A ray of hope
B.C.'s new minister of emergency management and climate readiness has the intellect and organizing savvy to save lives
On Thursday (December 22), I took the Number 14 bus from West 5th Avenue and Granville through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Much to my chagrin, hardly anyone was wearing a mask through most of my journey.
The only exception was at East Hastings and Main Street where several passengers boarded with their faces covered.
This is fairly typical on the Metro Vancouver transit system. Most people won’t wear masks indoors in spite of emergency wards being clogged with respiratory cases.
This blizzard of COVID-19, influenza, and RSV has forced the cancellation of many pediatric surgeries at B.C. Children’s Hospital.
There’s not much hope that B.C.’s new premier, David Eby, will reverse course. He won’t even take the simple step of requiring masks on public transportation.
Eby even thinks that he has the best health minister in Canada in Adrian Dix. For his part, Dix steadfastly supports the provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry. And she and many other health officials appear to subscribe to Alberta pathologist Dr. John Conly’s view on masking.
I’m not going to get into the science of masking and airborne transmission of COVID-19. I suspect that most of my subscribers already know about this. If not, they can scroll through mathematician Bill Comeau’s Twitter feed.
Words can’t express the level of rage and sadness that some are feeling over the B.C. NDP government’s refusal to require people take a simple step of wearing a mask when they hop on a bus.
So why would I write a column called “A ray of hope” with a photo of a B.C. NDP cabinet minister?
I can hear the skeptics saying: “Bowinn Ma was appointed as the minister of emergency management and climate readiness to calm down New Democrats who are livid about the disqualification of Anjali Appadurai’s leadership candidacy.”
And I acknowledge that Eby’s campaign operatives played a key role in Appadurai being tossed out of the race.
Despite this, here’s where the hope comes in. Ma is an engineer by training. My guess is that she knows what an atmospheric Rossby wave is. This may set her apart from most of the cabinet.
I suspect that Ma might even be aware of a landmark paper on this subject by top climate scientists—including Michael E. Mann and Stefan Rahmstorf—which was published in Scientific Reports in 2017. It provided evidence that rising greenhouse gas emissions are linked to devastating heat waves in the Northern Hemisphere during the summer.
We saw the consequences in B.C. in 2021 when about 600 people died from June 25 to July 1. The province was caught flat-footed.
This disaster occurred despite B.C Centre for Disease Control researchers providing a road map to diminish the number of deaths following a deadly heat wave in Vancouver in 2009. Their paper was published before the Mann group’s breakthrough research into the effect of climate change on Rossby waves.
These planetary Rossby waves can undulate with much larger curves and remain stationary for prolonged periods. That can create a deadly heat dome.
This is apparently due to the narrowing temperature difference between the air in the arctic and temperate regions.
“The intense high pressure system extends high up into the atmosphere, trapping warm air underneath like the lid on a saucepan and further intensifying the heat through both subsidence and compressional heating,” Science Brief News reported in 2021. “The high pressure prevents clouds from forming, which also adds to the accumulation of heat.”
We didn’t experience that in 2022, likely thanks to La Niña. But we can’t be complacent because climate models suggest that this cooler ocean current in the Pacific may go away by the spring.
Here’s another good thing about Ma being the minister of emergency management and climate readiness. She is likely aware of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. It specifies that for every one degree of temperature increase over the Pacific Ocean, the atmosphere holds an additional seven percent more water vapour.
I don’t expect that these insights will have any impact on the B.C. NDP government’s eagerness to continue fracking natural gas for liquefied natural gas plants. In this regard, Eby has demonstrated so far that he’s a status quo premier.
His willingness to advance John Horgan’s forestry and energy policies is what made him acceptable to the NDP dinosaurs of the 1990s.
The Horgan Doctrine—if I can call it that—states that it’s okay to continue drilling for fossil fuels and logging old-growth forests. That’s because eventually, we’re going to figure out how to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and bury it underground. This doctrine exists despite widespread skepticism internationally about carbon capture, storage, and utilization, which you can read about here and here.
But I digress.
So why does Ma offer a ray of hope even though she likely can’t change provincial energy policy? It’s because I believe that she can still save lives through her intellect and her ability to mobilize people.
Here’s something we must remember about the climate breakdown. While changes in hydrological cycles will cause the greatest property and economic damage, heat waves will kill far more people.
We can reduce the number of heat-related deaths by mobilizing municipal governments to open cooling centres. They should be advertising their existence in advance of heat waves. These cooling centres can be libraries, community centres, and any other buildings with air conditioning.
School boards can open gymnasiums and bring in portable air conditioners in summer when students aren’t in classes. The same can be said for universities, colleges, and other postsecondary institutions.
They can be kept open 24 hours during a heat dome, if necessary, and augmented with snacks, books, magazines, and phone rechargers.
In addition, movie theatres, shopping malls, and other privately owned, air-conditioned spaces can play an important role in saving lives.
Municipalities across the province can also be encouraged or even subsidized to set up water-misting devices in heavily populated areas lacking tree canopy.
If Ma is serious about saving lives, she should contact retired Australian social planner and West End resident Wendy Sarkissian. She has given a great deal of thought to how tenants can organize to help one another in a heat dome. It’s imperative that we pitch in together to save the seniors in our midst.
If there’s another heat dome, Ma also needs to work with provincial staff to prepare to move large numbers of people from hot zones—like the Downtown Eastside—to cooler places, possibly even the Pacific Coliseum.
Vancouver is lucky to have some world-class climate-adaptation researchers, including UBC professor emeritus Stephen Sheppard. He’s already identified which areas of Vancouver lack tree canopy and are far hotter as a result in the summer.
In reality, Ma should have Sheppard and B.C. Centre for Disease Control environmental-health researcher Sarah Henderson on speed-dial. Henderson can also educate Ma about what happens in pharmacies when wildfire smoke blows through municipalities. We can make preparations to make life easier for those who need inhalers at those times.
We know that too often in the past, the B.C. NDP government has shunned the views of aerosol scientists on airborne transmission of COVID-19. We’re living with the consequences in our emergency rooms.
But we don’t have to be so colossally stupid when it comes to climate preparedness.
In closing, it’s worth noting the research of James Flynn, who died in 2020. The former New Zealand university professor demonstrated that every generation scores higher than its predecessor on IQ tests.
While IQ tests aren’t ironclad measurements of intellect, this suggests that each succeeding generation is smarter than ones that came before.
At 37 years of age, Ma is one of Eby’s next-gen cabinet ministers. If the Flynn effect can be believed, she’s possibly much smarter than Dix, Horgan, Mike Farnworth, Bruce Ralston, George Heyman, and other baby boomer New Democrats.
That, too, should offer a ray of hope to B.C. residents.