What is the climate crisis all about?  According to Simon Lewis a professor of Global Change Science at the University College London and the University of Leeds,

“The climate crisis means that summer is a time of increasingly dangerous heat. In the Pacific Northwest last week temperature records were not broken, but obliterated. In another heatwave earlier in June, five Middle East countries topped 50C.  The extreme heat reached Pakistan, where 20 children in one class were reported to have fallen unconscious and needed medical treatment for heat.”

One of the things that is becoming more common, in the last year or two, is climate scientists no longer being shy about attributing specific extreme weather events to climate change. Until recently they refused to do that. Now the gloves have come off the scientific hands. As Lewis said,

“Additional warming from greenhouse gas emissions means extreme heat waves are mor likely and scientists can now calculate the increase in their probability.  The 2019 European heatwave that killed 2,500 people, for example, was five times more likely than it would have been without global warming.”

This was not expected, at least, not this soon. Climate change is here. That is the lesson of the summer of 2021. In some places climate change is becoming ugly. For example, as Lewis pointed out,

In places in the Middle East and Asia, something truly terrifying is emerging: unlivable heat. When both temperature and humidity are high, neither sweating nor soaking can cool us. The “wet bulb” temperature—given by a thermometer covered in wet cloth—show the temperature at which evaporative cooling from sweat or water occurs. Humans cannot survive prolonged exposure to a wet-bulb temperature beyond 35C because there is no way to cool our bodies. Not even in the shade, not even with unlimited water.

A wet bulb temperature was once thought impossible. But last year scientists reported that places in the Persian Gulf and Pakistan’s Indus river valley had reached the threshold, although only for an hour or two. Heatwaves and accompanying unlivable temperatures are predicted to last longer and occur over larger areas and in new places, including parts of Africa and the US southeast.

We are in for some interesting times. Are we ready for them? I would be surprised if we are.

The weather in western Canada and United States has been more than freakish.  According to Carlo Buontempo, the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service talked  about the unusual weather event in western North America in the summer of 2021:

“There was a clear human fingerprint on this “very freakish” event. Without emissions from cars, farms, and industry, he said, record temperatures in the western North Americas would be expected only once in tens of thousands of years. As Buontempo said,

In the present climate, getting an extremely hot June is likely to occur twice in three decades. However, an analysis from many computer models suggests that by the end of the century these extreme temperatures are more likely than not. Human influence is estimated to have increased the likelihood of a new record several thousand times.

Temperatures of 50C plus were once outliers even in the Middle East, but parts of Pakistan, India, Australia, the US and Canada are now regularly approaching or passing that mark.”

 

I have to admit that seeing Canada on this list still jars me. Who thinks of Canada having temperatures around 50C? No one I would suggest. No one now except scientists who have to change their projections. Or those who have lived through these events.

The fact is, as Levi Pulkinnen reported for the Guardian,

“In the temperate Pacific North West, a reckoning for the climate crisis has arrived decades before many people thought it was due.”

I come from Manitoba—a cold province.  We are the land of -40ºC, but a couple of summers ago I learned something that stunned me. That is that more people in Manitoba die of extreme heat than extreme cold. How can that be? A couple of summers ago Steinbach Manitoba hit 37C. This year similar temperatures were approached in spring! But to put Manitoba in the same category as Pakistan, India, Australia, and even the US seems crazy.

For some time now many people have thought that the western part of North America, except perhaps for California might escape the worst effects of climate change. But after temperatures in Canada of nearly 50C the sky is the limit. As Pulkinnen said,

“the region with its affluence, abundant resources, and usually mellow weather, seemingly better positioned than much of the world to cope with a hotter, more erratic climate. The deadly heatwave came as surprise.”

And then a couple of  summers ago  British Columbia was forced to report hundreds of “sudden and unexpected deaths.” Is that what the new normal will be all about—sudden and unexpected deaths?”

This year Manitoba has suffered nightmarish wild fires.

Is that what apocalypse now is all about?

Katharine Hayhoe, a professor of atmospheric science and political science at Texas Tech University has done a lot of work on the psychology of strongly held opinions about climate change. She is particularly concerned about her own community, evangelical Christians, many of whom seem irrevocably tied to Donald Trump and his anti-climate change stance.

A study from the University of Bath in September of 2021, on the subject to of youth anxiety about climate change, found that 59% of youth are very or extremely worried about climate change.  This covered 16 to 25 year-olds. 75% of them said that the future is frightening. 56% are so filled with despair and fear that they think humanity is doomed.

