From the Fall 2006 Spacing magazine, "What the Trees Give Back", page 40:

What Trees Give Back
The value of our urban forest far exceeds what we afford it

Todd Irvine

By best guess there are around six million trees in our city, half on private property, half on public. Together these trees make a forest, a haphazard patchwork quilt of forest that changes complexion at the crossing of each fence -- a few patches are lush and green; too many others are threadbare.

Urban foresters, however, are new kids on the block. It is only recently that the millions of trees that grace our city have been thought of as a single forest, and it hasn't been a quick idea to catch on. More established city builders such as architects, designers, and engineers have been leery of the time and expense necessary to make room for trees in a city they have so thoroughly planned and constructed.

When asked, the vast majority of people, politicians and otherwise, say they like trees and want them in the city. Unfortunately, our appreciation far exceeds the care and respect we afford them. Few have considered just how many sustainable, immediate and economically advantageous benefits a well-managed urban forest provides.

ENERGY REDUCTION, HEALTHY PEOPLE
On a summer day waves of heat can be seen rising off the surface of the schoolyard at St. Paul's Catholic School near Queen and Parliament. There is not a single tree on the property. As with many urban schools, the yard is covered from edge to edge by black asphalt, which surrounds a red brick building with a black tar roof, all surfaces that attract and hold heat from the sun. Studies have found that temperatures in schoolyards can be five degrees hotter than the surrounding neighbourhoods. We are literally baking our children alive.

Trees can help. They are like giant parasols we can set up wherever we choose to keep us, and our buildings, cool. For instance, three trees strategically placed around a house can reduce its summer colling demands by 40%, an imperative in these times of near brownouts and rising electricity costs.

The shaded ground under a tree can be 25 degrees Celsius cooler than the area directly beyond, which is exposed to the direct heat of the sun. Tearing up the asphalt in schoolyards and planting trees provides a canopy of protection that enables our children to play comfortably below.

BIRD CORRIDORS & GREEN DEVELOPMENT
Each spring, birds fly north across Lake Ontario looking for strips of green they can follow on their way to the further reaches of the province. The millions of trees throughout the city's ravings provide migratory birds safe passage to their nesting sites.

If these connections are broken, the birds will not come. If they are re-created, we can have migratory song-birds in our backyards, and, at the same time, protect these species by providing them with green corridors for a safe journey. With proper planning, we could map out these corridors and incorporate them in development plans. Ravines could be connected to each other, by way of a park or a swath of naturalized backyards.

STORM WATER MANAGEMENT
A heavy rainfall places an immense demand on the infrastructure below our city. Water roars through our hundreds of kilometres of sewers. Pipes often explode under the pressure requiring costly repairs. Many older sewer trunks do not have the capacity to handle the influx of water allowing it to mix with raw sewage, which then empties directly into the lake, lowering water quality and causing beach closures in Toronto.

The trees of the urban forest ease the pressure on our sewer system by slowing rainwater down. Their dense canopies, made up of thousands of individual leaves, act as giant filters through which each raindrop must slowly make its way. When the water that does not evaporate during this filtration process finally reaches the ground, much of it absorbed by a tree's vast network of roots. In the end less water enters the sewer; the water that does flow there does so at a more manageable rate.

Less water means fewer new sewers to build. For instance, it has been calculated that Washing DC's urban forest reduces the need for water retention infrastructure by 949 million cubic (metric), a savings valued at (US) $4.7 billion per 20-year construction cycle.

POLLUTION ABSORPTION
Smog days are a now common occurrence in Toronto. The brown clouds that hang in the air on muggy summer days is a stew of harmful toxins such as nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter most of which is released by the burning of fossil fuels. It's been estimated that 1,700 people die each year as a result of air pollution while another 6,000 experience health related problems.

The leaves of trees act as a filter, drawing pollutants out of the air. An appropriate mix of trees can filter out up of 85% of air pollution in a park and as much as 70% in a street setting.

The urban forest is one of the few assets the City owns that appreicates in value over time. If mature trees are lost so too are the benefits they afford. For a small investment, there can be a huge return -- we should be affording it the respect it deserves. Maintaining an ecologically vibrant urban forest is an easy, affordable way to make Toronto a healthier city.

From the Saturday, November 17, 2007, front page and pages A16-17, an article about the changes in the Arctic because of global warming:

Arctic in Peril

Within 60 years, climatologists predict most of the Arctic will be free of summer ice, just as it was 1 million years ago when giant beavers and camels roamed the North, Ed Struzik, this year's Atkinson Fellow, travelled the remote region to explore how Canadians can adapt to and even exploit this precarious return to warmer times

THE NEW COLD WAR

Ed Struzik

Atkinson Fellow

Devon Island, Nunavut - In the summer of 1985, helicopter pilot Paul Tudge was flying over Axel Heiberg Island in the High Arctic when he spotted what he thought were tree stumps near the edge of a giant ice cap.

