First, there was the plague. In February 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic seized the planet, disrupting normal life, and taking more than five million lives and counting as it spread despite humanity’s best efforts to limit its reach. Then, there was fire. In the summer of 2021, in the paradisal setting of the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia, Canada, the temperature rose to 49.6 degrees Celsius as a heat dome settled upon the Pacific Northwest. The day after the record high was set, the village of Lytton burst into flames, destroying more than 90% of the buildings in the village. Houses on the adjacent Lytton First Nation reserves, home to the Nlaka’pamux people who have resided on the territory for thousands of years, also burned to the ground. Hundreds of people in the province died from heat-related illness; more than a billion sea animals were cooked alive; and crops were destroyed – the cherries were roasting on the trees Then came the floods. In November 2021, an atmospheric river drenched the region that had just survived the summer wildfires. More than a month’s rain fell during 24 hours, causing massive flooding, and forcing the evacuation of the entire population of nearby Merrit, British Columbia, with approximately 8,000 residents. Vancouver, Canada’s largest port, was cut off from the rest of the country; the principal roads and rail lines had been washed away.
Suddenly, there were
thousands of climate change refugees looking for shelter. In a weird twist of
fate, a nearby Seventh Day Adventist Summer Camp and Conference Center, aptly
named Camp Hope, offered to take in some of Merrit’s refugees. In case you are
wondering, The Seventh Day Adventists are a Protestant denomination that
strongly believes in the sanctity of the Sabbath and the imminent second coming
of Jesus, in other words, a doctrine that incorporates a strong belief in the end
of days as spelled out in the bible. A few weeks earlier, Camp Hope had taken
in refugees from the Lytton First Nation reserves. As a result, Camp Hope became
the meeting place for displaced people from both Indigenous communities and the
descendants of the European settlers who made their way onto what had been
exclusively Indigenous land.
You have to think at some point in time, there would be an
exchange, some type of communication between these two forsaken groups. I would
love to have been there. A clash of civilizations. Competing narratives trying
to make sense of what had just happened. I imagine someone from the Nlaka’pamux
band lashing out at one of the beleaguered, white residents from Merrit, saying
something to the effect, “Look at us. We tried to warn you. But you wouldn’t
listen.” And a Seventh-Day Adventist handing them both a pamphlet explaining
how these types of natural catastrophes are a warning of the second coming.
Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary to cite scripture
to understand what’s happening, although the idea of the apocalypse certainly
appears to be in play. Instead, we can look to science to give us an
explanatory narrative, which unfortunately might be even more frightening than
end-of-days scenarios we have previously known.
In short, we have left the Holocene geological epoch, the
period of time after the last ice age in which the planet’s climate warmed and
remained stable for approximately 10,000 years, giving rise to human
civilization. Some time ago, we entered into the Anthropocene epoch, the period
of time in which human activity started to have a significant impact on the
planet's climate and ecosystems. That of course came about with the invention
of the steam engine, giving birth to the Industrial Age and the corelating burning
of fossil fuels to propel the economic expansion.
With the increase of CO2 released into the atmosphere due to
the burning of coal, oil, and gas, scientists correctly predicted that this
would have an effect on the environment: higher concentrations of CO2 in the
atmosphere would increase its greenhouse effect, eventually leading to global
warming. The particulars, how much and how fast, have been the subject of intense
debate, but the underlying principles to why the planet could expect global
climate change if we continued to indiscriminately dump trillions of tons of
CO2 into the atmosphere were sound.
Some scientists label the 1950s as the point in time in
which the Great Acceleration occurs, a period of time in which the consumption
of material goods begins to skyrocket worldwide as the planet’s inhabitants yearn
and aspire to North American levels of consumption. In 1958, the concentration
of CO2 in the atmosphere was approximately 310 parts per million (ppm). Today
(Nov. 17, 2021), the concentration was measured at 414 ppm, an increase of a
mind-boggling 33% in only sixty short years, a blink of an eye in geological
time.
As could be expected, the planet has warmed up since the
dawn of the industrial age, approximately 1.2 degrees Celsius and that has
already brought on cataclysmic climate change: glaciers in retreat, polar ice
caps melting, extended periods of severe drought, unprecedented wildfires in
North America, Europe, and Australia, increased atmospheric disturbances, grasslands
turning into desserts, and ocean acidification leading to the death of coral
reefs, to mention a few.
