The kaleidoscope turns, the patterns change, but the colours remain mostly dark and sombre. This year, last year, and the years before are sobering because the dramatic changes in awareness, policy and mechanisms we need to address our major environmental challenges do not match the urgency they require.

Everyone who is informed on environmental matters is justifiably subdued because our corrective actions are not even slowing the erosion of the fundamental ecosystems that provide us with our essential comfort and security. Some individual and local efforts have been heroic. Some European countries have met or exceeded their Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gas reduction targets. But the record for the collective human community has been dismal. Most measures indicate deteriorating ecological conditions. Science confirms that our multiple environmental problems are escalating from serious to crisis.

The ethical reflex of those who are concerned about these environmental threats is to go where the problem is, to assume a critical position and highlight shortcomings for correction and future avoidance. This is not only a journalistic inclination but a moral imperative. If we are to confront our behaviour and its consequences realistically then we must examine ourselves with a blunt and painful honestly. We can applaud our successes – and we have many of them – but they mostly measure small against the enormity of the challenges we face. Changing to more energy efficient lights bulbs, building biking routes or buying a fuel efficient car may make us feel better but they are corrective actions that barely register against the magnitude of the changes we must accomplish. Complacence and an exaggerated sense of accomplishment is dangerous self-deception. As for solutions in progress, they no longer need attention because they are now effecting their benefits. The big worries are the big problems. And 2011 addressed them poorly.

The United Nations’ December climate talks in Durban were mostly unsuccessful, a formal exercise in futility that succeeded only by rescuing delay from the jaws of total failure. If climatologists are correct, we don’t have another eight years of grace to negotiate and implement an international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions. This strategy is so fraught with procrastination, pitfalls and vague commitments that – if precedent is any indication – either nothing will happen in 2020 or binding reductions will happen too late to avoid serious climate change.

A recent study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for example, compares the economic damage in 2050 by two strategies: by either making low-cost reductions in greenhouse gases immediately or by delaying major reductions until 2020. The worldwide impact on “real income” for the first option was minus-6 percent and minus-9 percent for the second option. According to the OECD projections, Canada would fare worse than the world average with both options: minus-12 percent for immediate reductions versus minus-15 percent for delayed reductions (Globe & Mail, Nov. 28/11).

And this is just the impact on “real income”. The UN has estimated that by 2030, the economic damage from climate change alone will be about $100 billion annually, a figure that counts only added health expenses, farming adaptation and infrastructure repairs. A broader assessment of costs, considering flooding, storms, manufacturing impacts and ecosystem restoration at least triples that annual amount to $300 billion. And even this amount may be too low because the UN’s worst-case scenarios for carbon dioxide emissions are regularly exceeded. In 2011 alone, the United States had a total of $52 billion in damages from a record of 12 major weather events (Ibid., Dec. 9/11). Statistically, 75 percent of all natural disasters are now climate related. The obvious conclusion to be reached from this trend is that greenhouse gases have incontrovertible adverse effects on weather and, from a purely economic perspective, we would find it cheaper to cut emissions now rather than later.

But that’s just climate change. We have other critical issues that need immediate attention. Species extinction is in freefall. The world’s industrial fishing fleets are exhausting the oceans of fish, the source of protein for one-fifth of humanity. Why is no emergency action being taken to create protective marine reserves? Acidification, dead zones and pollution beleaguer our oceans, problems that need immediate action. Canada, instead of subverting action on climate change and muzzling scientific dialogue, could be leading the world community toward sustainable uses of our oceans and resources. It could be spearheading a universal carbon tax on all CO2 production, a levy that could be directed toward preventative measures such as energy research, mass transit and ecological protection. (Both BC and Australia have a variation of this tax.) Instead of subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and encouraging Alberta’s dirty tar sands, Canada could be financing geothermal energy, a massive source of clean and renewable power that could meet our nation’s entire electrical needs with as few as 100 projects (Times-Colonist, Sept. 14/11).

So a review of 2011 provides the sobering realization that the world community – and Canada in particular – is moving backwards rather than forwards on key environmental issues. Circumstances are getting worse rather than better. We are not rising to meet our environmental challenges. If we were at least moving in a positive direction perhaps some optimism would be warranted. Criticism and negativity are prevalent because humanity – and particularly Canada – is failing the most important test in our history as a species. Cynicism is rising measurably. Political leaders seem to lack the insight, will or ability to take the necessary remedial action. And voters seem to lack the perspective, conviction or resolve to direct them to do what is increasingly imperative.

