A Hot Topic: Is there a downside to rising temperatures?

Preface

I wrote this article for Nature Canada magazine (Winter 1999, pp. 26-31), more than 10 years after scientists began openly raising alarm about the threats of global warming. At the same time, an industry-funded public-relations campaign had sprung up to confuse the public and stall policy initiatives designed to address the crisis.
Another decade has slipped by. I reprise my essay here as a study of the progress (or lack thereof) made on what may well be the greatest challenge to our survival.
Yes, it’s long (3,500 words), but I encourage you to at least scan its contents, especially the conclusion. Do you think we’ve taken up the challenge?

One hundred years have elapsed since Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first laid the framework for the theory of global warming. His understanding—that carbon dioxide (CO₂) traps heat at the earth’s surface like the windows of a greenhouse—led him to assert that increased carbon dioxide (released into the atmosphere by the burgeoning industrial revolution) could lead to a corresponding rise in global temperatures. His prediction, greeted with bemused scepticism at the time, has since found wide acceptance from the halls of academia to private living rooms.
    The era of computer-aided research has contributed an avalanche of studies that point to steeply rising CO₂ levels caused primarily by human (anthropogenic) actions. Forty years ago, researchers added physical evidence of a build-up of CO₂ from fossil fuel combustion. Because carbon dioxide emitted under natural circumstances has a different nuclear signature than that created by the burning of fossil fuels, scientists were able to differentiate between the two. By studying the radioactive carbon-14 trapped in tree rings, they proved conclusively that our activities were loading the atmosphere with CO₂.
    Comparison of data sets from widely distributed monitoring locations also points a finger in our direction. Higher concentrations of CO₂ are routinely recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, where most human activity produces an excess of the gas. Because northern emissions take about a year to make their way to southern latitudes, the discrepancy in global distribution can be illustrated.
    Although natural processes, such as the decay of organic material, releases about 198 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually, it is balanced by natural sea water and plant life “sinks”. Both absorb this most abundant greenhouse gas (second only to water vapour). This extra CO₂, presently 3 percent of natural yearly emissions, has accumulated to bring current concentrationsto 30 percent above pre-industrial levels.
    Paleoclimatology is a relative newcomer to the debate, but the ability of this branch of science to add the broadest timeline to climate data is perhaps the most convincing validation for anthropogenic change. By studying “fossil air” trapped in Antarctic and Greenland glaciers, scientists have been able look back over 200,000 years of climatic records preserved in the ice. Cores extracted from the ice caps confirm that for 10,000 years prior to industrialization, carbon dioxide concentrations remained stable at about 25 percent lower than today.
    Given such evidence, it seems clear that human actions are having a significant impact on global levels of greenhouse gases. The United States alone produces 18 tonnes of CO₂ per person annually, but Canada is similarly prolific. Despite our sparse population, we hold the dubious distinction of second largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases—which also include methane, nitrous oxide, and the infamous chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). (Updated stats)

In the three years since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established by the United Nations (UN) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate,” little real progress has been made in reducing greenhouse gases. In a 1998 address to his colleagues, WMO secretary-general G.O.P. Obasi warned that “the panel’s most recent assessment suggests that the Earth could be as much as 3.5ºC warmer by the year 2100 if no preventive measures are taken.” Dire predictions like these have prompted international conferences such as the one held last year in Kyoto, Japan. But many, including a vociferous energy lobby, downplay the risks.
    In a month when Calgary choked on noxious smoke from nearby forest fires, then suffered a flooding deluge, energy ministers met in the city last summer to debate the contents of the Kyoto Protocol. Dan Miller, B.C.’s minister of Energy and Mines, joined his counterparts in Saskatchewan and Alberta in rejecting the Kyoto targets. Miller said Canada’s commitment—reducing emissions from burning fossil fuels to 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2012—was “unrealistic.”
    Some lobby groups go further in rejecting the IPCC report. Laura Jones, environment economist with Vancouver’s conservative think-tank, the Fraser Institute, asserts that the appearance of agreement among IPCC scientists is a distortion created first by the UN body itself, and further distilled by media reporters hungry for sensational copy. “The idea that there is consensus that we face some kind of apocalyptic global warming caused by human activity is false. Among scientists who are directly concerned with the science of climatology, there is considerable disagreement about whether or not we are entering a warming period and whether it is a result of human activity,” she says.
    The authors of the Fraser Institute book edited by Jones—Global Warming: The Science and the Politics—also downplay the relationship between fossil fuel burning and global warming, preferring to attribute climate variations to other causes. Some blame sunspots; while contributor Dr. Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia (and chief editor of World Climate Report) claims that, based on satellite measurements, the earth is actually cooling.
    In a similar vein, a website with links to the fossil fuel industry announces its raison d’être as a site to “spread the good news about the beneficial impacts of carbon dioxide on earth’s atmosphere and the American people.” Here, in cyber-space (and promoted by Sherwood B. Idso in the Fraser Institute book as well), the future is not a sweltering Armageddon or The Deluge, Part II. Instead, it is a green utopia where the gaseous by-products of industry become “the elixir of life,” freely dispensed to the hungry masses.
    The Greening Earth Society (funding source for World Climate Report) also envisages an improved world with a doubling of atmospheric CO₂. The society’s “correct and optimistic view” looks forward to a “30 to 40 percent” increase in crop yields, doubled “water-use efficiency” of the world’s vegetation, and “possibly triple the productivity of forests.”

