Canada – Page 62 – a sibilant intake of breath

Medicare and populist opposition to reform

I had no idea that opposition to Medicare was so vociferous in Saskatchewan, when Tommy Douglas and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) party introduced it in 1962:

“The city’s residents had been whipped into a near-hysteria by the doctors’ anti-medicare campaign,” Margoshes writes, adding, “There were graffiti threats on city walls and calls in the middle of the night to Tommy’s house. His campaign manager, Ed Whelan, got frequent calls from a man threatening to ‘shoot you, you Red bastard!’ A few homeowners placed symbolic coffins on their front lawns.”

It goes to show what determined politicians with a clear objective can accomplish, even in the face of misinformation campaigns and a large amount of visible public opposition. Perhaps that is something that should give hope to climate change campaigners. If we ever get a government that is really serious about the issue, they might be able to push through the opposition of those seeking to maintain the status quo and develop policies that people will look back in with pride fifty years in the future.

That said, it also seems quite possible that a party that created a serious climate change policy would be punished for it in the short term, as the CCF was for Medicare. After its passage, they got smashed in the next election and remained out of power for seven years. That reminds me a bit of Stephane Dion, though he never got to implement his Green Shift plan, which was certainly bold in comparison to what we are doing at present on climate change.

Does Canada see the north as a colony?

Writing in The Globe and Mail, Doug Sanders makes the interesting and probably not inaccurate observation that Canada treats the far north like a colony:

We own the Arctic but, unlike most of our northern neighbours, we are not Arctic. Rovaniemi is a serious city of 60,000 people, with a major university, a large airport and important ties to the mainstream of Finnish life. Like the Arctic cities of Tromso, Norway (60,000) and Murmansk, Russia (325,000), it’s a major centre of business, learning and tourism.

So when Canada tried to impress the world’s finance ministers and media with its Arctic identity by holding a summit in Iqaluit, a remote and somewhat inaccessible town of 7,000 just below the Arctic Circle in Nunavut, it didn’t completely work. “It looked like the Canadians had just arrived there – they didn’t seem to know the place any better than we did,” one European official told me.

What those leaders realized, and what Canadians instinctively know, is that we relate to the Arctic not as a part of our identity or culture or traditional economy, but as a foreign, faraway land we happen to control. The Far North is, in short, our colony.

To me, it does seem plausible that both Canadian decision-makers and the Canadian public at large see the north through the twin lenses of romance about the place and excited anticipation about what good things we are going to be able to do with it, once that ice is less of a problem and we can get at the shipping routes and fossil fuel resources.

The profound transformation of the Arctic is now all-but-inevitable, probably to an extent that few people realize. It will be interesting to see whether the inhabitants start taking a stronger and more visible stance once it becomes inescapably obvious that the whole region is being transformed, or whether they will just take that as a given and start scrambling for a share of oil and gas revenues.

‘Rotten’ multi-year ice

Because of the tilt of the Earth, the polar regions will always be cold in the winter. What is changing in the Arctic is the amount of ice that can endure through the summer months. Ice that has survived two winters is said to be ‘multiyear’ ice. Because more salt has been forced out from it, it is harder than younger ice. That makes it more durable, as well as a greater hazard to ships. While the decline in the overall extent of Arctic sea ice has been dramatic, the decline in the extent of multiyear ice has been even more so. This animation shows it vanishing over the past 30 years.

Furthermore, at least some scientists believe that most of the melting taking place has been from the bottom, and anecdotal reports from people operating icebreaking ships suggest that the multiyear ice still out there isn’t the same thing as what existed before. It is riddled with brine channels and weaker, and sometimes just consists of a thin layer of young ice covering small chunks of old ice. As such, it is more vulnerable to melting. This weak and vulnerable ice can provide a false impression of strength, when viewed from space. David Barber, Canada’s Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, has explained to Parliament that “we are almost out of multiyear sea ice in the northern hemisphere.”

While the loss of sea ice may be welcome to those seeking a transpolar shipping route, or the chance to drill for oil and gas, it is definitely bad news for the charismatic megafauna with lifestyles critically dependent on sea ice. Seals need it in order to rear their pups, while polar bears need it to hunt seals. The total loss of summer sea ice would probably spell the doom for both species in the wild.

Sea ice monitoring in Canada

I recently had occasion to learn a bit about how the Canadian Ice Service operates: tracking ice and oil slicks in the Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic oceans. They rely on a couple of satellites – RADARSAT I and II – which are primarily synthetic aperture RADAR instruments (though they also passively observe microwave emissions from ice, which are useful for differentiating young ice from the harder multi-year sort). They also have three aircraft to cover gaps between satellite passes, as well as collect evidence of ships discharging oil, for later prosecutions. They are also the ones who put the beacon I mentioned earlier on the ice island that calved from the Petermann Glacier.

As the Arctic continues to lose old ice and summer ice, their role will only become more important. Sea traffic of all sorts is likely to increase, particularly if a trans-polar route opens up in summertime (not through either channel of the Northwest Passage, but straight across the pole) or if major oil and gas discoveries occur in the increasingly clear Arctic ocean.

