By superimposing a big red “N” over the black “m” in “Global Warming”, the editors of a feature article on greenhouse gas emissions in NewScientist magazine (Nov. 17/12) altered the title to “Global WarNing”. This simple change of a single letter summarizes the sobering prospects of climate change induced by continuing to burn the fossil fuels that emit massive quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

It’s a disconcerting subject that is uncomfortable to consider. But, as the scientific calculations and modelling become more refined and credible, the predictions become more ominous. So we are being forced to contemplate the consequences for our unfolding future.

The magazine’s article, of course, is couched in the rational and calm language of science. The graphs, too, seem decorative and innocuous — until their meaning actually begins to register. On virtually every front of the climate change issue, we are exceeding the worse case scenarios described in 2007 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That prediction was for a 4°C global temperature increase by 2100. The revised prediction in 2009 was for 5°C. The 2011 revision was for 5.5°C. The most recent predictions are now 4°C by 2060 or 2070, with 6°C likely by 2100 and a 10 percent chance of 7°C. Meanwhile, the graph showing the actual annual tonnage of carbon dioxide emissions — 34.8 billion in 2011 — continues to angle steeply upward, the only sign of any reduction being a small dip during the “Great Recession” of 2008-9.

This is sobering information. Indeed, it’s scary for anyone who thinks beyond the moment and begins to imagine what these temperatures mean. The NewScientist article offers seven sketches.

• The volume of Arctic ice is “just a fifth of what it was three decades ago.” If current trends continue, the summer Arctic will be ice-free within a few decades. This means “more extreme weather in the northern hemisphere, faster melting of the Greenland ice sheet and greater releases of carbon currently locked away in permafrost.” Climate history has shown that even minor changes can have huge consequences — and the loss of Arctic ice is a major change.

• Global weather is getting more extreme. The water cycle has increased by double the rate anticipated in 2007 climate models. This means more heavy rainfall. The intensity of precipitation in China and Taiwan has increased ten-fold in the last three decades. Polar jet streams, the winds that distribute weather systems, slow down as the temperature difference decreases between the tropics and a faster-warming Arctic. Consequently, weather patterns tend to “get stuck”, causing longer hot spells, cold spells, droughts and rain storms.

• Slightly higher temperatures and a little more atmospheric carbon dioxide were expected to increase plant growth and, therefore, food production. But the anticipated benefits have been undone by the negative effects of extreme and irregular weather. The production of wheat, maize, rice and soybeans — 75 percent of humanity’s calories — fell by 1 percent between 1980 and 2008, and the decrease would have been 3 percent without more intensive fertilizing. In the US, scientists are predicting that production of these crucial calorie crops will fall by three-quarters by the end of this century if farmers attempt to grow them in existing locations. Above 35°C, many of such crops will fail to pollinate. The same scenario will apply elsewhere on the planet.

• Sea level rise is accelerating. The 0.3 mm per year predicted by the IPCC in 2007 is now 1.3 mm per year. Conservative predictions are for a total rise of one meter by 2100, with a possibility of 2 metres. This would cause havoc in most major coastal cities.

• Warming oceans and land will absorb less carbon dioxide, thereby increasing the atmospheric effect of continuing emissions. Rising temperatures will also release methane, methane hydrates and carbon dioxide presently held in cold storage, thereby accelerating the warming process.

• Present carbon dioxide emissions have now reached the top of the 2007 IPCC’s worst case scenario. Even if we were willing and capable of cutting emissions dramatically and immediately, we are “most probably” on the path to a 4°C rise by 2100, “way above the 2°C level it was declared we should avoid at all costs” (Ibid.). Most scientists, the NewScientist notes, “have underplayed the significance of the emissions story to make their message politically more acceptable” (Ibid.).

• Heat stress becomes an issue in hotter conditions. People are unable to perspire sufficiently to cool themselves when humidity and temperature rise beyond the so-called “wet-bulb temperature” of 35°C — they suffer exhaustion, heat stroke and kidney failure. A planet that warms by 7°C would render “vast swaths of Africa, Australia, China, Brazil, India and the US…uninhabitable for at least part of the year” (Ibid.).The full “development” of all the world’s fossil fuels would eventually create a largely “unliveable planet”.

