Raging wildfires and apocalyptic smoke. Huge algal blooms visible from space turn seafood on the Pacific Northwest toxic. California’s drought. Alberta’s drought. Alberta’s floods.

There’s no doubt: it’s hot and weird out.

According to officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) July was the hottest month ever recorded, putting 2015 well on track to beat out 2014 for the hottest year on record. Records date back to 1880.

NOAA climate scientists Jake Crouch said the new data “just affirms what we already know: that the Earth is warming.”

“The warming is accelerating and we’re seeing it this year.”

According to figures released by the NOAA, the average temperature for July was 16.6 Celsius (61.86 degrees Fahrenheit). That beats out previous record highs from 1998 by 0.08 C (0.14 F).

July also broke the record for ocean warmth. The average sea surface temperature was 0.75 C (1.35 F) above the 20th century average.

Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace Canada, said when it comes to breaking temperature records we’re just getting started.

“I think from now on out the anomaly will be when a year or a month isn’t the hottest ever. These things do go up and down but the trend is upwards so we’re going to continue breaking records until we take serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and even then the warming is going to continue for decades,” he said.

NOAA climate scientist Marshall Shepherd said he is concerned the seriousness of breaking pervious temperature records may not be hitting home with the average person. “I worry the public will grow weary of reports of new records each month,” he told the Canadian Press.

"I am more concerned about how the Earth is starting to respond to the changes and the implications for my children," he said.

Breaking temperature records “is an abstract thing,” according to Stewart.

“But when people see the drought in northern Alberta, and in northern B.C., the wildfires, flooding in other parts of the country, this is where it’s really hitting home. Those things you simply can’t ignore.”

“By choosing not to act on climate we’re making a decision to increase future suffering.”

Climate scientist Michael Mann said not only are we anticipating 2015 to be the hottest year on record, but “now we learn that we just saw the hottest single month Earth has experienced since record-keeping began.”

He said the evidence points out the absurdity of climate science deniers: “the continuing false claims by climate change deniers that global warming has somehow stopped become more ludicrous by the day.” 

Mann said despite what deniers claim, the warming carries on.

“It is time to act by reducing carbon emissions before it is too late, and we lock in ever more dangerous and potentially irreversible changes in our climate.”

Stewart said he agrees with the way President Obama’s science advisor John Holdren put it.

“He said there are three things we can do about climate change: we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that we warm less, we can adapt so when the impacts hit they don’t hurt as much, and we can suffer.”

“We are going to do all three but the policy choices we make determine how much we do of each,” Stewart said.

“The more we change our energy system to low-carbon, the less we’ll suffer

That’s the kind of choice we need to be putting in front of people. So when people see these records being broken they know there is actual suffering that goes along with that.”

Image Credit: Wildfire near Kelowna, B.C. Brian Davis via Facebook

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is a guest post by distinguished climatologist Michael Mann. The article originally appeared on .

The scientific community has long warned that environmental issues, especially climate change, need to be a global concern. Climatologist Michael Mann argues that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration is purposely obstructing the research that needs to take place to solve these problems.

In early 2013, the government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper introduced new science communications procedures that threatened the publication rights of an American scientist who had been working in the Arctic with Canadian researchers since 2003.

This was the first time the Canadian government’s draconian confidentiality rules had infringed on the scientific freedom of an international academic – or, at least, it was the first time such an incident had been made known. Professor Andreas Muenchow from the University of Delaware publicly refused to sign a government agreement that threatened to “sign away [his] freedom to speak, publish, educate, learn and share.”

To many of us American scientists, this episode sadly came as little surprise. We have known for some time that the Canadian government has been silencing the voices of scientists speaking out on the threat of fossil-fuel extraction and burning and the damaging impacts they are having on our climate. I have close friends in the Canadian scientific community who say they have personally been subjected to these heavy-handed policies. Why? Because the implications of their research are inconvenient to the powerful fossil-fuel interests that seem to now run the Canadian government.

This is really just a page from the George W. Bush administration’s playbook, used to muzzle government scientists in the United States only six years ago. In his book Censoring Science, for instance, Mark Bowen details the Bush administration’s efforts to silence James Hansen, then director and leading scientist of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The Harper administration has made it clear that all research related to Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), even that conducted with the help of outside parties, is “deemed to be confidential.” According to its new policy, no involved party “may release such information to others in any way whatsoever without prior written authorization of the other party.” Silently released behind the doors of the DFO, the new protocol only came to light after an anonymous researcher published the document online.

