Global Storming

This article was first published in the Skaha Matters Newsletter.

Twenty years ago, I asked a student in oceanography about global warming. She corrected my term to “climate change”, because you couldn’t get US government grants to study global warming. Then she paused, and said “You know, really it should be called global storming, because the first thing to hit us is not warming, but bad weather”.

There’s no doubt that the planet is going to survive global warming. It’s the habitants that are worried. One fascinating fact about homo sapiens is that we live in all kinds of crazy conditions, all over the world. The average winter temperature in Norway is two degrees C. Summer humidity in Duluth, Minnesota is 75 percent. The city of La Paz in the Andes has two million people living at 11,975 feet above sea level (I start feeling woozy at 8,000 feet).

Given this history of adaptability, will we just confront the new normal and move on?

There are two insurmountable problems. Every region has its “normal” bad weather. I grew up in the Cascades where it was normal to accumulated 10 feet in snowpack over the winter. Nobody left home in the winter without an avalanche kit, a snow shovel and tire chains. But we were not prepared to deal with drought, tornadoes, and a winter without snow in 1976-77 that almost bankrupted the ski areas. The worst of global warming is that everyone’s weather is going to be “abnormal”. Extreme events will happen out of season, and events that are normal elsewhere will suddenly happen in your location.

The second problem is that weather events have a completely different effect on high and low income areas. There are a few reasons for this. Global warming makes living by the ocean really dangerous. In Canada or the US, a property near an ocean or a lake is a mark of status, but we forget that world-wide the poorest people live near the ocean for access to fishing and transportation, often in high density cities. The list of cities most threatened by global warming include, Guangzhou - 12 million, Ho Chi Minh City - 7 million,  Kolkata - 14 million, Mumbai - 21 million, New York City - 19 million, Osaka-Kobe - 20 million and Shanghai - 23 million. Another reason global warming hurts the poor – people who are well off have options. These including moving away from floods, droughts and storm prone areas. Scientific American wrapped this up in the title of a 2017 article: “The Rich Leave and Poor Get Poorer”. Using data in part from Hurricane Katrina they found that the rich have insurance, they live in better quality housing which survives damage and they can leave and move to a safer city. This leaves post-disaster areas with lingering damage and weakened tax bases. People who had few options prior to the disaster, now have fewer options.

So it’s not a small rise in temperature that’s going to be the problem. You are going to hate the weather. Canada, as a rich nation, can afford to prepare and react, but the poor both in Canada and across the globe are going to suffer.


Articles and cartoons on Teaspoon Energy by Kristy Dyer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License You may reprint this as-is for free.