This is the preliminary scenario presented by the thousands of scientists who are working toward the next official IPCC report due in 2014. It’s a conscientious and dispassionate effort to describe the future we are creating — a future that no one will like.

Consciousness can be costly. Philosophers and poets have long pondered this dilemma. But the idea has rarely entered the theories of evolutionary scientists until Dr. Danny Brower introduced it to Dr. Ajit Varki, an oncologist who is also an authority on cellular biology and an expert on anthropogeny (the origin of humans).

Dr. Varki met Dr. Danny Brower for a brief but intense hour at a 2005 conference on the origins of human uniqueness. As a geneticist, Dr. Brower was fascinated with the evolution of human consciousness. But he was less curious about the human ability to be aware of their own minds and the minds of others as he was about the apparent inability of other animals to develop the same facility. Whales, elephants, apes, dolphins, and some birds such as magpies provide clear evidence of self-awareness. Even though they have existed in evolutionary history for much longer than humans, however, they have never developed the same degree of self-awareness, empathetic sensitivity, social sophistication and intellectual acumen as humans. Dr. Brower thought he had an answer.

His answer haunted Dr. Varki. So, when Dr. Brower died suddenly in 2007, leaving an incomplete manuscript, Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind, Dr. Varki inherited the task of finishing it. The completed book explores the advantages, costs and implications of our human capacity to understand, empathize, organize and act, the attributes that define us as individuals, societies and civilizations.

Dr. Varki notes that some species of animals seem capable of recognizing themselves as individuals and of mourning the death of their fellows. Such animals may even recognize their own mortality, a traumatizing experience that could be psychologically crippling without the protection of an appropriate defence mechanism. And this mechanism, the theory proposes, is denial.

Humans may have succeeded where other species have failed because we have simultaneously developed the contradictory capacity for both self-awareness and denial. Thus we are capable of exercising all the intellectual, empathetic, social and cultural skills that are responsible for our amazing accomplishments but we are also capable of isolating ourselves from the inevitable death which shadows all our efforts. This capacity, the theory suggests, is the adroit device of evolution that allows us to function while avoiding the heavy psychological cost of knowing the inevitable consequence of being alive. The problem presented by self-awareness is solved simply by sidestepping the reality we do not want to confront.

As Dr. Varki outlines in his elaboration of Dr. Brower’s theory, this is a useful strategy for the individual. And it has advantages for society, too. So people undertake enterprises they would never begin if they actually confronted the reality of the challenges. Denial forms a partnership with optimism to remove the obstacles preventing us from attempting the unpredictable, difficult or impossible. Travelling to the moon, rowing across the Pacific, or working faithfully for 45 years to reach a retirement pension all require an erasing of very credible risks and obstacles. Such ordinary activities as having a baby, driving on a freeway, flying in an airplane or buying a lottery ticket all require acts of denial. Even falling in love is an act that doesn’t consider the possibility of heartbreak. So risk and failure are blindly overlooked for the prospect of benefit. Bravery could be one word to describe such behaviour — if we were fully aware. But a better word might be denial, a strategy which Dr. Varki refers to as “terror management”.

The shortcoming of denial, however, is that it tends to be indiscriminate — so we deny things we should confront. Denial is also a much better coping strategy for an individual than for a species. Indeed, the loss of a few individuals because of their refusal to confront reality is unlikely to endanger the viability of an entire society. But this constraint no longer applies in a globalized world. If denial is responsible for a nuclear holocaust, then this lurking Armageddon could obliterate much of civilization as we know it. What if denial results in the use of uncontrollable biological weapons, or the release of a virus which could initiate an unstoppable global pandemic? What if genetic tinkering inadvertently creates an organism which crashes the planet’s biological systems? The denial mechanism which once affected only local people in local places could potentially affect life on the entire planet.

This is the context in which Dr. Varki raises the subject of climate change. The mechanisms we use to avoid confronting this threat are extraordinary. It is a silence that pervades many conversation. It is a subject that elections commonly avoid. It is a science that politicians suppress — at least in Canada where those who raise it are deemed pessimists, heretics, cynics, enemies, radicals.