Climate scientists have been trying to warn people for decades that climate change was an important issue that must be addressed with real purpose. Since 1965 they starting warning American presidents. Lyndon Johnson was the first American president who was warned in 1965, now more than 59 years ago. We should all think about how much progress we could have made on this subject had their warnings been seriously heeded for over 50 years. We would no longer have a problem! We would be there. We could probably have kept climate change down to a very manageable level. Sadly, that advice was not heeded. All of this is partly the responsibility to businesses, such as the energy sector, invested heavily in spreading false news about the climate crisis. The paid experts to deceive us.

The group of society that has changed the most in their thinking about climate change, according to Hayhoe, is young people and according to Hayhoe they have wielded a lot of political force. They have used that power at the local level and the national scale and even at the international scale. In fact, they have been immensely effective at the international level.

According to Joan Baez, the antidote to anxiety is action. If you actually get to work to solve the problem your anxiety will be most effectively dissolved. The antidote to despair is action.

As well, consider what another youthful activist, Greta Thunberg said, “Don’t look for hope; act! And when you act, hope is everywhere.”

Christiana Figueres who led the climate change talks for the UN at the Paris climate talks, probably has more reason to be frustrated than anyone else in the world. After all, how would you deal with every country, even ones like Canada (LOL), constantly breaking their promises? Frustration would be baked in. Yet she wrote a unreasonably hopeful book called The Future we Choose.

She wrote about what the world would look like in 2030 if we actually took the actions we should take. The air would be clean. Electricity would be affordable. Our cities would be walkable. She concluded her book like this: “The lesson we learned was that we were only as doomed as we believed ourselves to be.” Action is what gets us there. How do we act? We recognize that we all have a voice.

Things are not hopeless when it comes to climate change.

Katharine Hayhoe professor at Texas Tech University and author of a book on climate change and a scientist who has participated in evaluating science for the International Panel on Climate Change. She is a climate scientist who spends a lot of time trying to persuade evangelical Christians in the Bible Belt that the issue is serious and should be addressed. Those are her people and she is one of them.

Hayhoe did a study on possible reactions to the issue of Climate change. Here is the range of possible reactions: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful and dismissive. She said alarmed and concerned had risen from 2008 to 2000 while cautious has remained the same, disengaged has declined from about 12% in 2008 to about 8% in 2020 and doubtful and dismissive have remained the same at about 11% and 7%. The good news here is that even though we often believe the loudest voices rejecting the science are the biggest problem, but the dismissives are only 7%. They carry a lot of notice and traction on social media but actually their numbers are low.

In other words, “93% of us are not dismissive.”  Remember she studies Americans! And only 7% of the Americans are dismissive (or were at the time of the study a couple of year ago). There is clearly some room for hope here. That means in the United States, the categories of alarmed, concerned and cautious  mean ¾ of the population fit into those categories. Isn’t that huge? Isn’t that many more than we would have thought?

What then is the problem? According to Hayhoe it is the fact that we have not personalized the risk. We know that the civilization is at risk. We know polar bears in the Artic are in danger. We know the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are both in jeopardy, but we by and large don’t yet know how we are in jeopardy too. “We haven’t yet connected the dots about how it matters to me as a Mom, as a neighbor, as a citizen, as a person who works in the industry. That is what we need to do.

We have to drive it home. We have to own the problem. This is one of the things I always like about Hayhoe. She brings in psychology. Psychology of how we think, react and deal with problems.  Those are important.

As well, we don’t know what we can do about climate change. We like the idea of saving polar bears but how do we do it? As Hayhoe said,

“And if we don’t know what we can do about an existential threat to the civilization as we know it, metaphorically our human defence system is just to pull the covers up over our heads. We need to be empowered. We need to understand that we as individuals have agency. And that agency begins by using our voices.”

Professor Hayhoe understands that people have the same issues with regard to the coronavirus: “the parallels between climate change and coronavirus are unmistakable.”  That’s why she was sad, but not surprised when reactions to Covid-19 and the vaccines became politicized. This is also the case in the UK and Canada. None of us are immune to this either. We have to have earnest real conversations with each other.

How do we begin these conversations? As she says,

“We begin with the heart, not the head. We start with something we agree on rather than something that we disagree on. If we can find something we agree on and begin that conversation with a sense of mutual respect,  e.g. that I care about my child and you do too, I care about where I work or live and so do you. Or perhaps we are both passionate about a certain activity such as sports or knitting. All of these concerns are connectors. To begin the conservation on the footing of mutual shared values and respect, together, and then connect the dots to how climate change is affecting what we already care about because we are a good parent, or business person, or a concerned citizen. And always what is already happening and what can be done at the levels of our spheres of influence.”

This is Hayhoe’s recipe for successful discussions to dissolve polarization and animosity. I think it makes sense.