When Tudge reported the sighting to scientists, they were skeptical. The nearest tree was 2,500 kilometres south. Nevertheless, geologist James Basinger flew up the new year to have a closer look. It didn't take him long to realize he had found the Holy Grail of Arctic paleobotany.

Not only were tree trunks sticking out of the permafrost,some buried below were more than 2 1/2 metres wide and five metres long.

What really amazed Basinger was the realization that these trees were 45 million years old. Many of the nuts, seeds and cones were so perfectly preserved they look as if they had just fallen to the ground.

By the time Basinger finished excavating the site 14 years later, he had assembled a picture of a dawn redwood swamp filled with royal ferns and cypress that flourished downstream from pine, spruce and walnut trees. The High Arctic, Basinger concluded, was once as warm and lush as the Carolinian forests of Georgia in the United States are today. Several scientists have since discovered evidence that the Arctic was warm for a very long time after that.

*  On Devon Island, Richard Grieve and a team of scientists unearthed, among other fossils, remains of a primitive rhinoceros in and around a 39-million-year-old meteorite impact site. While not as warm as it was 45 million years ago, Grieve says it was warm enough to sustain a mixed conifer-hardwood forest. The mean annual temperature was between 8 and 12C.

*  On Ellesmere Island, there's a 4.5-million-year-old beaver pond site where Dick Harington and a team of scientists from the Canadian Mueum of Nature spent more than a decade unearthing fossils of miniature beavers that were preyed upon by ancestral black bears, weasel-like carnivores and Eurasian badgers. Some of the fossils were so detailed they were able to determine what tundra bunnies were eating at the time. Temperatures then were at least 10C warmer in the summer and 15C warmer in winter than they are today.

*  Remarkably, Haringon did this after he and Peter Lord, a Gwich'in native from Old Crow in the western Arctic, unearthed fossil remains of six-foot-tall beavers that shared part of the Yukon and Alaska with scimitar cats, American camels, mastodons and woolly mammoths between 70,000 and 90,000 years ago.

These are heady times for climatologists. The more they learn about the Arctic past, the better they are creating models that will predict the future.

In the next 15 to 60 years, they're predicting, most of the Arctic will be free of summer ice just as it was 1 milllion years ago.

When that occurs, the polar world could be beyond the "tipping point" - the term climatologist Mark Sereze uses to describe what happens when sea ice becomes so thin and vulnerable that winter's deep freeze will no longer be able to manufacture enough ice to offset the melting that occurs in summer.

The climate change that killed primitive rhinoceros, scimitar cats and American camels could be equally devastating to current species, even is this time the Arctic is warming once again, not cooling.

"The rest of the world will be in for a few surprises," predicts Serreze, a senior research scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Col. "What happens in the Arctic matters to the rest of the world. If we ignore what's going on, it's going to bite us down here, and it's going to bite us hard."

Unless the rest of the world finds a way of mitigating or adapting to the myriad effects of climate change, many scientists agree that history will be kind to former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, who was recently awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on publicizing the issue.

For Canada, one of the world's dominant Arctic nations, the stakes are even higher. Not only are there risks but also opportunities. Climate change could mean an economic bonanza, allowing shipping through the Northweest Passage enabling mining and oil projects not currently feasible.

The question is, how will Canada manage climate change?

NO ONE KNOWS why the Arctic was so warm for so long previously.

Ocean currents, volcanic activity, methane burps and other natural warming mechanisms may have been responsible. But the fossil evidence found in ancient lake beds, ice cores and permafrost suggests a cooling began after large mammals replaced the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This gradual cooling, interspersed as it was by periods of warmth, continued until the time Harington's miniature beavers were avoiding predators on Ellesmere Island.

Then rapid-fire fashion - at least in geologic time - the cold wiped out the forests, the tiny beavers and, on the other side of the Arctic, the woolly mammoths, American mastodons, scimitar cast and giant beavers.

Now that the polar regions are warming rapidly, scientists fear there will be a similar catastrophic impact on the fish and wildlife and the people who inhabit the Arctic today. With sea ice melting, glaciers receding and Arctic storms getting harsher, many coastal communities are becoming vulnerable to flooding and erosion. A warmer and shorter ice season also means less time for polar bears to hunt seals and more time for mosquitoes and blackflies to afflict caribou, musk oxen and nesting birds. Beluga whales and narwhal, which hide under the ice to avoid killer whales, could also be threatened.

A warm Arctic gives diseases normally killed by the cold the opportunity to move north and infect species that have no immunity to them.

Heat threatens Arctic species in other ways, as well. There's evidence that caribou, Arctic fox, char and other Arctic species may not be able to compete if deer, red fox, and Pacific salmon continue to migrate north into their territory. The possibility is no longer science fiction. In recent years, Pacific salmon species that are declining on the West Coast have been showing up in Inuit nets.

