Climatologists are at odds over when our climate will change for the worse, but most agree there’s a very real threat it will — and we’ll be in big trouble when it does

It is the not-too-distant future. A vast majority of Canada’s population lives west of the Rockies, crowded into British Columbia’s mountains, which have long ceased to be forested and are now parched semi-arid land barely rich enough in nutrients to maintain agriculture. To the east of the Rockies, a vast desert, long abandoned by farmers, stretches across the continent to Ontario and Quebec, where the ghost-town remnants of Toronto and Montreal remain cloaked in a deep, vicious winter for much of the year.

If this scenario reminds you of anything, it’s probably because of the hype still surrounding Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, the summer movie that presented viewers with the seemingly paradoxical idea that global warming could lead to a sudden, sharp cooling in the Northern Hemisphere.

But while the scientific community had a good laugh at the faux science of Emmerich’s interpretation — New York City, for example, was overtaken by a glacier within the course of a week — many environmental experts concede there was a glimmer of truth to the idea.

The chances are slim we will someday surrender our central Canadian cities to an endless winter, but apparently not slim enough to be ignored. Climatologists, academics and even defence experts are now looking at the possibility of rapid climate change and the far-reaching consequences it could have for everyone.

The notion that eastern North America and western Europe could suddenly be plunged into a new era of sharply lower temperatures is one scenario climatologists are beginning to take more seriously. Ice core samples taken in the Arctic and new data on oceanic activity is starting to convince many that climate change — once thought to be a gradual process, taking hundreds or even thousands of years — may be something that happens rapidly and with little warning.

This sort of abrupt climate change, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, “would bring us back to some very basic existential issues. How do we heat our homes? How do we feed ourselves? How do we have secure borders? A lot of the issues that preoccupy us on a day-to-day basis right now would seem completely trivial in the context of those concerns.”

We could be on the edge of a confrontation with our environment. Global warming could happen so suddenly that the societies affected would be ill prepared. And the pressures on the world’s natural resources that would result could hurtle Canada — with its abundance of fresh water, minerals and energy — into a dangerous position.

“Imagine what the world would be like if you had Iraq-style breakdowns, civil war and social chaos across much of Europe,” Homer-Dixon says. “At that point Canadian sovereignty is in jeopardy.”

At the centre of this latest alarm is a fundamental shift in the way the scientific community views climate change.

Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that climate change was gradual. We were told, for example, that global warming would increase the average temperature on the planet by as much as six degrees celsius during the next century.

Today, more and more frequently, the scientific community is talking about “abrupt” change. The planet’s climate, the theory’s proponents say, is in a state of equilibrium. When temperatures rise, the heat affects that equilibrium the way the pressure of a finger affects a light switch. As the pressure increases, eventually the switch flips the other way. While temperatures may be increasing slowly, eventually the planet’s climate will simply “switch” to a new equilibrium — bringing with it abrupt, massive readjustments in weather patterns.

While most researchers admit the possibility of this coming to pass is low, the notion was enough for the U.S. Department of Defence to commission a report last fall to theorize on what could happen if the planet saw a sudden realignment of weather patterns — and the security and defence challenges the world would have to confront in the face of this new world order.

The report, commissioned by Andrew Marshall, one of the Pentagon’s most respected long-term strategists, presents a scenario that has been receiving a great deal of attention. Global warming, it says, could paradoxically lead to a sudden and severe cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in western Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the northeastern part of North America.

The theory goes like this:

The climate of western Europe and eastern North America is kept relatively mild by a massive ocean current that circles clockwise, bringing warm water from the tropics to the eastern seaboard, then moving east to northern Europe. But the recent warming in the Arctic is causing the polar ice caps to melt, releasing fresh water into the north Atlantic. Eventually, the fresh water will force the salty, dense water coming north from the tropics to sink below the fresh water. If that happens, the Atlantic currents would bring much less warm air to the Northern Hemisphere.

The result, say Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, authors of the Pentagon-commissioned report, will be “harsher winter weather conditions, sharply reduced soil moisture and more intense winds in certain regions that currently provide a significant fraction of the world’s food production.”

Temperatures in western Europe and northeast North America could drop by three to five degrees on average — not exactly the ice age scenario of The Day After Tomorrow, but enough of a change to severely alter life in those areas.

That could lead to food shortages, decreased availability of fresh water and disrupted access to energy supplies, the report says. The result would be mass migration out of affected parts of western Europe, tensions between nations over migration of people and natural resources, and even political collapse in weakened countries.

It would also put Canada in a position where the country would have to make some radical decisions about its future.

