I’m from Canada, an industrialized country especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. We’re a northern nation, and the impacts are greater in polar areas. For decades, Inuit have sounded the alarm about rapidly rising temperatures affecting ice formation and loss, and the enormous ecological ramifications. Canada also has the longest marine coastline in the world, and sea level rise from thermal expansion of water alone will have a huge impact on our coastal areas. As the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melt or slide into the oceans, sea levels will rise by yards and Canada’s boundaries will undergo radical change. Glaciers are receding with shocking speed, and people and other species are already feeling the effects on Canada’s vast network of rivers and lakes. The economic impact on climate-sensitive activities—agriculture, forestry, fisheries, tourism, winter sports—is already being felt and will worsen if our emissions are not rapidly reduced.
Across Canada, I have interviewed local politicians and people who still spend time outside—farmers, hunters, fishers, loggers, hydrologists, skiers—all of whom confirm the reality that the climate is changing.
I have also learned from personal experience that the changes are real. Thirty-seven years ago, when my daughter Severn was born, Tara and I wanted to be sure she understood that food is seasonal and should be celebrated when it’s available. So we chose cherries. Each year, at the end of June, we set off camping, fishing, and working our way toward the Okanagan Valley, where we would gorge on cherries and pick boxes of the fruit to send to friends. It became a wonderful ritual. Severn was joined by a sister, Sarika, and as they became teenagers, boyfriends would accompany us and show off with their ability to climb and pick. Then grandchildren began to join us. In 2015, I called the organic farmers in Oliver to ask them to save trees for us to pick when we arrived on July 1. “Sorry,” they told me, “the cherries are already finished.” They had ripened three weeks early! In 2016, we went in mid-June for the first time and cherry season was already well underway. Farmers know that climate change is real.
Five or six years ago, I flew north to a meeting in Smithers, B.C. I was stunned to look out on both sides of the plane to see that the forest had turned bright red! Pine trees were dying because of an explosion in mountain pine beetles, an indigenous insect the size of a grain of rice, no longer controlled by cold winter temperatures. Immense clouds of beetles attacked billions of dollars’ worth of pine trees in an unprecedented epidemic that has blown across the mountains into Alberta, the western portion of the halo of boreal pines that extends all the way to the East Coast. Indigenous people of the north, as well as loggers, hunters, and outfitters, will tell you climate change has kicked in.
The debate over the reality or rate of a changing climate is over. It’s real, it’s happening far more rapidly than we expected, and it’s time for us to act. This crisis, exacerbated by the failure to respond to the challenge in 1988, is now a huge opportunity. I was a student in the U.S. when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. In the ensuing months and years, American rockets kept blowing up while the Russians demonstrated their superiority by launching into space an animal, a man, a team, and a woman, all before the Americans. I watched with admiration as the United States responded without hesitation or concerns about cost. In 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced the plan to get American astronauts to the moon and back within a decade, it wasn’t at all clear how the target would be achieved. The important thing was the commitment to beat the Soviet Union. With a lot of money, energy, and creativity, the U.S. became the only nation to land people on the moon and to realize spinoffs that no one anticipated: GPS, twenty-four-hour news channels, laptop computers, space blankets, ear thermometers, and more. To this day, when Nobel science prizes are announced, Americans win a disproportionate share, in large part because the country committed to beating the Russians to the moon more than fifty years ago. History informs us once we make the commitment to beat the challenge of climate change, all sorts of unexpected benefits will result.
This book aims to provide a comprehensive view of global warming: the science and its history, the consequences, the obstacles to overcoming the crisis, and most of all, the many solutions that must be employed if we are to resolve the defining issue of our time. If we summon the human ingenuity and intelligence that have propelled us as a species, this can become a time of great opportunity. But we must act now. In an important first step, world leaders committed to tackle the problem in Paris in December 2015. If we follow through on those commitments and step up our efforts, we can create a healthier and more just world for everyone.
DAVID SUZUKI
Introduction
BEYOND PARIS 2015
THE 2015 PARIS Agreement on climate change showed that the world is finally taking global warming seriously. Is it too little too late, or is there still hope for humanity? The agreement itself will only get us halfway to the emissions cuts experts say are necessary to avert devastating consequences, including rising sea levels, food and water shortages, and increased extreme weather, droughts, and flooding. But the fact that almost every nation, 195 plus the European Union, agreed to tackle the problem—and that most of them, including the two largest emitters, China and the U.S., have now formally ratified the Paris Agreement—offers hope, especially because the agreement calls on countries to regularly review and strengthen emissions-reduction targets. As important as talk and agreements are, it’s time to put those words into action.
Despite worldwide commitments to address the crisis, climate change remains a contentious subject. Even the terms used to describe the phenomenon spark debate: Is it “climate change” or “global warming”? The scientific methods to determine the properties, impacts, and possible consequences of climate change are constantly scrutinized and discussed. Are the models accurate? Is it possible to draw definitive connections between individual extreme weather events and climate change? Do we understand all the various factors and the roles they play? How much does human activity contribute compared to natural processes? Will the consequences be catastrophic or could there be benefits?
There’s also vigorous discussion around potential solutions. Can we find ways to burn fossil fuels cleanly? Should we deal with the causes or adapt? Do windmills kill too many birds? Is nuclear power the answer? And economic questions arise. Will cutting greenhouse gas emissions—such as carbon dioxide and methane, which create heat-trapping blankets around the planet—harm economies or create benefits? Is it even possible to address the problem under current economic systems? Many people are still confused about what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is or does. And, of course, there are those who deny that climate change even exists or insist that, if it does, it’s not a problem, or it’s a natural phenomenon over which we have no control.
All of these questions are good and necessary, but following the 2015 UN Climate Conference in Paris, we must accept that we have a problem that is in large part of our own making and that it will get worse without a collective global effort to address it. We must also keep in mind that it’s not so much that the planet is in trouble; it’s humanity. The planet and its natural systems are resilient; they recover. But the conditions that make the earth habitable and relatively comfortable for humans are jeopardized because of our actions.
Will getting the planet back on track be difficult? Yes, of course. But is it an impossible task? No.
Cars, air travel, space exploration, television, nuclear power, high-speed computers, telephones, organ transplants, prosthetic body parts . . . At various times these were all deemed impossible. I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed many technological feats that were once unimaginable. Even ten or twenty years ago, I would never have guessed people would carry supercomputers in their pockets—your smart-phone is more powerful than all the computers NASA used to put astronauts on the moon in 1969 combined!
Despite a long history of the impossible becoming possible, often very quickly, the “can’t be done” refrain is repeated over and over regarding global warming. Climate change deniers and fossil fuel industry apologists often argue that replacing