Greenland is now warm enough that farmers can grow broccoli in open coastal fields. The reward of a locally grown brassicus, however, comes in tandem with the melting of the island's ice cap. Nearly 3km thick, this gigantic sheet of frozen and compressed snow contains enough water to irrigate their broccoli farms indefinitely ‹ and, at a few millimetres per year, to raise the level of the world's oceans by several metres.
Fresh broccoli in Greenland and the unprecedented melting of its ice cap are just fragments of the climate change taking place all over the planet, a process almost too huge and complicated for us to comprehend. A warming of our atmosphere and oceans is magnifying the intensity of weather everywhere. As warmer oceans release more moisture and warmer air becomes more humid, storms strengthen. Winds get stronger and rains heavier. Rising temperatures shift precipitation patterns, making droughts more persistent. Our traditional settlement patterns, our agriculture, and such mundane things as the safe height of dykes, the appropriate size of drainage systems, and the secure location of our houses, buildings and roads, all become mismatched with a climate system on steroids.
While it's true that no individual weather event can be attributed directly to global climate change, the rising rate of weather-induced disasters excludes any other conclusion. Sir John Holmes, coordinator of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), says bluntly: "We are seeing the effects of climate change.... [T]he pattern looks pretty clear." The reality is that climate change "is with us already." (Guardian Weekly, Oct. 12-18/07). So far this year, OCHA has issued 13 "flash" appeals for humanitarian help, three more than the record year of 2005. Two years ago, only half of the disasters were climate related; this year, all but one are climate related.
The October fires in southern California that destroyed about 1,900 homes and businesses are part of a "moderate to extreme drought" that is affecting 43 percent of the contiguous United States. And the flooding in Mexico's Tabasco state, submerging about 80 percent of the region and displacing nearly 1 million people, was the result of torrential rainfall. In a cruel irony, the driest and poorest of African countries are now being hit by the worst of floods. For Uganda, Sudan, Ghana, Zambia and Mozambique, unprecedented and persistent rains have displaced several million people and destroyed at least 650,000 homes. Meanwhile, Lesotho and Swaziland are facing extended droughts, bringing over a million of their people to the brink of starvation. Bolivia has experienced a strange combination of both droughts and floods.
Australia's extraordinary drought has converted most of their climate change skeptics to believers. In India and Pakistan, as many as 66 million people have been affected by dramatic monsoon rains. Bangladesh was just hit by a November cyclone with winds of 240 kilometres per hour and a storm surge of 5 metres; 10,000 people may be dead and 3 million homeless. Hurricane Felix, a Category 5 "monster storm" with winds of 260km/hr, hit Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast in September, virtually shredding and denuding 1.5 million hectares of lush tropical forest, some of it protected for conservation purposes. An on-site assessment by Rory Carroll of the Guardian Weekly (Oct. 5-11/07) reports that, "The few remaining bits of green are no bigger than broccoli."
No place, it seems, is spared strange weather ‹ including coastal British Columbia. David Phillips, the climate expert from Environment Canada, described the most recent storm that struck here on the night of November 11th as "a major storm event". The wind, with gusts to 100km/hr, caused 508 outages that left nearly 200,000 people without electricity. "This is as bad a windstorm as we had last year," said BC Hydro spokesperson Gillian Robinson. BC Ferries cancelled almost all sailings. Heavy rain caused flooding and landslides. Locally, a high tide coupled with waves and a storm surge ‹ along with the creeping rise in sea levels ‹ littered Campbell River's Seawalk with debris and washed out a portion of Highway 19A at Oyster Bay. Phillips said it brought back bad memories of 2007 (Courier-Islander, Nov. 14/07). "What strikes fear in your heart is remembering what last November was like. It was truly one of the wettest Novembers on record. People don't want a repeat of the devastation that occurred last year."
Well, what we want may not be what we get. The evidence is virtually certain that our emission of greenhouse gases ‹ primarily from burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal ‹ is raising the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, warming the planet and inducing more extreme weather. During the last 10,000 years, human civilization has flourished because we have been blessed with remarkable temperature stability. Even during the "medieval warming and the Little Ice Age, there was only a variation of 1°C", says Dr. Robert Corell of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Guardian Weekly, Oct 5-11/07). In the last 200 years, we have raised this temperature by 0.8°C and we are very likely set for an unstoppable increase of at least 2°C. "Projections for global temperature increases," says Corell, "are now between three and four degrees. ...Now we see the potential for sudden changes of between 2°C and 6°C. We just don't know what the world is like at those temperatures. We are climbing rapidly out of mankind's safe zone into new territory, and we have no idea if we can live in it."
Meanwhile, our CO2 emissions continue to increase, not decrease. And nothing short of radical, concerted global measures are likely to curb this trend. The usually cautious scientists of the UN's IPCC are now using "catastrophic" to describe the weather we are provoking, and insisting that we must take "almost immediate action" if we are to avoid "irreversible impacts".
No one wants to consider such prospects. But we must do so. To deny or even to minimize the impact of climate change will invite weather we don't even want to contemplate. Unless we dramatically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, we will very likely discover that the cost of growing broccoli in Greenland is very, very expensive.