It’s not as if the leaders of the countries in the Global
North had not been forewarned. As early as 1957, scientists in the United
States sensed the potential scale of the problem that global warming presented –
human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a
kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future –
and decided to build a site to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide near the
summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above sea level.
For ten years, they collected data, and Presidents were informed of the
potential risks of global warming. Finally, in 1979, at the request of
President Jimmy Carter and the National Academy of the Sciences, the Climate
Research Board was convened to assess the future climatic changes resulting from
man-made releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The Board reached a
stark conclusion in its report: Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific
Assessment. The Assessment predicts that based on current rates of CO2
emissions (emission rates have increased significantly since the publication of
the report) the global surface of the earth will warm 2 to 3.5 degrees Celsius,
more so at higher latitudes, sometime during the twenty-first century.
During the 1980s, the Americans and the rest of the world
dithered when it came to reducing CO2 emissions. Instead, attention was focused
on the problem of atmospheric pollution caused by the release of chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs) normally emitted by refrigeration, solvents, and aerosol sprays that
were reducing the level of ozone in the atmosphere (remember the hole in the
ozone layer), thereby allowing a dangerous level of ultraviolet light to reach
the earth, potentially causing unprecedented levels to skin cancer to appear.
Here was a problem that was much easier to fix. To their credit,
representatives from around the world were able to negotiate an agreement, the
Montreal Protocol, to reduce the use of CFCs, and the threat to human health
was successfully mitigated. Yet, such an agreement, although showing that international
cooperation to solve a global environmental problem was possible, did nothing
to abate the increasing extraction and burning of fossil fuels globally.
There was a ray of hope in 1988 when NASA climate scientist, Jim Hansen, appeared before a Senate Committee and reported that there was undeniable evidence establishing the link between an increase in global surface temperatures and the greenhouse effect. The signal had emerged from the noise and the world took notice. That same year the United Nations established the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was tasked to periodically provide reports concerning climate change, drawing upon the peer-reviewed scientific research papers from around the world. A few years later (1995) the United Nations sponsored the first annual global conference about climate change held in Berlin. Some twenty years later, it appeared that some progress had been made at the level of discussions: during the 2015 conference in Paris, an agreement was struck to provide a global framework to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit the warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In some people’s minds, the Paris Agreement represented a potential pathway to avoid catastrophic climate change. A glimmer of hope – perhaps, but in reality, despite all the talk, more CO2 was being dumped into the atmosphere than ever before.
Looking at the data compiled and presented by Barry
Saxifrage in the following charts concerning the consumption of oil, gas, and
coal, it is clear that the global burning of fossil fuels has actually increased
dramatically since 1990.
Looking at the global fossil fuel burn from a longer historical perspective, we discover that more than 80% of the CO2 emissions dumped into the atmosphere occurred after the Great Acceleration in the 1950s, and more than 50% since 1990 when the threat of global warming had become well known in the political corridors around the world.
No wonder the youth of today look at the UN-sponsored
conferences on global change with cynicism. In their eyes, the world’s
politicians have been co-opted by the multinational fossil fuel corporations,
and both are engaged in a concerted effort to greenwash the future, which will
certainly be bleak for future generations if the present trends continue.
For example, the latest global conference held in Glasgow in
2021, COP26, confirmed that such meetings were, in the words of the world-renown,
young activist, Greta Thunberg, little more than “blah, blah, blah.”
And she’s right.
The take-a-ways from COP26 included more hollow pledges
committing governments to future actions that have no compliance measures to
ensure that the reductions in the burning of fossil fuels will be met; a
laughable recognition that the burning of fossil fuels is linked to climate
change; and the failure to put into words the commitment to “phase out”, not “phase
down” the burning of coal.