Of course, reality is remarkably insistent. So the trauma of extreme weather events force climate change into public awareness where it is too often heard but denied. The required remedial action is invariably postponed. The necessary government regulations become promises that never materialize. Excuses and rationalizations abound as the carbon dioxide levels rise and the planet’s weather becomes more unusual, threatening and destructive. Dr. Varki summarizes the stakes succinctly. “This is the one case,” he says of global warming, “where we cannot afford to get it wrong the first time.”

Dr. Varki concedes that his refinements to Dr. Brower’s theory need more scientific study and evaluation. But, he contends, the theory seems to fit the evidence. More sobering, however, is the way the theory seems to fit our history.

The tragedy of the Calgary flood is mostly being reported in stories, interviews and anecdotes that are rich in heroism, tenacity, resilience, stoicism, determination and sometimes even moments of levity. The unstoppable rising waters of the Bow and Elbow Rivers also brought the adversity that bonded people into a community of incredible co-operation and caring. The flood was an unmitigated disaster. But it happened. And the stories attest to its terrible impact and severity. But little reportage has attempted to explain why it happened.

Calgary’s flood, it seems, is just the latest in a growing frequency of extreme weather events that have been causing havoc nearly everywhere on the planet. Indeed, the list is getting too long to itemize. While Canadian news was fixated on Alberta’s misfortune, the same weather system was causing unusual flooding in south-eastern BC, with implications for the entire eastern watershed of the Rockies. But elsewhere — media attention goes to the most immediate and dramatic — other disasters were occurring. While Calgary was drowning, extreme monsoons with torrential rains of extraordinary intensity were sweeping away entire villages and killing hundreds in India. Colorado was having the worst forest fires in its history. Record floods in central Europe were just subsiding. Northern Mexico and the southern United States are now suffering regular and protracted droughts. Australia — for macabre variety — seems to alternate between unprecedented floods, droughts and fires.

And this is barely a sample. Pakistan, Poland, France, Thailand, Brazil, Japan, Russia and the Philippines have all been traumatized recently by extreme weather events. New York is trying to recover from the 2012 ravages of Hurricane Sandy, and New Orleans from the 2005 impact of Katrina. The city of Toronto has spent at least $700 million repairing the damage from four once-in-a-century floods in the last 20 years. Manitoba hasn’t fully recovered from a 2011 flood that did $1 billion in damage and necessitated another $1 billion in preventative engineering.

The last once-in-a-century flood to hit Calgary was in 2005. The current flood was immeasurably worse — after water levels had subsided considerably, they were still twice as high as the 2005 flood. “Surreal. This cannot be,” was the response of one Calgarian who was trying to reconcile the reality with a recollection of normality. “This is unbelievable,” said another who couldn’t understand how the benign little Bow and Elbow Rivers that usually wander so innocently through the city could become raging monsters. “Completely unprecedented,” said the province’s premier, Alison Redford, “the largest flood in Alberta’s history.” Indeed, this claim has been confirmed by the flood’s unsurpassed speed, level and scope.

To address the disaster, Premier Redford has allocated an immediate $1 billion to assist the pressing task of early cleaning and restoration. Those without access to money will be provided with instant cash. The initial economic damage to businesses is estimated to be $2 billion. The property damage may be $5 billion. A 10-year recovery plan is being designed to return the city to its former pride. What cannot be returned to the city, however, is its former innocence because such events are becoming much more frequent.

This particular flood was caused principally by a torrential rainstorm in the Bow River watershed, a deluge that dropped nearly 250 mm of water in a matter of hours — half as much precipitation as the area usually receives in an entire year. The river swelled to raging proportions, taking out trees, bridges, highways, homes and every obstruction in its path.

Although no individual event of this severity can be attributed to the anthropogenic changes in the planet’s hydrological cycle, the increasing frequency of such events leads to no other likely conclusion. On a warming planet, the rhythms of evaporation and precipitation become more intense. The atmosphere holds and releases greater quantities of moisture. The basic physics of climate change is as predictable as gravity. Many of the details are still uncertain but the science is quite precise about the effects on the hydrological cycle when global temperatures rise. The only uncertainties are the specifics. This time the surprise occurred for Calgary.