Theoretically, a polar meltdown could shut down the ocean "conveyeor belt" that brings warm water into the North Atlantic and moderates the climate of Great Britain and northern Europe. The cold water moving south could compromise important fisheries in the North Atlantic just as it did in the early 1990s.

Rising sea levels brought on by this meltdown could also displace the 104 million people who live in coastal areas that are within a metre of the ocean surface.

Those who live on higher ground won't escape the changes that are coming. Polar ice is the genesis of cold fronts that bring rain and snow to much of the world. If it shrinks, droughts could worsen, as could heavy rains.

The rest of the world will also be vulnerable to forest fires caused by lightning strikes in the hotter north. Few people in Toronto may realize it, but part of the suffocating smog that the city endured in the summer of 2004 was fallout from fires in Alaska and the Yukon. Five per cent of Alaska and the Yukon burned that record hot year.

Serreze cautions skeptics who think there's time to adjust. So far, he notes, the climate models that he and others have put together have seriously underestimated how quickly the changes that have happened already would occur.

Yesterday in Spain, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change backed that view. The IPCC - which share the Nobel with Gore - completed a scientific summary that is to be released today that says the damage from global warming may be "abrupt or irreversible."

Already, the latest data shows that the Arctic ice cap was 20 per cent smaller this year than it was in 2005, a record year.

"It's not so much what we know that's a problem," says Serreze. "It's what we don't know. The paleo-climate record tells us that the system changes very, very quickly, on the order of just 10 years. I suspect that there are surprises ahead that we won't be ready for."

UNTIL THIS SUMMER, John Falkingham, chief of Forecasting for the Canadian Ice Service, was reluctant to push the button so hard. But this summer, the ice retreated so far beyond all expectations that he was left shocked. Not only was the ice cover at record lows inthe Arctic, the so-called "mortuary" of old ice that normally chokes McClintock Channel in the Northwest Passage was almost all gone. What's more, Viscount Melville Sound, "the birthplace" of a lot of Arctic ice, was down to half of its normal summer cover. That's why a Russian ship was able to deliver a load of fertilizer to the Port of Churchill in October - a first.

"The ice is no longer growing or getting old," says Falkingham, who then echoes Serreze's choice of words. "Ten years from now, we may look back on 2007 and say that was the year we passed the tipping point,"

The big challenge is what to do about it.

Reducing greenhouse gases is one solution because it's accepted that carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity, are a big driver of the warming. But even if world leaders muster the will to do something meaningful in the coming years, it will take a century or more to stop or even slow the warming that is already melting the polar world.

Many think that adaptation is the key. Not only do governments like Canada's have to control emissions, they need to develop strategies that will mitigate, exploit and help communities and ecosystems adjust to the changes that are coming. A new environmental state requires a new way of managing it.

The View From the North

Edmonton journalist Ed Struzik has been writing about Canada's Arctic for 28 years.

In July, he set off on the first of nine northern journeys to examine the implications of climate change as part of the 2007 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy.

He travelled by plane, icebreaker, snowmobile, dogsled and skis, making his way from Churchill, Man., to Ellesmere Island, and from the Alaskan border to the coast of Greenland. Struzik saw first-hand evidence that the Arctic is warming almost twice as fast as the rest of the world. The change, he determined, offers economic opportunities for Canada, but also poses special risks. Watch his video at thestar.com/arctic. 

From the Friday, January 11, 2008, Toronto Star, Living Section, page L5, an article about a store that provides environmentally friendly clothing:

Eco Logic

ALL SHADES OF GREEN

Store caters to fashion-conscious shoppers seeking environmentally friendly options

Karin Kobayashi

Special to the Star

Kerry MacMullin, a former model and a vegan since she was 17, never believed in shopping therapy. In fact, MacMullin felt as if she needed therapy after she went shopping.

"Unfortunately, my relationship with fashion became negative. I expected consumers to boycott unethical clothing," admits the environmentalist, who only felt comfortable wearing second-hand clothing." I decided instead of complaining, I would create a solution to the problem."

MacMullin's solution came in the form of her new store, Green is Black, specializing in eco fashion for men and women and featuring only sweatshop-free brands that use hemp, soy, organic cotton and reclaimed materials.

"The idea was to design tthe store I wanted to shop in," says MacMullin who spent hundreds of hours researching ethical and environmentally friendly fashion labels from local designers Passenger Pigeon and Me to We to internationally established brands like Loomstate and Edun.

She paid particular attention to how far the garments would have to travel to get to her store. "A lot of people don't take into account the fossil fuel used for shipping," she says, which is why she carries a lot of brands from Ontario and Quebec.

