Richard Zurawski

Sometimes even an old dog like me can learn new tricks. Of late, with the cascade of information about climate change pouring into the information torrents, I have tended to focus on the bad things that could happen and will to a huge degree change the ways we do things forever. But perhaps there is also a good side to all this change.

Imagine for a moment if you will, that humanity does rise to its finest hour and does solve the the climate change issue. To do that we have to gain control of three things, our population, our need to consume and our economy. By that I mean we have to find a non catastrophic way to a population of perhaps a billion souls, smaller than the population of either India or China today. We have to stop the rampant destruction that is caused by the West’s runaway consumption. And hand in hand with that, we have to reinvent our economy so that it can sustain and provide for all those living on the face of the Earth. Not just the powerful and the wealthy, but for everyone and everything.

Idealistic? Perhaps. But think of what life might be like for a baby in Sao Paulo if Brazil could reduce its population to 50 million instead of rushing headlong into 250 million. That would mean an end to the rape of the Amazon rain forest traded for “lebens raum.” Or what about a child of Los Angeles, if the United States could arrest its consumption to its own footprint and give back the 50 per cent of the world’s resources it steals, to not only the other citizens of the world, but to all the animals and plants in need of non industrialized and undeveloped spaces to live. And to the child in Nova Scotia who could look to a future within a nature similar to what it was like 200 years ago, rather than having to leave to find work.

For the past 30 years I have been aware at a core level that humans have been altering their environment. I have felt that my generation has rushed headlong into the consumptive nirvana for which they were willing to sacrifice everything for it. But perhaps there is hope.

During a talk at Focus Acadia at Acadia University a few weeks back, where I was one of the guest speakers, I had the occasion to meet a few students who have actually made me wonder whether my pessimism is warranted. They are heading up a drive to use only food that is grown within a radius of 100 kilometres and have begun a garden, greenhouse and other initiatives to bring food from their own hands into the kitchens at Acadia University, rather than food from New Zealand, China or Chile. They call it slow food.

Now I don’t think that this is going to do more than make a small dent in the vast global climate change problem, but on the other hand, what if. What if, what they are doing catches on? What if, we become self sufficient and don’t fly food from all over the world, or truck, or ship it as a business, but rather grow it so we can eat it. Isn’t that how it all began, with cultivators and farmers and growers producing for their own and others around them. Slow food indeed. I like it. I wonder if MacDonald’s is interested?

In 2005, for the first time in the history of humanity more people lived in cities than in the country. Of the more than three billion people in the urban communities of the world, one third live in the worst conditions imaginable, with no hope of escape. The places they live in are called urban slums. The global war on poverty has been a resounding, abject failure. The sprawl of today’s unprecedented megaslums like Sadr City, the Cape Flats, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Mexico City and a legion of others too numerous to mention has created an urban populace disconnected in every way from industrialization and economic growth. Ruthless engines of urban renewal and “beautification” expel millions of poor city dwellers to the despair of the periurban shadowlands.

The vital frontier of the free or cheap land surrounding third world cities has ended and today’s squatters must wager their lives against inevitable disaster on precarious hillsides, in flood plains or next to toxic dumps.

Instead of cities of light, as futurists once imagined, much of the twenty first century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay. Vast numbers of humanity are warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal economy. Is the war on terrorism the beginning of new world war between the American Empire and the new slum poor?

Slums: Is this the future of our cities? Today more than one billion disenfranchised people live around the globe in the periphery of what we call life, hidden behind the detritus and cast-off garbage of the wealthy and powerful. In South America, Africa, Asia, North America and Europe there are unforgettable images of the new world that we have created with globalization and the uncontrolled population explosion.

Within 30 years the world population is expected to close in on ten billion, with the global megacities absorbing the majority of that increase. Today’s, slums will, unbelievably, have tripled in size. Will the waiting explosion of the poor against their abysmal conditions have happened?Will the conditions they are forced to live in have leaked into a permanent feature of day to day life around the world? Will the United Nations, the United States, the G8 have been able to alleviate the crushing degradation of human life?

This is the vast hidden under belly of our western way of life, what more than one billion people endure, while we, in our oblivious lifestyles, suck 90 per cent of the world’s resources into maw of progress. What is the solution? It begins with us.

The ice is melting. All over the world the ice is melting as our planet warms. And sooner than you think, the world will no longer have vast fields of glaciers to air condition and cool its ecosphere.

There are three main ice fields that contain 98% of all the fresh water and 99 per cent of the glaciers on Earth. They are, in order of increasing size, the Western Antarctic, the Greenland and the Eastern Antarctic ice sheets. Each ice sheet is unique and contains more fresh water that all the lakes and rivers of the world combined. Each has its own history, effects and fate. Each one has the potential to change life on the Earth in ways that stagger the imagination.