If this changes, then the colours in the kaleidoscope will brighten. Maybe 2012 will be a better year.

One of the most insightful and profound poets of the 20th century was T.S. Eliot, and one of his most powerful poems was The Hollow Men, a disturbing portrait of a people paralyzed by doubt, uncertainty, confusion and a debilitating faith that nourished resignation rather than conviction and action. “We are the hollow men,” he wrote, “the stuffed men”, and “Our dried voices, when / We whisper together / Are quiet and meaningless / As wind and dry grass / Or rats’ feet over broken glass / In our dry cellar.” The poem ends with a simple, mindless and infectious incantation that anticipates a sorry future earned by default rather than intention:

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Ecologists with a philosophical perspective are quick to remind us that the world is not going to end. It has already survived at least five other cataclysms that were as traumatic as anything we are capable of inflicting on it, so regardless of what we do, it will still be here. The future in question is not our physical planet but our civilization as we presently know it.

We get some glimpse of this future from the Canadian government’s advisory panel, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. Its report, Paying the Price: The Economic Impacts of Climate Change for Canada, is “the first of its kind to analyze Canadian trends in the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, population and the economy in the context of climate change science” (Times Colonist, Sept. 30/11). The findings and implications are sobering.

If “governments reject the science that links human activity and greenhouse gas pollution to global warming” and do not actively and immediately undertake emission reductions, then we can expect very costly damage from flooding, rising oceans, extreme weather and ecological transformations that will cause “dramatic changes to the forest industry and other sectors” (Ibid.). By 2020 these costs are expected to be $5 billion per year, escalating to as much as $43 billion per year by 2050. This means that money being spent on health, education, infrastructure and services will be diverted to preventing or repairing damage done by climate change.

BC, with its coastal cities and inhabited shorelines, is particularly vulnerable. As ocean levels rise, dykes in the greater Vancouver area will have to be heightened and reinforced. Higher ocean levels mean rivers will evacuate less effectively so lowland flooding will be more common. Extreme rainfall will increase this risk. “The annual cost of flood damage to dwellings in British Columbia by the 2050s is estimated to be between $2.2 billion at the baseline level to $7.6 billion under the ‘high-climate change’ scenario” (Ibid.). (“Baseline level” probably means the costs to which we are committed by climate change conditions already set in motion.) The per-capita costs to British Columbians will be between $565 to $2,146 per year, a huge drain on the economic viability of our present way of life – not to mention the grief, loss, trauma and social stresses caused by the damage and dislocation. Unusual wind, snow and heat will add other costly complexities. The report concludes that, “Ignoring climate change costs now will cost us more later.”

Individual communities and provinces have initiated modest steps to avoid climate change by slowly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. BC, for example, has an escalating carbon tax and Ontario is phasing out coal-fired power plants. But BC’s insistence on exporting increasing quantities of coal and Alberta’s energy-intensive production of oil from its tar sands are counteracting these benefits.

Meanwhile, Canada’s emphasis has been on adaptation, a term that really means easing the consequences of climate change rather than preventing them. Despite having a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emission to 1990 levels within a vague 10 to 15 years, Canada’s casual measures do not match the urgency being advocated by climatologists. Furthermore, the global community has generally rated Canada’s historic contributions to international agreements as dismal.

So this is our present situation. Despite local, provincial, national and international efforts, global greenhouse gases emissions continue to rise rather than fall. Although new technology is responsible for incremental reductions, it is not supplying the breakthrough inventions needed to counteract the effects of soaring populations ever hungry for more energy, resources and consumer goods. The world’s present economic system is not saving us from the future that climate science is predicting. And politics is not yet reflecting the severity of this unfolding environmental crisis. We know with increasing clarity that “humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet”, as Jeffrey Sachs wisely notes in his book, Common Wealth, but this insight is not yet powerful enough to motivate us to collective, corrective action.

The most sobering prospect – the one intimated by T.S. Eliot – is one in which most people anticipate the ominous arrival of global climate change but only an ineffective few have the convictions to act to avoid it. The result of this collective inertia will be that we abdicate choice for the implacable forces of nature. If this happens, we will eventually be responding to a succession of calamities that become progressively more costly and debilitating. Adaptation will become defeat, a tragic process of repairing and then retreating from those cherished places and conditions where we once prospered.

The story of three blind men describing an elephant illustrates the shortcomings of trying to understand global climate change by regarding only local weather. One man wraps his arms around a leg and decides that an elephant is like a tree. Another is feeling the contours of its trunk and deduces that an elephant is like a snake. The third is touching an ear and concludes that an elephant is like heavy canvas. A little more perspective would lead them to a more accurate description.