As a resource-rich nation, Canada could find itself under increasing pressure from other parts of the world, where natural resources such as energy, food and minerals have suddenly become harder to find and, therefore, more valuable.

In the report to the Pentagon, the authors suggest that increased difficulties with resources would lead to “alliances of convenience.”

“The United States and Canada may become one, simplifying border controls,” the report says. “Or Canada might keep its hydropower — causing energy problems in the U.S.”

Canada, therefore, could be faced with a stark choice: Enter into political union with the United States, or take a more isolationist tack, closing off its borders and selling its highly-prized resources to the highest bidder.

While the former option may raise serious concerns with many Canadians, the latter is by far the less likely, says Douglas A. Ross, a defence analyst and professor of political science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

“We don’t have a political elite that’s trained to think in these terms,” Ross, who is also executive director of the Canadian American Strategic Review, said. “By and large they’re liberal, optimistic. They just don’t believe that catastrophes happen, certainly not to Canadians.”

The idea that Canada could close itself off from the world and defend its resources during a climate catastrophe is just not Canadian thinking, Ross says.

“It’s not realistic to think that the Canadian political culture is going to throw up leaders who are going to think in those terms,” he says. “An ability to defend against the U.S. — you’re not going to see that from any Canadian government, even an ultraconservative government wouldn’t do that. They would scurry immediately into some kind of continuing special relationship with the Americans.”

But Canada would probably not be allowed to join the United States outright, Ross says, because Canadians would shift the balance of power in Washington. “What politically sensible Republican is going to want to let a bunch of Canadians into the American political system? We’re a huge block of voters who are going to lean to the Democrats.”

Ross believes that a likelier outcome would be some sort of special status, “commonwealth status, like a big Puerto Rico,” he says in a half-joking tone.

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada has little leeway in controlling its natural resources, says Robert Huebert, associate director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.

Trying to take more control of the country’s natural resources would put Canada “in a situation where we would have to abrogate our agreement under NAFTA with the Americans before we could constitute any form of discriminatory pricing or stockpiling,” Huebert says.

Most natural resources, including oil and gas, are covered by regulations within NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, “so anything we would do would require a major foreign policy decision to go against those international agreements.”

For Huebert, one of the major concerns is Canada’s water supply.

“The problem we’ll be facing in Canada is that the same predictions for a drought in the southwest U.S. are also saying that a similar drought is going to be hitting western Canada,” Huebert says. “We’re already seeing some signs of that,” he added, referring to the severe dry spells British Columbia has seen over the past several years.

Huebert cited researchers at the University of Alberta, who stated that with a temperature increase of no more than one degree celsius, Alberta and western Saskatchewan could go from being semi-arid today to fully arid in the future, decimating the area’s enormous agricultural base.

Additionally, the Rocky Mountain glaciers that supply much of Alberta’s water needs are expected to disappear in the coming decades. Besides being necessary for agriculture, 40 per cent of water consumption in Alberta can be attributed to the oil industry, “so you can see how the systems are all interconnected,” Huebert says.

Currently, bulk water is not considered a commodity under NAFTA unless it is bottled, so provincial governments theoretically still have control over it. But whether or not Canada could take control of its extensive water supplies in the event of rapid climate change is “the million-dollar question,” Huebert adds.

Yet other researchers dispute the idea that Canada could become a natural resource hot zone in a climate change scenario. Thomas Homer-Dixon wonders whether Canada will even have natural resources worth defending by the time a climate flip occurs.

“We don’t have a huge amount of oil left in Alberta. We’ve also gone past the peak in natural gas. We do have large tar sands supplies (of oil), but the trouble is current technology requires a lot of natural gas to extract oil from tar sands,” he says.

Homer-Dixon predicts that the North American economy “will be so profoundly affected by climate change that the United States will not have the resources to extract water from Canada. It just won’t have the resources to build huge pipelines and dams and reservoirs to bring huge amounts of water from Canada.”

“So what resources are they going to come for? We’ve already fished out our fish.”

Homer-Dixon predicts Canadians will have enough of their own, internal problems to deal with.

“The problem is that our infrastructure, institutions and the physical aspects of our society, like where our agricultural land is located — all that is organized for a particular climate,” he says. “When climate changes dramatically, all of a sudden all that … is in the wrong place.”

If the Atlantic cooling scenario plays itself out, Homer-Dixon foresees serious energy supply problems in the northeast U.S. and eastern Canada, as demand spikes at a time when energy resources are in increasingly short supply.

Food production would also suffer, with shorter growing seasons and disrupted rainfall patterns playing havoc with the world’s agricultural supply.

