Wildfires are ripping across California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska during this summer of 2015, the result of unprecedented droughts and record temperatures. Millions of hectares are being burned along with hundreds of homes. Fire-fighting costs are multiplying, the economic damage is soaring and the environmental consequences are foreboding.

The old ecologies of the Pacific Northwest are being reshaped as climate change begins the long and disruptive process of altering the weather and remaking the biological structure of the region.

Washington fires claim lives, threaten BC

Countless statistics tumble out of news reports as uncontrolled fires scorch California and dozens of active fires burn in Oregon and Washington. Bushfires explode because of unprecedented heat and wind, igniting whole neighbourhoods and even parts of downtowns, as was the case at the end of June in Wenatchee. Sometimes firefighters are the casualties.

Grass becomes tinder in the Pacific Northwest, waiting for any spark to set off a conflagration. Washington stopped counting and even fighting some its fires during parts of August, letting them burn to exhaustion, whenever that may occur. At least one has spread northward toward British Columbia.

BC’s firefighting costs exceed budget by 4 times

BC’s fire situation is similar to that in the American states to the south. Over 1,734 have been counted in the province since April and firefighting costs of more than $224 million have dwarfed a budget of $63 million. The focus of media attention shifts quickly from place to place depending on the size of the fire, the loss of property and the extent of human tragedy. Some people have barely escaped with their lives as walls of flames have roared toward them. The charred bodies of dead wildlife are commonly found in the ashen remains of the blackened landscapes. The danger in BC is exacerbated by the 18 million hectares of interior forest attacked by the mountain pine beetle.

Baked Alaska

Alaska, like BC, has undergone an average temperature increase of about 1.4°C, mostly during the last 50 years, and is at least as vulnerable to the effects of rising temperatures, droughts and wildfires. Record areas of the state have burned in 2015, 183 more than the 216 fires that burned during the scorching season of 2004.

From a climate perspective, Alaska’s fires are particularly serious because they burn off the deep layers of organic insulation that are protecting the permafrost from further melting and the subsequent release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. “Everything is connected,” notes Bob Bolton, a University of Alaska hydrologist.

[quote]The climate, the permafrost, the water, the fires. You can’t look at one without looking at the other. Changes in one changes everything. It’s a really, really sensitive system.[/quote]

A scary forecast

Complex ecologies such as the Pacific Northwest are similarly sensitive. Increased levels of atmospheric of carbon dioxide from human sources are raising temperatures, changing weather and forcing the region into a protracted and traumatic transition. Altered precipitation patterns are lowering crucially important snowpacks, degrading the vitality of watersheds and transforming the character of West Coast forests as California’s climate shifts northward.

The summer fires are just part of a difficult and disruptive climate revolution we have set in motion. This change may be welcomed by those who like California’s climate, but the process is going to leave many others badly burned.

The carbon emission numbers are disquieting. Despite the 2009 pledge of multiple nations to reduce the release of their greenhouse gases so that global average temperatures do not rise by more that 2°C, the total tonnage of carbon dioxide keeps going up. The chief scientist for the United Nations Environment Program, Joseph Alcamo, issued a November 2014 climate report that calculated the emissions for all such gases, including methane, must peak by 2030 at 42 billion tonnes per year and then fall to zero by the end of the century if the 2°C target is to be met.

Long way to go

The likelihood of reaching this target is getting more and more remote. According to the UN report, all indications are that emissions will continue to rise until 2050, at which time they will be 15 to 19 billion tonnes per year above the 42 billion tonnes ceiling. This means that by 2050, 20 years after emissions should have peaked and started to decline, another 300 to 380 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases will have been added to the biosphere — plus, of course, the approximately 17 billion tonnes that should have been reduced from the 42 billion for the period between 2030 and 2050.

The prospects for keeping the global average temperature rise below 2°C is now looking bleak. Granger Morgan, a climate scientist from America’s Carnegie Mellon University, noted that keeping to this target given today’s circumstances “is akin to a 60-year old man who resolves to be 25 years old next year. It ain’t gonna happen, but it’s time to get really serious about achieving what we can.” As some scientists have already considered, this would mean abandoning the 2°C target.

2°C: a compromise from the get-go

But the 2°C target was chosen as a realistic balance between two uncomfortable alternatives, what Dr. John Holdren, former Science and Technology advisor to US President Obama, describes as “the best we can do, while being the worst we can tolerate.” Abandoning the target would offer only a temporary relief in the pressure to reduce emissions, thereby creating the opportunity for further procrastination, increasing the difficulty of meeting future reductions, and raising the threat of environmental damage.

BC, Canada on wrong track

Canada is not going to come close to meeting the reductions it promised in 2009. British Columbia, if it continues with its dream of an LNG industry, is going to shatter any prospect of containing its present level of greenhouse gas emissions.

Alberta now appears as an anachronistic petro-state enthusiastically drilling and digging toward the edge of ecological doom. Even the vague emission reductions recently agreed to in bi-lateral discussions between the United States and China are not going to change significantly the global carbon calculations. The US intends to reduce its 2005 emissions by 28% by 2025 (about 2 billion tonnes), while China has agreed to reach unspecified maximum emissions by 2030. But something is better than nothing, and the agreement by the world’s top two emitters is bringing hope that the December 2015 climate talks in Paris will be able to reach legally binding agreements on carbon reductions.

Mark Carney climate chorus

Hope, of course, comes coupled with pressure as impatience for action escalates through frustration toward desperation. Cracks are appearing in the facade of pretending. One of the most surprising examples came from Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada who is now the governor of the Bank of England. At an October World Bank seminar, he repeated the brooding reality that first received publicity two years ago.