Here in the Great White North, who wouldn’t mind a bit less winter—a few more days of sunshine, a more productive forest industry? But, according to a recent study by Environment Canada, glib predictions of California North (palm trees on Bay Street?) fail to anticipate the implications of such unparalleled changes.
    The Canada Country Study (CCS) has gathered expert opinion to envision what this part of the world might look like with double the amount of carbon dioxide. Their projections are not quite so rosy as those offered by the Fraser Institute and Greening Earth Society. The CCS warns that Canada could be particularly hard hit, with warming “up to three times the global average.” The study also states that spring flooding “could be more severe and frequent” in low-lying areas along waterways, as winter snow packs melt at accelerated rates.
    A sea level rise of up to 95 centimetres is expected along Canada’s coastlines. That would put West Coast metropolitan areas like Richmond under water and threaten Atlantic shores “from the Bay of Fundy to the coast of Newfoundland.” Prince Edward Island’s crumbling north shore would be exceptionally vulnerable. Conversely, our greatest bodies of fresh water, including the Great Lakes, would lose volume to increased evaporation—putting strains on water supplies and reducing hydroelectric capacity.
    The study predicts that landslides will increase in mountainous terrain as “winter precipitation rises, permafrost degrades” and many of Canada’s glaciers “substantially melt or disappear completely.” Already, warming at three times the global rate has melted permafrost in the Mackenzie Basin, causing extensive sloughing along the banks of the Mackenzie River; and measurements from Alberta’s Columbia ice field show its glaciers have lost 40 to 60 percent of their mass over the last century.
    In the Yukon, the vast glacial area west of Whitehorse, containing the largest ice masses outside the polar regions, is giving up secrets from another age. Researchers there are now able to study the contents of caribou poop, locked in a deep freeze for thousands of years. Still further north, an international group of scientists aboard the Canadian icebreaker Des Groseilliers— deliberately frozen into the Arctic ice pack late in 1997—witnessed a melting phenomenon on a scale that staggers the imagination.
    The yearlong research project, that wrapped up last October, is called SHEBA for Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean. Data collected as the ship drifted with the moving ice will be used to improve the climate modelling programs on which global warming projections are based. Very early on though, the scientists were astounded to discover ice less than half the thickness found there in other years. The melting continued during the period of study at a rate of up to seven centimetres a day. Meanwhile, at the southern extremity of our planet, at the beginning of the latest antipodean summer, Antarctic researchers watched an area 5800 square kilometres in size calve from the Ronne Ice Shelf into the southern Weddell Sea.

Summer drought could become a real problem as well. British Columbia—a province renowned for its dreary climate—saw very little rain last summer. Gary Myers, superintendent of climate services for Environment Canada in Vancouver, confirmed that 1998 was “warmer than usual.” Although precipitation rates looked close to normal, “the numbers were skewed by some particularly heavy rainfalls in some areas,” he says.
    In British Columbia, the first seven months of 1998 averaged out at 1.6°C above normal; a dozen weather stations reported records, including warmest one-day maximums. In B.C.’s mountains and across northern Canada, temperatures over 2°C above normal were recorded. Nationally, preliminary Environment Canada statistics (Sept. 1998) indicate the summer of 1998 was 1.8°C above normal and the warmest on record. Nine out of the last 10 summers have shown similar increases.
    And Canada is not alone. British meteorologists report that, according to last years’ data, 1998 will almost certainly break 1997’s record as the warmest year since global records began 139 years ago. The nine warmest years on record are all clustered in the last 11 years.

In 1977, thermometers in the northern Pacific recorded a sudden jump in temperature. Since then, this continuing “regime shift”, intensified by strong El Niño events, has had major repercussions along the west coast of North America. The warmer water is blamed for a corresponding 70 percent crash in zooplankton, an integral component in the ocean food chain. Biologists associate the death of four million seabirds with these changes as well; and researchers with the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) warn that warmer, nutrient-poor waters may be the final straw for already depleted Pacific salmon stocks.
    In a recent paper, Howard Freeland of the department’s Institute of Ocean Sciences reported “watching a tongue of warm water … travelling steadily across the Pacific.” It is responsible for the lowest nutrient levels ever recorded in the Gulf of Alaska and suggests “profound changes are taking place in the ecology of the northeast Pacific in response to climate change.”
    Dr. Kees Groot, a retired DFO scientist who was an early pioneer in relating global warming theory to fishery concerns, describes the ocean as a stage on which an epic drama is unfolding. “In this particular case [the Aleutian Low Index Change], the stage is moving. Slight movements in the physical stage have dramatic effects on the biological play, to the point that if the stage moves too much, all the players fall off. This is probably the case with [Pacific] salmon right now,” he speculates.

