After locking through the Seaway, around Montreal, we turned around at Ile Sainte-Helene and motored up upstream to the old port, passing under the Jacques Cartier bridge through the Courant Sainte-Marie, where the current runs five nautical miles an hour.
Since my boat's top speed is five-and-a-half knots an hour, the short trip went agonizingly slowly, and as we crept through the roiling waters of the passage, I marvelled at the volume of the water rushing from the Great Lakes to the sea.
When we got back to Ottawa, the plants on my balcony were dead and the grass everywhere was yellow, and I learned that our good holiday weather was part of a drought that has farmers across the continent facing ruin.
It's scary. The American government has declared one-third of the counties in the United States to be disaster areas. The United States Drought Monitor reported Thursday that 88 per cent of corn and 87 per cent of soybeans are in areas affected by drought.
This is hitting farmers hard, driving up feed prices. The price of corn has gone up 40 per cent in six weeks, which will lead to higher meat prices for consumers.
The drought is also affecting shipping. The volume of water in the St. Lawrence was sufficient to slow my progress up the river, but it is lower than usual. According to Environment Canada, lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, St. Clair, Erie and Ontario are all well below average levels. The level at Montreal is at a 10-year low.
In June, the managers of the St. Lawrence Seaway ordered ships to reduce their draft in the seaway, which means they can't carry as much cargo.
The trend line suggests this may be a challenge for shippers in the future.
According to a Rolling Stone article published Thursday by Bill McKibben, the continent is heating up.
In June, 3,215 temperature records were broken in the United States. May was the "327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th century average," McKibben writes.
McKibben, the environmental activist who led the charge against the Keystone pipeline, believes increased temperatures are caused by anthropogenic climate change: the steadily increasing amount of carbon belching from smokestacks has caused a greenhouse effect, warming the planet, threatening catastrophe.
The vast majority of the world's climate scientists agree humans are heating the planet, but that doesn't mean that this particular drought can be blamed on our pollution. There have been bad droughts in the United States in the past that had nothing to do with atmospheric carbon.
There is growing scientific evidence, though, that global warming contributes to extreme weather events. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 2011 climate study, released last week, found that warming likely contributed to droughts in eastern Africa and Texas last year.
Climate change makes droughts and catastrophic storms more likely, even if you can't blame climate change with absolute certainty for any particular event.
"Every weather event that happens now takes place in the context of a changing global environment," said deputy NOAA administrator Kathryn D. Sullivan.
And extreme weather influences public opinion. A poll by the University of Texas this month found that 70 per cent of Americans now believe that the climate is changing, up five points from March.
That shift doesn't mean that North Americans are about to take meaningful steps to reduce the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere, because politicians know that anything they might do to reduce carbon emission will hit consumers in the pocketbook.
Over the long run, though, if the scientists are right, we will have more extreme weather, food prices will go up and, in a reaction to the changing public mood, politicians will act to cut carbon emissions, which will increase fuel prices that are already being driven up by growing demand in China and the rest of the developing world.
Farmers, facing higher diesel and fertilizer prices, will increase the price of food.
According to Agriculture Canada, food prices have fallen steadily in recent decades - to nine per cent of income in 2005 from 19 per cent in 1961.
The era of inexpensive fuel and food — which drove a glorious, decades-long boom in North America — may be coming to a painful end. Our way of life may not be sustainable without radical changes, particularly to agricultural systems that have been sustaining high yields with ever-increasing inputs of oil, a big contributor to climate change.
There is no guarantee that things will continue as they have been, and every reason to pray for rain.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Stephen Maher
No comments:
Post a Comment