The new restrictions constitute just one of many new protocols that the Harper government has introduced since 2006 that restrict the flow of scientific communication, not just in Canada, but within the global scientific community. And those rules are paired with severe monitoring and oversight of federal science employees.

Federal government handlers often chaperone Canada’s scientists at international scientific conferences, monitoring their public-speaking engagements and presentations and participating in interviews with the media to limit any unsanctioned chitchat. These policies are disturbingly reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration’s attempts to censor the views of U.S. government scientists speaking out on the threat of fossil-fuel burning and human-caused climate change.

Government interference in scientific research in Canada extends well beyond message control. Numerous scientific institutions and research stations across the country have been shuttered, including the world-famous Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), home to groundbreaking research on freshwater ecosystems and the effects that industrial pollutants have on them.

My own experiences at the center of the climate-change debate, which I’ve recounted in my book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, began a decade and a half ago, when I published what is now popularly known as “the hockey-stick graph.” The graph clearly showed the unprecedented nature of the recent rise in temperature, and was a threat to entrenched fossil-fuel interests. That placed me in the crosshairs of industry front groups and hired guns that attempted to discredit the science by attacking individual scientists like myself.

Sadly, Canada is the latest front in the expanding battlefield, as Chris Turner indicates in his new book, The War on Science:

A war on science, after all, is ultimately a war on scientists … Canada has become a place where the best and brightest scientists are less and less likely to feel welcome … Who would want to work in an environment so anxious and chaotic, under an authority so arbitrary, for a nation so contemptuous [of] certain kinds of science that it seems to have all [but] reneged on its commitment to the Enlightenment itself?

The Harper government’s efforts to chill scientific discourse are part of a larger war on science conducted by well-funded special-interest groups that value short-term profit over the long-term public good. Recognizing this, it is important not only that Canadians fight back in an effort to restore the nation’s scientific integrity, but also that Americans, who understand all too well what is at stake, do all we can to support them in this battle.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

A couple weeks back, I found myself enmeshed briefly in a local debate here in Calgary regarding the validity of the argument that a continent-wide spell of frigid weather raised a serious challenge to the scientific foundations of anthropogenic climate change. In the depths of the cold snap, a rookie city councillor, Sean Chu, tweeted:

I replied:

The exchange and other snarky dismissals of Chu’s line of reasoning got picked up by the Calgary Herald, which ran a news item on its blog and a follow-up piece defending Chu against “anthropogenic global warming religionists” on the op-ed page.

As we were engaged in our local rhetorical joust, climate change deniers continent-wide were re-enacting the same little drama on stages big and small, eventually inspiring one of those killer rapid-fire round-ups of TV news talking-head idiocy on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. “Apparently decades of peer reviewed study can be, like a ficus plant, destroyed in one cold weekend,” Stewart concluded.

In itself, any given one of these minor foofaraws (or are they argle-bargles?) is barely worth wasting the pixels contained in this sentence. But as a whole — as a tenaciously consistent, recurring pattern of discourse — they actually illustrate a singular challenge to concerted and sustained climate change action. So if you’ll stick with me, let’s unpack the mess a bit and take a look.

Now, the phrase “Hot enough for you?” is a cartoon cliché, a bit of glib small talk placed in a character’s mouth as a signifier for “obnoxious person.” I’d argue that its 21st century reboot should go like this: If global warming is real then why is it cold? This sentiment, the current iteration of which was parodied by Stewart, is trucked out by right-wing critics of action on climate change with such seasonal regularity that it has inspired its own Tumblr.

The line is especially notable for its tone, which is usually hyper-confident and self-congratulatory, freighted with the assumption that there’s not a climate scientist in the world who can possibly explain cold regional short-term weather on a warming planet. In Stewart’s clip round-up, the Fox commentators invoking the line sound like they’re dismissing the ravings of flat-earthers (as opposed to, you know, being flat-earthers).