Greenland, the largest island in the world, and considered to be one of the prime global thermostats, has the second largest ice sheet on the planet. The incredible Global Conveyor and its off-shoot the Gulf Stream are inexorably tied to what is happening on the Greenland ice sheet. In the past decade the melt has increased by a factor of ten, pouring in 2005, almost 200 cubic kilometres of freshwater into the North Atlantic, capping the major source of heat and energy to much of North America and Europe, posing a dire threat and paradoxically putting us at risk of falling into a devastating ice age. It is thought that almost 30 times in the past three million years, the entire Greenland sheet has melted in the space of a century. Are we on the threshold of another such spectacle?

The Western Ice Sheet has occupied the Western Antarctic for three million years. And while the massive ice advances of the Ice Ages have ebbed and waned, it has remained and endured. So great is the mass of ice that sit on Western Antarctic, that most of that part of the Antarctic is pushed a kilometre below sea level and its ice fields rest on a slurry of water greased gravel. The Larsen, Ross and Ronne ice shelves, larger in total area than Spain, France and Germany combined, push out into the South Atlantic and Pacific and fill scientists with trepidation and fear. New satellite data shows they are riddled with a honey comb of rivers and lakes of melted fresh water, lubricating some of the fastest flowing glaciers on the planet. In 2004 the Larsen B shelf collapsed and researchers gasped. Was it a portend of things to come?

The Eastern Antarctic ice sheet is the mother of all ice. It is a Behemouth. 80% of all the ice in the world, enough to raise the ocean levels 100 metres, exists on its plateau. It has been there for a staggering 45 million years, almost since the time of the dinosaurs. It is the oldest ice on Earth. Its permanence is astounding. The oldest ice cores, dating back almost 700,000 years, are collected from its incredible, slow moving fields. Lake Vostok, below the most inaccessible ice station station in the world, Vostok, is the largest, totally submerged, pristine lake in the world, cut off from the surface for more than one hundred thousand years. Ever since Antarctica drifted over the Earth’s South Pole there has been permanent ice on the Eastern Antarctic. Is it threatened? Can even its permanence wither in the face of the onslaught of climate change? Or will it grow and kick us back into another series of unstable weather patterns and another round of global ice advance?

It is that time of year when people’s hopes begin to come out of the winter doldrums. As a matter of fact, early this morning we officially went from winter 2008 to spring 2008 as the Earth makes its yearly trek about the sun.

But it feels anything but springlike out there. The weather is and has been for this past three months a winter anomaly when compared to the winters of the recent couple of decades. It has been cold, snowy and stormy, almost without let up since the advent of the winter solstice. And its not just the Maritimes. Quebec and Ontario have been pummeled as well. And Newfoundland, well Newfoundland has received the worst weather is recent memory and this past week saw no end in sight as the Avalon was buried in white drifts and the worst that winter has to offer. So you could be forgiven for asking, what gives? Whence goeth the much vaunted climate change with its mild winters and ferocious summers?

Well, sit back and read, because this is all part of the general scheme of what homo sapiens have put into place. And it ain’t over yet, not by a long shot.

The short answer is that the La Nina and the Greenland melt have conspired to create stormier weather. The longer answer is that you should have paid more attention to your grade ten science lessons in pendulums and waves. You see, we have been adding energy to a dynamic equilibrium system. That means we have been pushing against a swing, so to speak. The swing is our ecosystem and weather patterns. For the longest time they have been in a pretty benign, set, series of oscillations. In short the weather and the climate have been very predictable and not very stormy. But now that we have added so much more CO2 to the atmosphere we are also adding more energy to the weather and climate systems. That is, in effect, pushing on the weather swing. What happens is that the swing starts to swing higher as it seeks to get back to a different, new balance point. When you are pushing against the weather patterns, you make the weather in effect fluctuate more wildly. That means more storms, more systemic weather as the system tries to rebalance itself.

How do we restore the balance close to where it was in past years? Well, the same way you try to stop a swing from swinging higher. Stop pushing the system. Stop adding CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the systems and it will slowly, mind you, settle back down.

Keeping pushing and you will get more of the same, more storms, more fluctuations between hot and cold, more sever weather. Push too hard and you get a run away effect, a broken swing and then all bets are off. Ain’t spring fun?

China has more than 1.3-billion people living in an area the size of Canada, more than thirty times our population. More people live in China today than lived in the world 100 years ago. One out of every five people in the world live in China. And their population is still growing in what is the fastest expanding economy on Earth.

