Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs (SACPA)

Hurricanes, typhoons, killer heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires — these things seem to be getting worse all the time. Are these events caused by global warming? Or are they just bad weather? Climate scientists are careful to explain that one cannot attribute any particular storm or wildfire to climate change alone. But there is strong evidence that global warming is steadily increasing the chance that the intensity and sometimes the frequency of such disasters will occur. Climate is complex, but the simple fact is that there is more heat than there used to be in the atmosphere and oceans and all that heat has to go somewhere. And go it will, whether or not there are people with their vulnerable infrastructures in the way. Is the human species doomed? The speaker will say that reports of our imminent extinction are greatly exaggerated. But there is no hope of getting through our present ecological bottleneck without acknowledging the reality and the seriousness of the self-induced survival cha