Posted on 23 February 2018

An interesting thing about climate change is that even though there is lots of long-term, system level data to show it’s happening and is causing extreme weather events, climate scientists are hesitant to attribute specific extreme weather events to climate change.

For example, where I live in British Columbia’s interior, we’ve been getting more extreme forest fires in recent years, putting people out of their homes for weeks at a time and putting a layer of smoke over cities hundreds of kilometres away.

But although it is widely agreed a changing climate will likely result in these sorts of fires, more extreme and more often, there is a hesitancy among scientists to attribute any specific fire to climate change, specifically.

The reason is because although aggregate data suggests changing climate patterns will result in changing forest fire patterns, forest fires are complex and have occurred for thousands of years. To try and say any single fire would not have happened without climate change is a difficult statement to prove.

At the same time, it’s when people’s lives and properties are being threatened by forest fires that they are most likely to pay attention to the problems more frequent and intense forest fires pose and ways to stop them from happening.

Which brings me to the Canadian justice system.

There are any number of experts, including lawyers, social scientists and former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, who have looked at aggregate data and identified a systemic problem with how Canada’s justice system interacts with Indigenous people.

Like those climate scientists hesitant to point to any individual fire and say, “This, THIS, is a specific example of the problem,” they are more likely to say things like, “Incidents such as this do stem from systemic problems, but we can’t say for sure any one case is a specific example.”

System-level problems pose a unique challenge. On a broad level, it can be seen they are resulting in bad outcomes, but it is extremely difficult to point to any single outcome as a specific example of the system-level problem.
So the question is: when a forest fire destroy someone’s life, and other people start talking about how forest fire’s have been ruining their lives, too, do you sit back and explain to them that, well, we don’t know the specific cause of any one forest fire?

Or do you figure out how to solve the problem?

See also: One of the good ones, Canada

Filed under: Canada, Indigenous