The natural ice cellars needed for food storage are no longer cold. Homes and buildings along the coast sink into the ground and fall into the sea. “As the permafrost melts, roads and airport runways buckle.

Given all the apocalyptic scenarios associated with the predictions around climate change, I don’t recall any that painted that particular picture.īut apocalyptic modelling has turned into reality much faster than predicted: raging wildfires in California and Australia more intense and frequent hurricanes rapidly shrinking ice sheets in the Arctic.Īnd according to some climate scientists there is a connection between the warming Arctic and that frozen infrastructure in Texas.īut northerners rarely get the kind of attention about their plight that Texans received even though 40 per cent of Canada’s land mass is in Arctic territory.Īnd yet northerners, and that includes the Canadian Inuit, as well as people in other countries that stretch into the Arctic, have been living with the frightening effects of warmer weather for years. And yet there they were, humbled by the weather, their oil and gas virtually useless as a distinctively Canadian kind of cold bore down on them. Many Albertans were left reeling at the sight since Texas’s petroleum riches, yen for independence, and swagger have long been seen as a model that many here yearn to copy. Urban chaos ensued as people who normally take electricity and water supply for granted scrambled to keep warm and get enough water to see them through the day. This was more than evident in the chilling accounts coming out of Texas last week as millions of people tried to cope with a sharp, prolonged temperature drop that froze power plants and water pipes.

The right to be cold