Indeed, it is a sad and terrible justice that the “energy capital of Canada”, one of the business centres for the world’s production of fossil fuels, should be the victim of a storm linked to climate change. The full dimensions of the tragedy are not diminished by this coincidence. Significantly, Calgary is also the family home and riding of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, our political leader who has made a disproportionate contribution to thwarting the efforts of the global community to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. Did his helicopter flight over the drowned and crippled city change his thinking?

Calgary is sobering evidence that we will pay for our carbon emissions one way or another. The considered and predictable way is to levy carbon taxes that are sufficiently high to force down the use of fossil fuels and thereby reduce the weather extremes resulting from global warming. The risky and reckless way is to tempt the limits of tolerable temperature increases by continuing with unabated carbon emissions. Then we will pay for the cost of floods, droughts, storms and other extreme weather events that disrupt our agriculture, destroy our infrastructure, traumatize our ecologies and assault our interests in various and surprising ways. Witness the Calgary flood.

News of the devastating floods in Alberta hit Canadians hard. We’ve all been moved by extraordinary stories of first responders and neighbours stepping in to help and give selflessly at a time of great need. As people begin to pick up their lives, and talk turns to what Calgary and other communities can do to rebuild, safeguarding our irreplaceable, most precious flood-protection assets should be given top priority.

The severe floods in Alberta used to be referred to as “once in a generation” or “once in a century”. As recent floods in Europe and India are added to the list, that’s scaled up to “once in a decade”. Scientists and insurance executives alike predict extreme weather events will increase in intensity and frequency. Climate change is already having a dramatic impact on our planet. Communities around the world, like those in Alberta, are rallying to prepare.

While calls are mounting for the need to rebuild and strengthen infrastructure such as dikes, storm-water management systems and stream-channel diversion projects, we’ve overlooked one of our best climate change–fighting tools: nature. By protecting nature, we protect ourselves, our communities and our families.

The business case for maintaining and restoring nature’s ecosystems is stronger than ever. Wetlands, forests, flood plains and other natural systems absorb and store water and reduce the risk of floods and storms, usually more efficiently and cost-effectively than built infrastructure. Wetlands help control floods by storing large amounts of water during heavy rains – something paved city surfaces just don’t do.

A study of the Upper Mississippi and Missouri Basins showed wetland restoration would have provided enough flood water storage to accommodate excess river flows associated with flooding in the U.S. Midwest in 1993. Research done for the City of Calgary more than 30 years ago made similar suggestions about the value of protecting flood plains from over-development. When wetlands are destroyed, the probability of a heavy rainfall causing flooding increases significantly. Yet we’re losing wetlands around the world at a rate estimated at between one and three per cent a year.

By failing to work with nature in building our cities, we’ve disrupted hydrological cycles and the valuable services they provide. The readily available benefits of intact ecosystems must be replaced by man-made infrastructure that can fail and is costly to build, maintain and replace.

Protecting and restoring rich forests, flood plains and wetlands near our urban areas is critical to reduce carbon emissions and protect against the effects of climate change. Nature effectively sequesters and stores carbon, helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It also regulates water. Forested basins, for example, have greater capacity to absorb water than clear-cut areas where higher peak stream flows, flooding, erosion and landslides are common.

How can we protect ecosystems rather than seeing conservation as an impediment to economic growth? The answer is to recognize their real value. The David Suzuki Foundation has evaluated some of Canada’s natural assets. This approach calculates the economic contribution of natural services, such as flood protection and climate regulation, and adds that to our balance sheets. Because traditional economic calculations ignore these benefits and services, decisions often lead to the destruction of the very ecosystems upon which we rely. Unfortunately, we often appreciate the value of an ecosystem only when it’s not there to do its job.

Cities around North America are discovering that maintaining ecosystems can save money, protect the environment and create healthier communities. A study of the Bowker Creek watershed on southern Vancouver Island showed that by incorporating rain gardens, green roofs and other green infrastructure, peak flows projected for 2080 from increased precipitation due to climate change could be reduced by 95 per cent. Opting to protect and restore watersheds in the 1990s rather than building costly filtration systems has saved New York City billions of dollars.

