2024 was the year of Climate Crisis – so how did it fall off the political agenda?
2024 was the year of climate crisis: so how did it fall off the political agenda? – The Hill Times
The World Meteorological Organization recently concluded that 2024 was the hottest year on record, globally.
The global climate system is complex. Ocean currents interact with massive atmospheric circulatory systems. The rapidly warming Arctic caused the northern polar vortex to collapse. What was once a barrier of rapidly moving winds holding the Arctic’s deep freeze over our polar north is now a wobbly system that has allowed cold air masses to move into what were once warmer areas. That has had the unanticipated side effect of interfering with what was once a predictable jet stream. The jet stream used to move at mid-latitudes, fast, solid, east west air currents have now deteriorated to deeply wobbly wavy slowly moving currents. It turns out what kept the jet streams reliably fast and horizontal at mid latitude was the differential between the heat at the equator and the deep cold at the poles. As the Arctic has warmed, deep and dangerous unpredictable extreme weather events are occurring nearly daily and nearly everywhere.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada is taking note. Summer 2024 had a combined total of over $7 billion in insured losses – in Canada alone. Where our summer background soundtrack used to be the Beach Boys, it is increasingly a post-apocalyptic movie score – Mad Max on steroids. Summer is now a season of extreme heat, wildfires, drought, killer storms and floods. We have not recovered in British Columbia from the traumatizing effects of 619 people dying in four days in the last weekend of June and Canada Day 2021. A heat dome is a deadly and lethal event. As the temperature hit 50 degrees C at my husband’s family farm in Ashcroft BC, 40 km away Lytton all but disappeared. The new fire truck burned in the fire station, the town was gone in 15 minutes. My step daughter, a healthy young woman in her thirties, nearly died. Her story was recounted in The Tyee, One woman’s dance with death in the heat dome. https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/08/04/One-Woman-Dance-Heat-Dome-Death/
Fall 2021 delivered another crippling blow to BC with the atmospheric rivers. And we had wildfires all across BC.
As bad as 2021 was, the Insurance Bureau of Canada ranks summer 2024 as the single most destructive season in Canadian history.
In the Global South the climate crisis does even more damage as poorer countries are less able to protect the vulnerable. The 2024 floods in Afghanistan and Pakistan killed over one thousand people. The October 2014 floods in Spain killed over 200 people.
The killer heat waves of 2024 were particularly deadly in India, Bangladesh, Thailand and the Philippines.
The US was also hit hard. The USA experienced 24 extreme weather events each of which had an impact of over $1 billion. Hurricanes Milton and Helene caused widespread property devastation and loss of life. Helene killed over 200 people in the southern US.
Yet the US presidential campaign led to the election of a climate ignoramus. Donald Trump still proclaims that Climate change is a hoax.
It is a source of angst beyond measure.
We just cannot connect the dots. The price of groceries goes up when harvests fail due to droughts and floods. The climate crisis increases the cost of living as it also drives up provincial debt and deficits as the costs of fire-fighting and of rebuilding the devastated infrastructure of community after community and province after province.
We hear a steady drum beat about “affordability” but the threat to the survival of human civilization – a real risk of the galloping climate crisis – is met with silence.
The April 4, 2022, report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was clear- to keep a habitable planet, to ensure the survival of human civilization greenhouse gas emissions must peak and begin to decline rapidly “at the latest before 2025.”
The clock is ticking, but politicians are not leaders. We look at polls and rush to distract the citizenry with shiny trinkets.
As a wish for the start of a new year, watch the 2009 film The Age of Stupid. The premise is that the last person on earth is an archivist, Pete Postlethwait, with vast records of human society, news reels and videos of how we ignored the climate crisis. He asks the most critical question:
“We could have saved ourselves, but we didn’t. It’s amazing. What state of mind were we in, to face extinction and simply shrug it off?”
Fortunately, we still have time. We must take the actions, difficult as they are, to protect our children’s world. What does it take for politicians to realize that when you are in free fall, you reach for the parachute- not the pocketbook.
Elizabeth May, O.C. is the Member of Parliament for Saanich-Gulf Islands and Leader of the Green Party of Canada. She is an increasingly angry cranky activist and grandmother.