In an article published in Nature on December 7, authors Patrick T. Brown and Ken Caldeira report, in technical language of previous climate change studies, that the most accurate climate change predictions have been those predicting worst-case scenarios. They conclude in their synopsis: “Our results suggest that achieving any given global temperature stabilization target will require steeper greenhouse gas emissions reductions than previously calculated.”
As I typed this, Tuesday morning, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) morning radio show, The Current, was interviewing folks from fire-ravaged southern California. It is the year after the worst forest fires in the history of British Columbia to the north, and not long after the savagery of fires that earlier ravaged much of the rest of the world, from Portugal to Australia. We won’t get into the increase in numbers and intensities of storms, like the one that caused so much death and destruction in Puerto Rico, still so far from recovery.
“Greenhouse gas emissions?” It is beyond my comprehension how anyone could think that humanity could produce something like over 50 billion metric tons of anything per year, and somehow not have an effect on where it is produced depending on what it is—in this case the thing produced is greenhouse gases and the place is our planet, Earth. And, the deniers’ assumption—that because mass extinctions happened before in the planet’s history, all is fine—works if you don’t mind waiting tens of millions of years for biodiversity to recover, or the possibility of being one of the species lost.
Facts won’t change the minds of climate change deniers, but meanwhile I’ve been fielding e-mails linking me to that horrific image of the starving polar bear on Baffin Island. The video has gone viral, but then so has a “report” by so-called “polar bear scientist” Susan Crockford, claiming polar bears are doing “just fine”, as reported by the Financial Post.
Crockford isn’t a polar bear scientist. But, Martyn Obbard was until he retired earlier this year, and as he stated when he sent the link to Crockford’s report, “…the population I studied (Southern Hudson Bay) declined from 943 bears… in 2011/12 to 780 bears in 2016, a drop of 17% in 5 years. So no… the polar bears are not doing fine…”
In Canada, the issue is exacerbated by the fact that the Inuit government of Nunavut wants to continue the economic benefit that accrues from subcontracting their allocation of polar bears that can be killed for “traditional” or “cultural” needs to foreign trophy hunters. They argue that their elders know better than the scientists, who caution that polar bears are in decline. But, as one scientist put it to me, it’s a matter of scale. Yes, there can be concentrations of polar bears in certain areas, and in the past, that might have indicated a healthy population, but scientists running vast grids with aircraft get a much broader and more accurate picture of what’s really going on. Meanwhile, climate-fueled disasters continue.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry