Climate: whistleblowers were not wrong

The author is Director of Domestic Policy for Climate Action Network Canada.

In Greek mythology, Cassandre receives from the god Apollo the gift of predicting the future.For years, the scientific community and indigenous peoples have been warning us of the dangers of climate run and the destruction of biodiversity.But as the predictions of the Trojan princess, condemned by Apollo not to be listened to seriously when she provides for the misfortunes which will afflict her family - whose Trojan took -, their warnings are not heard.So much so that extreme climatic events even worse than what the models predicted were realized.This is the case of the heat dome which wrapped the west of the North American continent a few days ago: the village of Lytton smashed the absolute heat record in the country three days in a row, to peak at 49.6° C (before being destroyed by a fire)), hundreds of people died, and more than a billion sea creatures have cooked in their shells.

Will these events awaken us?And if so, do we need such devastation-closer to home, and in one of the coldest countries in the world-to finally believe what we have been warned for decades?

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A week after this heat wave, World Weather award, an initiative bringing together climatologists around the world, estimated that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions had made the event at least 150 times more likely, i.e."Virtually impossible without climate change caused by humans".While the planet warms up, this kind of incident will become much less rare.The peak of extreme temperature even led several employees of this group to raise the possibility that "rocking points" have been affected - which the group of intergovernmental experts on climate evolution (IPCC)) defines as thresholdsbeyond which certain impacts are irreversible, even if the temperatures are lowered later.

The effects and dangers of climate change has been known for a long time, as details in a blog the scientist of the Katharine Hayhoe climate.In the 1820s, the French mathematician Joseph Fourier calculated that the earth should be much colder, given the energy it receives from the sun every day, recalls the director of the center of climate science at Texas UniversityTech, in the United States.The effect of carbon dioxide on heat sequestration was discovered by amateur scientist Eunice Fote in 1856, she also notes.And it was in the 1890s that a Swedish chemist, the Nobel Svante Arrhenius, calculated by hand the very first climate model, which evaluated how much the world would warm up if humans doubled or tripled the quantity of carbon emitted inthe atmosphere.

En octobre 2015, un symposium a souligné le 50^e anniversaire de la première alerte climatique lancée à un président américain : Lyndon B.Johnson was warned in 1965 by his science and technology advisers that continuous carbon emissions in the atmosphere from fossil combustion "would almost certainly cause significant changes" and "could be deleterious for human beings".In 1981, a study published by James Hansen and his team from the NASA Space Studies Institute at the Goddard Space Flight Center predicted with precision the geophysical impacts of warming, such as the creation of regions subject to drought in North Americaand the rise in ocean level.Already, we proposed to "encourage energy conservation and develop substitution energy sources, as well as to use fossil fuels if necessary only in the coming decades".

Seven years later, James Hansen found himself in front of the American Congress and once again sounded the alarm during a testimony, evaluating at 99 % his certainty that the increase in temperature was not a natural variation, but rather linkedto the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, stressing that "it was] time to stop jamming as much".And in 1990, the first IPCC assessment report raised that climate change was a global major problem requiring international cooperation.

This is without talking about the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples, whose lives and livelihoods are intrinsically linked to the territory, and which observe changes in their environment for millennia.In 2005, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, then president of the Inuit circumpolar conference (now Inuit circumpolar council)), launched with Inuit hunters and seniors from Canada and Alaska the first international legal action in the world on climate change: a petition at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights alleging that uncontrolled GHG emissions of the United States constituted a violation of human rights.

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I could continue thus until 2021, because the frequency and the intensity to which the alarm sounded have only increased: the scientists, indigenous and climatic activists are the Cassandres of modern times, and their propheciesare now made.

We must not forget the role that Apollo plays in the myth of Cassandre.It is the latter who, to seduce her, promises her the gift of the prophecy.But when she rejects her love, he punishes her and throws her a curse: her prophecies will never be believed.

In the climatic declination of the myth, it is the fossil industry that ensures that Cassandre's warnings are in vain by sowing doubt about climate science, thus planting the seeds of climatoscepticism.The American oil company Exxon, for example, was aware of the climate change and the impact of its business model in 1977 - more than 10 years before the stake was found before the Congress Congress.This did not prevent the company from refusing to recognize the reality of climate change, and even to promote false information on this subject.A survey published by the Union of CONSEXD scientists, which brings together 85 documents and notes of fossil companies and commercial associations which represent them, concludes that they have led over several decades of the campaigns aimed at "deceiving the American public by distorting therealities and risks of climate change, sometimes acting directly, sometimes indirectly ”.One of these notes even maintains that "victory" will be reached when "average citizens" and the media will be convinced of "uncertainties" about climate science, despite the almost unanimous consensus of the scientific community on theveracity of warming.

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The temperature has now increased by 1.2 ° C compared to pre -industrial levels - to 1.5 ° C, we are exposed to the most catastrophic and irreversible effects of climate change.According to calculations of the Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific analysis tool, current policies take us to between 2.7 ° C and 3.1 ° C increase in 2100.In addition, Canada warms up twice as quickly as the world average, and three times faster in the north of the country.It is, in view not only of scientific warnings but also events in the northwest of the Pacific of the last days, of a dangerous and terrifying future.

Billions of tons of greenhouse gases, however, continue to be rejected and accumulated in the atmosphere.The post-Cavid economic recovery and the billions invested in fossil fuels will have led to GES growth estimated at 5 % in 2021 compared to 2020, the second increase in importance after that, Record, of 2018-2019.

Now is not the time to give up.We still have the possibility of quickly reducing our emissions and breaking our dependence on fossil fuels to avoid the worst.Each tenth of degree and each of the impacts spared.We must also rethink our communities and cities to adapt them to this new reality of permanent emergency.Time is running out, and to catch up with lost years, it will be necessary to increase the pace and the extent of the climate action.

The cognitive dissonance we are affected by is more and more untenable and dangerous.The heat wave would have caused 719 dead in a few days in British Columbia, according to the province's coroner office.Fallen by the deceptions of the fossil Apollons, governments are far from reacting to the climate crisis with the required emergency.

We can no longer ignore the Cassandres of the climate.Otherwise, just like Troy, the planet will continue to burn.

(The author thanks Keith Stewart, from Greenpeace Canada, for the inspiration relative to the myth of Cassandre.))