Is the Summer of '21 a Turning Point or a Tipping Point?

NPR had an item this morning about Florida's manatees dying off. They're starving. Apparently warming waters are causing a die-off of their main food, sea grass.  The victim du jour on America's Pacific coast is the humble shellfish - mussels, clams and oysters - that are baking in their shells during this the Summer of Heat. Some streams are now too hot to permit Salmon to spawn. The eggs die in the too warm waters.

Think of a very tall ladder where rungs are starting to fail.  That's what a marine food chain is. It's a ladder of predation. It starts with plankton that feed krill and other small marine creatures that feed small bait fish such as anchovies and herring that feed larger fish, salmon and cod, even whales, that feed the apex predators such as sharks and orca. It's a ladder and when rungs begin to fail, well...

Out my way we have a front row seat to watch this playing out. All sorts of marine creatures are migrating out of the warming southern waters. A pod of Sei whales, a bit smaller than blue whales, was spotted off the west coast of Vancouver Island. These creatures are Goldilock whales. They don't like their waters too hot and they don't like it too cold. 

But what about us? Surely we'll heed the warnings. We'll answer the fire bell, right? Guardian columnist, Rebecca Solnit, writes that's a longshot.

Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping track of this species or that temperature record. Climate catastrophe is a slow shattering of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the holocene era we exited when we manufactured the anthropocene through a couple of centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction.

This spring, when I saw the shockingly low water of Lake Powell, I thought that maybe this summer would be a turning point. At least for the engineering that turned the southwest’s Colorado River into a sort of plumbing system for human use, with two huge dams that turned stretches of a mighty river into vast pools of stagnant water dubbed Lake Powell, on the eastern Utah/Arizona border, and Lake Mead, in southernmost Nevada. ...The US Bureau of Reclamation is overdue to make a declaration that there is not enough water for two huge desert reservoirs and likely give up on Powell to save Lake Mead.

We saw an unusual amount of wildlife on the trip too – mustangs, bighorn sheep, a lean black bear and her two cubs pacing the river’s edge – but any sense of wonder was tempered by the likelihood that thirst had driven them down from the drought-scorched stretches beyond the river. We need a new word for that feeling for nature that is love and wonder mingled with dread and sorrow, for when we see those things that are still beautiful, still powerful, but struggling under the burden of our mistakes.

Then came the heat dome over the Northwest, a story that didn’t appear to make the top headlines of many media outlets as it was happening. Much of the early coverage showed people in fountains and sprinklers as though this was just another hot day, rather than something sending people to hospitals in droves, killing hundreds (and likely well over a thousand) in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, devastating wildlife, crops, and domestic animals, setting up the conditions for wildfires, and breaking infrastructure designed for the holocene, not the anthropocene. ...It seemed to get less coverage than the collapse of part of a single building in Florida.

In Canada the previous highest temperature was broken by eight degrees Fahrenheit, a big lurch into the dangerous new conditions human beings have made, and then most of the town in which that record was set burned down.

Later news stories focused on one aspect or another of the heat dome. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the heat wave may have killed more than a billion seashore animals living on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Lightning strikes in BC, generated by the heat, soared to unprecedented levels – inciting, by one account, 136 [now 300] forest fires. The heat wave cooked fruit on the trees. It was a catastrophe with many aspects and impacts, as diffuse as it was intense. The sheer scale and impact were underplayed, along with the implications.

A turning point is often something you individually or collectively choose, when you find the status quo unacceptable, when you turn yourself and your goals around. George Floyd’s murder was a turning point for racial justice in the US. Those who have been paying attention, those with expertise or imagination, found their turning points for the climate crisis years and decades back. For some it was Hurricane Sandy or their own home burning down or the permafrost of the far north turning to mush or the IPCC report in 2018 saying we had a decade to do what the planet needs of us.

Summarizing the leaked contents of a forthcoming IPCC report, the Agence France-Presse reports: “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions […] Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas – these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30. The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds…”

What's it going to be, turning points or tipping points? The go slow, don't worry/be happy, message from our prime minister is demoralizing. Apparently Mr. Trudeau didn't get or doesn't care about the warning that we have just a few more years - six, maybe seven, max - to change course and that's almost no time, it means an abrupt change of course starting now.

How did Justin put it when he bared his climate soul to the Globe & Mail? Oh yeah:

He likened fighting climate change to turning a big ship in the ocean. At first, it doesn’t feel like the boat is moving at all. He said eventually – in the case of climate change policy, we’re talking decades – movement begins to accelerate.

Your prime minister thinks we've got decades to turn this around. Where will we be in four more years with this guy?

How many rungs in this ladder can we lose? Are we looking at a cascade that devastates the food chain? Good thing we've got Ottawa and its Department of Fisheries and Oceans. They'll think of something. Just ask the cod fishermen of Newfoundland.