THIS WEEK IN BAD CLIMATE NEWS

The big piece of bad climate news which you may have already heard about was the big melt in the Greenland ice sheet, since aforementioned melt was dramatic even for Greenland. Like, you’re probably tangentially aware about Greenland icecap melting as things get warmer, and you know it’s bad, but it’s one of those bad background things where you know things are steadily getting worse but it’s never really a dramatic spike so it doesn’t make it into the news most of the time, except when they do a different global warming story and someone writes a paragraph that goes, more or less, “also, Greenland, that’s bad too.”

So this week’s melt - which saw over ten billion metric tonnes of ice melt into the ocean in a single day - was one of those incidents where Greenland actually gets to be the star rather than background “also this is bad” supplemental information. For example, did you know that the melt was exacerbated by a spread of wildfires across Greenland? Yes, actual wildfires in Greenland. I know that seems like it shouldn’t be a thing, but apparently now it is a thing, because we didn’t start doing anything about global warming thirty years ago and we are barely doing anything about it now. Anyway, the ten billion metric tonnes of melted ice will only represent, by itself, a 0.03 millimeter increase in the sea level worldwide, which is very little except, again, this was one lousy day’s worth of melt, and actually in terms of melt progress we are already at where, twenty years ago, scientists expected we wouldn’t get until 2070. Because global warming creates feedback loops, you see.

The big piece of climate news which didn’t get as much press was a press release from Brazil’s national space agency that explained that, since Jair Bolsonaro came to power, Brazil has deforested a piece of the Amazon as big as Luxembourg. (Actually it’s bigger than Luxembourg but bear with me for a second.) Luxembourg isn’t really a great metric for measuring things, though - I’m pretty sure even the Luxembourgish don’t think of anything in terms of “number of Luxembourgs” - so let’s go to that old standard for measuring area, football fields. Luxembourg, at 2,586 square kilometers, is 483,254.7 football fields. Except, and this is the thing, the “as big as Luxembourg” thing is actually just something the media used because Luxembourg was the largest-sized country comparable to the actual rate of deforestation in Brazil last month, which was actually 3,926 square kilometers (733,665.1 football fields), and that was just the deforestation in the month of July, which was in fact the highest it’s been since 2017 (it was much higher previously, but the Brazilian government pre-Bolsonaro severely cut back on logging permits because they understood the concept of environmental suicide). If you add up all the Amazon clearcutting this year, it’s roughly three Luxembourgs, and bluntly, nobody needs or wants more than one Luxembourg’s worth of anything, because I have been to Luxembourg and trust me, Luxembourg sucks.

Anyway, Jair Bolsonaro reacted to this statement the way you would expect an elected leader to react: he fired the chief scientist of the national space agency and told world leaders it was all a lie, because Bolsonaro is a stupid thug who either doesn’t understand that the rest of the world has these things called “satellites” which have “cameras” on them or he just doesn’t care. This is worrisome, because Brazilian scientists have also been trying to explain that temperatures in the Amazon rain basin have been increasing faster than world average and that rainfall has been decreasing, because the more trees you cut down the worse those two metrics get, because trees make it cooler and increase rainfall potential. The scientists also explained that there is very likely a tipping point fast approaching where, because of increased temperature and decreased rainfall, there’s just going to be a point where you won’t need to clearcut any more because the rest of the trees will just start dying. This is great news for the entire world, of course. No word on whether Bolsonaro has fired those scientists as well.

The only bit of good news here is that French president Emmanuel Macron pointed out that the recent EU/Mercosur trade deal (Mercosur is a South American trade bloc consisting of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and the ‘Guays, Para and Uru) is dependent on certain environmental protection guarantees which Brazil is royally fucking up and that maybe it won’t get implemented if Bolsonaro continues to try and murder the planet to increase Brazil’s farm production. Of course, this is a well-known neoliberal free trader talking here so my confidence that Macron will back up his words with action is relatively slim, but some hope is better than none.

THE LATEST DOUG FORD CUT

…is the Addiction Services Initiative, a program which helped drug and alcohol addicts on welfare find treatment programs with the express goal of helping them deal with their addiction/disease and getting them, if possible, to a point where they could be productive working citizens again. The program was proven to work, cost-effective and relatively cheap (only $9.4 million a year, mostly for a small network of social workers who basically identified clients and then cross-connected them with existing social programs).

