suggests there might be a connection between the planet's steadily rising temperature and conditions in B.C. Logic suggests that if this is the consequence now, it could get a lot worse later.
So let's quickly take stock. We have forests laid waste by pine beetle infestations that should have been held in check by winter cold. Instead, a warm winter means thousands of square kilometres of beetle kill are drying out in this summer's heat wave. They will provide fuel for a new round of fires in the next hot, dry summer.
Winter snow packs have diminished and, because we've logged so many upper watersheds, what run-off there is comes swooshing out where once it would have been held back by tree cover to dribble cold water out over summer months.
In crucial rivers, temperatures now routinely approach the lethal range for fish. Water shortages trigger urban rationing. But some of us cling to the delusion that we have enough water to export it to the U.S. So we speculate about water exports while drought imperils our own prairie livestock operations and field crops.
Of course, this is not just about us.
Forest fires sweeping through Spain, Portugal, France and Italy this summer have left 14 dead. More fires scorch remote Siberia. At 22 million hectares, the burn there is already double the 11 million hectares incinerated last year and the pall of smoke obscures the view from space.
Fires were so intense across Southeast Asia this season that when NASA passed a satellite over in April, it mapped immense infusions of carbon monoxide into the atmosphere over Myanmar, south China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. The plume reached three kilometres high and spread out over the western Pacific. Season after season, Australia has been ravaged by wildfires. Not to mention California.
Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, Germany, Serbia, Spain, Italy and France, farmers are warning of drastic reductions in cereal and dairy yields. Heat in Spain killed more than a million chickens and stressed the survivors so severely that they suffered dramatic weight losses, driving poultry prices up by more than a third.
In B.C., we've got West Nile virus knocking at our door. Farther south, the mosquitoes that carry dengue hemorrhagic fever, yellow fever and malaria expand their ranges dramatically as winters become milder and rainfall increases. Tick-borne diseases like bubonic plague and Rocky Mountain fever are spreading. Rift fever expands in Africa.
Which is why the lead scientists on a two-year baseline study analysing epidemics across plant and animal systems said they were alarmed by what they found on land and in the sea.
"The accumulation of evidence has us extremely worried," said epidemiologist Andrew Dobson of Princeton University. "The risk for humans is going up."
Now, before I go farther, a cautionary word.
All you folks who are still convinced that global warming is a gigantic hoax cooked up by junk science, hysterical greens and sensational columnists out to sell papers; those who think that even if climate change is for real, human activities don't have much to do with it and the Kyoto accords are folly; those who are certain that a rise in average temperature will be beneficial; those who blame it on solar output -- I respect your right to think what you like, but please don't bombard me with your arguments.
I've heard the conspiracy theories. I'm just not in the mood to debate with ideological missionaries. Please direct arguments on behalf of everybody's right to drive an SUV, industry's right to add millions of tonnes of crud to the atmosphere, the apocalyptic job losses that will accompany serious pollution control and the communist-inspired insanity of public transit at somebody else.
I suggest the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the British government's Hadley Centre for meteorological studies, the Institute of Earth and Ocean Sciences here in B.C., the Union of Concerned Scientists, the American Academy of Sciences and the federal and provincial environment ministries. Convince them first.
In the meantime, consider me eccentric, but I find reports that nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1990 and that this one may be the hottest yet rather alarming.
Which makes it the more dismaying to watch Premier Gordon Campbell dismantling B.C.'s environmental programs like a little kid pulling apart his rival sibling's Lego set.
Those who feel the same way after the events of recent weeks might think a bit harder about what it will take to get provincial premiers like Campbell and Alberta's Ralph Klein, who's been playing dog-in-the-manger over Kyoto, to start paying serious attention to what's happening around them, which -- after all -- is only what we pay them to do.
shume@islandnet.com
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