Now you may not agree with China’s policies, politics or style of government, but they, in their wisdom have instituted what may be the most progressive stance against human induced global warming of any country in the world. What you say? How can this be? They have a one couple, one child policy. And they mean to keep that policy in place for at least the next decade. Its an incredible and very important step, one that we should applaud and take note of. Now why do I think this is note worthy for us?

In my new book and most of the talks that I do about climate change, I outline three significant obstacles to making a dent on our ability to mitigating climate change. They are our growth based economy, our population and our consumption.

In that vein China, with the world’s largest population, has probably done more to than any other country in the world given its ability affect the global climate. Its sheer size is staggering. And by choosing to reign in its population it is addressing one of the three most critical problems plaguing the environment today. Only one hundred years ago china’s population was under 300 million, where the United States is today. The exponential rise in population brought on by the miracle of fossil fuels has made the twentieth century a boom for humanity and a plague for the rest of creation. Now, many in the west point out that our population has stabilized and that it will not increase as quickly as it has in the past, if at all. What they fail to mention is we continue plague the Earth with our consumption. We are adding toys, plastics, cars, houses, roads and an accelerating lifestyle to our already hyper-consumptive ways. So that even though our gross population is comparatively small, our consumption is enormous.

From the right wing radicals (read Conservatives et al) I hear a lot of claptrap about Canada’s insignificant contribution to climate change, that we only produce 2 per cent of the total of the world’s CO2. Bull feathers! Because of our rampant consumerism and globalization, our true footprint is distributed to the third world. In short, our companies and capital are shifting to the third world where we can take advantage of their huge poverty prone populations. We just shift the burden overseas and trumpet, “look at them, they are the problem”! We then import the goods back to home and say, its not our industry that is creating the problem. Let them reduce. Let them cut back. But what we fail to realize is that they already have and if they cut back any more they wind up with death.

We have to recognize that this is a problem that affects us all and that there are no borders anymore when it comes to the climate change. If you consume, you doom. China has begun to solve the problem, we have to help.

I was musing a bit the other day about the pace of technological change that we have gotten used to in our society. It truly is a marvel to behold. It seems that a better future is just around the corner, thanks to our accelerating technological innovations. But its not only about making life easier. We also, in the same mind set, have come to believe that if we base our solutions to the myriad of problems that we have, on our technology, there will be a better way of solving those problems tomorrow.

So, if you take that premise to its extreme, you have to believe that it is better not to implement any changes or make any effort to mend our ways, because tomorrow we will have better, faster, more complete solutions to the problems that we have created, today. Procrastinators rejoice! Off load the problem on our children’s doorstep and have another Mai Tai!

Using this logic its not hard to understand why the fossil fuel companies, manufacturing giants and auto behemoths believe that doing nothing to our wasteful ways is a solution to the environmental crisis we find ourselves mired in. And since governments these days takes it marching orders from big business that wonderful and innovative policy is by and large the course of action that we have taken.

Oh to be a teenager again with a caboodle of books and a homework galore. Don’t worry Mom. No need to study tonight. I will be smarter tomorrow and be able to zip through this algebra like a hot knife through no transfat margarine tomorrow. So it would be a waste of time to burden my noggin with facts that are better left with sleeping dogs. See ya later! Where are the car keys?

Instead of reducing emissions, let’s burn baby, burn and wait for those geniuses in the tech department to come with a carbon sequestering fix or a maybe we can shoot cannon loads of sun block into the upper ionosphere or seed the oceans with iron pellets. That’ll do the trick. That’ll set those pesky tree huggers back a notch. Yep, technology is a marvel. Party today, fix tomorrow and let the good times roll.

Before we all march off into the better living tomorrow world, hand in hand with our mega, giga luxo-barges, I have some questions. What if there is no solution, no tech fix. or worse, what if technology has a fix but it is too late? Or worser what if the fix is worse than the problem? What if the cure for the hangover causes cancer so to speak? What if technology falters in its upward trajectory?

True, our technology is a marvel to behold. Never in the history of humanity has the pace of innovation and change seen anything like it. But also never has the scope of the problem to the environment ever been this onerous. It seems that for every tech fix and innovation there is the attendant hydra of problems that again require tech fixes of some sort. Its a vicious cycle, one that in truth, we have barely been able to keep up with. Trying to stay one step ahead of armageddon, battling with the gods, so to speak, is a risky business.

Perhaps there is another solution. Let’s party after we have reduced, reused and recycled. Let’s fix our ways not the problems. Time to grow up and to be less self indulgent.