"I wanted to have as much Eastern Canadian product as possible. You can say something is 'made in Canada' but if you are getting all of your materials from China and outsourcing your sewing, the garment is not ideal," MacMullin says.

She's particularly proud of the reclaimed jewellery and eco labels from Quebec she discovered, including Oom Ethikwear and Okzoo.

"Quebec eco labels are similar to how Quebec films are received," she says." Around the world they are renowned and award-winning but in English Canada they are largely ignored."

The store may seem a little stark but MacMullin's selective and stylish offerings with a price point of $90 make up for the fluorescent lighting in the back. I was ecstatic to discover Green is Black is the only Toronto retailer that carries the Spring 2008 collection of Del Forte Jeans, a U.S. organic denim brand. Even better, MacMullin ordered the must-have style of the season wide-leg, high-waisted jeans that fit like a glove.

The store also carries a selection of shoes including styles from Yellow Port made out of tires and reclaimed leather seating from 18-wheeler trucks. "I didn't want to have a store full of pleather," says MacMulin. "But I do have stock for folks who refuse to wear leather and I look for shoes that are as fabric-based as posssible as opposed to 100 per cent PC-based shoe."

The studded shoes by Mink available at Green is Black are not only a far cry from Birkenstocks but are so chic they were featured in Elle magazine.

Green is Black is open Tuesday to Saturday, 624 Yonge St., greenisblack.ca.

Erin Kobayashi is a Toronto-based writer, ecologicerin@gmail.com.

From the Saturday, November 24, 2007, Toronto Star, New in Homes section, pages H, and H16, an article about green housing construction:

ECO-CONSTRUCTION
Lowrise bar hits new heights

Environmentalists argue there's still a long way to go, but a pair of subdivisions are on new turf for green building

Tracy Hanes
Toronto Star

The green building bar for lowrise subdivisions has just been raised.

Rodeo Fine Homes, a small custom builder, and Monarch, a division of the world's largest building company, have thrown down the green gauntlet with two projects in the GTA that they claim will represent firsts in Canada.

Rodeo's is the 34-house EcoLogic enclave in Newmarket and it aims to be the first all-LEED Platinum lowrise development. Monarch's is called Evergreen, a 196-unit LEED-H project on a former Scarborough brownfield.

Rodeo calls EcoLogic the "greenest housing development in Canada," while Monarch calls Evergreen "Canada's largest lowrise green residential community."

Both projects have also been developed in partnership - Rodeo with the Town of Newmarket and Monarch with the Toronto Economic Development Corporation (TEDCO) - as leading edge examples of green building for other builders and municipalities to follow.

And while such claims are often derided as more image than substance, at least one leader of a prominent eco-conscious group has some nice things to say about these "green" housing projects - even if it's somewhat qualified.

"On the whole, (developments like these) are good, but we get into quibbles," says Chris Winter, executive director of the Conservation Council of Ontario - a province-wide association of groups and individuals dedicated to a healthy environment.

"One major issue is if you're talking about climate change an energy efficiency as priorities, the housing industry is still building sprawl, putting houses where you have to drive to get a bag of milk. They haven't got the full concept yet."

Residents of Rodeo and Monarch's new subdivisions are unlikely to go on foot for much of their shopping, but both projects score better than most new lowrise sub-divisions in terms of transportation. A bus route passes the entrance of the EcoLogic development and major recreation facilities and green space are close by. Evergreen will be a fairly easy walk from the Scarborough GO station, a bus to the subway and within an existing neighbourhood.

So while some will argue that the green bar must be raised further still, there can be some agreement that these projects are part of a new era, a change in direction.

"The whole green industry is new and everyone is trying to stake out their turf," says Vincent Santamaura of RN Design, lead architect the EcoLogic project. "What is green anyway? What brand is the market going to recognize? For us, it's a whole new journey."

"There is too much information, too many programs and it is creating a tremendous amount of confusion," says Brad Carr, Monarch Corp's senior vice-president, low-rise. "But that doesn't discount the need to push the envelope," he says.

Santamaura adds that one of the key challenges will be convincing homebuyers that by spending a little more upfront for a LEED house, they are buying a portion of all the energy they are going to use over 20 years at current prices.

"You're pre-buying energy at today's dollar . . . that's a fundamental concept that's hard to get through everyone's head," Santamaura says.

He says over the 70-year life cycle of a building, the capital cost - the purchase price - typically represents only 5 per cent of what it will cost to operate the building.

"But people don't spend 70 years in a home - they are going to have to see that in 10 years they will have added value to their home," Santamaura says.

Lenard Hart, a consultant on EcoLogic and co-creator of the Energy Starfor Houses in Ontario program during his former job as business development manager for the EnerQuality Corp., says LEED offers better choices for consumers.

"For me, this LEED platinum project is so far beyond anything I have ever been involved with, R2000 or Energy Star, but it feels like we are truly beginning to transform the way homes are built," he says.

