Melting ice and mild media

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      On October 23, UBC law professor Michael Byers undertook an Arctic voyage that should have been too late in the season. Travelling with some of Canada’s top Arctic scientists, Byers was on the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen as it became the first vessel in history to get through the Bellot Strait during the month of October. The Vancouver-based UBC Canada Research Chair in global politics and international law noted that ships would traditionally get through in the months of August and September, “if at all”.

      “The rate of loss of sea ice in the Arctic is terrifying,” Byers told the Georgia Straight. “Winter was roughly five weeks late in the Canadian Arctic this year. This is a pattern. From March 2005 to March 2006—March is when you have the maximum extent of ice in the winter—we lost 300,000 square kilometres of sea ice, which is getting close to the size of B.C.”

      Byers said he and his colleagues were “collectively despondent” at what they saw. Byers says that climate change is showing early warnings that storm-battered Lower Mainland residents should heed.

      However, Byers says the mainstream media are not doing enough to raise awareness. Though he is currently in the U.K., Byers read an on-line version of a Vancouver Sun front-page story on December 15.

      “I did read it,” Byers quipped. “You mean the one that makes no mention of the possible link between extreme-weather events and climate change?”

      On the above-the-fold cover story the previous day (December 14), the Vancouver Sun headline stated: “Storm Warning: Thousands urged to leave homes”. Only on the inside page of the paper’s weekend edition (December 16)—where the recent windstorm was ranked as one “for the history books”—was any mention made of climate change potentially having an impact on the weather.

      On December 10, before the major storm, an unsigned editorial in the Province noted: “Converts to the cause of climate change regard any serious challenge to their convictions as little short of blasphemy. But we should be aware that consensus is rare within the scientific community on any number of contentious subjects.”

      “There are a couple of things that go through my mind,” Byers said. “One is that—although it’s absolutely true that you can’t link individual weather events to climate change—you can certainly link patterns of weather events to it: the fact that 10 out of the warmest years in recorded history have occurred in the last 12 years globally. Given that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are somewhere around 30 percent above pre-industrial levels, given that ice in the Arctic is disappearing at a precipitous rate, there would seem to be a possible connection with the rather unusual weather we’ve been having in Vancouver.”

      Shortly before his visit to Vancouver last month—to promote his book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning (Doubleday, $29.95)—Guardian columnist and author George Monbiot told the Straight why he felt a lot of his ideas had not received greater attention in the U.K. media.

      “Most of the media are not keen to take serious action on climate change for the simple reason that the television stations and the newspapers are by and large owned by multimillionaires,” Monbiot deadpanned. “They want things to stay just the way they are because that’s what makes them rich.”

      Despite Monbiot’s damning assessment of papers in his country, Byers also spends a lot of time in the U.K. and claims: “No British journalist today would write a story like the one that was in the Vancouver Sun without mentioning climate change. It would be considered irresponsible and unprofessional not to identify the possible link.”

      Vancouver Sun editor-in-chief Patricia Graham did not return a call by the Straight’s deadline.

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