There is simply no excuse

As reported in May by Nature, ocean temperatures hit a record high in April, just over 21°C—probably the highest in 100,000 years. And that’s before this year’s El Nino warming begins.

The science of climate change is both simple and complicated. If you know the energy fluxes —how much solar radiation is coming in and how much outgoing earth-heat is being reflected back using physics that has been understood since the late 1800s, it is not so difficult to estimate overall heating. But the devil is in the details—where does trapped energy go?It’s good for life on earth that most of it goes into the oceans, which is why sea level is a better measurement of climate change than air temperature—water expands as it gets hotter—as well, ice melts on land—and both cause sea level to rise. Modelling a system as complicated as the climate is a formidable problem. I have done fluid dynamics professionally and even the basics are difficult. But adding climate details—the interface between sea and air, how clouds form, how ice melts, how air currents (trade winds) change, and ocean currents (the Gulf Stream), and what happens inside intense storms—makes understanding climate dynamics extremely challenging.

We can measure and make predictions about the vast amount of energy being stored in oceans, but if your next question is, “what will happen”, we really don’t know. We can give educated guesses: devastating conditions for wildlife, fisheries, and corals; much higher rainfall in some places because warmer air over warmer oceans carries exponentially more water; and much drier in others as weather patterns we have come to rely on, change. Recently we have come to understand ‘atmospheric rivers’ that have always been with us, but are now much stronger and have dumped unprecedented amounts of water on BC and California. And we have seen more severe hurricanes with unprecedented sea level surges—most areas previously hit in the US are still recovering a decade later. And closer to home, Alberta is burning—in May! As Jens Terhaar, a climate ocean modeller tweeted, “we are in a new climate state, extremes are the new normal”.

Meanwhile, here in the County our climate change planning has barely begun. We have a plan for tourism management, but not for the most serious challenge mankind has ever faced. As I have commented before, an academic paper by Guyadeen and Henstra from Guelph University provides a simple and widely used planning framework. They surveyed climate change planning for all 108 Ontario rural municipalities and the County scored 25 per cent— a shamefully failing grade! On the other hand, a number of Ontario municipalities have made good climate change planning progress. There is simply no excuse for the County’s continuing inaction.

Don Wilford