"LEED looks at more than just insulation levels and furnace efficiency. It changes the way you build, promotes recycling on site, soil erosion controls, recycled materials, advanced framing and many other environmental advances that other programs do not cover."

He says while public education is important, the EcoLogic site "is such a leadership project that we are really appealing to an elite segment of very green consumers who are already quite well informed."

One hurdle is distribution of the materials needed for LEED homes.

"The products are out there, but it's the channels and pricing that are the challenge," Hart says. "We had to develope new channels. Builders have a fairly small circle of suppliers and we went to them first and made them part of the process, but asked them to bring in what we needed. That's part of the social transformation."

EdoLogic project hopes to achieve LEED platinum status by reducing household water draw by 25 per cent and reducing water discharge (effluent and storm water runoff), solid waste, greenhouse gas production and energy consumption by 60 per cent over conventionally built homes.

The site was part of the 36-hectare Stickwood-Walker farm, purchased by the Town of Newmarket in January 2003. The town developed a land-use plan that included the Magna Centre recreation complex, green space and heritage reserves and 160 residential lots, says Jason Unger, assistant director of planning.

Of the 160 lots, Menkes bought 124 for $16.1 million in August 2005: the town set two lots aside for Habitat for Humanity homes and slated another 34 lots for an environmentally progressive subdivision, based on public consultantion. Menkes offered to buy the 34 lots for $3.7 million if a suitable environmental developer did not come forward.

But Rodeo responded to the town's request for proposals and in January 2006, bought the 34 lots for $3.2 million with the condition that the developer had to achieve the stringent water use, waste reduction and energy-saving goals set by the town.

Two model homes, which should be completed next spring, will be learning vehicles for trades and building inspectors about LEED. Prices have not yet been determined for the detached homes.

Santamaura says a company like Rodeo is perfectly suited to tackle such a project. For one, it is a small, custom home builder that has had experience "tinkering" with new products that custom homeowners want. As well, a small builder can easily educate staff and quickly make changes.

Santamaura says that in three decades of green building, "it has taken 15 years for us to understand the building envelope, then 15 years working on mechanical systems and HRVs (heat recovery ventilators) and knowing how to design them for the right type of space. The final step is LED lighting, which we are just understanding now.

"For all us diehard advocates (of green building) we've been quietly trying to apply them for years and it's really great to be able to put all the stuff we've learned into a development," says Santamaura, who started his green building career in the 1970s, designing a super-insulated custom home for a Newmarket client.

The $100-million Evergreen development in the Midland and St. Clair Aves. area, to consist of 196 brick old Ontario-style singles, semis and townshouses, will be built to LEED-H, or basic, certification. All homes will meet Energy Star standards, construction waste will be reduced significantly and rainwater collectors will recycle runoff. The homes are to be ready for first occupancy in late 2008.

The goal is to demonstrate a green residential community can be economically viable and marketable, Carr says.

Monarch had owned five hectares of the site since the late 1990s and the City of Toronto oowned much of the land surrounding it. Carr says it was virtually impossible to get approvals as a result, but then the land reverted to TEDCO, the city's principal redevelopment corporation.

TEDCO operates at arm's length from the city, its sole shareholder, and has a mandate to pursue opportunities with a variety of public- and private-sector partners to restore derelict and vacant lands. It agreed to sell five hectares to Monarch, with the condition it build an innovative green community, makring the first time TEDCO has worked with a residential builder.

TEDCO CEO Jeffrey Steiner says fair market value was received for the land and TEDCO did its due diligence by obtaining two value appraisals and testing the market by tendering other lands nearby by confirming prices.

He says as the two properties were intermingled, it made sense to sell to Monarch and to share services such as roads, storm water management ponds and more. These economy-of-scale savings will be reinvested in the green aspects of the development.

Carr says Monarch is striving for basic LEED certification, not silver, gold or platinum, because the builder feels it is more effective to "reduce energy use by 15 per cent on thousands of homes," rather than achieving more dramatic reducctions on a small number.

He says it's important that Evergreen not be a "one-off" but something that's economically viable and repeatable" that could be built without government subsidies.

"LEED is very paper-driven and is a prove-to-me auditable process," Steiner says. "It's not just about how you build, but what you put in and about leaving the smallest possible footprint."

Steiner says the Evergreen site will triple the number of LEED lowrise homes in North America and the projet's results and know-how will be shared with the housing industry, including the GTA's BILD (Building Industry and Land Development Association).

Carr says part of the mandate was to keep the homes affordable. He says that's why, for example, the homes will use conventional natural gas heating, cutting energy consumption with efficient two-stage furnaces and extra insulation.

Priced from the mid $300,000s to $500,000s, Carr admitsthat "clearly not everyone can afford that, but in the City of Toronto, unfortunately that's where affordability is."

