It is now summer and I am starting into my “dog days”. Hillside Music Fesitival is just around the corner, things are happening on the municipal scene, I just can’t seem to be inspired to write at the moment. If you have not been following the World Cup, the games between France and Brazil and between Italy an Germany were thrilling to say the least - regardless whom you might have supported. From a philosophical perspective, these games were the epitome of arete - excellence and athletic virtue - but I digress, I am not teaching ethics right now and I can enjoy a bit of holiday and just cheer on the world’s greatest sport - apologies to Leaf fans (I confess I am one).

Now is the time to consider how to get invoved in the municipal elections happening all over Ontario. Vote, work run for School Trustee, City Council - elect the government you deserve. There are excellent candidates out there including June Hofland and Leanne Piper. There are others too.

So that is it for me, I am going golfing. I get the best value out of a golf game on the face of the earth. For my dollar, I swing more often. I consider myself lucky when I am one or two over par - for balls lost and found.

Below is an article written by Cameron Smith. It is a compelling look at Global Warming - something to consider in the hot days of July.

We are running out of time
Evidence of the potentially devastating effects of global climate change keeps accumulating
With the time to move fast approaching, governments will need to be prodded into taking action
Jul. 1, 2006.
CAMERON SMITH

The world is at its tipping point — on the brink of runaway global warming that will have devastating consequences. But the worst can be avoided, and the world can remain prosperous and habitable, provided massive cuts in carbon dioxide (CO{-2}) and methane emissions are started immediately.
We have only 10 years to get it right, and it’s going to take a tremendous and concentrated global effort.
These aren’t just my opinions. James Hansen is the one using the phrase tipping point. I’m simply putting his language in briefer, more dramatic form. But he’s no less emphatic.
Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, is one of the world’s top climate scientists, and was one of the first to sound the alarm about global warming. Recently, he defied efforts by White House appointees in NASA to force him to remove postings on his website (http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh) that contradict positions taken by U.S. President George W. Bush.
His message comes as a particularly sharp reminder that Canada has an enormous amount of ground to make up, since it has been lagging so badly on reducing CO{-2} emissions.
Hansen’s concern centres on the melting of polar ice caps, which is occurring far faster than predicted. To prevent an unmanageable rise in sea levels, he says increases in global temperatures must be held to no more than 1 degree Celsius. That differs from a lot of other scientists who have been saying an increase of 2 degrees is safe.
But the scientific community as a whole has not yet fully digested what’s happening at the ice caps. And Hansen has been right so often in the past, it makes sense to accept what he’s saying now.
He points out that in the warmest periods during the past 400,000 years, temperatures were about 1C warmer than they are now, and in a couple of cases seas were five metres higher. In addition, rapid increases in sea levels of 10 metres of more occurred many times in the past.
If his targets are met, maybe seas won’t rise nearly as high, or as fast as they have in the past, Hansen says. In any event, with a 1C increase, they wouldn’t rise significantly in the lifetime of people who are now teenagers, since there’s a lag time between temperature increases and polar melting.
However, if today’s rate of increase were to continue unabated, temperatures would be 2.8C higher by the end of this century. The last time the Earth was this warm was 3 million years ago, when seas rose 25 metres above previous levels.
If that were to happen now, Hansen says, “the United States would lose most East Coast cities … (and) practically the whole state of Florida … China would have 250 million displaced persons. Bangladesh would have 120 million refugees, practically the entire nation. India would lose the land of 150 million people.”
No wonder he urges caution. If a 1C increase could produce a five-metre rise, a 2C increase would be far too close to a watery Armageddon.
It’s not just the level of seas that should worry people, Hansen says. It’s the destruction of coastal communities by storms matching or surpassing last summer’s Hurricane Katrina — and he adds firmly that global warming is unquestionably behind the increasing frequency and intensity of storms.
Catastrophic storms will continue to increase, he says, but they’ll be manageable if the temperature increase is held to 1C. As temperatures rise beyond that, the destruction will become progressively less manageable.
If any should doubt him, all they need do is look at the graphic of catastrophic damage prepared by Munich Re, one of the main international reinsurance groups. It shows a dramatic increase since 1988 in insured and uninsured losses.
A similar pattern is emerging in Ontario. Environment Canada’s Impact and Adaptation Research unit in Toronto checked 79 years of destructive windstorms in Dufferin County and found an exponential increase in the number and intensity of winds since the mid-1980s. What’s more, as intensity has been increasing, damage has been skyrocketing.
Hansen says to prevent temperatures rising beyond 1C, global emissions of CO{-2} must be capped within 10 years. Then, they need to be cut a further 60 to 80 per cent by 2050.
He also says human-caused methane emissions — for instance, those released in oil and gas operations — should be cut immediately by 30 per cent. Since methane is 21 times more potent as a greenhouse gas, limiting its emissions offers a fast start toward his targets. (Methane impact is calculated in terms of equivalent CO{-2} emissions.)
To underline how necessary these reductions are, I should point out that the current warming momentum will produce an increase of 0.55C even if not a single additional molecule of CO{-2} is added to the atmosphere.
There’s a bright side, however: Hansen says that if the world meets the cuts he’s urging, the momentum can probably be slowed.
His greatest fear is that global warming will rise so high that permafrost will melt and release methane. This is what caused intense global warming 58 million years ago that resulted in mass extinctions, he says. Temperatures then were about 5.5C above today’s level.
Many of Hansen’s comments are grounded in data from the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory, where scientists examined ice cores drilled in East Antarctica.
As the graphic of that data shows, there is great regularity to the swing between warm and cold periods over the past 420,000 years, with warm periods lasting about 10,000 years, and cold roughly 100,000 years. It confirms several things:
We have only 10 years to get it right, and it’s going to take a tremendous global effort
First, it confirms the Earth is undergoing a regular, cyclical period of global warming.
Second, it shows that global concentrations of CO{-2} and methane are far higher than they were in any of the previous warm periods during the past 420,000 years. This points to how forcibly the natural warming cycle is being accelerated.