To date, ocean temperature changes have brought tropical fish to the Mediterranean, and sardines and mackerel to British Columbia waters. In Russia last spring, flocks of siskins, a bird usually confined to habitat much further south, turned up in northwestern Siberia. And besides the noted seabird deaths, the once abundant, now beleaguered Steller sea lion could also become a casualty. Findings like these indicate that the “species extinctions and redistributions” predicted in the Environment Canada study may already be a fact of life.
    In the Canadian North, polar bears—listed as “vulnerable” by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada—will be impacted severely by a warmer climate. If the astounding changes noted by Ice Station SHEBA represent an indicator rather than an anomaly, the great bear and its prey, the ringed seal, are consigned to oblivion. Musk oxen and the High Arctic Peary caribou would also face extinction.
    “Profound changes” are expected in Canada’s forests as well, according to the CCS report. Although some species adaptation may be possible, wildfire is the wild card here. Last summer, NASA satellite views of the North provided apocalyptic visions of the boreal forest. Red “hot-spots” flared like bloody wounds from Whitehorse to James Bay, bleeding a blue-grey plume of choking gases and particulate aerosols across the continent. By year end, Canada-wide statistics put fire incidence at 123 percent above normal with the area burned up a whopping 159 percent.
    Serious smog problems in Vancouver and Toronto during recent heat waves illustrate, all too adequately, the effect of declining air quality associated with warmer summers. But increases in respiratory disorders and pulmonary infections are not the only human health risks. Epidemiologists tell us to expect invasions of foreign bugs, as well as virulent outbreaks of familiar Canadian scourges, such as beaver fever.

This is a sobering list, but the question still remains: can we blame an enhanced greenhouse effect for all these disquieting phenomena? “I don’t know anyone who can say definitively that these events are caused by global warming, yet most of us believe they are,” says David Suzuki, host of CBC’s Nature of Things. Bill Taylor, Environment Canada climatologist, and co-editor of Volume I of the CCS report, also stresses that “it’s very difficult to speculate as to what is causing any particular event, but when you look at the fact that average temperatures rise over a long period; that’s the evidence [for global warming].”
    As for rumours that there is wide-ranging disagreement within the ranks of the IPCC science community—that charge is summarily dismissed by Professor Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences. As a lead author of two chapters of the IPCC report, he insists that were it not for restrictive guidelines imposed by the UN, the scientists involved would have worded a much stronger warning.
    Weaver notes that it is not surprising that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were dissenting voices. “You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to know why they were critical—they are major oil producing countries.” Otherwise, “what IPCC put forward is, indeed, a consensus” among leading scientists, he says.
    Kees Groot concurs. “If you go to a major conference in which global warming is the issue, and if you take a vote—in New York they took a vote like that—you will find the ratio is nine to one; that is, nine think global warming is serious business, one thinks that it’s overplayed.”
    Climatologist Bill Taylor prefers to believe the IPCC as well. “It comes back to the precautionary principle. What are the consequences of inaction? Though there’s quite a bit of uncertainty surrounding the phenomenon, enough is known that we feel action is warranted.”
    Weaver reserves particular contempt for the idea that more carbon dioxide would be a boon to the world, particularly plant life. He rejects studies on which those claims are based as deeply flawed. “The last time I looked, plants are not limited by the amount of carbon dioxide.… The single most important limiting factor for plant growth is water.” Since every global climate model projects drier summers—which, Weaver observes, “is precisely the growing season for plants”—no amount of CO₂ will make a desert bloom.