The Conservation Council of Ontario's Winter says there will be a market for the EcoLogic and Evergreen homes, as a recent poll shows homeowners are investing their own money in conservation practices. Some of them will want turn-key energy-efficient houses and "LEED is a very reputable standard and it's doing a tremendous job putting forth standards the building industry can work with."

He says one of the difficulties in bringing LEED standards to entire develpments is that it will require changes to planning standards that have been around for 50 years.

I don't know whether you saw the documentary March of the Penguins. Now I know scientists don't like people attributing human characteristics to animals. However, it is hard not to when you see the father penguins so anguished when the egg they keep warm on their feet while the mother goes to get food, slips off onto the ice, freezes and kills the baby penguin inside. That was one of the saddest things I have seen.

The World Wildlife Federation says we are putting penguins at risk by not addressing climate change. Here is an article from the Wednesday, December 12, 2007, Metro newspaper, metronews.ca, page 12:

PENGUINS WILL DECLINE

The emperor penguin will march toward drastic decline if the brakes are not put on climate change, wildlife advocates announced in the United Nations conference on the topic in Bali, Indonesia, yesterday.

Already, melting sea ice and a shrinking food supply are threatening the four penguin species that live entirely on the Antarctic continent - including the celebrated star of the Academy Award-winning documentary March Of The Penguins - the World Wildlife Fund's study reveals.

:This is happening before our very eyes because of the fossil fuel pollution, we're pumping into the air," WWF Canada's director of global threats Julia Langer said yesterday from Toronto, admonishing Canada's stance at the climate talks as "not very helpful."

"We don't have time for political posturing,"

While increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is warming temperatures around the globe, it is most extreme at the poles.

Torstar News Service

From the June 2007 green issue of the Toronto Life, torontolife.com, there is a multi-page section about various green heroes, from which I have included the excerpt about Sarah Harmer.

"They are artists, entrepreneurs and activists - all standouts in their respective fields. Some are lifelong devotees to the movement; others are recent converts. But there's nothing faddish about their endeavours: these local green heros share a fierce and abiding commitment to changing the way we live. And we're finally ready for them."

By Sasha Chapman, Andrea Curtis, Gillian Grace, Jason McBride, Alec Scott and Olivia Stren

GREEN GIANTS

The Vocalist

Sarah Harmer: Songwriter, Activist, Escarpment Love

In March, Sarah Harmer won a Juno for Escarpment Blues, a documentary chronicling her now-famous fight against mining expansion in north Burlington, where her family has lived for 36 years. The award was a well-deserved honour for the folk-rock musician, but it couldn't quite match the good news she'd received two weeks earlier: in a landmark decision, the Ministry of Natural Resources had finally declared the region to be "provincially significant wetlands." While the Niagara Escarpment had long been designated a World Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, in Ontario, only provincial legislation governs land use, and the decision put a stop to the 80-hectare expansion of an immense limestone quarry. It was a victory for both Harmer and Protecting Escarpment Rural Land, the community group she helped found two years ago, which has doggedly sought to defend the area, already home to 44 pits and quarries. No Lexus liberal (when she has to drive, she drives a Prius), Harmer speaks about water tables and impact studies with the case of an engineer. "I spend a lot of time on it," she says. "But it's really compelling work. I'm grateful it came into my life." She divides her time between the family farm on Mount Nemo, her home north of Kingston and a crash pad in Toronto. She's all about acting locally, praising Toronto's strong sense of community and insisting on the need ofor investment in regional agriculture and renewable energy sources. Inspired by George Monbiot's global warming primer Heat, she's now questioning how far she needs to go on tour, eschewing CO2 emitting airline travel in favour of performance closer to home. Still, when asked how optimistic she is, Harmer says, "I don't want to go around hanging my head. It's my job to be hopeful and positive."

From the StopGlobalWarming.org website,  http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/sgw_read.asp?id=6385211172007 , here is a brief summary of the “Synthesis Report” from the International Panel on Climate Change's  Climate Change 2007 report. 

The three other sections of the report are available online to read at the IPCC website, http://www.ipcc.ch/ , or if you are a scientist or independently wealthy from Amazon.com, etc.; (1) The Physical Science Basis;  (2) Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability; (3) Mitigation of Climate Change. I imagine copies will also find their way into libraries around the world, as they are available in many languages.

Key Findings of United Nations' Scientific Report

by: Associated Press    17 November 2007

The following are some key findings in a report issued Saturday by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

• Global warming is “unequivocal.” Temperatures have risen 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years. Eleven of the last 12 years are among the warmest since 1850. Sea levels have gone up by an average seven-hundredths of an inch per year since 1961.

• About 20 percent to 30 percent of all plant and animal species face the risk of extinction if temperatures increase by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. If the thermometer rises by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, between 40 to 70 percent of species could disappear.

