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Preface

I FIRST LEARNED OF global warming sometime in the mid-1970s but thought of it as a slow-motion catastrophe that we had lots of time to work on. Meanwhile, at home in British Columbia, I was focused on pressing issues such as clear-cut logging, toxic pollution, and overfishing. In 1988, I visited Australia as a guest of the newly formed government think tank Commission for the Future, where I was shown the data climatologists had gathered. I realized climate change demanded immediate action, because although greenhouse gas accumulation and changes in global temperature and climate went unnoticed by most people, scientists were confirming that emissions and temperatures were rising at unprecedented speed.

In 1988, public concern about the environment had risen to such a level that George H.W. Bush promised that if Americans elected him, he would be an “environmental president.” Once in power, he revealed his strong support for fossil fuels, describing pipelines as a boon to caribou and refusing to attend the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro unless the proposed international climate agreement was watered down. He attended after the emissions target was set at stabilization of 1990 levels by 2000. (Over and over, we see politicians making commitments to targets that will only be reached long after they are out of office.)

In 1988, Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney asked politician and diplomat Stephen Lewis to chair some sessions for a major climate conference in Toronto. Lewis told me attendees were so concerned that they put out a news release at the conference’s end warning that global warming represented a threat to human survival second only to nuclear war and calling for a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over fifteen years. Subsequently, numerous studies in Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the U.S. concluded that the target was readily achievable and would result in net savings that far exceeded costs. The problem was that few politicians were willing to take the heat for an initially costly program when someone else would get credit for meeting the target while saving large amounts of money.

In 1989, I hosted a five-part CBC radio series, It’s a Matter of Survival, describing the devastation that would occur if we were to carry on with business as usual. As a result, the pre-email audience sent in more than sixteen thousand letters, most asking about solutions. In response, my wife, Tara, and I, along with a few other activists, established the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990. Our goal was to use the best scientific information to seek the underlying causes of our destructiveness and to find solutions that would protect nature and move us onto a sustainable path. We were impelled by the urgency of the message in It’s a Matter of Survival and the World-watch Institute’s designation of the 1990s as the turnaround decade, a ten-year time frame for humanity to shift onto a better path.

The CBC TV show I host, The Nature of Things, presented its first program on global warming in 1989, with scientists and politicians calling for action to reduce the threat of climate change. Ever since, human-induced climate change and its global consequences have been included in dozens of programs on The Nature of Things.

In 1988, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, a scientific body charged with examining the state of the climate and the political and economic implications. Although the IPCC was to be science-based and objective, it was subjected to enormous pressure from the fossil fuel industry and oil-producing nations, so its reports and conclusions were authoritative but extremely cautious and conservative. In 1995, I attended the IPCC meeting in Geneva, where evidence was provided that the human imprint on climate change was discernible and action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was necessary—a conclusion most climatologists had reached years earlier.

In 1997, world leaders gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to discuss ways to reduce emissions. Although some countries tried to block or stall action, delegates agreed on targets to be achieved by 2012. Because evidence showed economic growth and fossil fuel exploitation in industrialized nations were the primary causes of the climate crisis, those nations would be required to cap and reduce emissions while countries in the developing world could grow their economies without restricting fossil fuel use. Industrialized countries were given a target of reducing emissions 5 to 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, after which all nations would agree to a comprehensive reduction plan.

As soon as the Kyoto conference ended, critics began to denounce the agreement, saying it was unfair that countries such as China and India were exempt, that the evidence for the human role in climate change wasn’t compelling, that meeting the target would be expensive and a threat to economies, and that individual nations should determine their own solutions. These were all bogus arguments driven by conservatives and the fossil fuel industry, but they succeeded in diminishing the fervor to reach targets. Little was done subsequently to seriously reduce emissions. If we in the rich countries, who had created the problem in the first place with our carbon-intensive economies, were not willing to reduce emissions, India, China, and all the other developing countries could not be expected to curb theirs. Meanwhile, each IPCC report provided greater certainty about the rising threat of climate change and the human contribution to it. The 2013–14 Fifth Assessment Report was the most conclusive and led to the 2015 Paris Agreement, signed by 195 nations responsible for 95 percent of the world’s emissions. It was the first universal accord to spell out ways to confront climate change, requiring industrialized nations to transition from fossil fuels to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050, and developing nations by about 2080.