Rebutting Wente

Writing in The Globe and Mail, World Wildlife Fund President Gerald Butts has done a good job of expressing what is and is not important about the recent errors in IPCC reports that have gotten so much attention and rekindled the fires of the climate change denier community:

Yes, some scientists showed poor judgment in private e-mail exchanges later hacked and made public. Yes, some errors in fact and incomplete citations have been found in the IPCC’s 1,000-page reports. That said, even scientists who have criticized the IPCC agree that anthropogenic climate change is both a fact and an urgent threat to the planet.

All independent reviews undertaken so far (by The Associated Press, the University of Michigan and The Economist, for example) agree that none of the stolen e-mails or errors bring into question the science supporting climate change. To conclude otherwise is to misunderstand the process and power of science, and to dismiss the need to draw on the best available evidence and consensus to guide national policies.

Science is not a cold body of facts, but an organized system of inquiry, discovery, evaluation and learning. Science not only welcomes the correction of errors, its key attribute is that it is self-correcting over time. As new research arises, old hypotheses gain or lose support. While this process never stops, generally accepted conclusions do accumulate, based on the overwhelming weight of evidence. The fact and threat of anthropogenic climate change are clearly among those conclusions.

It is encouraging to see such an effective rebuttal printed to Margaret Wente’s misleading recent column, though it remains dispiriting that The Globe and Mail is still happy to give a platform to people as irresponsible and scientifically illiterate as Wente and Rex Murphy. Wente’s column is a prime example of a position that – on first glance – appears prudent, in suggesting that we shouldn’t take serious action while there still seem to be scientific uncertainties about climate. Unfortunately, the known characteristics of the climate system make this position irresponsible. The full effect of emissions today will take decades to fully manifest, and the climate system has the capacity to amplify small changes into much larger outcomes. What we know about the history and character of Earth’s climate tells us we need to take action now, not at some future point when the faulty claims of deniers have finally been deflated in the eyes of the public.

I suspect that, a few decades from now, people will be puzzled about why we were so unable to separate signal from noise, when it came to hearing what scientists were saying about climate change. Part of that is surely the result of actions taken in bad faith by those seeking to prevent policy action (people quite capable of exploiting the peculiar phenomenon that arise at the intersection of science and the media). That said, much of the explanation has to lie with the complacency of a public happy to hear that no action is required at the moment, no matter how thin the credibility of those making this announcement.

Another shot at shutting down InSite

Disappointingly, the federal government is going to the Supreme Court to try to shut down InSite – Vancouver’s safe injection site (mentioned here before). It seems astonishing to me that any government would want to emulate the hard anti-drug stance embraced in the United States, given the extent to which drug prohibition has wrecked their justice system. It defies both evidence and logic to suggest that the proper response to drug use is to lock up the people doing it.

Here’s hoping the Supreme Court rules that facilities of this sort are permissible, given the proven success of harm reduction programs in diminishing the negative effects of drug addiction. Giving InSite a clear legal mandate to exist could encourage the emergence of similar programs in other areas where drug problems are a major concern.

[Update: 10 February 2010] There is a good post about InSite and the Conservative government over on Knitnut: Ideology trumps evidence: Conservative drug policy.

Is runaway climate change possible? Hansen’s take

Back in 2008, I wrote about whether ‘runaway’ climate change might be possible on Earth. At one point, Venus had liquid water on its surface. Then, the sun grew brighter and Venus warmed. Its oceans evaporated and huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) got baked out of the crust. The heat made the water break up into hydrogen and oxygen: the oxygen bonded with carbon to make more CO2, and much of the hydrogen escaped into space. Venus became permanently hostile to life, with surface temperatures of 450°C.

Could burning all of Earth’s fossil fuels produce the same outcome?

Some people take comfort from the fact that there have been times in the history of the planet when greenhouse gas concentrations were much higher than now. The world was very different, but there was no runaway greenhouse and life endured. James Hansen devotes the entire tenth chapter of Storms of My Grandchildren to considering whether this assessment is valid. Three things give him pause:

The sun is brighter now than it was during past periods with very high greenhouse gas concentrations. The 2% additional brightness corresponds to a forcing of about 4 watts per square metre and is akin to a doubling of CO2 concentrations.
For various reasons, the greenhouse gas concentrations in past hot periods may not have been as high as we thought.
We are introducing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere far more quickly than natural processes ever did. This might cause fast (positive) feedback effects to manifest themselves forcefully, before slower (negative) feedback effects can get going.

He also explains that the sharp warming that took place during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) were not caused by fossil fuels (which remained underground), but rather by the release of methane from permafrost and clathrates. If human emissions warm the planet enough to release that methane again, it could add a PETM-level warming on top of the warming caused by human beings.

