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.