This is our El Niño wakeup call and it is our last chance, people

GIBSONS, B.C.—"We need to be on a war footing. It has to be all hands on deck. We need to alter and change our societies and economies. And I just don’t see that happening. I don’t know what it’s going to take. But something has to give. Something has to change," said British Columbia fire ecologist Robert Gray. There is a major El Niño building over the next couple of years, and this longtime climate activist thinks it will be a profound wakeup call for Canadians. Society-wide denial will no longer be possible; we will be looking over a precipice in fear and panic; we will have to recognize our culpability and responsibility. We will have to accept the need for deep systemic change. Canada is a major producer of fossil fuels. Canadians—though few in number globally—have a very high personal carbon footprint. We have been a major contributor to what will finally be seen as an existential threat to civilization if not humanity itself. Don’t we already know that climate change is this existential threat? Yes, but the implicatory denial we share society-wide hasn’t let us confront the full reality of our predicament, and our full complicity and responsibility. We are still trying to increase the production of fossil fuels—now a potential fatal toxin—and we are still in an ineffectual mitigation plan to fail. We are still sleep-walking in hopium, and we are going to have to wake up to the full nightmare we are helping to create. The major El Niño will spike temperatures; rising temperatures are expected to cross the 1.5 Celsius line, if only temporarily. Extreme weather events—with the potential for major disasters—will unfortunately make more news. Heat waves in regions already more vulnerable are one possibility, perhaps escalating ecosystem damage. I’m going to sketch out the view from the precipice and what I expect the El Niño awakening will mean, and what possibilities I think will emerge. I’m going to be positive—I’m a lifelong team sports guy and positive is how I think we should play even if we’re behind a couple with barely minutes left to play. As we approach a 1.5C rise in global mean temperature from the stable Holocene, pre-industrial era, climate, monotonic warming brings serious-enough problems. Extreme weather events combined with vulnerable populations and other building stresses in our world today feeds the ‘four horseman’ problems from which humanity has always suffered. Canada is a rich and technologically advanced nation, and we can handle the local dimension of these problems. It will be expensive and draining, but nuclear war or a worst-class pandemic arising from disaster in more vulnerable countries will be an increasing threat to our safety. The projected monotonic rise in temperature by 2C or 3C is dangerous, but adapting to it is possible. The real building danger—the precipice on which we stand—is non-linear warming precipitated by the warming caused by humans burning fossil fuels (and our land use changes). There are potential feedbacks like decreasing albedo from the melting Arctic and/or the presently safely sequestered carbon in soils, forests or permafrost becoming greenhouse gases (GHGs) and/or a breakdown in the circulation of warming in the world's oceans. These feedbacks could cascade and push global temperatures up by 4C, 5C or even 10C to a globally uninhabitable environment where only a small fraction of the present population could survive, and then only in a few potentially safe remnant areas. Climate scientists have been trying to tell us that the threshold for this feedback-fuelled warming is somewhere over a 1C rise in temperature (probably between 1.5-3C). After at least three decades of knowing about this possibly fatal-to-humanity threshold—three decades of failure to even halt the increase of GHG emissions—we are now close to, if not already over, the brink. The feedbacks are starting to kick in, and soon the momentum will be irreversible. We should never have allowed ourselves to be this close to unimaginable catastrophe. But of course we downplayed the climate dangers and wanted mitigation to be only a tweak to our very fortunate lifestyles. Like our prime ministers, we didn’t want and feared deep systemic change, and believed that we could use revenues from increasing fossil-fuel production to build a renewable tech solution that kept our fossil fuel-powered economy chugging along. Like oil and gas industry management and the investor class, we refused to recognize that the party was over and chose instead to believe in carbon pricing, 100 per cent renewables, and now hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage. Emissions kept increasing but when we looked at our leaders, they didn’t seem too concerned. Climate change is an emergency, but up until now we have been able to practically deny its existence and continue to live our lives as if the threat were minimal. But now we are going to have to wake up. It is as if we had just visited the doc and he told us again that we have a potentially fatal condition requiring major regime change but now he’s pointing out how close to death we already are. We are dead man walking: “You didn’t give up your bad habits. You didn’t do the regime change, diet, exercise, treatment, etc., advised and now you’re close to death. There’s still a chance, but you’ll have to completely change your ways, a complete regime change, and stop working to undertake one last chance at treatment; or, more practically, book your time at the hospice because it’s now obvious how you’ve left it way too late.” Except with climate change it’s not us who are the victims—unless you are a young person—but innocents in more vulnerable parts of the world today and all future generations. Our production and use of fossil fuels—from which we have greatly benefitted—is creating massive and probably fatal damage to those vulnerable in the future. Our failure to effectively mitigate is a trauma and death sentence for our children and theirs. Those alive around the middle of this century will be in a horrific nightmare of irreversible catastrophe as the scientist/doctors diagnose impending doom. The building El Niño is going to shred denial. Look what we’re doing to all we know and love, all we care about and all our futures. How guilty are we? How hot is hell? Why didn’t we act when we could have when there was still time? We’ve seen massive fires, super hurricanes, devastating droughts, raging flooding and lethal heatwaves—but we still didn’t wake up to our denial and act. We’re still investing billions in future fossil fuel production. Something has to change. But I’m betting that this major El Niño will be a biblical wake-up call impossible to ignore, and that we will finally act responsibly. In Canada, we will finally do what we should have done decades ago: form an emergency coalition government and regulate a complete wind-down of fossil fuel production and use. (Probably after close to civil war divisiveness and violence.) We will need every major fossil fuel producer globally to do likewise and the wind-down will have to be very rapid—at least half by 2030 and completely by around 2040. We’ll finally realize that each year we don’t act—each year of pretend mitigation—makes effective mitigation much more difficult. We’ll finally realize that each year of staying in denial is propelling us over the precipice. Bill Henderson is a long-time climate activist based in Gibsons, B.C. The Hill Times