As towns burn and reefs bleach, whither are we bound?

The most sensible intervention of the federal election campaign came not from the federal leaders but a more humble layer of government: mayors and councillors from across the country banded together urging the federal parties to get their “elbows up for climate.” 

One of the most poignant signatures to the open letter was Richard Ireland, the mayor of Jasper. Just nine months ago, an inferno roared into the beloved townsite in the Rockies. National politicians were rushing to offer help at the time, but on the campaign trail, they have been more eager to promise support to the companies that fuel the flames.

“Our experience certainly shows what can happen with climate change and climate-change catastrophe,” Ireland said, as he and over one hundred of his colleagues insisted that climate action be given more priority in the campaign.

Mayors and First Nations leaders must be dreading the warming days in the Northern Hemisphere. New York was already choked with smoke this week (although thus far they cannot “blame Canada” since the fires are raging through the Pine Barrens of New Jersey). Fire season is not only lengthening but has become a kind of Russian roulette for municipal leaders: where will the fires rage this year? Whose town might be next on the ashen list?

“My hope is that no other community has to face challenges in the same way we did,” said Ireland. And yet, the plea from Mayor Ireland felt inconsonant with a campaign peppered with pipeline promises.

As the gallows humourists have pointed out, the main choice facing voters is between a climate derider who promises to axe the tax and get pipelines built, and “climate leaders” who’ve already done both. It makes for a good, bleak, joke even if the election of Donald Trump should make us acutely wary of cynicism and blurring the difference between political parties. 

The campaign was infuriating not just for the mayors but for climate-concerned voters at large. The leaders’ debates were a prime example. Just as the mayors must have hoped, organizers scheduled a whole segment on the topic. But it came a full hour into the proceedings and the moderator’s intro summed up the tortured state of climate debate in the country. “Energy and climate change,” Steve Paikin announced. And then, to the dismay of anyone anticipating some focus on the climate itself: “I know how much all of you love talking about pipelines, so here we go…”

It’s not as if the climate hasn’t been shouldering itself into the frame. Mother Nature has been throwing sharp elbows this month. We might, for example, have posed a question about the figure 25 per cent — not, in this case, a reference to the latest Trumpian tariffs but the unprecedented leap in carbon pollution thickening the heat-trapping blanket around the Earth.

Twenty-five per cent is a big enough number to strike fear among auto workers and other Canadians. It had the same effect on those climate scientists who still have jobs at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere grew at the fastest rate in recorded history last year, they reported. The annual spew into the sky was up 25 per cent from the year before.

It means carbon dioxide concentrations are now at a level not seen in at least three million years — back when giant camels roamed the high Arctic, the Greenland ice sheet was non-existent and coastlines were kilometres inland from their current locations.

Enough to warrant a wee question in a two-hour debate with a section purportedly about climate change, one might think. And, hold on, all you party leaders, a follow-up, please: It’s bad enough if the CO2 growth rate speeds up, but this past year was “next-level high,” say experts like Glen Peters, a carbon cycle expert at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Norway. “So it raises that concern of ‘why is it much higher than expected?’”

Fossil fuels are a prime culprit, of course, and carbon pollution from oil, gas and coal did hit an all-time high last year. But only an increase of about 0.8 percent year-on-year — nowhere near enough to explain the drastic increase in greenhouse gas levels. Something else is contributing as well. “The likely implication is that the land sink was considerably weaker,” says Peters.

The land and oceans have been absorbing about half the greenhouse gases from human activity, so far. But an analysis published this month by Peters and colleagues suggests that nature hasn’t been able to keep up as we pushed temperatures to the hottest levels on record.

“The obvious question is, are we on the cusp of a tipping point in natural ecosystems?” said Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University. “I don’t think one year’s rise answers that question, so I’m not saying we are, but that’s the question on my mind.”

No comment from Messrs. Poilievre, Carney or Singh. Maybe a more mind-stopping number is required. How about 84 per cent?

That’s the proportion of the world’s coral reefs hit by the latest, ongoing, global bleaching event. Prolonged ocean heat makes corals expel the colourful algae that live with them, a symbiotic relationship that’s also the source of the psychedelic underwater colour show. A bleaching event leaves a skeletal reefscape, devoid of teeming marine life. Parted from their colourful partners for too long, the corals die.

“We’re looking at something that’s completely changing the face of our planet and the ability of our oceans to sustain lives and livelihoods,” said Mark Eakin, executive secretary for the International Coral Reef Society.

Eighty-four percent is uncomfortably close to “all of them.” And it’s a stark reminder of the forecasts by the IPCC's Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 C. Back in 2018, at the behest of the world’s most vulnerable nations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarized what’s known about the difference between 1.5 and 2 C of heating. Among its many forecasts about heat was a particularly chilling one about coral reefs: upwards of 70 per cent are at risk beyond 1.5 C “with 99 per cent of corals being lost under warming of 2 C or more above the pre-industrial period.”

This most recent global bleaching event began in 2023 as temperatures jumped. It’s not clear when it will end, but it has already been so severe that NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program had to add three new threat levels to its alert scale. 

It’s the fourth worldwide bleaching event. Those 84 per cent of reefs exposed to bleaching are a major jump from the third, which occurred from 2014 to 2017, and affected 68 per cent of reefs. And the trend is clear if we track backward in time; the second impacted 37 per cent of reefs in 2010 and the first saw 21 per cent of them suffer bleaching, back in 1998.

Coral reefs are sometimes called the rainforests of the sea — mainly because we’re such landlubbers, but the analogy does hold — they support somewhere between a quarter to a third of the planet’s marine species, along with millions of our own, who depend on them for food and livelihoods.

This ongoing bleaching event has hit reefs across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Some have been bleaching even more frequently, including the world’s biggest, the famed Great Barrier Reef. Last week, the Marine Park Authority in Australia declared a sixth widespread bleaching event in the last nine years.

There’s something about the bleaching of coral reefs that cuts deeply into the psyche. It’s probably one reason we prefer to look away. It’s also fair to say that coral reefs are a distant concern for Canadian politics. They would make for a novel debate topic during a Canadian election, but that 84 per cent figure does focus the mind. 

And there are so many other numbers and stories that might have contextualized all that pipeline talk. The loss of 1.3 million square kilometres of Arctic winter ice, perhaps. Or the testimony from a mayor hoping to rebuild a town. 

“We can’t keep watching our homes, towns and forests burn to a crisp, and pretend the status quo is working or safe. We can’t adapt our way out of this problem,” the mayors said in their joint appeal to the federal leaders. “Let’s be honest: new pipelines require massive public handouts, trample on Indigenous sovereignty and mean more climate disasters hitting our cities and towns in years to come.” 

That sounds remarkably similar to the exhortations from scientists studying the coral reefs. Whether it’s the loss of tropical reefs or ice, towns or forests, it all comes back to the burning of oil, gas and coal. “The best way to protect coral reefs is to address the root cause of climate change. And that means reducing the human emissions that are mostly from burning of fossil fuels,” said Eakin, the reef scientist. “Everything else is looking more like a Band-Aid rather than a solution.”