Hansen’s conclusions are, frankly, terrifying:

The paleoclimate record does not provide a case with a climate forcing of the magnitude and speed that will occur if fossil fuels are all burned. Models are nowhere near the stage at which they can predict reliably when major ice sheet disintegration will begin. Nor can we say how close we are to methane hydrate instability. But these are questions of when, not if. If we burn all the fossil fuels, the ice sheets almost surely will melt entirely, with the final sea level rise about 75 meters (250 feet), with most of that possibly occurring within a time scale of centuries. Methane hydrates are likely to be more extensive and vulnerable now than they were in the early Cenozoic. It is difficult to imagine how the methane clathrates could survive, once the ocean has had time to warm. In that event a PETM-like warming could be added on top of the fossil fuel warming.

After the ice is gone, would Earth proceed to the Venus syndrome, a runaway greenhouse effect that would destroy all life on the planet, perhaps permanently? While that is difficult to say based on present information, I’ve come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty.

To re-emphasize the point, averting catastrophic or runaway climate change is the most important ethical and political task for those alive now, even if most politicians don’t yet realize it or don’t yet understand what that involves.

That last line also offers something to throw back, next time someone says the billions of dollars of revenue from exploiting the oil sands are simply too valuable to not collect.

Media from the anti-prorogation protests

Today’s Ottawa protest against the prorogation of Parliament drew fewer people than the Fill The Hill climate protest, though it enjoyed much nicer weather.

Here is a slideshow of all of my photos from today. Higher resolution versions are available on request.

One of the more entertaining parts of today’s rally was Trevor Strong‘s song “The Wild Proroguer.” This member of the Arrogant Worms modified a traditional song to include lyrics about Canada’s second prorogation in about a year. The MP3 is on his website; I uploaded a video of the performance on Parliament Hill to YouTube.

This might be the funniest sign I saw today. The owner will never need to make another one, regardless of how many protests or counter-protests they decide to attend.

Note: all this content is covered by a Creative Commons license. Feel free to use it for non-commercial purposes, with attribution.

[Update: 24 January 2010] Other Ottawa bloggers also attended the event: Zoom, Watawa Life, and Coyote.

CES Franks on democracy in Canada

CES Franks, of Queen’s University, has written an interesting essay describing the state of parliamentary democracy in Canada: “The Functioning of the Present-Day Canadian House of Commons: a paper prepared for the conference in honour of Peter Aucoin.” It focuses to a considerable extent on the reality of minority governments in Canada today, though also considers broader factors and long-term trends. For instance, the number of days per year in which Parliament is sitting has fallen by a third since the 1950s and the proportion of government bills eventually receiving Royal Assent has fallen from over 90% to just over 50%.

Franks also highlights the drift towards a bigger role for the provinces, with fewer national strategies and initiatives:

[M]y findings leave me with a sense of slight unease, and I am prepared to argue that the role of Parliament has diminished in recent decades and is continuing to diminish, to the detriment of good government in Canada. Further, much of the reason for this diminished role does not lie in the fact that we now have a Pizza Parliament with four parties and a likelihood of continuing minority parliaments. The causes lie elsewhere, and many are beyond the control of Parliament and government. They lie in fundamental changes in recent decades in the political economy of the Canadian Federation, in the increasing role of provincial governments as compared to the federal government, and in the unwillingness, rightly or wrongly, for better or worse, of recent federal governments to establish national programmes, policies, and national standards for the services Canadians expect from their governments.

In some ways, wider variation between the provinces doesn’t seem problematic. After all, there is nothing objectionable about populations with different perspectives being governed under differing rules, selected through democratic processes in which they participate. At the same time, there does seem to be reason for concern about the possible diminishing of the entity that is Canada. For one thing, there are major cross-cutting challenges that all provinces need to address, and it makes sense to do so in a cooperative way. For another, the temptations to make policy with only an eye turned towards the short-term consequences might be even greater for individual regions than they are for the confederation as a whole.

The full Word document is online, and linked from the Macleans website.

The MSC and BCs sockeye salmon

I have written before about how the certification of a fishery by the Marine Stewardship Council is not sufficient cause to think it is genuinely sustainable (even before factors other than fish numbers, such as fossil fuel use by ships, are taken into account). More evidence for this has been forthcoming recently. Now, they have decided to certify the British Columbia sockeye salmon fishery, despite how the fish numbers are dwindling and subject to an ongoing inquiry. Last year’s run on the Fraser river was less than 10% of what had been expected. The recent history of salmon in BC is a catalog of failure. The decision to certify regardless certainly doesn’t leave the MSC looking very credible. Their decision doesn’t become official until a 15-day complaint period has concluded, and people will hopefully be able to persuade them to think differently during that span.

For those who really care about environmental issues and are willing to make personal choices to reflect that, I recommend avoiding fish (and other sorts of meat) entirely. Keeping fishing activity at a sustainable level just seems to require more political integrity and long-term thinking than any of the world’s governments can muster. It’s so much easier to grab a haul now, earn a bundle, and leave the mess for those who will come later.