And once the populations of the affected regions realize the climate change is a permanent condition, many would begin to make plans to leave.

“Over time, you would see a hollowing out of the economies of eastern North America,” he says.

But the real crisis, Homer-Dixon says, will be in places like Europe, “which aren’t able to feed themselves effectively and don’t have indigenous energy supplies adequate to their demand. There you could see something of an economic collapse.”

As a result, security in North America could become an even greater concern than it is already.

“What we’ve learned since 9/11 is that zones of anarchy are really dangerous. Afghanistan, Somalia, what Iraq could become if the Americans get pushed out … To the extent that climate change creates instability and weakness and even collapse of states in various parts of the world, that becomes a place from where threats to North America can emanate. It becomes everybody’s problem.”

And if that happens, Canada’s independence could become compromised.

“That’s when Americans look at Canada and say, ‘We don’t know what’s coming across that border,’ especially if the Canadian state itself is weakened and can’t mobilize forces to defend that border,” Homer-Dixon says. “At that point it makes sense to establish a continental security perimeter.”

Yet the question remains: How likely is it that this theory of sudden cooling will become reality?

“It’s not a theory — it’s happened in the past, lots of times,” says Terence Joyce, a senior physical oceanography researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.

Woods cites evidence of two periods in the past when a sudden warming in the atmosphere resulted in a cooling in the North Atlantic: Once about 8,200 years ago when temperatures in Greenland suddenly dropped by about three degrees celsius, after a prolonged period of warming; Some 10,000 years ago, during what is known as the Younger Dryas period, another period of warming resulted in a drop of around 15 degrees. That time, the cold, dry weather lasted for more than 1,000 years.

One thing no one can predict is when this will happen, if it happens at all. The complexity of the planet’s environment makes it almost impossible to determine when exactly the Atlantic ocean’s “switch” will be pushed far enough to cause a sudden climate shift.

“The timing is important,” says Joyce, explaining that, if it were to happen 100 years from now, it might actually be welcome, because temperatures will have risen so much by then that it would simply bring the climate of the Northern Hemisphere back to where it is today.

“However, if it happens in 10 years, it could be a problem.”

And if it does happen, there is little anyone could do to shift the climate back to its previous state.

“Once the change occurs, it’s too late,” Joyce says. “The system doesn’t follow the same path going up as it does going down. Once you’ve flipped off the switch, it’s not so easy to flip it back on again.”

Yet not all weather experts agree that we are facing a similar scenario today as the ones that occurred back then. Some oceanographers say the amount of fresh water entering the Atlantic ocean is not enough to trigger a switch in the Northern Hemisphere’s climate. Others, such as Igor Yashayaev, co-author of a research paper cited in the Pentagon report, say that the real problem won’t be a sudden flip in the climate, but rather the extreme weather events that will accompany global warming.

“We speculate that increased evaporation in the tropics could lead to an increase in hurricane activities,” Yashayaev, a researcher at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia, said, adding that evaporation of ocean water in the tropics is 10 to 15 per cent more today than it was 40 years ago — enough to increase hurricane activity.

Yashayaev cited the freak hurricane that hit the Maritimes at the end of last summer, as well as record-setting snowstorms in eastern Canada this past winter, as potential evidence that global warming is hurtling the world into a period of increased climatic instability.

Others believe both theories. Wallace Broecker, a geochemist at Columbia University in New York, has suggested that what could be particularly nasty about a rapid climate change scenario is a “flickering process” as the climate adjusts from one equilibrium to another. Extreme weather events could punish the planet as the climate jumps back and forth between two different states.

Though environmental scientists are still debating when, how and if this will ever happen, Thomas Homer-Dixon believes the world should start preparing for the possibility of a new climate regime.

“It’s a small risk of a huge disaster,” he says. “It’s what economists call expected value calculation. You multiply the probability by the potential cost and the possibility might be small but the potential cost is huge so you should still take it seriously. That’s what insurance is all about.”

Homer-Dixon suggests that the problem may be too large to tackle within the context of our relatively comfortable lives today.

“It implicates so many different segments of our society and so many different aspects of our lifestyles, that the vested interests are immense. And there are so many uncertainties, which makes it easy to say ‘let’s just wait until we know a little bit more.’ And that combination of characteristics for this problem makes it pretty deadly.”

Calgary Herald
Sunday, August 1, 2004
The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
Saturday, August 14, 2004
The Daily News (Nanaimo)
Friday, October 22, 2004
The Ottawa Citizen
Sunday, July 25, 2004