Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 15, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 WEDNESDAY JANUARY 15, 2025 Ideas, Issues, Insights Dealing with a time for kings E ARLY January seems to be a time for kings, especially this year. As Epiphany overlaps Orthodox Christmas, “we three kings of Ori- ent are” visit the Bethlehem stable and offer their gifts to the child “born to be king of the Jews” (Matthew 2:2) We have just witnessed the state funeral of another “king,” as former U.S. president Jimmy Carter was honoured by five presidents and many others. Then, there is the pending inauguration of Donald Trump 2.0, whose behaviour certainly warrants the title of “The Man Who Would Be King.” While we have awkwardly learned to sing God Save the King in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation means losing our local current political leader. With no succession plan, chaos is ascendant here, as it is elsewhere. In a time of kings, when lesser folks are treated badly, or forced (like Joseph and his family) to flee as refugees to a foreign land, we also need to be reminded, in the midst of chaos, that there are always more possibilities than we are at first able to see. So, as a commoner confronted by a January sur- feit of royalty, I thought of this cartoon. Behind the illusion offered by pomp, circumstance and ceremony, there is always a more prosaic truth. The wise men/three kings/Magi are standing outside the stable, and one says to the other two: “Look, I know we just agreed to give him the gold, but this place really smells.” If you know the Epiphany story (or the carol), you know the other two gifts were expensive perfumes: frankincense and myrrh. I have always wondered why. Gold is obvious, but perfumes? Not so much — so perhaps this cartoon offers a good explanation. If by now you have looked more closely at it, however, you will see the autograph in the corner: “Gruber and Denton.” For me, this cartoon has always been a sign of hope and new possibilities. When I went to kindergarten, I won no prizes for artistic creativity. Even as a five year-old, I lagged so far behind my classmates that my frustrated teacher archly informed my parents their first-born had “absolutely no artistic ability whatsoever.” (I have an odd memory, and remem- ber some things — like this assessment — when I have long forgotten everything else.) So, literally, every time I pick up a drawing pencil, that assessment echoes in my head and the results are uniformly disastrous. I have always dreaded family efforts to play Pictionary, because whichever team was saddled with me was bound to lose, though with great hilarity at my repeated humiliation. Worse, to compound my own frustration, de- spite this artistic inability, I have a cartoon brain. The world spawns a continual series of cartoons for me every day; detailed images that are forev- er locked inside. Fast-forward 35 years. One day before Christ- mas, at Trinity United Church in Portage la Prairie where I was working, I complained to the secretary, Lesia Case. I told her about my cartoon problem, and how I had a good one about the three kings at the stable that I could see but not draw. She simply asked: “Have you met Charlotte?” So, I met Charlotte Jones — a member of the church, almost as old as my mother, who lived on a Saskatoon berry farm with her husband, Bob, outside of town. She had cartooned for many years, under the pen name “Gruber,” mostly for agricultural newspapers or local publications. She took that idea of mine, and returned the drawing (as you see it now) in a couple of days. I was stunned — especially when she asked for more ideas, and suggested if we came up with good cartoons, we might trying selling them to religious magazines across Canada. I sent her a list of scribbled ideas, and we clicked in an extraordinary way. About 80 per cent of those ideas she immediately turned into salable cartoons, with about 15 per cent requiring some revision or two. (The rest, we agreed, were junk!) So, thanks to Charlotte, this kindergarten artis- tic failure became an award-winning, published cartoonist. What I couldn’t do by myself happened anyway because I found someone to work with who saw possibilities, and not just obstacles. We were an unlikely pair, to be sure. No one could imagine we would become a cartooning team that produced over 200 cartoons in six years, selling them to Canada Lutheran, the Pres- byterian Record, the United Church Observer and other magazines. We won three awards in 2000/2001 from the Associated Church Press, a professional associa- tion with a circulation of over 25 million. We had a public exhibition of the best ones in the Hamilton Galleria at the University of Winnipeg in 2005, and concluded our partnership by publishing a cartoon in the Saturday Evening Post. So, I still see cartoons, and I still can’t draw. But, thanks to Charlotte Jones, I know that means I just need to find another way. Something worth remembering this month, amid the chaos of kings. Peter Denton writes from his home in rural Manitoba. Climate feedbacks — not in front of the children “THIS does not mean the international +1.5 C target has been broken, because that refers to a long-term average over decades.” If those carefully chosen words don’t set your alarm bells ringing, you have not travelled much in the land of lawyers. This statement was published on Friday in the annual report of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s main climate science centre. Yet elsewhere in the same document it admitted that the world’s average temperature did indeed exceed +1.5 C higher than the pre-industri- al level in 2024. And here’s United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, peddling the same story on the same day: “Individual years pushing past the 1.5-degree limit do not mean the long-term goal is shot.” You’ll find similar mantras on the websites of NASA and NOAA in the U.S., the Hadley Centre in the U.K., the Potsdam Centre for Climate Im- pact Studies in Germany and the Japan Meteoro- logical Agency. None of them is actually lying, but they are definitely seeking to mislead. The problem is that our scientists and politi- cians have been telling us for 10 years that we must never exceed that “aspirational” +1.5C target or very bad things would follow (as indeed they will). Nobody listened, we have now passed that target, and some of that hell is breaking loose. Los Angeles is the latest example. So now they need to reassure us that it is still worth trying to hold the warming down (as indeed it is). This requires playing down the importance of passing +1.5C, which is why we have just had a co-ordinated effort by politicians and scien- tists telling us we really didn’t go there. How did things get so tangled? The “aspirational” +1.5 C target was adopted by the 2015 climate conference partly because the hard target of “never more than +2 C or the heavens will fall” was seen as too far away to mo- tivate people properly. The other reason was that a group of scientists centred around the Potsdam Institute had been working on “feedbacks.” They knew that heating the planet with our emissions would