Al Gore gave his talk “An Inconvenient Truth” in Vancouver on Saturday, September 29th. It was an awful, wet evening outside – the rain lashed down and the wind howled along the concrete canyons of the downtown. Inside the Westin Bayshore hotel were the great and the good of Lower Mainland society. And me.
The first speaker was David Suzuki, who received a standing ovation. Suzuki really ripped into the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his policies towards Global Warming and The Kyoto Accords. Even though Canada has ratified Kyoto, Canada isn’t even going to try to meet the agreed targets. Suzuki’s humour and passion for the battle ahead against Global Warming really shone through. He ridiculed Harper for his use of intensity as a way of measuring a country’s carbon emissions, a method that doesn’t take into account new economic production.
The next speaker was Gordon Campbell, the premier of British Columbia, who didn’t get an ovation from anyone. Campbell was introduced as a ‘leader’ and a ‘visionary’, words I didn’t associate with the man myself. Campbell was there to introduce Al Gore and to try and gain an environmental tan from Gore’s shining presence. Campbell’s embracing of the need to reduce carbon emissions doesn’t tally with his government’s policies of twinning one of the main bridges over the Fraser River and with the expanding of Highway 1 between Langley and downtown Vancouver, policies that will increase the number of SUVs, Trucks, and cars on the road. Protesters outside the hotel were noisily reminding attendees of these facts. Presumably Gordon Campbell doesn’t share the views of his brother Michael, who has been a critic of Al Gore’s environmental beliefs. This Campbell is a talking-head on financial matters on a local TV station.
Al Gore was a very impressive speaker. Not surprisingly the whole room stood to applaud him. Global Warming seems to be in vogue right now, though judging by the number of large SUVs, trucks, and gas-guzzling cars in the hotel parking lot, being seen to care about Global Warming is more important than actually living a life that reduces an individual’s carbon footprint.
I am sure that most people are at least aware of some of the statistics related to Global Warming. I had seen some of the most recent ones, relating to the melting of the Arctic icecap, in an online edition of the Guardian newspaper. An extra one million square miles of ice melted in the summer of 2007, an increase of 22% on last year, which was the worst year on record. The Guardian reported that in one week during September an area of ice melted that was double the size of the UK. I don’t remember such a headline in The Vancouver Sun, one of the sponsors of “An Inconvenient Truth”. Perhaps it will only get reported here when all the outdoor ice hockey rinks melt and children have to play Octopush instead.
When the Arctic Icecap disappears forever, which could be in as little as 20 years, the melting of the Greenland Icecap will increase. This is because ice reflects sunrays back into the atmosphere. If there is no ice these sunrays will heat the Arctic Ocean directly and raise the temperatures at the top of the world by as much as 7 degrees. No one knows how long it would then take for the Greenland Icecap to disappear; what is known is that once this happens, sea levels around the world will rise by 6 metres, causing severe flooding in Beijing, Florida, New York, and Shanghai amongst many other places. Mr Gore didn’t have a slide showing the effects of such a rise in sea levels on Vancouver. This was a shame because showing this information would have been the single most compelling evidence about how Global Warming will affect people here on the Western Coast of Canada. There’s nothing like a favourite park disappearing under a few feet of water to convince someone that Global Warming should be taken seriously. This only happens when it interferes with our daily lives in a tangible way. Where will I take the dog for a walk? How can I cycle around the seawall if it’s under 5 feet of water?
The other frightening things about this flooding will be the displacement of hundreds of millions of people and the tainting of the fresh water supplies of major coastal cities. After Greenland melts, every subsequent 1 centimetre rise in sea level will mean that a further 1 million people will become refugees.
Watching the people leave the show, I tried to understand why people seemed so happy. I think the problem is that most people in the West believe that Global Warming isn’t going to affect them, that it’s someone else’s problem. You see, we are being asked to be environmentally responsible for the sake of people in countries and continents that most people have never been to. And we are being asked to stop something intangible happening. We aren’t being asked to take measures to reverse something tangible that has already happened – it’s not like the hole in the ozone layer, which the banning of CFCs has helped close. It’s not like dieting and taking exercise that helps you lose weight, the tangible effect of which can be seen on the weighing scales. There are no Global Warming scales for us to stand on as individuals so that we can see what progress we are making towards reducing our own carbon footprint.
If we make all the suggested changes to our lifestyles, as suggested by Mr Gore and George Monbiot amongst others, things will stay as they are now throughout the 21st Century – the icecaps would remain, Greenland would still be in existence, and Polar Bears would still hunt seals. But if this happened, it would cause a lot of people many problems. People need a reward for their actions and there won’t be one, other than the fact that Bangladeshis will be able to live in their villages and the Dutch won’t have to live en masse on floating housing complexes. Something in the human psyche needs a reward for taking a certain course of action and preventing something happening isn’t good enough. Making sure that something nasty doesn’t happen somehow isn’t a valid goal. Take the Millennium Bug – there was an outcry when no large disasters occurred. On January 1st, 2000, planes didn’t crash, the lights stayed on, and banking systems still credited your account with the correct amount. Things stayed the same and people cried that a hoax had been perpetrated, when all that happened was that systems were changed in plenty of time and tested thoroughly. Planning ahead can work miracles, especially when you know what has to be done.
Finally, we can’t say we haven’t been warned. When the Arctic icecap has gone, Greenland is an environmental Atlantis, and the Siberian peat bogs have released 70 year’s worth of human carbon dioxide emissions, Vancouverites will be able to show their grandchildren Stanley Park Island and tell them how you used to be to cycle around the seawall, to sunbathe on the beach, and to marvel at the beauty of the trees. Their grandchild will look at them and ask, “If it was so special, so beautiful, why didn’t you try harder to save it for me?”
And what will the answer be to that?
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