Never mind that the argument backing the phrase is logically identical to the argument that the arrival of night proves the sun has been extinguished forever. Never mind indeed that the very moment this latest round of witty rejoindering swept frozen North America, Australia was sweltering under a record-breaking heat wave. No, your typical deployer of the If global warming is real then why is it cold? trope is not just convinced he’s right but delighted by the certainty he’s just sprung a logical trap on you that will have you stuck in a snowbank till the next summer heat wave.

The tendency among climate change advocates, in the face of such braying nonsense, is to fire back with a barrage of facts, footnoted arguments, citations and links. There’s even a whole subgenre in this vein, an online chapbook of bullet-pointed lists tallying the 8 ways to prove you’re right or 14 ways to debunk your right-wing uncle or 27 LOLCAT gifs that are more complex and nuanced than the baseless argument behind the question If global warming is real then why is it cold?

The hitch, though, is that the assertion, the line of thinking and the whole vast culture propping it up are not sustained by insufficient access to facts. They are sustained by a mistrust of the sources of those facts — and, moreover, the disseminators of them. In other words, it’s not them, it’s you. It’s us.

Let’s dissect another local case in point, which arrived in my Twitter feed hot on the heels of that city councillor’s musing on the connection between cold weather and climate change. It was a link to an ad in the Calgary Herald, touting the latest line of denial — that cosmic rays are largely responsible for climate change — from Friends of Science, an astroturf “public interest” group funded through the office of arch-conservative University of Calgary professor Barry Cooper.

I’d seen this line of reasoning already awhile back, when Friends of Science’s under-read Twitter feed sent me a link to the source of this paradigm-shifting scientific breakthrough in response to something or other I’d posted about climate science. Thus did I learn that Friends of Science has a new pet dissenter, an astrophysicist named Nir Shaviv who co-authored a paper in a journal called GSA Today arguing that “cosmic rays” were a bigger factor in climate change than anything people had ever done, and so “a significant reduction of the release of greenhouse gases will not significantly lower the global temperature, since only about a third of the warming over the past century should be attributed to man.”

Now, GSA Today is a legitimate scientific journal. This is a genuinely remarkable finding. It invites further consideration. And here’s where those of us in the consensus camp — which includes more than 97 per cent of climate scientists, the vast majority of Canadians and pretty much all of Europe — part ways.

You or I might consult a valid source — RealClimate.org, for example, which is written and curated by climate scientists — and we might discover in less time than it takes to tweet that Shaviv’s paper has been considered, responded to and determined not to actually bring the entire climate change consensus down into a pile of rubble.

Indeed, Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt reported at RealClimate.org that the claims in Shaviv’s paper “were subsequently disputed in an article in Eos by an international team of scientists and geologists … who suggested that Shaviv and Veizer’s analyses were based on unreliable and poorly replicated estimates, selective adjustments of the data (shifting the data, in one case by 40 million years) and drew untenable conclusions, particularly with regard to the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations on recent warming.” So then: Just lousy science. Happens all the time. Move along.

But Mann and Schmidt go even further. They speculate on the impact of the study if cosmic rays had in fact done all the stuff Shaviv and his co-author said they did. “Even if the conclusions … had been correct,” they write, “this would be one small piece of evidence pitted against hundreds of others which contradict it. Scientists would find the apparent contradiction interesting and worthy of further investigation, and would devote further study to isolating the source of the contradiction. They would not suddenly throw out all previous results.”

There’s a really significant point there. Did you miss it? THEY WOULD NOT SUDDENLY THROW OUT ALL PREVIOUS RESULTS. (If net etiquette still allowed it, I’d have made the previous sentence blink like a late-’90s Geocities post.)

Friends of Science, however, has no qualms with throwing out all previous results. I’d speculate they uncovered Shaviv and Veizer’s paper on a needle-in-a-haystack hunt for something to use for the expressed purpose of throwing out all previous results. Convinced there must be a magic bullet, Friends of Science found one. They discovered a single data point against a thousand others and reckon they’d found Galileo in the pages of GSA Today. (Friends of Science’s Twitter feed actually cites Galileo in reference to Shaviv.) It’s a very slightly more highfalutin version of If global warming is real then why is it cold?

