By the year 2047, the coldest yearly temperatures may be warmer than the hottest yearly temperatures we experience now - according to a recent report released in the online journal Nature.

For Robert Shirkey, executive director of the not-for-profit organization Our Horizon, the report is something that gives further fuel to its Face the Change campaign, currently on its way across Canada.

“It’s a little hard to make those firm predictions but it is always going to be within a range,” he says. “It’s just not sustainable… the rate at which we are burning fossil fuels now.”

Face the Change is hoping to curb that rate by having municipalities in all Canadian provinces pass a by-law that would see mandatory warning labels put on gas pumps. They would state – with the help of graphics and statistics – the extent to which fuel consumption contributes to climate change.

Initiatives such as these – ones which remain proactive about accepting responsibility and looking for solutions – are gaining momentum in the face of a small but influential sector of society attempting to absolve humans of responsibility for the rapid change in our climate. 

Dr. Roy Spencer, a climatologist and former NASA scientist, is a prominent skeptic of the statistics that show climate change is the result of human activity.

“Warming in recent decades is mostly due to a natural cycle in the climate system – not to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning” he claims on his website dedicated to the topic. Spencer, along with other skeptics The Uniter approached, were not available for comment.

NASA itself has given the opposite consensus, posting on its website that human activity is “very-likely” the cause. A 2010 report by W.R.L. Anderegg, too, titled Expert Credibility in Climate Change, finds that 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is very likely due to human activity.

Dr. David Barber, an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Environment, Earth and Resources at the University of Manitoba who teaches a class on climate change, clarifies that the popular point of contention surrounding an increase in solar activity would be taken into account in climate models used for studies. 

“It’s only one small variable and it’s one that is fairly well constrained and understood,” he explains. “We do know that the key variable is our fossil fuels.”

In a review of the study published in Nature, Environment Canada declares it is “based on credible science using an ensemble of climate models including Canada’s earth system model.”

“It’s frightening,” Shirkey says of the results of the study. “It creates a sense of urgency.”

Initiatives like Face the Change will become increasingly important as a result. – climates are predicted to go up in temperature throughout the planet by 2 or 3 degrees celsius in the next few decades. 

Dr. Barber puts it into perspective by pointing out that during the last glacial period, the global planetary temperature was only four degrees colder than it is now.

“The planet can adjust itself, it can adapt to a variety of things; the difficulties are [for] social systems, political systems, economic systems,” he says. “It’s about effecting the people’s habitat.”

Published in Volume 68, Number 8 of The Uniter (October 23, 2013)