The Road to Glasgow

The Glasgow climate summit is just three months away and the climate science types are taking every opportunity to get their message out: This may be our last chance.

They've got a quiver full of arrows. Much of that is due to what the world has endured this summer - record heatwaves that can take the lives of the old and young and devastate coastal fish stocks, wildfires that cloak a continent in clouds of smoke and now reach high above the Arctic Circle, flash floods that can drown subway commuters in China and tear the main streets out of picturesque towns in Germany and central Europe, severe drought that sears agricultural production - both crops and livestock. What more powerful backdrop  could they have to convey their message that this is it. Either change now or bring calamity down onto our societies.

Research papers warn that humanity is nearing or has already exceeded climate tipping points. Record shattering heatwaves are our new normal. Nowhere is immune to flash flooding and that will only get worse. Leading climate scientists no longer speak in terms of what we must do in 20 years or 50 years. They tell us we're already out of time.

These warnings couldn't be more urgent or dire. We're up against it now. Not at some future point - now.

I can't wait to see what our prime minister does, the guy who strolled onto the floor of the Paris climate summit in 2015 to proclaim that "Canada's back."  Even his own government's departments admit that he's largely screwed the pooch and there's no sign that, beyond empty promises, he has any plan to arrest Canada's carbon economy.  The worst part is that there's nobody on the horizon who would do any better.