To come back to my point: there is no amount of contradictory data that you or I or RealClimate.org could assemble, no PowerPoint TED-exy talk we could deliver, no infographic so incontrovertible and compelling that it would convince the Friends of Science or anyone else peddling this line to reconsider their position in any fundamental way. The data doesn’t count. The accumulated facts don’t matter. This is about culture and social trust and a kind of tribalism. You’re wrong — or at least I am — because I’m One of Them.

The motivation here is explained in significant measure by a fine old Upton Sinclair line: “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But it’s not just the financial investments or the near-term rewards; Friends of Science and their brethren on Fox News and on Calgary City Council are invested culturally in climate change being something other than primarily human-caused. They are invested culturally in the idea that Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann and thousands of other climate science PhDs are no more likely to know the truth than Nir Shaviv or Barry Cooper or anyone who just stepped outside into an abnormally chilly morning.

There’s a name for this, and (to amble finally to my main point) it is a vital concept for climate change communicators, climate scientists and anyone else with skin in this game to understand. The name is cultural cognition. It comes to us from Dan Kahan of Yale University and his colleagues, whose 2010 paper in the Journal of Risk Research is an essential read for the tribe David Roberts at Grist once dubbed climate hawks.

Cultural cognition, Kahan and his colleagues write, “is a collection of psychological mechanisms that dispose individuals selectively to credit or dismiss evidence of risk in patterns that fit values they share with others.” Subjects in Kahan’s study were divided into those holding “hierarchical and individualistic outlooks” and those holding “egalitarian and communitarian outlooks” — conservative and progressive, more or less. They “significantly disagreed on the state of expert opinion about climate change.” And they did so, the paper argues, due to the “polarizing effect of cultural cognition.”

Put more plainly, people tend to trust information only from sources and outlets they’ve already identified as their sort of people — sharers of common cultural values, members of their tribe. To reach those who reject the consensus on climate change, the paper concludes, “communicators must attend to the cultural meaning as well as the scientific content of the information.”

It’s not enough to be right. To put it in Colbert Nation’s terms, it has to feel truthy. The message has to come in the right frame, through the right kind of channel.

Among the tools Kahan et al. innumerate to do so are these:

1) “Identity affirmation” (a framework in which accepting the consensus leads to an outcome you already like — in the climate change context, perhaps energy independence or an entrepreneurial boom).

2) “Pluralistic advocacy” (emphasizing that experts from a range of backgrounds are involved — clergy and right-wing political icons like Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger as well as your Al Gores).

3) “Narrative framing” (stock characters, familiar arcs — maybe farmers and tradespeople and CEOs instead of activists and progressive policy wonks, engaged not in saving the planet but renewing the economy).

None of this is wholly new, of course. Climate hawks and other progressives have been talking about getting the frame right for years, playing up the entrepreneurial angle of green energy and cleantech, making a hero of Texas natural gas baron T. Boone Pickens. So why does the counterfactual denialist/hoax message persist? One possibility, very funnily illustrated in a little Socratic dialogue I found via Metafilter, is the “crazification factor” — the argument, based on the number of votes Alan Keyes got when he ran against Barack Obama in the 2004 Illinois Senate race, that there’s some core group of dug-in, dead-ender partisans who will never move on some issues.

In the case of Obama v. Keyes, the number was 27 per cent. Polls suggest Canada’s denialist base is much smaller — in a 2012 survey, for example, 86 per cent of Canadians agreed that humans were at least partially responsible for climate change, and only two per cent flat-out denied it was happening.

The voice of the If global warming is real then why is it cold? contingent, however, seems much louder in the public discourse than a 1/50 share. Which leaves me wondering: Could part of the problem be that the engagement of this argument on any level — and particularly one of just-the-facts rebuttal — amplifies it well beyond its actual constituency? Might climate change advocates themselves be way off in their perception of the size and scope of opposition to their point of view? And if so, might it not be best to carry on as if everyone in the room already agrees that the guy making the “Hot enough for you?” joke is just being obnoxious for its own sake?

Image Credit: Polar Vortex wind currents on January 7th, 2014 from earth.nullschool.net and featured on the Washington Post.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

I've always had a deep affinity for nature, having been blessed to spend my childhood summers on the idyllic and mysteriously underpopulated pristine beaches of Nova Scotia’s Northumberland shore.

