The past three years have each set a new global heat record, with 2018 set to take fourth place behind only 2015, 2016 and 2017.
As a result of this trend, countries all over the world — including, as we all well know, our own — are combating more frequent and powerful wildfires. In other words, choking on smoke from B.C. might very well be our new late summertime norm.
Disconcertingly, areas historically not as prone to such events, Sweden and Siberia for instance, are also experiencing major wildfires.
Meanwhile, extreme droughts in Australia are fuelling unseasonal winter bush fires while torrential floods unleash deluges upon people in India.
By now, the picture should be crystal clear.
The climate is warming, and we are all going along for the ride together.
Sadly, as the so-called debate on whether human activity is playing a role rages on, time — precious, irrecoverable and forever lost time — slips through our fingers while the situation continues to spiral.
Yet skeptics still toss about the same tired arguments — primarily the deflective assertion that the earth's climate has over the eons changed regardless of industrial activity, cars and air travel. Or perhaps they'll even conjure up outright flagrant falsehoods, such as claiming that a belching volcano emits more emissions than humankind has ever contributed throughout our history.
Thing is, no one is suggesting that the planet's climate hasn't naturally changed dramatically without the presence of humans long since before the tectonic plates started to shift apart all the way through the eras to the dinosaurs, ice ages and eventually now.
The point is that past climate change cycles, which indeed were natural and happened irrespective of human activity, were far more gradual, spanning over millennia and indeed millions of years.
However, thanks to the new variable in the equation — humans — that process has been accelerated to an unprecedented pace on a scale of mere centuries. On a geological timeline, that's basically the snap of a finger.
Early in the 20th century, there were barely more than a billion people on the planet — consuming but a mere tiny fraction what modern consumers do, both in terms of resources and energy. Barely making our way into the 21st century, we're closing in on eight billion. Human activity now pumps 100 times more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than volcanoes.
Downplaying or dismissing as inconsequential our impact is a great disservice to future generations, who are going to bear the brunt of the intensifying extremes a few decades from now. The cost of our inaction will in the end be far greater than the cost of at the least making the remotest attempt to mitigate the impending climate crisis.
There's some sense of irony there for those who bemoan the cost of reducing our dependency on and in the long run transitioning away from fossil fuels, as there's a legitimate economic case to make for preparing for climate change and even attempting to reduce its pace by lowering emissions than to simply charge full steam ahead right off of the cliff.
Of course spending today at one's own expense to benefit future generations does not seem to resonate much with those who covet short-term profits for personal gain.
Still, reason for optimism remains.
As Emma Gilchrist, co-founder of The Narwhal, writes, "In 1987, the world came together to protect the ozone layer. More than 98 per cent of ozone-depleting substances have been phased out and the hole in the Antarctic ozone is shrinking.
"The world has worked together to solve big problems before. And we can do it again."