Fisheries research scientist Dr. Gordon Hartman, just back from a World Bank sponsored biodiversity project in Malawi, points out that we cannot look at events in isolation. Because “these kinds of problems are often cumulative in nature, we need to consider whole systems,” he explains.
    Hartman illustrates his thesis with the plight of the Fraser River, where temperature increases could very well be amplified by reduced flows from its largest tributary—the Nechako—which has 80 percent of its water drawn off to drive Alcan Aluminum’s hydroelectric turbines. The cause-and-effect scenario can also be applied to the catastrophic flooding that swept more than 3,000 people to their deaths along China’s Yangtse River and its tributaries last summer. Record temperatures high on the Tibet-Quinghai plateau—western source of the Yangtse—caused snowcaps to melt at an alarming rate, while unrestricted upper watershed logging destabilized steep terrain, triggering faster run-off.
    Such events suggest that it may be time to treat the whole planet as a complex living organism. A paper recently published by the American Geophysical Union lends weight to that view. “Oceanography of the Antarctic Continental Shelf” describes recent discoveries in the Southern Ocean, where Australian scientists believe that the Adelie area may be the source of up to a quarter of Antarctic Bottom Water. This water, heavy with salt released from freezing sea ice, sinks four kilometres to the bottom of the ocean, carrying oxygen and creating currents that impact global climate. Ice Station SHEBA reports similar functions at the other pole—an oceanic conveyer belt that ultimately pumps moderating currents toward Europe. Disruption of these monumental weather engines that circulate salt, oxygen, and transfer heat around the globe could have impacts reaching far beyond the poles.
    Canadians should keep this in mind this winter, when (if forecasts hold true) the season will feel anything but balmy across some parts of the country. The reason? Whereas, in 1997, El Niño presented observers with the greatest ocean warming anomaly in 150 years, contrary cousin, La Niña, has been registering record low temperatures this past summer in the tropical Pacific. Some researchers believe that such wild pendulum swings may indicate a tendency toward exaggerated cycles as the planet warms.

How should we respond to these threats? Not by rushing into restrictive public policy that could have extensive economic impacts, according to the Fraser Institute’s Laura Jones. She believes that the measures proposed at Kyoto are Draconian, and legislation intended to mitigate climate change may actually have adverse effects on the environment. Her advisors say that “even if we delay action for five or 10 years, and we do discover that, gosh, it is human activity [that is causing climate change]—then you haven’t lost very much.”
    Critics of laissez-faire economics disagree. They suggest that the limits of the planet—referred to as “externalities” by some economists—must be integrated into market analysis. Among the latest groups to throw their weight behind the IPCC conclusions are 2,800 North American economists (including 300 Canadians) who warn that the price of dealing with global warming now will be a pittance compared to the cost of inaction.
    If some recent events are an indication of what the future in a warmer world might look like, the economic tally will be steep: $276 million and fire-fighting costs of $176.9 million for Florida fires; $140 million to fight fires in British Columbia’s parched forests; an estimated $38 billion in flooded China; the economies of Central America—obliterated by one devastating storm. Figures like this may supply us with a foretaste of things to come—if, indeed, the future is not now.

James Bruce, co-chair of the IPCC Soci-Economic Working Group III, says that only inertia in the social and economic system stands in the way of remedial action. Summing up the group’s report, Bruce states, “A 10 to 30 percent reduction in emissions could be achieved at no cost, by using energy efficiency measures and by putting in place low-cost energy alternatives. On a global basis, emissions could be reduced by 18 percent if all subsidies to fossil fuels were eliminated.”
    Andrew Weaver likens present industry stalling on these emissions to earlier foot-dragging over ozone-destroying CFCs. As the main producer of those chemicals, “Dupont vehemently denied that there was any evidence [linking CFCs to ozone destruction]” and their lobbyists resisted controls for years, “until the company had a patent on HCFC substitutes.” Then, he says, they became eager signatories to the Montreal Protocol that phased out the use of CFCs.
    While Jones argues that “concern for the environment is directly related to per-capita income,” few accept the link between wealth and regard for environmental health. Were that the case, they say, Tokyo or New York would be a pristine Shangri-La, while cash-poor tribes would have trashed their homelands long ago. A cursory examination of the globe points to the opposite conclusion.
    In spite of recalcitrant provincial governments—particularly Alberta’s Premier Ralph Klein—and the petroleum industry, federal government officials say they are determined to ratify the Kyoto agreement. Environment Canada “recognize[s] that the potential human and economic costs of unchecked climate change are simply too high for us not to take action now.” As a result, the 1998 federal budget earmarked $150 million over the next three years “to build momentum toward concrete action and results on climate change.”
    Whether that “momentum” will produce any real results remains to be seen. Clearly, the challenges of climate change point to a need for holistic approaches to environmental and economic planning. But only time will tell if we’re up to the task.

Epilogue

Not much has changed. Scientists’ warnings have grown more dire, deniers’ tactics more desperate.
Meanwhile, the kind of cumulative effects of our environmental neglect listed above hit closer to home. Just a month ago, the combination of deforestation and an increasingly common “abnormal rain event” inundated communities from Northern Vancouver Island to the Central Coast.
Little has been done to concretely deal with rising CO₂ levels, particularly in Canada, where whatever government momentum there was has changed to inertia under Stephen Harper’s regime.

Can we afford yet another decade of foot-dragging?

Canada Country Study (PDF) | SHEBA | IPCC | UVIC Earth & Ocean Sciences

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