During the summers, my extended family would sometimes gather around the red varnished picnic tables in our backyard, for feasts of clams, mussels and sometimes oysters that we had gathered from the shores near the cottage built by my great grandfather in 1917. These gatherings – attended by young and old, aunts, uncles, nephews, neices, siblings and parents of multiple generations – stand out as cherished highlights of my youth.

One day, quite a few summers ago, a neighbour noticed us struggling to haul our aluminium boat across the hot white sand beach, and kindly offered to lend a hand, as local beachgoing etiquite dictates. When we finally reached the water the helpful neighbour (who happened to be a family physician) asked where we were headed. I explained that we were going off to dig some clams. His demeanour changed as he warned that it was too risky to eat the wild shellfish anymore, due to the danger of potentially fatal paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP). I later learned that PSP was occurring around the entire region with increasing frequency.

The realization that my son might never experience the time honoured family tradition of clam digging greatly underscored the poignancy of this sad and unwelcome revelation.

My son Julian on the beach near my family's cottage in Nova Scotia.

This stuck in my mind long after my return to Ottawa that summer, as I pondered how something on such a scale could occur, and what it portended. I had personally and ominously been witness to the end of a traditional activity that had likely been practiced for 10,000 years.

Change is in the Air

I have been following the unfolding saga of climate change since it first started appearing in the media. For quite a few years it has been my main area of concern, and I am an abnormally avid follower of current affairs. It’s not unusual for me to read a dozen or more reports on the subject in the course of a day. Lately the deluge of articles on climate change and related events such as extreme weather has become completely overwhelming. If the frequency of media reports is at all indicative, the impacts of this phenomenon are accelerating very rapidly. But perhaps even more telling is the increasing concern of the experts.

Scientists and science journalists are alarmed. And scientists are a curiously conservative bunch. Professionally obligated to deal in evidence and not emotion, you may have read or heard statements such as "we're not in the business of making predictions." The scientific culture is one wherein statements are scrutinized or criticized if there is no credible source (typically peer-reviewed papers published in esteemed scientific journals) to support an assertion. Given that, for there to be such a vast scientific consensus on the fact that climate change is happening, and that it is almost exclusively caused by human generated greenhouse gas emissions, lends significantly more gravity to this issue than perhaps most people appreciate.  And yet, the effects of climate change, even to a casual observer, seem to be dramatically outpacing most of the predictions many are familiar with. I asked the noted scientist and author Michael Mann, who introduced the world to the famous “hockey stick graph,” about this discrepancy and the track record of underestimating the rate of climate change by the IPCC and he responded:

“The current projections (e.g. as described in the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have in many respects been too conservative, underestimating for example the rate of decline in Arctic sea ice. That may, in turn, be influencing the pattern of the jet stream, in such a way that certain effects – heat waves, floods, droughts – become more persistent. The precise impacts are uncertain. But rather than being an argument for inaction, as contrarians in the climate change debate often like to claim, it is a reason for more immediate and more concerted action. The uncertainties could well cut against us, giving us impacts that are considerably worse than what the model projections currently forecast."

I also asked acclaimed scientist Naomi Oreskes why scientists are reluctant to publicly express the full extent of their concern, as many have to me in less public venues, and she supplied the following comment on the subject:

“We call the phenomena 'erring on the side of least drama.' The culture of science also discourages scientists from talking about how they feel, so even if they feel worried, concerned, anxious, scared, terrified, these are not words that scientists will normally use. Scientists are ill-equipped, both individually and collectively, to speak clearly about things that are worrisome – or indeed, that provoke any kind of emotional response at all.”

Meanwhile, journalists, scientists and citizen groups alike have taken on the unfortunate but necessary task of combating the fossil fuel industry’s well orchestrated and heavily funded misinformation campaign. A campaign dedicated  to undermining and bringing the established science into doubt in the minds of the general public for the sole purpose of protecting their vast and grossly disproportionate financial interests. At the same time the mainstream media has been under-reporting and frequently mis-reporting the issue while the climatic stability that has facilitated the rise of civilization for millennia seems to be rapidly deteriorating before our eyes.

Given that CO2 molecules will persist in the atmosphere for a century even if all emissions ceased today we know that the trends we are witnessing will continue well into the future. If we unleash any of a number of uncontrollable tipping points, we may induce changes that will continue for thousands of years, if we haven’t done so already.

