Climate Science on the Hill

I was grateful for the invitation.  Denise Savoie, NDP MP from Victoria, is now Assistant Deputy Chair of Committees of the Whole – an archaic title that essentially means she has a non-partisan beat working with the Speaker.  As such, she booked the Speaker’s Salon along the north corridor of Centre Block for a breakfast briefing for MPs, titled “Climate Change and Canada: Looking ahead to Copenhagen.”  She is to be congratulated.  Cross party cooperation is critical and all too rare.  In fact, in the same room where we had the breakfast, I recall former Speaker of the House, the Hon John Fraser, telling a group of environmentalists that we were all engaged in the “conspiracy to save the planet.”
 
The briefing was co-hosted by the Pembina Institute and featured two strong Canadian scientists, Dr. Dick Peltier, Physics professor at University of Toronto who is a leading world expert on polar ice melt (talk: “Lowdown on the meltdown”), and Dr. Dave Sauchyn, University of Regina geography professor and expert in climate and hydrology (could the Prairie rivers go dry?).  Both have worked in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process, Peltier as a lead author, Sauchyn as an expert reviewer.  The word eminent is an understatement.
 
The talks were geared to the crowd that disparages the IPCC.  Great care was taken to ensure that no one with an ounce of common sense could fail to be impressed by the scientific rigour, the consistency of measured, observed impacts, matching the climate modelling, the inability to explain climate changes when anthropogenic forcings are removed from the models, etc.  All evidence pointing to human interference in the climate system.  Given that about five Conservative MPs, including Environmental Parliamentary Secretary Mark Warawa, attended, I was mindful that their party had, in the 2006 election, attacked as illegitimate the IPCC graph known as the “hockey stick,” (resembling a hockey stick for the sharp rise in temperature and carbon dioxide observed in the last hundred years).  To their credit, they attended.  As did a goodly number of NDP members, including Jack Layton and stalwart Bloc Environment critic Bernard Bigras, with a Bloc few colleagues.  No Liberal MPs attended, although some Liberal staff came to take notes.  
 
Sauchyn’s talk focused on the increasingly serious drought conditions on the prairies.  Based on studies he has conducted on tree rings, the North Saskatchewan River was much drier in the mid 1800s, and one year dried up altogether.  Now the region is experiencing one severe drought after another. (Edmonton hit 34 degrees last week, and a record breaking over 35 earlier this summer).    His message was that we have to reduce emissions as fast as possible, and still will have to adapt to a new climate.  We cannot assume that a river like the North Saskatchewan can provide water to more oil up-graders or power plants.  It could dry up in the face of the enhancing impacts of global warming.
 
Dick Peltier described the fascinating science of using satellite readings to measure the thickness of ice.  His project is the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE.  The rising average global temperature is, of course, much more extreme at the poles. (a phenomenon called “polar amplification.”)   The complex relationships between gravity, ice, continental post-glacial rebound were elegantly explained and I will not try to repeat them here.   The most critical part of his talk was the enormous risk to Canada from the melting of land-based ice (such as Greenland or the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet.)    If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, the impact would be enormous and the planet would experience 7.6 metres of sea level rise. If the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet were to melt, the impact would be 6.3 metres. 
 
When I wrote (with Zoe Caron) Global Warming for Dummies, the estimates for sea level rise from a non-linear perturbation like the loss of these ice sheets was around 4-5 metres for each event.  
 
But it gets worse.  The newer science also explains that the gravitational force of the ice actually impacts the sea level rise in inverse fashion.  So the loss of the Greenland Ice sheet would not be as dangerous for Canada as the loss of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet.  In fact, like some giant sloshing of a bath tub, the impact on Canada of the loss of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet would be, according to Dr. Peltier, 9 metres. 
 
OK.  I admit I still think in feet, so 9 metres is 27 feet plus sea level rise. I live near sea level in Sidney , BC.  My daughter is close to sea level at university in Halifax, ditto my dad, my brother, my grandkids in Vancouver. This is a slow motion tsunami. 
 
Move inland? Not likely to be water there for a population of environmental refugees, and this would only be Canada’s domestic population.  The environmental refugees will be a global force for geo-political instability and human suffering. 
 
It was sobering even for someone like me who stays immersed in climate science.  I hoped someone of the MPs, seized with the severity of the crisis we are facing, would raise it in Question Period.  I attended. The questions touched on the amount of money being spent by taxpayers for government ads to tell us how great the stimulus package is (no answer, but I bet it makes the sponsorship scandal look under-resourced).  The lead Liberal questions and one shared out between a few more Liberal MPs and then the Bloc related to how it was Quebec had so little infrastructure funding.  There were questions on the struggling forest industry and the recent adverse trade ruling.  Questions on the alleged molestation of small Afghanistani boys at the hands of our soldiers. Layton asked about the coming corporate tax cuts and the impact of the Ontario and BC HST…..
 
No one asked about climate. 
 
What to do?  More briefings.  More MPs to attend.  More cross-party cooperation. More demonstrations. October 24 is a world day of action to build support for real action in Copenhagen.  We need a huge citizen mobilization.  The youth movement is rising to the challenge, but they need their parents and elders to stand with them.  The new film, “The Age of Stupid” is being shown by groups across Canada.  I saw it the other night in Victoria and over Thanksgiving weekend it will be on Salt Spring Island.  The premise is that sometime in the future an archivist/historian looks back at humanity and asks “why didn’t we save ourselves while we still had the chance?” 
 
Will we be too busy scoring stupid points off each other in endless rounds of political brinksmanship?  Can we ensure our epitaph is not the “Age of Stupid”? 
 
We are not powerless.  We are not alone.  We are the majority. We do not have the right to give up on our children’s future.