• Human activity is largely responsible for warming. Global emissions of greenhouse gases grew 70 percent from 1970 to 2004. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far higher than the natural range over the last 650,000 years.

• Climate change will affect poor countries most, but will be felt everywhere. By 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia's large cities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water.

• Extreme weather conditions will be more common. Tropical storms will be more frequent and intense. Heat waves and heavy rains will affect some areas, raising the risk of wildfires and the spread of diseases. Elsewhere, drought will degrade cropland and spoil the quality of water sources. Rising sea levels will increase flooding and salination of fresh water and threaten coastal cities.

• Even if greenhouse gases are stabilized, the Earth will keep warming and sea levels rising. More pollution could bring “abrupt and irreversible” changes, such as the loss of ice sheets in the poles, and a corresponding rise in sea levels by several yards.

• _A wide array of tools exist, or will soon be available, to adapt to climate change and reduce its potential effects. One is to put a price on carbon emissions.
  
• By 2050, stabilizing emissions would slow the average annual global economic growth by less than 0.12 percent. The longer action is delayed, the more it will cost.
  

Today, the 17th of November, 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change met in Valencia, Spain, to adopt and approve the fourth and final report that makes up Climate Change 2007.

The draft report (without final copy editing) is found at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf. The IPCC site is http://www.ipcc.ch/.

Are the governments of the United States, Canada and Australia unaware of the human and environmental and financial consequences of dealing with increasing climate change losses? No.

Each country has scientists and researchers who have been involved for many years in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report, which includes scientific research, and information on adapation and mitigation. The report is easily available online to anyone, even politicians, in full or in a shorter policy version, to anyone who can type IPCC in Google.

So why are the leaders allowing themselves to be led by the nose - by multinationals, their lawyers and lobbyists, trade agreements favouring corporations, corporate contributions to election campaigns, insteading of leading the campaign to slow global warming?

The U.S., Canada, and Australia are three of the largest historic polluters and have a moral obligation, being wealthy, developed nations, to clean up the mess they have caused in the past, without any strings being attached to poorer and less developed nations, who did not create the historic mess.

Forget the next election, gentlemen, your own self-interest or those of your political parties or corporate pals or their lobbyists, needless spending on needless wars instead of the environment, or whatever useless and lame excuse is stopping action. The costs of not doing anything will far outweigh the worth of anything we are spending money on now and they will continue to increase.

The writer of the Global Issues section of the Toronto Star, called the three heads of state the Three Climate Stooges.

Leaders, you have all the information you need to act now. Get out of Iraq (US) and Afghanistan (Canada), don't start a needless war on Iran (US), and the billions saved can be used to solve not only climate change issues, but poverty and other humanitarian issues at home and in the world.

Anything less is not a joke, but a crime against humanity.

From the November 13, 2007, Toronto Star, Living section, page L2, an article about fighting against both obesity and the environment:

Multi-Tasking

MELT FAT WHILE YOU SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT

Washington - Public health experts suggest the obesity epidemic and global warming can both be attacked with the same effort.

How? Get out of your car and walk. Or bike instead of driving. And while you're at it, eat less red meat. That's how North Americans can simultaneously save the planet and their health, say doctors and climate scientists.

The payoffs are huge, although unlikely to happen. One number-crunching scientist calculates that if all Americans between ages 10 and 74 walked just half an hour a day instead of driving, they would cut the annual U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, by 58 million tonnes.

About 25 billion litres of gasoline would be saved. And Americans would be saved. And Americanas would also shed more than three billion pounds overall.

"A simple intervention like walking to school is a climate change intervention, an obesity intervention, a diabetes intervention, a safety intervention," said Dr. Howrd Frumkin, director of the Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Environmental Health.

"That's the sweet spot."

The World Health Organization estimates that 160,000 people died in 2000 from malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition and drownings from floods - problems that experts contend were worsened by global warming. A dramatic increase in those figures is predicted.

"This may present the greatest public health opportunity that we've had in a century," said University of Wisconsin health sciences professor Dr. Jonathan Patz, president of the International Association for Ecology and Health.

In a little-noticed scientific paper in 2005, calculations for a half an hour a day of exercise instead of driving estimated an average person would lose about 13 pounds a year. And if everyone did that, the country would burn a total of 10.5 trillion calories, according to scientist Paul Higgins, with the American Meterological Society.

At the same time, that would cut carbon dioxide emissions by about the same amount New Mexico produces, he said.

"The real bang for the buck in reducing greenhouse gas emissions was from the avoided health expenses of a sedentary lifestyle," said Higgins.

Dr. Robert Lawrence, of the Johns Hopkins School of Public health, adds that a diet shift away from heavy meat consumption would also help since it takes much more energy and land to produce meat than fruits, vegetables and grains.