Watch Coral Reefs Die as Ocean Temperatures Rise, Water Acidifies on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Whether or not someone is familiar with – or concerned about – the mechanisms behind this phenomenon, one only need scan the headlines on any given day to appreciate how our world is changing.

Amongst the staggering volume of recent empirical evidence: unprecedented extreme weather events such as epic and life threatening heat waves, tornados, hurricanes, historic flooding,and all-around crazy weather; persistent droughts; crop failures and diminishing crop yeilds; the proliferation of invasive species; rapidly depleting aquifers; warming oceans; peak soil; dying forests; raging forest fires; disappearing coral reefs and marine ecosystems; unprecedented rates of species extinction; sea level rise and hyper expensive projects to attempt to mitigate against it; spreading diseases; severe coastal erosion; vanishing glaciers and polar ice sheets, strained cross-border relations over rapidly depleting critical resources; and ocean acidification, which could ultimately pose a mortal threat to all marine and terrestrial organisms.

Any one of the above should be cause for grave concern, in combination they represent unprecedented challenges for humanity.

The Incalculable Cost

We are now left to grapple with the incalculable risks and costs associated with a highly unstable and rapidly changing planetary biosphere: the loss of thousands of species that have contributed to nourishing and sustaining humanity for eons. And only a select few benefit from the very cause of our demise: primarily the fossil fuel industry and its political backers. It could be argued that any member of industrialized civilization contributes to climate change just by being part of modern society. However, the vast majority of us would opt for cleaner and cheaper sources of energy if we had the choice.

Yet, despite all of these outrageous offences, and decades of warnings, our governments continue to generously subsidize the fossil fuel industry. And our political affairs seem easily swayed by disproportionate wealth, power and political influence. Organized campaigns work to deceive decision-makers and the general public about the dangerous reality of climate change or the affects of highly-polluting fossil fuels. And, by and large, we tolerate their efforts to undermine and impede the development of cleaner alternative sources of energy; sources that would mitigate the effects of climate change, reduce pollution and liberate us from energy tyranny.

Climate Externalities

Ordinary people around the world, particularly the poor – now and many generations into the future – will bear the burden of this incalculable expense on behalf of the fossil fuel industry and its “externalities” – those expenses the industry outsources to the public.

These un-paid-for expenses amount to an additional subsidy of massive proportions. If the true dollar cost – not to mention the human cost – of our addiction to fossil fuels could ever be calculated, the industry would surely be insolvent many times over. Recent efforts to calculate things like the ‘social cost of carbon’ show just how expensive our continued reliance on fossil fuels really is. It's fair to say this represents the greatest ponzi scheme in human history – by far.

If our leaders were serious about resolving this problem, nations would come together and devote all resources necessary to address this crisis immediately. STAT.

Making the Transition

What we need (and I’m not the first to say this) is something akin to the Apollo program, which landed humans on the moon in 1969 – except bigger – if we are to avert catastrophic outcomes. It must, for instance, rapidly advance, and broadly implement, cheap and clean alternative sources of energy, dramatically improve energy efficiency while reducing the consumption of fossil fuels and stop unfairly subsidizing fossil fuels.

There are no silver bullets here, as many will remind you. And there likely aren’t short term answers, such as geoengineering, that don’t involve huge risks of geopolitical conflict or unpredictable outcomes. But international governments are already bracing themselves for very serious and widespread problems that are already arising from their failure to act on globally significant environmental issues.

Yet we are racing to exploit even the dirtiest and resource intensive fossil fuels while we have been warned that up to 80 per cent of reserves must stay in the ground in order to maintain a habitable planet for future generations.

It’s well past time to make the switch to cleaner sources of energy and yet we have barely begun to embrace the idea. At least not popularly. At least not yet.

In the meantime some scientists have dire warnings about how bad things could get if we do not take urgent action immediately. Paleontologist Peter Ward told me such large scale changes to Earth’s biosphere should be considered against the backdrop of the ancient history of our (one-and-only) planet:

“What is missing in the current debates about climate change and their anticipated results on both the physical and biological worlds (where in fact "anticipated" should not be interpreted in the hopeful sense sometimes attached the word, if Deep Time is any indicator) is that, like politics, we as a society cannot seem to expand our temporal view either far enough into the past or future to encompass the full effects that a rapidly warming world, with a rapidly rising sea level can wreak.