Intact ecosystems are vital in facing the climate change challenges ahead. They also give us health and quality-of-life benefits. Responsible decision-making needs to consider incentives for protecting and restoring nature, and disincentives for degrading it.

As Alberta rebuilds and people begin to heal from the flood’s devastation, it’s time to have a discussion about adding natural capital to the equation.
 
Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Communications Specialist Theresa Beer.

“Story is for a human as water is for a fish,” writes Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal. Indeed, this would seem to be so. For hundreds of thousands of years — probably for as long as we have been a speaking species — stories were the way we conveyed important ideas to each other. Of course, hunter-gatherers must have exchanged factual information about the grazing habits of game and the location of berries, nuts and roots. But stories have always been the personalizing, humanizing and empathizing process that has defined relationships, bound us into communities, and connected us to our surroundings. Stories have been the metaphorical and mythological language that has given context, justification and meaning to our very existence.

Think of stories as the poetic interpretations of a reality that always escapes objective understanding. So we try to represent this deep and endless mystery in a narrative of language rich and resonant in symbolism. Each story is intended to describe and explain the meaning of events, to bond the listener to the speaker, and then to connect them both by shared experience to a common place. The implied depth of the story invariably exceeds the stated one. In Pauline Le Bel’s soon-to-be-published book, Becoming Intimate with the Earth (Collins Foundation Press, 2013), she cites a wonderful example. During the colonization of northern British Columbia, an official of the federal government told the Tsimshian people that he was claiming their land as a part of Canada. One of the Tsimshian elders asked the official, “If this is your land, where are your stories?” According to Le Bel’s account, ”The official was silent while the elder went on to tell a story about the land in his own language.”

Stories, therefore, contain a truth that is not represented in legal documents and scientific facts, just as a birth certificate does not remotely represent the love and care that parents have for a child. The emotional depth is simply not present in a record of facts. The important human information, according to Burkeman in his brilliant exploration of this subject (Guardian Weekly, Jan. 11/13), is “suffused with moral drama: strivings, betrayals, victories, lies, conflicts and reconciliations. Drama happens in human minds, not complex systems,” he writes. And herein lies the danger of stories, notes Burkeman, because they “strip facts away, dragging attention to what’s most narratively satisfying, not what’s most important.”

Burkeman’s poignant essay emphasizes the point that, “the most important issues of our era aren’t particularly interesting. Worse than that, there’s good reason to believe in an inverse relationship between interestingness and importance.” For example, when global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million for an entire day — the first time in about 3 million years, and a terrible milestone in the unfolding catastrophe of climate change — the report received only passing mention in the interior pages of North American newspapers. But the escape of three American women, held in enslavement in a Cleveland house for ten years, commonly received front page coverage —The Globe and Mail gave it an entire double-page spread. The freedom of the women, of course, was important to them and their families. But rising carbon dioxide concentrations are an ominous portent, with huge implications for the ecologies of the entire planet and for all humanity.

However, 400 ppm is just a number, so it elicits almost no response. As an abstract statistic, it’s wholly disconnected from the human narrative. Burkeman cites the marine biologist Randy Olson who refers to global warming as “the great unmentionable”, saying, “I dare you to find any major program studying it, and willing to call it what it is.” Olson adds, “You’ll find huge budgeted projects examining public attitudes towards climate…. But what about the simple fact that climate is quite possibly THE most boring subject the science world has ever had to present to the public.” Why so boring? Because it is not a story.

Of course, climate change creates stories. The extraordinary hurricanes that struck New Orleans and New York generated innumerable news items replete with tales of heroic struggle, harrowing escapes and tragic deaths. The same happened with unprecedented floods and raging bush fires in Australia, California and Europe. But the focus of attention invariably shifts away from the essential issue of extreme weather events to the human sagas of loss, grief, relief, bravery and resilience.

As Burkeman explains so insightfully, climate change and all the other environmental catastrophes unfolding around us, are “not stories about the suffering or triumphs of individual, knowable humans. They’re failures of complex systems: millions of individuals are affected, but in incremental, widely dispersed ways; in the case of global warming, most of those millions aren’t even born yet.”

