Lament for the Planet
The heatwaves, forest fires, and drought brought on a deep sense of mourning that I could not shake this summer. I mourned for the people who lost their homes, jobs, and lives not from one natural disaster but from a series of climate change related events, one right after the other. I mourned for the future of my 21-year-old kids as I accepted the tumultuous world they are inheriting. I mourned for the ocean, the glaciers, the rivers, and the salmon. But I did not mourn because I learned about climate change for the first time. I have been part of the climate movement for well over a decade. I understand what the scientists are saying, and I watch how the politicians are responding. But there is a big difference between understanding something intellectually and feeling something deep in your heart. This summer, my heart simply broke. I could no longer tap into the belief that if we wrote just one more strategy, launched one more campaign, survived one more election, then we could pull ourselves back from the edge of a climate disaster. That feeling burned up with the forest fires. And so I mourned.
Science validated my lament for the future when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report called the Assessment Report 6 Climate Change 2021: ThePhysical Science Basis (AR6). This comprehensive summary of climate science and models from around the world is based on 14000 scientific papers compiled by 234 scientists from 66 countries, with the final summary report approved by all 195 countries. That’s right, every government in the world approved the report (IPCC, 2021).
While previous IPCC reports detected that the climate had changed since the industrial revolution, the 2021 report concluded that it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.” (p. 5).It also found that extreme weather events happen more often and will increase at a faster rate depending on the world emission levels (IPCC, 2021). The problem is clear: humans are at fault and the impacts will be severe if we fail to take more substantive action.
The global average temperature change (compared to 1850-1900) is 1°C. A 2021 assessment by Climate Action Tracker (Figure 1) predicts that existing climate policies will result in a global average temperature change of 2.7-3.1 degrees by 2100, but they will rise above that first. If all countries in the world meet their current commitments, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC), that would be reduced to a 2.4°C temperature change by 2100. Scientists have modelled the implications of this temperature change and the results are staggering.
According to the IPCC AR6, hot temperature extremes over land that happened on average once every 10 years before anthropogenic climate change now occur 28% more often. A 2°C temperature increase will result in extreme heat waves occurring more often 56% of the time and 2.6°C hotter. A 4°C temperature change means, on average, there will be an extreme weather event 9.6 times every 10 years (P. 23). That is almost every year!
Remember the heat dome in June of this year? Before we caused the climate to change there was a 1 in 150,000 chance that a heat dome would happen. With the current change of 1° in global temperature change, the chances are 1 in 1000. If the temperature goes up one more degree, there is, on average, the possibility of a heat dome every 5 years (Phillip, 2021).
Extreme weather impacts are localized, so they vary across the country. In 2019 Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick saw increased floods (Dangerfield, 2019). 2018 was the worst fire season in BC’s history (Lindsay, 2018), but 2021 is a close second with devastating losses (Little, 2021). And in 2021, parts of the country, especially the west, are experiencing the worst drought in 20 years (Lao, 2021). Internationally the impacts are even worse. According to the World Bank, with a 2° temperature change, 100-400 million people worldwide might not have access to food and water, and by 2080 there could be a 30% decline in crop yield (United Nations, 2019). Research shows that one-third of all conflicts in poorer countries with large populations and alienated ethnic groups occurred within 7 days of a climate disaster (Ide et al., 2020).
No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear
C.S. Lewis
This information seeped into every part of my body and I felt a kind of emotional paralysis, afraid to love or hope for things that may not exist in the future. Every time I looked at the ocean and forests around me, I felt like I was saying goodbye. And I am not alone. A survey by the University of Montreal found that 83% of Canadians say the earth is getting warmer, and 70% say they already feel the impacts in their province (University of Montreal, 2020). The Lancet medical journal reported that surveys from the UK and Greenland found people experiencing increased fear, depression, and anxiety due to climate change, a condition the researchers call ecological anxiety or ecological grief. More specifically, ecological grief is defined as “grief associated with physical ecological losses, grief associated with the loss of environmental knowledge, and grief associated with anticipated future losses.” (Cunsolo et al., 2020, p 261). Unfortunately, that perfectly describes what I am feeling.
I have accepted that grief is now a part of my life and I must learn to live with it. This is not easy (and I am painfully aware that the privileges I have in my life make my journey more manageable than others). But I cannot let this grief paralyze me. I cannot be idle while the world burns. So I will continue to write one more strategy, develop another campaign, and yes, I will make it through this and future elections. I will do this because grief needs hope to soften its hard edges. And hope needs a plan if it is going to be more than just blind faith.
References:
Cunsolo, A., Harper, S. L., Minor, K., Hayes, K., Williams, K. G., & Howard, C. (2020). Ecological grief and anxiety: the start of a healthy response to climate change? The Lancet Planetary Health, 4(7), e261–e263. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2542-5196(20)30144-3
Dangerfield, K., (2019, April 26), ‘100-year floods’ are increasing in Canada due to climate change, officials say — is this true?, Global News, https://globalnews.ca/news/5206116/100-year-floods-canada-increasing/
Ide, T., Brzoska, M., Donges, J. F., & Schleussner, C. F. (2020). Multi-method evidence for when and how climate-related disasters contribute to armed conflict risk. Global Environmental Change, 62, 102063. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102063
Climate Action Tracker, (2021, May), Temperatures, Addressing Global Warming, https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/
Lao, D., (2021, July 29), Severe drought in Western Canada will pressure food industry, raise prices: Expert, Global News, https://globalnews.ca/news/8071120/drought-statistics-canada-food-prices/
Lindsay, B., (2018, August 29), 2018 now worst fire season on record as BC extends state of emergency, CBC News https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/state-emergency-bc-wildfires-1.4803546
Little, S., (2021, August 17), BC’s 2021 wildfires have now burned more than half a million hectares, Global News, https://globalnews.ca/news/8077958/bc-wildfire-update-sunday/
IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.
Philip, S, Kew, S, van Oldenborgh, G., Yang, W., 2 , Vecchi, G., Anslow, F., Li, S., Seneviratne, S., Luu, L., Arrighi, J., Singh, R., van Aalst, M., Hauser, M., Schumacher, D., Marghidan, C.P., Ebi, K., Bonnet, R., Vautard, R., Tradowsky, J… Otto, F., (2021, July 7),
Western North American extreme heat virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, World Weather Attribution, https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/western-north-american-extreme-heat-virtually-impossible-without-human-caused-climate-change/
United Nations, (2019), Climate Change and Poverty Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, United Nations General Assembly, https://undocs.org/A/HRC/41/39
University of Montreal, (2020), Maps, Changement Climatique, https://www.umontreal.ca/climat/engl/index.html
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