The reality is that in the deep past, the many million years old past, short term warming caused by volcanically produced carbon dioxide increases in the global atmosphere have begun chains of events ending in mass extinction.

Repeatedly.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Imagine if you discovered that a doctor was doing open-heart surgery based on a technique they saw on the TV show Grey’s Anatomy, or that a dentist used a Google search to guide them through a root canal.

Sound far-fetched? Unfortunately, it’s this kind of unscientific technique that the Harper government appears to be relying on to diagnose the health of our planet, and how they should react to it.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver recently cast doubt on climate change science and one source of his information appears to be climate-change skeptic and author Lawrence Solomon, who is not a scientist.

The revelation came in mid-April when Oliver told the Montreal daily newspaper La Presse that “people aren’t as worried as they were before about global warming,” and citing a recently revised forecast from UK National Weather Service (known as the Met Office) that the average temperature is likely to be 0.43 C above the long-term average by 2017 – as opposed to an earlier forecast that suggested a warming of 0.54 C.

Oliver went on to say that “scientists have recently told us that our fears [about climate change] are exaggerated.”

Oliver wasn’t immediately able to cite who those scientists were, but his staff followed up with reporters afterwards, pointing to an article written by Solomon and other publications from academics questioning whether the pace of global warming was slowing, according to The Canadian Press.

Environmentalists were right to pounce, questioning the federal government’s commitment to the environment and where it was getting its information on global warming.

The Oliver team’s ill-informed argument came alongside an International Energy Agency report stating that the world is way off track if it wants to prevent global warming of more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. “The drive to clean up the world’s energy system has stalled,” the IEA said in its report, “the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago.” That report was followed by another study from Chinese and Canadians scientists linking the burning of fossil fuels to a daily temperature spikes in China.

These are just some of the numerous studies done over the years that conclude the burning of fossil fuels have an impact on global warming. Still, none of these reports, or columnists who write about them, was cited as Oliver’s source of information.  

This comes as little surprise to anyone paying close attention to the Harper government’s abominable environmental record. This is the same administration, after all, that recently withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol climate change agreement amid international backlash, and that continues to paint Alberta’s oil sands as a “greener alternative” than other sources around the world.

It’s this type of ideological blindness that is driving Canadian policy around climate change, and Canadians should be very concerned. Isn’t it the job of elected official to make policy decisions based on facts – from both sides of an argument – and weigh public sentiment? Doesn’t a cabinet minister – particularly one so directly tied to the environment debate – have a responsibility to get his information from reliable sources, and both sides of the debate?

I asked Michael Mann, a professor of meteorology at Penn State University and author of the recent book "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars,” about what Oliver should be reading if he is truly committed, as he claims, to environmental protection.

According to Mann, Oliver should be reading scientific assessments that look at what the peer-reviewed literature collectively has to say, “rather than cherry-picking individual articles.”

Mann said a good place for Oliver to start is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading international body for the assessment of climate change established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Mann, who follows the climate change debate closely,  said assessments from IPCC and other peer-reviewed literature indicate that we can expect “anywhere from a 2-to-5 C warming from a doubling of CO2 concentrations relative to pre-industrial levels, a level we will hit in a matter of decades if we continue to burn fossil fuels at current accelerating rates.”

As for the UK Met Office forecast, Mann says Oliver’s use of the information is flawed, and that the weather service is still standing by its long-term forecast.

The BBC reported in January the UK Met Office changed the forecast as a result of a new computer model that it is experimenting with, and quoted a spokesperson as saying “this definitely doesn't mean any cooling – there's still a long-term trend of warming compared to the 50s, 60s or 70s. Our forecast is still for temperatures that will be close to the record levels of the past few years.”

To try to figure out more about how Oliver perceives the threat of global warming, I reached out to scientists at the Pembina Institute to see if there was anything the Harper government has done since it was first elected in 2006 to suggest they see climate change as a serious problem.

While there have been occasional “bright spots,” Canada’s overall record is poor, said Matt Horne, the director of the Pembina Institute's climate change program.

“Our emissions are still projected to rise, government statements about climate change and climate policy are often incorrect and unhelpful, and many of Canada's efforts on the international stage have taken the world further from agreement,” Horne said.