The time scale for the graph is so long it doesn’t show that the drop-off in CO{-2} and methane occurred about 1,000 years ahead of the drop in temperature. So, in the past, what caused the concentration of greenhouse gases to drop and the Earth to cool?
The answer, Hansen says, has been primarily the Earth’s orbital variations. The planet moves from a circular to an elliptical orbit about every 92,000 years; the tilt of its axis changes by about two degrees on a 40,000-year time scale; and its closeness to the sun varies over about 23,000 years.
None of this affects the total amount of radiation received from the sun. But it does change the angle, so that the northern hemisphere receives less heat — and less heat means lower CO{-2} and methane emissions, and a lower greenhouse effect.
Again, Hansen says, there’s good news: Never again will there be another ice age, “unless humans become extinct.” Human-made greenhouse gases will offset cooling from orbital variations.
“Humans now control global climate, for better or worse,” he says.
But this still leaves the other great threat: runaway global warming. A quick glance at the graphic estimating emissions to 2025 shows just how big a task capping them by 2016 will be. North America and emerging Asian powerhouses, especially China, are already responsible for the bulk of the annual 2.1 per cent average increase.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, this year there will be about 27 billion tonnes (gigatonnes or Gt) of CO{-2} emissions, and by 2016, if current trends continue, there will be about 34 Gt of emissions, an increase of 29 per cent.
Hansen wants to keep the atmospheric concentration of CO{-2} to between 400 parts per million (ppm) and 475 ppm. Any more and the world will edge into the dangerous area of a 2C increase. The current concentration of CO{-2} in the atmosphere is about 381 ppm, and it’s increasing at a rate of 2 ppm a year, which would get it to 550 ppm by 2090. If that happened, it would send temperatures shooting well over a 2C increase.
Meeting Hansen’s target is a matter of timing. The lower the level at which emissions are capped by 2016, the lower will be the CO{-2} atmospheric concentration, and the lower the need to cut emissions in 80 per cent range.
Make no mistake, however — a global capping by 2016 will be an enormous undertaking. But the consequences of failure are so severe, it should surpass everything else on international agendas.
Still, once again Hansen has some good news, and it coincides with similar information in a report by Canada’s National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) and ICF Consulting International of Toronto: All the tools needed to achieve the cuts in Canada and the United States are available; nothing new needs to be invented.
The report lists the tools in great detail (see: Advice on a Long-term Strategy, at http://www.nrtee-trnee.ca/eng/index_e.htm.). They range from upgrading homes, to improving fuel efficiency for motor vehicles, to capturing carbon dioxide and storing it. One thing that Hansen urges, but the report does not, is a carbon tax. Quebec already is introducing one.
Both Hansen and the NRTEE report stress that using the tools will strengthen the economy, not impede it.
However, cutting CO{-2} emissions in China and India is another matter — in fact, it’s the most important issue — and Canada is ill-equipped to help because the Conservative government in Ottawa is not enforcing the Kyoto Protocol, and there’s no effective cap on emissions. As a result, there’s no incentive to invest in projects in China and India that reduce emissions because an investment won’t count toward meeting emissions caps in Canada.
Now, one final word about the environment. Because of current warming, climatic zones have been moving northward at a rate of about 56 kilometres every 10 years. However, habitat ranges for everything from trees to salamanders and lake trout are moving at a rate of only about 6.5 kilometres a decade.
So, there are going to be extinctions in areas where zones have shifted and species have not. The only questions are how high will temperatures be, how fast will zones move, and how extensive will be the extinctions.
Whether the world meets the challenge is going to be strictly a matter of will. Hansen points out that in 1974, when it was discovered that CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) were destroying the ozone layer, nations mobilized and CFC emissions were drastically reduced.
“How narrowly we escaped disaster was not realized until years later,” Hansen says. If the growth rate of CFCs had continued “just one more decade … (they) would have caused a larger greenhouse effect than CO{-2}.
“Why is the same cast, which acted so heroically (with CFCs), failing so miserably in the global warming crisis?”
That’s a question I can answer: It’s because there has been an appalling lack of political will — and I think it’s going take a determined clamour from the grass roots before there’s political backbone enough to meet the challenge.

Cameron Smith can be reached at camsmith@kingston.net.