“This probably doesn’t need to be said but planning for low probability, high impact, worst case scenarios is looking pretty smart right now.”  Gavin Schmidt The building climate change dangers promise to make the coronavirus pandemic look like a day off work with a cold. Increasing global temperature means rising sea levels, worsening extreme weather, more forest fires, and widening[Read More…]

An open letter to Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland Minister Freeland, an open letter regarding ‘there’s nothing inconsistent about the federal government’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions while promoting a thriving oil and gas sector on the Prairies’. Climate change is a suite of potential dangers. Canadian governments have agreed in international treaties going back three decades to try[Read More…]

Neoliberalism has put the blinders on public imagination, hindering our ability to envision, and thus build, a world free from fossil fuels. Fremstad and Paul It’s the beginning of a new year and decade. 2020 beckons. Life is good, better than the human condition has ever been, but climate change is happening, is accelerating and has become an existential danger[Read More…]

Climate change is real, happening. It is human caused – mostly through our use of fossil fuels, and could be catastrophic, could be a tragic end to our present evolution. Without effective mitigation. But we’ve gone three decades of failure to even slow the increase in burning coal, oil and natural gas, with consequential greenhouse gases (GHGs) increasing in the[Read More…]

Energy transitions have historically taken many decades, half centuries. But now, to stay under even a 2C (and not the much safer 1.5C) global rise in temperature, greenhouse gas emissions must be halved in each of the upcoming decades. Climate change is now a sprint with heavy emission reduction needed as quickly as possible. A carbon pricing aided decarbonization where[Read More…]

There is a Canadian federal election on the horizon. The campaigning has already begun. I’m a long time climate activist who thinks that you should know a very important perspective on climate change and, in particular, mitigation strategies in Canada (election issue).   But what I have to tell you is out of the box, outside the Overton Window, heretical;[Read More…]

We’re dead men walking. Last summer a group of eminent climate scientists published a warning that we were close to a threshold where human induced warming could set off a cascade of positive feedbacks which would increase temperatures to Hothouse Earth, a 5-7C rise in temperature, the end of civilization and maybe even humanity. They warned that “Incremental linear changes[Read More…]

“A fast,emergency-scale transition to a post-fossil fuel world is absolutely necessary to address climate change. But this is excluded from consideration by policymakers because it is considered to be too disruptive. The orthodoxy is that there is time for an orderly economic transition within the current short-termist political paradigm.Discussion of what would be safe—less warming that we presently experience—is non-existent.[Read More…]

Hothouse Earth is this summer’s Uninhabitable Earth, a chilling reminder of how close we are to possibly fatal climate change. The Steffen et al PNAS paper is a review of the climate science concerned with the interplay of ten potential tipping points which when triggered by temperature rise due to anthropogenic warming could potentially push the Earth out of it’s[Read More…]

This spring I was diagnosed with cancer and I have just finished a treatment consisting of seven weeks of radiation aided by chemo therapy. Things look good now. I had a very treatable cancer; I have had effective treatment as quickly as possible. As a long time climate activist totally preoccupied with trying to get to effective climate mitigation my[Read More…]

Hello Justin, I hope you understand that while I must be critical of you and your government I have a great deal of empathy for everyone involved in this wicked problem climate change. I recognize that there are severe constraints upon you and every other national leader. But we still need effective mitigation urgently or climate change promises to become[Read More…]

This third essay on my new metaphor for effectively treating climate change is about climate change being potentially fatal for all we know and love, potentially fatal for civilization as we know it, maybe even for humanity itself. Do we need to consider a major disruption in our society and economy for effective treatment of what could be a fatal disease?[Read More…]

Continuing my new metaphor for effectively treating climate change (I’ve been traveling into town everyday: ferry, bus, Canada Line to the Cancer Agency and same back from treatment) – this quote was in my post-Canada Day Guardian Weekly: “I can’t believe how long I’ve been on hold,” says the Canadian who’s been on hold for the length of time it takes a kettle to[Read More…]

Hello again Ms. Goldsmith-Jones, At a climate meeting you arranged at Gibsons Yacht Club before the election I said I thought you were in what Kari Norgaard describes as implicatory denial:  climate change itself is not denied but “the psychological, political and moral imperatives that conventionally follow”. And then again after you were elected MP I talked with you after[Read More…]