I was going to postpone a post on climate change until after the holidays, lacking a suitable hook to hang it on. Then I looked out my window.
It's gonna be a green Christmas in Kitchener-Waterloo: indeed, in most cities in Canada. Snow is forecast here for Boxing Day, but the white Christmas that used to be a better-than-even bet around here is increasingly a longshot proposition.
As recently as thirty years ago, there was a 60% chance of a white Christmas in Toronto--an hour east of here. Now it's 30%. If current trends continue, and nobody sees any reason to think they won't, by 2020 snow for Christmas will be the stuff of old sepia-tinged postcards.
This is the one day of the year that most Canadians welcome snow. Its absence might provoke some thought.
Then again, probably not. Here in Canada, it's difficult to sell the possible catastrophic aspects of climate change when it'll also mean a reduction in our heating bills, an extension to the growing season, and fewer accidents on the roads, among other things.
It's actually beastly hard to sell climate change at all, to anyone, anywhere. Britain seems to be getting colder, making people scoff at global warming. Every single weather event brings a cavalcade of climate-change-cries to the fore, making skeptics think to themselves "is climate change actually the long-searched-for Theory Of Everything?"
My wife lived in Vancouver for half a decade. The weather there is boring. Rain, mist, drizzle, showers, the odd sunny break here and there just to serve as a teasing contrast. But severe weather? Lightning is front page news, and--aside from those freak winter storms that deposit a couple of inches, leave the city paralyzed, and elicit laughter from the throats of winter-weary Canadians elsewhere--there's no severe weather to speak of.
Until recently.
In the past month and a half, the coast of British Columbia has endured a storm, on average, every third day. First came up to 50 centimeters of snow at the end of November; that has been followed by an endless parade of windstorms, one of them featuring the equivalent of class-2 hurricane force wind. Ask Vancouverites about the cost of climate change as they survey hundreds of trees downed in majestic Stanley Park, as they boil their drinking water, as they brace for yet another power outage.
One storm is a storm, no big deal, even if it's severe. Twelve storms in a little over a month, in an area not all that storm-prone in the first place? That's a tap on the shoulder.
One green Christmas in Waterloo is a green Christmas in Waterloo. An increasing prevalence of them? Climate change is a reality, folks!
So what do we do about it? It's entirely possible there's nothing we can do, at this late date. Perhaps I have been overhasty in the past suggesting that the needed changes would force the end of our civilization. But I maintain the majority of people have no real clue just how much societal change is involved in even a modest effort at greenhouse gas reduction. It's something like the aging hippie exhorting everyone to go live "off the land...become self-reliant...make everything you need."
Hey, buddy, can you make an axe?
For starters, any serious effort at greenhouse gas reduction has to begin with its biggest source: aviation. Are you willing to go back to the days of Southampton-Cherbourg-New York in six days? How about Toronto-Vancouver in three days?
Or consider the economy in the form of a can of bottle of mango juice and a can of pop. Thanks to the Toronto Star's environmentalist, Peter Gorrie, for this revelation.
The mango came from somewhere tropical, thousands of klicks away. The sand to manufacture the glass bottle came from Florida; so did the bauxite to make the aluminum can. Then both were packaged, labelled (doubtless the ink for the label ultimately derives from somewhere foreign too) and shipped, from wholesaler through distributor to retailer and thence to your hands. And you'll drink either in a matter of minutes and then toss the container away, unthinking.
I'll take it a step further. Any time something's transported, it's done so using some combination of ship, plane, train, and (mostly) truck. Each of these is a complex piece of machinery comprised of many, many parts, each of them manufactured. The manufacturing of planes, trains and trucks also involves an aggregation of material from all over the world. That single can of pop bears a share of a truly astronomical amount of greenhouse gas emission.
Do you begin to get a sense of just how fundamental a shift is required if we are willing to tackle the climate change beast? And consider again that it might all go for naught: we could well have passed the tipping point already.
Merry "green" Christmas, everyone.
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