Urban Meltdown - The Blog

Two degrees of centigrade

I was a guest on a popular, local radio show a few weeks ago with a rural councillor. I think the host expected me to be confrontational but what is there to be confrontational about? We don’t have a city council. We have a township council. Two more rural councillors were added in the last election. These two councillors have been elected with a new Mayor devoted to cutting taxes and building more roads.

The result is easy enough to see. Council moved 10 million dollars from transit to roads, approved the Strandherd bridge design (across the Rideau River) and once the Strandherd Bridge is built, Armstrong Road which now dead-ends in the countryside will be linked with the 417 on the west and then on the east giving the city another ring road to join Hunt Club. This will push the suburban sprawl out another 30 kilometers and create more traffic in Manotick village than they can imagine changing the entire landscape around it from rural to suburban.   

As I write, Toronto is reducing its road budget and spending $17.5 billion on transit to create 17 surface electric light rail lines to serve the entire city. In 2007, Ottawa will build a record 200 kilometers of new residential roads and spend 167 million on the top ten arterial road projects. This is at a time when road construction costs are rising at 7 to 8 per cent a year and our city taxes are rising at 2 per cent. Do the math.  It isn’t complicated to see this is a recipe for financial failure. As we build more roads to debt, gasoline prices are rising even faster than construction costs.

The news on the climate change front is even more alarming.  An Australian report by Dr. John James for the ‘Climate Crisis Coalition’ indicates that the political will is not there to stop global warming from hitting 2 degrees Celsius within a few years. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Just two degrees centigrade.

The earth’s climate has certainly changed in the past by two degrees and more, but never so quickly, and the heating is not being distributed evenly. It affects the Arctic regions where the temperature is spiking more than 8 degrees. According to this report, once the planet heats by 2 degree centigrade overall, the permafrost is expected to melt and this will release methane gas into the atmosphere which is 20 times stronger than carbon dioxide in terms of its green house gas effect.  Methane gases from the permafrost and methane released from the sea have the potential to heat the planet as it never has been in human history – up to 60 degrees. 

On the radio show, I try to explain that we are facing a crisis of unimaginable proportions but how can you find solutions when Council won’t even acknowledge there’s a problem? One of the solutions I suggest is that we concentrate on maintaining the roads already built while building electric light rail as vigorously as Toronto is doing. We have put public transit expansion on hold for more than a decade in the past, why can’t we put new road construction on hold for a few years while we create greener transit alternatives for the city?

The host responds with “It’s been cool lately and what about that intersection at Bronson and Carling? Councillor Doucet, you have taken a turning lane out, narrowed the intersection and planted trees? What were you thinking? It’s a pain.”

End of interview.

I went back to reading to reading the Australian report. One of the points that it concludes with is that although the science of climate change and its consequences are now crystal clear, politicians aren’t listening, not even to their own appointed experts. The experts are right and it’s one of the principal points of my own book, but the extent of the denial is a great deal larger than a political one as my little radio show experience makes clear.

Tewkesbury is a quaint little place.

Tewkesbury is a quaint little place of about 17,000 people a couple of hours outside of London. Formerly famous for its cathedral, now famous for being under water. In Canada, we are reassured on the front pages of the national newspapers that all this is quite understandable now because government scientists have confirmed that global warming is creating a wetter north and a drier south. So we can plan. Isn’t that great!

It’s like attending a play where you’ve read the prologue and you’ve figured out how Acts I to III are going to unfold. Tewkesbury will be remembered as the opening Act. There are 300,000 people displaced by the current high water in the United Kingdom. Act II will be London under water. Try and imagine the city of London under water just like Tewkesbury. Fifteen million displaced people, that’s the population of London and environs. Then try and imagine it happening again.  Then try and imagine millions of very comfortable people having to find some other place else to live. They ain’t going south because it will be too hot and dry. 

The prologue to Act I is the theory of fat tail change which was elaborated several decades ago by scientists who weren’t government employees. Fat tail says that the carbon loading of the atmosphere is creating a new atmospheric balance, which will result in weather change that isn’t smooth or gradual but spikes sharply straight up. It will continue to go straight up for many years even if the annual carbon loading stabilizes or reduces, (which is isn’t, it’s increasing). This is exactly what has happened and is happening. Since 1997, municipalities across Ontario have seen fat tail change at work. Each year is hotter and wetter than the last.  Municipalities are now building storm sewers for 200 and 250 year floods; that means they are expecting annual rain storms with volumes that in the past we only saw every 200 or 250 years.

This is what is happening. Rain storms of tremendous ferocity are regularly rolling down the Ottawa Valley to drown summer fields and flood city basements. The last one was just a couple of weeks ago. Last winter, Ottawa had 17 separate ‘weather events’. A weather event is an exceptional circumstance, e.g. freezing rain, flash freezes, extreme precipitation. Stratford, Ontario could be thought of as the Tewkesbury of Canada. It is now re-building its entire storm sewer system after being flooded from one end to the other. Stratford can do this because it’s a relatively small city and relatively rich. You can’t do this for a city the size of Toronto, Montreal or Ottawa, the costs are simply too large. All you can do is start replacing the ‘mains’ which will take decades. But even if your city has 250 year storm sewers, if the water table rises, no storm sewer in the world will protect your city, it just floods.

Don’t refinish your basement. Don’t use carpet anywhere. Use tile. Do not have expensive, difficult to move furniture or electronics. Have nothing in the basement that can’t be moved easily or be repaired by anything more complicated than washing and drying. And don’t expect the city to protect you from storms beyond the 100 year horizon because that’s all they have been built for and they can’t be changed overnight. Suing the city may seem like a satisfactory alternative but when the entire city or large portions of it are underwater – whom do you sue? At the end of the day, you are the city.

This kind of knowledge and planning is useful in that it can mitigate the damage in the short term. But the long term continues to look grim as the folks who control the planet’s thermostat – the federal governments of the largest, most polluting nations, China, India, the United States, Russia, Canada – continue to preach that religious extremism is the greatest threat to humanity’s well being. While the greater threat, of the planet’s ice cover from Greenland to the Antarctic disappearing into the oceans and those oceans rising and moving into people’s living rooms, continues to elude them. 

We can be confident that sooner or later, they will grasp this large but simple relationship but the problem is fat tail theory teaches us when London is under water, it will be too late. Climate change doesn’t work on election cycles.