Just as we are inclined to construe the personal as universal, individual experience inclines us to believe that the local is global. So for people who lived in the southwest corner of British Columbia during spring and early summer of 2011, the protracted bout of unseasonably cool and wet weather might be erroneously construed as the weather occurring elsewhere.

The six-state region of the US southwest – Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee – had months of “exceptional” drought. By September, Texas was enduring its worst dry spell since measurements began in 1895. A “disaster declaration” has been announced for every month of 2011. To date, wildfires have burned 40,000 hectares and engulfed more than 1,000 homes. Meanwhile, the nearby Missouri and Mississippi Rivers have offered some of “the greatest floods in US history” (Guardian Weekly, June 24/11).

For America’s Atlantic coast, 2011 was the stormiest year on record – these intense weather systems brought heavy rains but winds must exceed 119 km/hr for hurricane classification. Even though September’s “Irene” was downgraded to a storm, it still ravaged much the East Coast, deluging 11 states in torrential rains, killing 38 people and causing an estimated $20 billion in flood damage.

Elsewhere in the US, a record number of tornadoes twisted through the southern states – 600 alone in the month of April. Wind, heat and drought in Arizona created some of the largest wildfires that state has ever known (Ibid.). Oklahoma set yearly records for cold (-35C) and 24-hour snowfall (68.5 cm). Record weather damage is now noted as a factor in America’s economic woes.

Mexico suffered the hottest temperatures (48.8C) on the planet in April. “Nearly half the country is now affected by drought. There have already been 9,000 wildfires, and the biggest farm union says that more than 3.5 million farmers are on the brink of bankruptcy because they cannot feed cattle or grow crops” (Ibid..).

After one of the coldest winters in 300 years, drought zones were declared in much of England and Wales in June when rain failed to arrive, making it the hottest and driest spring in 100 years. Kent was receiving as much rain in May as Timbuktu, Manchester was getting more sunshine than Spain’s Costa del Sol, and soils in southern England were drier than those in Egypt (Ibid.). Meanwhile, “Scotland registered its wettest-ever May” (Ibid.). British meteorologists were describing their weather as “remarkable”, “unprecedented” and “shocking” (Ibid.).

Although hot conditions still prevail in the agricultural regions of eastern Europe and Russia in 2011, last year was extraordinary. The hottest summer in at least 500 years scorched 2 million square kilometres of crops, contributed to the death of 50,000 people, caused hundreds of giant wildfires, and created crop failures that initiated worldwide grain shortages when Russia curtailed all exports. Summer drought and heat are causing even more fires in Northern Russia for 2011 than 2010.

As the Guardian Weekly pointed out, western Europe had its turn of extreme weather this year. Record hot weather stressed 16 countries in March, April and May. Rainfall was half of normal. Then the heat and dryness ended with “massive storms and flash floods [that] left the streets of Germany and France running like rivers” (Ibid.).

Australia ended a 10 year drought of unprecedented magnitude last year with record Queensland floods in January of 2011. Australians deemed this event their “worst natural disaster”, with economic costs expected to be about $32 billion.

2011 brought another once-in-a-century drought to China, scorching the southern and central regions, drying up rivers and reservoirs, shrivelling crops and fomenting political unrest. In an effort to quell the turmoil, the Chinese seeded the sky with various rain-inducing chemicals. By design or coincidence, the drought ended with torrential rains – in some places, as much as 30 cm in 24 hours – that caused floods, mudslides, thousands of wrecked homes and 94 deaths.

A worldwide tracking of local weather in 2010 identified 17 countries that measured record high temperatures, including Colombia, Peru, Cuba, Kenya, Somalia and the Amazon Basin. While Rajasthan in India registered 49.6C, Kuwait reached temperatures above 50C.

Climate statistics confirming more freak and extreme weather are corroborated by insurance companies. Worldwide claims from natural disasters have risen from $25 billion per year in the 1980s to $130 billion in 2010. Canada’s freaky weather has been confirmed by the Insurance Bureau of Canada which notes that the severity and frequency of tropical storms has caused “water damage” to replace “fire and theft” as half of all its claims.

Although climate scientists cannot attribute any specific weather event to global climate change, a trend is clearly discernable. Extreme weather has now become the “new normal”, according to officials at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Vancouver Sun, Aug. 26/11). Whether this trend is meaningful, of course, is quite another matter. But it should remind coastal British Columbians that a little cooler and wetter than normal may be better than the alternatives.