“You’re getting warmer… warmer… warmer. Now you’re getting very warm. Oh, you’re getting hot!”
That used to be something that you’d hear kids say while they were playing hide and seek.
But it’s not a script for a kids’ game anymore.
American scientists put together a comprehensive report detailing the ways that climate change is going to cost that country alone hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
Ironically, the report was released on Black Friday – a day in which it’s likely to get lost in the news cycle because, on that day more than any other, people are spending billions of dollars on useless stuff that is a big part of the global warming that is going to cost them billions of dollars.
By the time people turn on their Black Friday sale-price TVs, the contents of Volume II of the Climate Change Assessment will be old and boring, and the news channels will be dominated by something ridiculous and dangerous that Donald Trump has said which is demonstrably even more ridiculous and dangerous than other ridiculous and dangerous things he has said.
This is the guy who viewed the devastation in California and suggested raking forest floors to prevent forest fires… the way they do in Finland. The ridicule from Finns You-Tubing their forest rakes and rumbas was hilarious… and happily diverted us all from how dangerously silly “the most powerful man in the world” is.
But we’re not innocent in Canada. Our politicians talk more smoothly than Trump (a low bar, to be sure), although all but two of this country’s federal, provincial, and territorial governments are failing to meet 2020 greenhouse gas emissions targets. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are among Canada’s least industrial jurisdictions, and they set their sights relatively low.
Few countries – including ours – will achieve 2030 targets needed to keep the our forests from burning hotter, diseases and bugs from decimating our crops and ourselves, or the permafrost from thawing, the very thought of which causes scientists’ eyes to glaze over in panic.
And the sea levels keep rising.
The American report is even more dire than global estimates that Vancouver and 10,000 other coastal cities around the world will be flooded by the time children born today reach middle age.
Perhaps Trump will suggest everyone start baling… like they do in Holland.