This is of course stupid and cruel, because it’s Doug Ford, of course it is. And of course there’s no solution or alternative program seriously being proposed, other than the Tories talking about how they’ve directed more money towards mental health treatment (which is highly questionable), and of course this combined with the cuts towards safe injection facilities indicates that the entire Tory strategy towards addiction control skews strongly towards “just let ‘em die.” The fact that Doug Ford’s useless late brother was himself an addict does not seem to have created any empathy in Doug, but it would be silly to expect anything to create empathy in Doug.

But beyond that, what really strikes me about this story isn’t the cruelty or the policy-blindness, but the political stupidity of the whole thing. This cut story landed this week, but these cuts are the result of the Tory budget which dropped back in April. A marginally competent political operation would simply have announced all of the cuts at once, but the Progressive Conservatives didn’t, and I strongly suspect the reason is that there really isn’t anybody in the party who has central knowledge of what all of the cuts entail - so as the year continues and more cuts reveal themselves, there’s a fresh news story every week or two. I’m also reminded of the various nepotism scandals for the same reason: it’s very clear that all of these nepotism hires happened very rapidly and nobody really knows how many totally unqualified dolts they ended up hiring, so instead of them ripping off the band-aid and getting all the corruption stories out of the way all in one go, instead every week or two there’s a new story about how Joffrey Upper-Canada-Smythe, a 27-year-old university dropout and former [sport] coach who’s an old school buddy of [Tory higher-up]’s nephew Flargence, got hired by the Tories to promote Ontario trout in [tropical paradise] for a $350,000/year salary.

(ASIDE: I didn’t get a chance to write last week about how the Ontario Line, Doug’s highly touted top-down solution to Toronto’s transit crisis, was revealed to be wildly more expensive than Doug promised, impossible to implement in the time frame Doug promised, and in fact significantly different in scope from what Doug promised. This was predictable, of course. As a matter of fact, I pretty much predicted it back in the April 14th newsletter. Because predicting the bloody obvious is not, really, all that hard.)

HERE IS A FUN WACKY STORY ABOUT JAPAN TO MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER AFTER ALL THOSE UNPLEASANT STORIES

This week, following the conclusion of a successful lawsuit, Japanese public schools announced that they will stop forcing students who do not have black hair to dye their hair black.

”…wait, what?” you say. And this is understandable, because it sounds like a crazy and stupid policy, but there is a sort of underlying reason. See, most students in Japan attending Japanese public schools are, well, Japanese, both in citizenship and ethnic background, and Japanese people overwhelmingly have black hair. (Most non-Japanese students in schools in Japan attend international schools.) Since Japanese public schools mostly require students to wear uniforms, black hair is effectively part of the uniform, so really, the intent of the rule is to prevent students from dying their hair and violating the spirit of the dress code by, like, having pink hair or something similarly shocking. I am not saying that I agree with any of this, mind you, but I can at least see the logic.

The problem, of course, is that occasionally some Japanese people don’t have black hair; rather, they have brown hair. It’s not common, but it does happen. So one school forced a girl with brown hair to dye her hair black, and she suffered scalp damage and her parents sued the school and won. The total value of the lawsuit wasn’t much ($2.2 million yen - the equivalent of about $27,000 Canadian), but public school adminstrators in Japan have the same attitude towards being sued as public school adminstrators everywhere else do, which is “we have enough problems already.” So now, the official school policy nationwide is “nobody has to dye their hair black, so long as their hair is naturally not black.”

Of course this is still Japan so students with non-black hair will be gently encouraged to dye their hair black to show that they are willing to submit to the expectations of society and their future employers. (No. I’m not kidding. It’s literally part of the new policy.)

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

Wise Girl (1937, Leigh Jason, TV) - 3/5

See You Yesterday (2019, Stefon Bristol, Netflix) - 3.5/5

Our Veronica Mars rewatch continues apace because we decided not to watch the new series until we’d watched all the previous stuff again. It holds up! Although the Crave version we’re watching changes some of the music because of rights issues, which sucks.

See you in seven.