... according to the predictions made in this paper published in Nature. The benefits being predicted are agricultural, where a longer growing season increases production. There's also industrial development along arctic seacoasts to consider since warming will reduce the polar ice cap.

Canada and Russia would be the big winners along with lesser benefits to Europe. Since the science seems to indicate that the world is locked into a two degree warming anyway for the next hundred years or more, and far greater warming in the arctic no matter what measures are to be taken, should northern economies be planning to adapt to the warming and exploit it?

Seems pretty politically incorrect to be considering it especially with the speechmaking going on in Paris right now, but this must be somewhere in the sights of governments, economists, developers and industrial interests.

http://web.stanford.edu/~mburke/climate/map.php

PS... that wall that wannabe POTUS Trump wants to build along the US-Canadian border might actually be built by Canadians to hold back the American stampede north.


<J/K, still no easy answers to that one>

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Yes ... and there were people who benefitted from slavery as well. If this was meant to be funny, it's clearly on the twisted or warped side of the spectrum. Not to be disingenuous, but you do understand people are listening, don't you?

Where did you get the notion I was making this out to be funny.... I joked about Trump in one sentence and said so in the PS.

The IPCC also states that the world will need to adapt to climate change so you must see them in the same light as those benefitting from slavery... well, how can I argue with that kind of reasoning? You must be right, all those scientists have a hidden agenda and every last one of them is in it to make money.

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Yes we need to adapt to climate change. Whether it was the advance of the Laurentian ice sheet or the flooding of the Mediterranean the key to survival has always been to adapt. Ignoring change, is usually the fast lane to extinction.

Of course Don Quixote is a classic story complete with attempting to push back the sea with a lance. Alas, I am often left with the impression that too much of the fervor around climate change is indeed spent on charging the sea with a lance rather building sea walls.

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Loon Island Outdoors
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Adaptation is about reducing and managing risks, not profiting (and capitalizing on a deteriorating planet and the less fortunate). IPCC has not written a primer on how to get rich quick on a planet with large scale human generated environmental, social, and economic disruptions.

If your solution is a wall separating Canada from the rest of the world (or advancing hydrocarbon production and an industrialized frontier to the arctic), then yes, I find your approach pretty laughable and unserious. At least as far as climate mitigation and adaptation are concerned (or anything else informative and reasonable, I might add).

At the risk of stating the obvious, any post that mentions Trump must be, by definition, a joke!!

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Old canoeists never die---they just smell that way.

Hm... well, I'll be... slap my face and call me silly. Darn it where are the IPCC definitions...

Oh... the howwah... Save us from those corporate IPCC fascists, they use horrible words like exploit, opportunity and benefit in adaptation.






https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_da ... y-e-o.html

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Are you suggesting adaptation (that reduces and manages risks) has no benefits? That doesn’t make any sense (common sense, according to IPCC authors, or otherwise). I take it you don’t consider a benefit of climate mitigation to be burning more hydrocarbons or industrializing the arctic? Your so called benefits appear to be despite climate adaptation, and not in keeping with them.

If there is a policy recommendation here (as you suggest), I’m at a complete loss for seeing one. Besides your disdain for climate mitigation (and your desire to see this reflected in Canadian policy), little else is coming through!

You seem to be ignoring what I was taught as "the first rule of holes"--when you are in one, quit digging. Building seawalls may be necessary because, out of ignorance, we've already caused irrevocable change. But we should also stop doing the things that will ensure our seawalls need to grow ever taller.

Well if you lived on the current bottom of the Black Sea around 5600 BC, then no, building a seawall probably wouldn't have helped much. So I completely agree that sometimes the solution will be to pack up and move.

The metaphor was meant to say a couple of things. One was that yes we need to adapt and sometimes that will mean building sea walls and sometimes that will mean moving and sometimes it will mean taking advantage of longer growing seasons in northern regions.

The other is that I see the world spending too much time, effort and money on feel good measures. Things like taking gas tax money to increase mass transit subsidies doesn't change the dependence on fossil fuels. That's about as effective as Don Quixote was at chasing back the sea. On the other hand, if gas tax money was invested in solar power it would be a real step forward to building that seawall. Even better would be for mass transit to be not only fully funded by the riders, but to invest in it's own clean power generation capacity to eliminate mass transit dependency on fossil fuels altogether.

At the end of the day, climate change happens with or without human intervention and we will always need to be willing to adapt. Evolution says that we have done a decent job of that so far. For the current case where we are trying to address human impacts on climate through the consumption of fossil fuels, then we need to replace the power source.

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Loon Island Outdoors
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Idylwyld,


The IPCC's last report on adaption, and I'm sure you've read it, makes a clear distinction between adaptation and mitigation... they acknowledge that adaptation measures may work against mitigation since some will increase carbon loadings.

Similar to the above Nature report, the IPCC noted that food production will need to increase in Canada, and Northern Europe and Russia to make up for the losses due to drought further south. Agriculture is known to be a significant contributor to carbon loadings, and works against mitigation measures. Still, adaptation in agriculture will be necessary to feed global populations and the boost to northern economies another benefit.

The downside may be that food prices will be higher but that's an effect of the world's reliance on supply and demand capitalism to feed the world (imagine all that corn production in the states moving north to the Canadian prairies as droughts take effect further south). Climate change has the potential to transform Canadian prairies in a profound way and if the above predictions are right, capitalist megabucks will also be moving north to exploit that.

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