To Horne, a serious response to climate change would include a plan that gets the country on track for our targets and includes, “an honest conversation with Canadians about climate change and the actions we can take in response, and a constructive approach to engaging with our international partners in accelerating global action.”

For Oliver, that honest conversation needs to begin with an expansion of his climate change reading list.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

On Monday night one of the world's most famous climate scientists took the stage at the University of Victoria in B.C. as part of the university's Lansdowne Public Lecture series.

Michael Mann, popularly known for his research involving the 'hockey stick' graph – undoubtedly the most iconic and controversial image of global warming science – presented on his book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

Hounded, hunted and harassed, Mann has suffered much of the public backlash against climate science over the last decade, being accused of everything from conspiracy and fraud to scientific dishonesty.

He has been at the centre of several of the last decade's most high-profile climate science smear campaigns including the Cuccinelli subpoena circus in 2010, the debunked 'Climategate' charade, and a failed climate scientist witch-hunt led by Congressman Joe Barton. 

Despite all the controversy, Mann is resolute in his efforts to address climate change in a meaningful way which involves making some difficult social decisions.

There's "no magic bullet" solution, he says and so "even controversial proposals need to be weighed."

But solutions are what come once we've recognized the problem. For Mann, there is still some work to be done on the ground in that regard, especially when it comes to our over-reliance on fossil fuels.

"We can't have that discussion until we accept that the challenge is real, the problem is real, and we shift away from the burning of fossil fuels."

"We are obviously going to need to incentivise that shift away from fossil fuels, both in American and in Canada," Mann says, mentioning carbon tax and cap and trade legislation as popular considerations on this front.

Although, Mann will tell you, he doesn't necessarily see himself as one to advocate for certain policies. Scientists, he feels, should for the most part stick to science. Although that is easier said than done when the science is being mishandled.

Hazarding the risks of appearing politics, Mann says that sometimes scientists have to weigh in when facts are mishandled and information misrepresented. As a climate scientist Mann, at times, has been given no choice but to speak up. 

"I'd like to think [climate scientists] are not being political for standing up for science. Sometimes I'm accused of being an advocate because I'm fighting back against the disinformation effort, against the attacks on climate science. And my argument would be that, if by advocate you mean an advocate for the notion that our public discourse on this issue should be informed by an honest assessment of the science, then I'm happy to wear the mantle of advocate."

He adds, "I stop short of trying to proscribe policy. I leave that to be worked out in good faith by politicians as long as they're playing by fair ground rules, as long at they're accepting reality of the threat and risks that [the science] exposes."

Scientists have to decide for themselves when it's appropriate to speak out either for or against specific policy decisions.

James Hansen, says Mann, has taken a very strong position on a carbon tax. Some, he says, "are just more comfortable weighing in on these kinds of matters than others."

But in "all matters of policy there is a role for government regulation, for government policy to incentivise. [Incentives] would take us in the direction we need to go."

Looking forward, we've got a lot of options, according to Mann. To avoid replicating the mistakes of the past, we will need to come to terms with our pollution and the way our current business-as-usual model allows us to externalize certain – especially environmental – costs.

"When it comes to carbon emissions, there is a hidden cost: we're doing damage to the planet. But that cost is not internalized. We're not paying for that damage – through a carbon tax or cap and trade legislation."

So when we're talking about accounting for our pollution and emissions, "we're simply talking about levelling the playing field when it comes to alternative energies."

But not all discussions about if or how to move forward can take place in the realm of science, politics or policy, says Mann. There is a moral element not to be forgotten.

"To me more than anything else it's a debate about what kind of world we leave for our children."

Mann moved to a photograph in his presentation, one of his daughter smiling, watching a polar bear swim overhead along a tall aquarium window.

"I hate to think we're going to leave a world for our children where they could come back to a zoo like this decades from now and point to these animals that used to live in the Arctic before we essentially melted their environment," he said.

"And that, of course, is emblematic of a much larger and very serious set of detrimental changes that we are going to be making to this planet if we continue developing these concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere if we don't shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels."

"So to me," Mann added, "it's really a matter of what kind of world we are going to leave behind for our children and our grandchildren. It's important that we make the right choices so that we don't leave behind for them a degraded planet."

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.