4TheRcrd Mag.

This is phase four or our critique of BC’s preparedness and political position on climate change and its many implied events. I posit a few more critical points (and points of criticism) of our local government’s “Plan” for action (the BCCCP), or the BC Climate Change Plan (an extension of the BC Energy Plan). So here goes:

I criticize this document because it is reactive (SEE note c) as opposed to preventative — as so much of government work is and has perhaps always been. I will explain. The “Plan” comes up with expensive (100,000,000 and upwards) and ingenious other Plans (like the Drought Action Plan, the Fire Action Plan, or the Pine Beetle Management Plan — a beautiful paper trail) which are ONLY responsive to already existing disasters. My question is why prevention was never and, frankly, is presently not even the paradigm of thought? Even the BC Health Guide everyone has at home mentions prevention at least a dozen times, why can’t out government? When are all these plans going to end? Enough “planning” already, do these plans, do them NOW!

I praise (just to show that I’m not a total skeptic) this document for stating that, over the last 50 year period, natural weather-related disasters (world-wide!) increased 400%, which is an insane number (see note b). The document also rightly acknowledges that the computer-modeling of climate change confirms the past events very closely and, thus, often affirms what alarmists were saying about global warming over the last few decades: rising water levels, diminished ozone, blurring climates, and that the global atmosphere is warming.

There are also plenty of arguments — and this you might want to check out on Google — that what we’re doing today pretty much dictates what the next 50 years are going to look like. This means that greenhouse gases (including but not limited to: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) — not to mention all other pollutants in the environment by way of plastics, pesticides, rubbers and the like — all of these render a complex intersecting effect on not just predictable systems (air, water, ground). These also affect more complex systems in nature like water aquifers, underwater rivers and their temperatures, careful pH balances all over the place, among a plethora of complex systems most pop-talk doesn’t even include in our worries about “climate change”. This has effects which cannot even be predicted in casual yet well-informed debates about climate change, so my question is: why aren’t more people taking it seriously? Or, more importantly, why aren’t we talking about the environment as the extremely complex and delicate system that it is?!

NOTES
(a) “Utilities rationed water, power was imported, cattle were culled and salmon died from water heat stress. A survey of 329 water systems, serving 3.3 million British Columbians, found that 84 systems, primarily in southern B.C., were stressed in terms of water supply”(BCCCP, 2).

(b) “Between 1950 and 2000, the number of weather-related disasters1 in Canada increased from less than 30 to almost 120 per decade. During the same time period, the number of great weather disasters2 world-wide increased from 13 to 72 per decade. The global statistics on economic and insured losses associated with these disasters demonstrate their significant costs.”
(c) “The government has released a Drought Action Plan4 that provides local governments with the tools and resources they need to manage local water supplies and plan for potential shortages. To decrease provincial vulnerability to forest fires, the government has prepared a Fire Action Plan5 that implements all 47 recommendations of an independent review team6. The government has also set in place a Mountain Pine Beetle Management Plan7 that will limit further damage to forests, recover value from damaged timber, and foster emerging forest-based activities in response to mountain pine beetle.”

PHOTO CREDIT: SorbyRock’s photostream