The world’s known fossil fuel reserves were then estimated to represent 2,795 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions if burned, of which only 565 billion tonnes could be burned if global temperatures were to be kept below the 2°C target. In Carney’s judgment:

[quote]The vast majority of [these] reserves are unburnable, [so will have to be considered as] “stranded assets”.[/quote]

Signs of hope

Other signs of hope mark the laborious struggle to control global greenhouse gas emissions as it becomes attached to local concerns. More carbon emissions accounts for one of the essential objections to the movement of Alberta’s tar sands bitumen through Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline to Kitimat.

Similarly, it’s one of the reasons why 126 people — including children, grandmothers and university professors — chose to be arrested in Burnaby for protesting Kinder-Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline proposal. Concerns about greenhouse gas emissions are connected to the shipment of American coal through Vancouver and Texada Island. The global has become inseparable from the local.

Canada stands in way of climate progress

This is the context in which Canada’s government has been thwarting emission controls while promoting its oil and gas policies. Fossil fuels simply do not — and cannot — have a significant future in any equation that is going to provide an optimistic option for our unfolding energy needs. Continuing to disregard the nearly invincible wall of peer-reviewed climate science would almost certainly be disastrous.

Indeed, decades of delays in reducing our carbon dioxide emissions is already moving us into threatening circumstances.

At this very moment humanity is writing a crucial chapter in its history. What we and our politicians decide to do about carbon emissions will likely be the single largest determinant in defining our legacy, in shaping the lives of generations to come, and in regulating the health of our planet.

All the important evidence suggests that this is not rhetorical hyperbole. Each one of us, from our prime minister, our premiers and our elected governments to every citizen will be measured by the decisions that we make in the immediate future. The numbers are clear, the calculations are disquieting, and the opportunity for avoiding a colossal tragedy is rapidly closing.

I hesitate to give the man any more publicity.

Patrick Moore, a former environmentalist and now a constant and consistent spokesman for right-wing causes, had an article on the op-ed page of the Vancouver Province, September 24th edition. In it, he denies the worldwide scientific opinion that global warming here, driven by humans, and a deadly serious problem. The Province, in my view, has become the leading journal of the right and regularly publishes the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation and the Fraser Institute so Moore is a natural for them.

A long way from Greenpeace

Moore has been utterly inactive in environmental matters for years – in fact, being an unspoken foe of those who are. This particularly includes Captain Paul Watson who has, with unbelievable courage, done so much to save whales and other mammals in our oceans. Moore bills himself as an environmentalist, which is Orwellian in the extreme and makes true environmentalists want to retch.

Moore plays on claims that he was a founder of Greenpeace (though this is disputed), a director of Greenpeace Canada and of Greenpeace International. This is somewhat like Satan reminding us that before he was tossed out, he was once a colleague of the Saints in heaven.

In fact, Moore was made unwelcome both at the Canadian and the International level and has been persona non grata ever since.

Moore was last in the news for criticizing the president of Greenpeace International for using airplanes for travel while he, Moore, regularly uses cruise ships to make lectures, and money – cruise ships themselves being a major consumer of fossil fuels.

Downplaying human-caused climate change

The pith and substance of Moore’s article is that there is doubt that global warming is actually taking place. He trots down the usual path, referring to times before the Ice Age and that sort of thing.

What Moore ignores is that since the Industrial Revolution, and particularly for the last hundred years, humankind, both socially and industrially, has dumped ever-increasing amounts of waste into the atmosphere. This makes the situation today vastly different then it was in the years gone by to which Moore refers. One is tempted to think that, given Moore’s self-proclaimed expertise and glibness, this is a deliberate oversight.

Sewing seeds of doubt

Moore then moves into the area of the law in talking about “doubt”. He clearly assumes that if any sort of doubt is raised about a proposition, it must fail.

This is not what standards of proof are all about and the standard cannot be the mere raising of doubt.

We have two choices as to standard of proof required. In civil cases it is called “balance of probabilities”, whereas in criminal cases it is “reasonable doubt” – a much heavier onus.

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The question of global warming has to be, of course, subject to standards of proof, as are all allegations that cannot be proved beyond any doubt whatsoever. But if mere doubt were the standard in criminal law, for example, there would be very few ever convicted of a crime. Any good criminal lawyer will tell you that he can raise a “doubt” in the most flagrant of circumstances.

It can even be raised about a man with a gun in his hand standing over a corpse. Even though the man with the gun is demonstrated to have been a bitter enemy of the deceased, a “doubt” can always be raised.

Criminal law sets the standard at “reasonable” doubt. This is surely the standard we must set with respect to global warming.

The science is clear

The scientific community has been investigating this issue very closely for decades. All the doubters, like Moore, have been heard and their arguments more than met. The result by 2014 is a very clear. Beyond a reasonable doubt, climate change is with us, with disastrous consequences for now and the future.

We, the general public, sit as a common jury assessing the evidence before us. We must decide whether or not the virtually unanimous opinion of the scientific community is to be preferred over the bleatings of Patrick Moore and his ilk.

What’s the harm in tackling climate change?

Another way of looking at this is: What if the scientific community is wrong? In that most unlikely event, we will have cleaned up our air and established a far healthier  atmosphere in the world. Surely that would be a very good thing, no matter what impact warming was having.

On the other hand, if we follow Moore, and he is wrong, we have exacerbated in the extreme the catastrophe which faces us.

Patrick Moore is entitled to his opinions and, of course, The Province is entitled to be a shill for neo-lib views – but in evaluating Moore’s opinions one must remember where he is coming from. This former environmentalist is now a proponent of nuclear, supports the tar sands, pipelines, and tanker traffic carrying bitumen.

As that juror, I have no trouble deciding for the scientific community and that Moore has no credibility.

Patrick Moore is likeable and glib but, on a balance of probabilities, dead wrong.