have big effects on other parts of the climate system, and set out to discover what those effects were and when they would be triggered. The feedbacks are the real killers. Our emis- sions heat the planet, and then wildfires, floods and mudslides, hurricanes and cyclones, rising sea-levels and half a dozen other feedbacks wreak mayhem. Many of the feedbacks also cause more warm- ing, like the melting snow and ice which expose dark rock and open water, which then absorb sunlight and heat the planet further. Some of these feedbacks are active already and almost all will be activated between +1.5 C and +3 C. Since we did not cause them directly, we can’t shut them off. Only planetary cooling can do that, and how likely is that? The scientists also knew that there were almost certainly other feedbacks lurking in wait for us, so staying below +1.5 C really did matter. How- ever, it’s gone now, and the bitter truth is that we probably won’t see it again in this century (if ever). We stumbled across the first big “unknown” feedback in June 2023, when the average global temperature jumped by more than two-tenths of a degree in a single month. It has never fallen back, and it took scientists more than a year even to figure out (tentatively) what is causing it: less low-level marine cloud, which therefore reflects less incoming sunlight. Average global temperature for 2024 has been +1.55 C, and the past three months have been +1.6 C, so why are the Great and the Good telling us that we haven’t “really” passed +1.5 C? What’s all this nonsense about waiting a couple of decades to be sure? Requiring a 20-year run of data when calcu- lating average global temperature made sense when temperatures fluctuated up and down in the familiar old way. It makes no sense to use that method to calculate the headline number for average global temperature, incorporating data from as long ago as 2005, when the only way it has gone each year is up. So why do they do it? Partly because they have always done it that way, but there is also a belief among both scientists and politicians that the pub- lic cannot be trusted with the brutal truth. They might riot in the streets demanding huge immedi- ate emissions cuts — or, (more likely) they might retreat into paranoid fantasies and deny climate change exists. It’s pointless. Scientists can use the old method among themselves if they wish, but don’t try to foist it on the public. It just undermines trust. Give them straight information in terms they can understand, and let the chips fall where they may. Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. Populism and the right IF populism is on the right, where to turn? That is, if you find populism between disturbing and repellent, and align with political conservatism. Two recent pieces in the Free Press — Truth takes a sad holiday (Think Tank, Jan. 8) and Turn right and head south (Jan. 3) — address populism and its association with the political right. Donald Trump, Pierre Poilievre, Premiers Scott Moe and Danielle Smith (of Saskatchewan and Alber- ta, respectively) and Maxime Bernier are mentioned. Is populism necessarily embedded in the political right? If so, what is the attraction? On Jan. 9, French Radio-Canada broad- cast an episode called Notre rapport au travail et l’argent — roughly, how we relate work and money. One expert, Jacques Forest of the Uni- versité du Québec à Montréal, referred to research showing (my translated summary) that societal ills and associated costs such as mental health, violence and substance abuse are more dire in societies with larger income disparity (specifically, based on the difference in average income between the top 20 per cent and bottom 20 per cent of earner income levels). As defined in the previous paragraph, it is evident how a strong capitalist bent in governance can exacerbate this. He also mentioned the Mincome experi- ment (not by name) in Dauphin in the 1970s, designed to study the impact of providing livable income support. (The Canadian Museum of Human Rights has an online exhibit.) He opined that “false political beliefs” brought the experiment to a halt with a governmental shift to the right. A similar event took place when Ontario Premier Ford closed down a basic income pilot project there in 2018. Evidently, income redistribu- tion to the extent of a basic income policy is distasteful and countertheoretical to the po- litical right, notwithstanding evidence and the harms associated with income disparity. Which illustrates the link between popu- lism and the far right. Populism entails the exploitation of sentiments of we who are unable or unwilling to distinguish the civil, probable and factual from their opposites. Political stripes underpinned by beliefs that analysis and evidence show to be of limited validity when it comes to general societal well-being, and harmful at times, are best shrouded by populist tactics. And so we see ploys such as contentious applications of parental rights (to conceal intolerance) and of freedom of speech (to protect populism). Extreme entitlement is also a feature. The right-wing tendency for pre-emptive invocation of the notwithstanding clause demonstrates the belief that devoutly held far-right beliefs, exclusively, properly carry more weight than human rights as described in the constitution, and are more compelling than any consideration by the justice system. If public education is a factor in the growth of populism, it is despite govern- ment impositions on curricula tending to be from the perspective of right-wing politics (e.g., regarding gender identity). Also, critical thinking, defined in Manitoba as “… the intentional process of synthesizing and analyzing ideas using criteria and evidence, making reasoned judgments and reflecting on the outcomes and implications of those decisions…” is an important educational goal. Many practical techniques for protect- ing against misdirected influence are also adroitly described in the Jan. 11 Free Press Think Tank piece, You don’t always have to have a hot take — or share it. Despite this, the effectiveness of popu- lism is clear and more difficult to explain than its adoption by some on the political right. It likely involves social, demographic, economic, technological (information tech- nology, in particular) and other factors, and their connections to cynicism, pessimism, malaise, bitterness, disengagement and disaffection. Also clear is that lamenting about truth and populism has been exhausted. The next and critical step is to interrogate the nature of, and how to address, the spread and influence of populism. So that all political directions are open again. The price to pay, meanwhile, is leadership prone to specious claims, vacuous promises and school yard-style name-calling that auger poorly for the maturity and sophis- tication available for governing; in Canada and throughout the world. Ken Clark, retired and living in Winnipeg, specialized in assess- ing and evaluating educational outcomes, and applies that to other areas, including politics. KEN CLARK SUBMITTED “Look, I know we just agreed to give him the gold, but this place really smells.” PETER DENTON GWYNNE DYER ;