I’m from Canada, an industrialized country especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. We’re a northern nation, and the impacts are greater in polar areas. For decades, Inuit have sounded the alarm about rapidly rising temperatures affecting ice formation and loss, and the enormous ecological ramifications. Canada also has the longest marine coastline in the world, and sea level rise from thermal expansion of water alone will have a huge impact on our coastal areas. As the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melt or slide into the oceans, sea levels will rise by yards and Canada’s boundaries will undergo radical change. Glaciers are receding with shocking speed, and people and other species are already feeling the effects on Canada’s vast network of rivers and lakes. The economic impact on climate-sensitive activities—agriculture, forestry, fisheries, tourism, winter sports—is already being felt and will worsen if our emissions are not rapidly reduced.

Across Canada, I have interviewed local politicians and people who still spend time outside—farmers, hunters, fishers, loggers, hydrologists, skiers—all of whom confirm the reality that the climate is changing.

I have also learned from personal experience that the changes are real. Thirty-seven years ago, when my daughter Severn was born, Tara and I wanted to be sure she understood that food is seasonal and should be celebrated when it’s available. So we chose cherries. Each year, at the end of June, we set off camping, fishing, and working our way toward the Okanagan Valley, where we would gorge on cherries and pick boxes of the fruit to send to friends. It became a wonderful ritual. Severn was joined by a sister, Sarika, and as they became teenagers, boyfriends would accompany us and show off with their ability to climb and pick. Then grandchildren began to join us. In 2015, I called the organic farmers in Oliver to ask them to save trees for us to pick when we arrived on July 1. “Sorry,” they told me, “the cherries are already finished.” They had ripened three weeks early! In 2016, we went in mid-June for the first time and cherry season was already well underway. Farmers know that climate change is real.

Five or six years ago, I flew north to a meeting in Smithers, B.C. I was stunned to look out on both sides of the plane to see that the forest had turned bright red! Pine trees were dying because of an explosion in mountain pine beetles, an indigenous insect the size of a grain of rice, no longer controlled by cold winter temperatures. Immense clouds of beetles attacked billions of dollars’ worth of pine trees in an unprecedented epidemic that has blown across the mountains into Alberta, the western portion of the halo of boreal pines that extends all the way to the East Coast. Indigenous people of the north, as well as loggers, hunters, and outfitters, will tell you climate change has kicked in.

The debate over the reality or rate of a changing climate is over. It’s real, it’s happening far more rapidly than we expected, and it’s time for us to act. This crisis, exacerbated by the failure to respond to the challenge in 1988, is now a huge opportunity. I was a student in the U.S. when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. In the ensuing months and years, American rockets kept blowing up while the Russians demonstrated their superiority by launching into space an animal, a man, a team, and a woman, all before the Americans. I watched with admiration as the United States responded without hesitation or concerns about cost. In 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced the plan to get American astronauts to the moon and back within a decade, it wasn’t at all clear how the target would be achieved. The important thing was the commitment to beat the Soviet Union. With a lot of money, energy, and creativity, the U.S. became the only nation to land people on the moon and to realize spinoffs that no one anticipated: GPS, twenty-four-hour news channels, laptop computers, space blankets, ear thermometers, and more. To this day, when Nobel science prizes are announced, Americans win a disproportionate share, in large part because the country committed to beating the Russians to the moon more than fifty years ago. History informs us once we make the commitment to beat the challenge of climate change, all sorts of unexpected benefits will result.

This book aims to provide a comprehensive view of global warming: the science and its history, the consequences, the obstacles to overcoming the crisis, and most of all, the many solutions that must be employed if we are to resolve the defining issue of our time. If we summon the human ingenuity and intelligence that have propelled us as a species, this can become a time of great opportunity. But we must act now. In an important first step, world leaders committed to tackle the problem in Paris in December 2015. If we follow through on those commitments and step up our efforts, we can create a healthier and more just world for everyone.

DAVID SUZUKI