Complex systems, however, are cerebral and rational constructs of little interest to most people. Described in numbers and equations, in statistics and graphs, in charts and projections, they are too distant and impersonal to speak directly to the human heart. History may define this incongruity as fatal since the accumulation of evidence and the detailed analysis of information has replaced stories as our contemporary measure of truth. Our modern civilization would not be viable without the disciplined thinking of science.

Stories have their many valuable uses. They may even guide the direction of science if powerful enough narratives can imagine the trajectory of the present into an ominous future. But, as yet, our stories are unable to provide solutions for today’s unfolding environmental crises. Indeed, more and more of our stories now mark the tragic course of our failures, told after we have missed the opportunity to avert disasters by preventative measures. But this may be the way our future unfolds. Without understanding science and its profound relevance to our present lives, we may be committing ourselves to a proliferation of stories with very sad endings.

It’s happening again. Research confirms agreement among most climate scientists that we are altering the Earth’s climate, mainly by burning fossil fuels. And industrial interests, backed by climate change deniers, pull out every trick to sow doubt and confusion. What will it take for us to start seriously tackling the problem?

For the latest study, investigators led by John Cook at Skeptical Science examined abstracts of 12,000 peer-reviewed papers on climate science. They also received comments from 1,200 scientists, who rated more than 2,100 full studies. In both cases, more than 97 per cent of studies that took a position on the causes of global warming said human activity is a primary factor. Less than one per cent rejected the consensus position. The results are consistent with previous research.

As expected, deniers are out in full force, many employing methods common to those who reject science. Medical scientists Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee examined these tactics in the European Journal of Public Health: cherry picking, reference to fake experts, misrepresentation and logical fallacies, impossible expectations of what research can deliver and conspiracy theories. Deniers often rely on talking points spread by a handful of usual suspects, including Christopher Monckton in the U.K., the Heartland Institute and Anthony Watts in the U.S. and Friends of Science and Tom Harris in Canada.

The Alberta-based group was caught several years ago funnelling money – most from fossil fuel companies – through a “Science Education Fund” at the University of Calgary. It was used to create a disinformation campaign and video with Harris, who then worked with PR firm APCO Worldwide and now heads up an organization called (ironically) the International Climate Science Coalition, which rejects the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. According to Desmog Blog, Friends of Science has misrepresented the recent survey, calling it “careless incitement of a misinformed and frightened public, when in fact the sun is the main driver of climate change; not human activity or carbon dioxide.”

Another recent misrepresentation concerns research by the U.K. Met Office, which deniers falsely claim shows the Earth hasn’t warmed for 17 years.

Science isn’t perfect, but it’s one of the best tools we have for understanding our place in the cosmos. When people around the world apply rigorous scientific method to study our actions and their impacts on the things that keep us alive and healthy – clean air, water, soil and biodiverse plants and animals – we must listen, not just about climate, but about a range of issues.

Many scientists are saying we’re creating serious problems – but we have solutions. A recent statement, “Scientists’ Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century”, lists five major challenges: climate disruption, extinctions, loss of ecosystem diversity, pollution, and human population growth and resource consumption.

More than 2,200 have signed, stating, “As scientists who study the interaction of people with the rest of the biosphere using a wide range of approaches, we agree that the evidence that humans are damaging their ecological life-support systems is overwhelming.”

Some may claim this is “alarmist”. It is – because the situation is alarming. It goes on: “For humanity’s continued health and prosperity, we all – individuals, businesses, political leaders, religious leaders, scientists, and people in every walk of life – must work hard to solve these five global problems starting today.”

Many of the proposed solutions have long been advocated by people working in science, the environment and even business: conserving energy and reducing fossil fuel use; better ecosystem management through processes like natural capital evaluation; improved food production and distribution and waste reduction; regulating and preventing pollution; and stabilizing population growth through better education, health care, family-planning services, economic opportunities and women’s rights.

Humanity has changed direction before. When our tools become outdated, we invent new ones. It’s why in many countries, we no longer rely on slavery to maintain economies, we can all vote regardless of race or sex and we enjoy longer and healthier lives than before. Many systems we’ve invented don’t apply to current circumstances. We can and must change the way we act. That requires listening to scientists and those who are working on solutions, and not to the naysayers and deniers who would keep us stalled in a doomed spiral.

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Communications Manager Ian Hanington.