Associated Press

This excerpt about the cost of climate change losses is from a book by Dr. Ron Nielson called The Little Green Handbook, p. 103. It was published in 2005.   

Preliminary examination of the data shows that the prospects are not encouraging, because the losses are increasing much faster than income. As we have seen, global weather-related losses per decade increased from $86 billion to $474 billion, or 450 per cent, the last two decades of the 20th century. However, GWP increased from $291 trillion per decade to $386 trillion, or 33 per cent, during the same period. GWP is still greater than the weather-related losses, but the losses are increasing much faster, and in time they might match global income. That would mean global bankruptcy. 

Weather-related economic losses can be fitted by using exponential function. The best fit corresponds to a doubling time of 4.42 years. GWP can be fitted using a polynomial function, which increases slowly and has no doubling time. The two calculated curves cross in 2045. If about that time we decide to repair the damage there will be no money left for anything else.

 

The November 5, 2006, issue of The Economist, contains an article regarding a British government economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, and his report about climate change costs impacting the economy:

Economics of climate change

STERN WARNING

Sir Nicholas Stern's figures may well turn out to be wrong. That is no excuse for inaction.

British civil servants can normally be relied on to favour calm and moderation. Not Sir Nicholas Stern, head of Britain's government economic service. His report on the economies of climate change, published on October 30th, suggests that what he calls "market failure on the greatest scale the world has seen" should lead the planet to panic.

Critics argue with his economics; and there may well be grounds for picking holes in his figures (see page 69). But that's no reason to ignore his recommendations.

Insuring the world

Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, asked Sir Nicholas to look into the economics of climate change because he wanted some solid material to counter the argument of those who accept that global warming is happening but believe mitigating it is too expensive to be worthwhile. That view is rare these days in Europe, but common in America, where it is often infused with the belief that attempts to control greenhouse-gas emissions are part of a European socialist conspiracy to undermine the American way of life.

Sir Nicolas has tried to assess the future costs of climate change - drought in Africa, floods in Europe, hurricanes in America, rising sea levels around the world - and has set them against the costs of cutting fossil-fuel usage enough to stabilise carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. His answer to the second part of this calculation is fully uncontroversial. The costs of switching away from carbon should not be huge because of the rise in fossil-fuel prices and the fall in alternative energy prices. Sir Nicholas reckons that the world could stabilise concentrations at a reasonable level at a cost of 1% of GDP by 2050. Many other economists have looked at the matter, and most agree with Sir Nicholas.

But Sir Nicholas dissents from the general view on the costs of climate change itself. Most economists who have looked at the matter up to now reckon that, if greenhouse-gas emissions continue on their current path, the costs of climate change would be between zero (where the benefits of warming to cold countries balances out the costs) and 3% of global output over the next 100 years. Sir Nicholas thinks they would be a massive 5-20% over the next century or two: in other words, world output could be up to a fifth lower, as a result of climate change, than it otherwise would have been.

He justifies these high numbers on two main grounds. First, he says, the earlier estimates were based on temperature increases of 2-3 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. But the science has moved on. A better understanding of feedback loops in the climate, such as the melting of Arctic ice, which increases the region's tendency to absorb sunlight and therefore reinforces warming, means that, although 2-3 degrees Celsius remains the likeliest increase, scientists now think that warming of 5-6 degrees Celsius is a real possibility. That would be a massive jump: 5 degrees Celsius is the difference between the temperatures now and in the last ice age. Second, he points out, most economists have fed only the likeliest climate-change scenario into their models and ignored the outlying possibilities of catastrophe.

Sir Nicholas has received plenty of support from economists (four Nobel prize-winners have endorsed the report) and a certain amount of criticism. One complaint is that he has selected the most pessimistic research and ignored more conservative work. Richard Tol, a professor at Hamburg University and a big noise in this field, describes the report as "alarmist and incompetent." Another criticism is that figures on the economic costs of climate change are bound to be nonsense because they are based on a cascade of uncertainties. Nobody knows just how much carbon dioxide the world is going to produce in future. Nobody knows just what it will do to the temperature. Nobody knows just how temperature rises will affect the world economy. These numbers are therefore too uncertain to act on.

Sir Nicholas may well err on the gloomy side. And it is certainly impossible to predict precisely what effect climate change will have had on the world economy in a century's time. But neither point invalidates Sir Nicholas' central perception - that governments should act not on the basis of the likeliest outcome from climate change but on the risk of something really catastrophic (such as the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, which would raise sea levels by six to seven metres). Just as people spend a small slice of their incomes on buying insurance on the off-chance that their house might burn down, and nations use a slice of taxpayers' money to pay for standing armies just in case a rival power might try to invade them, so the world should invest a small proportion of its resources in trying to avert the risk of boiling the planet. The costs are not huge. The dangers are.