What is more telling are the actions undertaken by the
governments of the world leaders who try to pass themselves off as climate
change warriors. In the case of Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, his
government bought the Trans Mountain pipeline so to continue with its
construction it would triple the amount of tar sand oil, one of the most
destructive carbon-intensive and toxic fuels on the planet, to be exported from
Alberta. The pipeline runs across British Columbia, a province that has just
been hit with two climate change catastrophes in less than six months. In a
similar vein, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, has lent his support to
the building of the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, slated to be the longest in
the world, bringing even more oil to global markets, in order to increase France’s
economic presence in the region. Finally, the American President, Joe Biden,
proud of the green energy proposals in his Build Back Better plan recently
signed into law, failed to halt the approvals for companies to drill for oil
and gas on U.S. public lands – more than 2000 permits were approved during his
first six months in office – and his administration opened up more than 80
million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to auction for oil and gas drilling only
four days after the close of COP 26 in Glasgow, a lease sale that has the
potential to emit more than 500 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions
into the atmosphere.
Here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter how many new clean
energy resources we develop to fuel our vehicles, heat our homes, and light our
buildings as long as we continue to dump CO2 into the atmosphere. Adding new
CO2 at the present rate increases the greenhouse effect and, as a result, increases
global warming, regardless of how much of our energy needs are met by renewable
resources.
As the following chart demonstrates, the growth in the available
amount of clean energy is woefully insufficient to match our energy needs as
compared to the global fossil fuel burn.
According to Saxifrage, “it is just another form of climate denial to expect clean energy to force fossil fuel burning to fall — let alone fall all the way down to zero as required to avoid a climate crisis.” I agree. It is also another form of climate denial to expect carbon sequestration technology or geoengineering interventions to counteract potential catastrophic climate change without severely reducing the global fossil fuel burn.
So, either we eliminate the use of energy obtained from burning
fossil fuels – an extremely disruptive change, requiring fundamental changes to
the way we lead our lives and organize our societies – or we continue along our
present collective path, leading us to the possible extinction of the human
species as the planet’s atmosphere morphs into one that no longer supports
human life.
Such a scenario makes me think about the pamphlets the Seventh
Day Adventists were handing out to the climate change refugees in Camp Hope,
British Columbia. If I could rewrite the story in the pamphlet, I would say
that we were all born into something like the Garden of Eden, but we were not
cast out. On the contrary, those of us lucky to find ourselves in paradise
never learned when enough is enough, and we let our desire to have more and
more get the better of us, and we chose to ignore the warning signs that we
were destroying the garden. Moreover, we decided to build a wall around a
portion of the garden and began to transfer the wealth from outside the walls
inside, leaving the people who lived outside of the walls to live on the
impoverished soil. Those living inside the fortress blamed the poorer people
for their plight, saying that they deserved their misfortune because the
outcasts were liars, and cheaters, and refused to help themselves.
I would also change the part that deals with the apocalypse.
In the biblical version, as prophesized in the Book of Revelation, the apocalypse
depicts the complete destruction of the world preceding the establishment of a
new world and heaven. In my version, the destruction of human civilization is
not a prelude to a better life. Rather, the massive die-off of humans is simply
a stage in the evolution of the planet: the dominant species on the planet
became too numerous and greedily devoured as much of the planet’s natural
resources as it could, destroying the habitat that made its life possible on
earth, and putting into play planetary forces out of their control that over
time brings about the extinction of the species. Humans may be warm-blooded and
capable of performing advanced cognitive feats, like putting a man on the moon,
harnessing the tremendous energy contained within a single atom, or writing a
symphony that elicits tears of joy, but when it comes to our collective
intelligence, we are like the dinosaurs that used to be the dominant species
and met their demise as a result of climate change.
The other thing that calls into question our collective
intelligence is that unlike the biblical version, where the coming of the end
of days is revealed, and the hidden information about God, the real nature of
our lives and the spiritual world is made known, humanity knows very well what will
bring about its demise, but chooses to do little or nothing to change the path it’s
on.
The scientific evidence available to all doesn’t lie. The
message is clear: stop extracting and burning fossil fuels!
Yet, we continue on this path as if there were no tomorrow. Consequently,
I feel like I am a character in a science fiction film in which humanity learns
that there is an asteroid hurtling toward the earth and will destroy the planet
upon impact. However, in this movie, there are no heroes that save the day. As
well, the cascade of natural disasters unfolds in what appears to be slow
motion. This movie doesn’t last two hours; it runs for decades, perhaps for
centuries, slowly grinding towards its inevitable conclusion: the end of the
world as we know it.
