The CBC Sunday Edition's feature today on the UK/global newspaper The Guardian pulled a few punches, but still made the point: climate change is the greatest threat to life on earth since the cataclysm 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. The Guardian is continuing a long tradition of campaigning newspapers. My homeland, Australia, and my adopted country, Canada, both depend on fossil fuel extraction for much of their wealth. But The Guardian is right, political leaders in Canada, Australia, and many other countries that have become wealthy and influential because they extract and/or use prodigious quantities of carbon fuels, are wrong, dead wrong, to believe and eagerly disseminate the lies, half-truths, misinformation and obfuscation of carbon fuel advocates. For my grandchildren's sakes, and for the sake of all who come after them, may truth and the good guys prevail! The Guardian's call for society's opinion leaders to divest from the fossil fuel industry is a sound strategy. It might work if the boards of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Foundation, and others took up the challenge.
The first punch pulled in this morning's CBC feature was to say that "90%" of scientists support the scientific evidence. The truth is nearer 99%. The media's near-universal obsession with "balance" leads them into the trap set by the carbon fuel advocates and their tame "scientists," lobbyists and shills. It is a reprise of the artificial "debate" in the 1960s about smoking and lung cancer. In reality there is no "debate" - all the facts, all the evidence, confirm the reality of climate change. The hard facts can't be refuted. For instance, 14 of the 15 hottest years ever recorded have been in this century, which is only 15 years old. The relentless retreat of polar and alpine glaciers and ice-fields is further irrefutable empirical evidence. The underlying science has been known and studied for well over 100 years. Almost all of the so-called "scientists" recruited by industry or drawn into debates and discussions for other reasons are either pronouncing on scientific evidence outside their domain of expertise, like Freeman Dyson, bloody-mindedly obstinate, or have been bought, body mind and soul, by the carbon fuel industry, which has virtually unlimited wealth and has obvious reasons to promote its own interests.
Of course other global changes are occurring. In an article I wrote for the Annual Review of Public Health in 1993, I focused on stratospheric ozone depletion and its far-reaching biological consequences. Even the right-wing ideologue Margaret Thatcher, UK prime minister, was persuaded by this evidence, and was an eloquent advocate for the Montreal Protocol (1987) to limit production and use of ozone-destroying substances. In the same review article I summarized the evidence on greenhouse gas accumulation and its horrendous impact. In the 22 years since then, climate change has become the dominant threat, but the harmful biological effects of increased ultraviolet radiation remain menacing even though they have been partially contained by controlling production and use of many ozone-destroying substances.
Other global changes - resource depletion, especially of fresh water for drinking and irrigation, species extinction, emerging pathogens, reduced biodiversity, population pressure, unprecedented migrations, industrial development, environmental pollution and desertification, have been synergistic with climate change, but climate change is the most dangerous. Its immediate effects have been increasingly apparent in recent years and are becoming more serious much sooner than the theoretical models were predicting 35 years ago when I first became seriously engaged with the implications of climate change for public and population health. Changes that the theoretical models predicted for late in the 21st century or even further off, are already happening. It is increasingly likely that ice-melt in Greenland and Antarctica that was predicted by the models to be several hundred years away - plenty of time to prevent by aggressive mitigation initiatives - will happen before the end of this century, in the lifetime of my grandchildren. This will cause a sea level rise of 5-7 meters, that will inundate Amsterdam, London, New York, Miami, Washington-Baltimore, Lagos, Kolkata, Shanghai, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and many other large cities located at or near sea level. More than half a billion people live within a meter of current sea levels. Well over a billion will lose their habitat when the Greenland and Antarctic glaciers and ice-fields melt. Desertification is rapidly advancing too. California is becoming a desert because shifting Pacific ocean currents are causing a drastic decline in precipitation, rainfall and snow on the coastal mountains. This is a longterm climate change, not a consequence of capricious weather in recent years. Ocean currents are changing direction and force because ocean temperatures are rising. California's carrying capacity is at the beginning of a longterm, irreversible decline. Where will all the parched Californians go? There are many more than there were Oklahomans who moved to California in the dust-bowl 1930s.
Perhaps these trends presage a major evolutionary upheaval, the end of the dominance of homo sapiens and the rise of arthropods - beetles, cockroaches and ants - that are more tolerant of deserts and heat, more efficient converters of energy from their food intake, than hot-blooded humans.
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