The climate emergency has planet Earth in crisis. Slowly increasing global mean temperatures represent a huge amount of heat continually added to the atmosphere and oceans, and heat is energy. All atmospheric and oceanic dynamics have been energized, including the basic poleward Meridional Circulation, the tropical Hadley Circulation, tropical storms and mid-latitude weather systems. The impacts are far-reaching and deep, and affect all natural and social systems throughout the globe.

Virtually unnoticed here are the health impacts on human and all other living things. Burning fossil fuels emit greenhouse gases but also release toxic air pollutants, including carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, various oxides of nitrogen, and other aerosols. The WHO estimates that these poisonous gases cause more than eight million global deaths annually from heat stroke, melanoma, various cancers and asthma. The warming climate also lessens our ability to grow healthy foods.

The obvious answer should be to convert our energy production over from fossil fuels to renewable clean electric energy. We discuss how and why this needs to be carried out in a step- wise fashion, starting at local scales while ignoring fossil fuels, and allowing market forces to reduce fossil fuel demand, ultimately resulting in reduced carbon emissions. This may be our only way to secure a liveable future for our grandchildren and generations to come.

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Bio:

Geoff is an atmospheric/climate scientist by profession, having obtained his MSc (1974) and PhD (1985) in thunderstorm dynamics at the University of Alberta (UofA). He is a 50-year member of the Canadian Meteorological & Oceanographic Society (CMOS), a Fellow of and former national President of CMOS (2006-07), and received several awards from that society during his career that began in 1963. He chaired local CMOS Centres in Halifax, Saskatoon, Edmonton, and Victoria, and chaired the Science Committee for three CMOS Congresses. He was nominated twice for the prestigious Patterson Medal from Environment Canada, most recently in 2024.

After retiring from Environment Canada in 1998, Geoff continued independent research on severe thunderstorm initiation, atmospheric moisture budgets, prairie drought, and Heat/Dry Islands. He applied contract research funding towards mobile field studies in Alberta, while supporting and co-supervising several graduate students at UofA. He was Secretariat for both MAGS (Mackenzie GEWEX Study) and DRI (Drought Research Initiative). He also taught various environmental courses as an adjunct professor at UofA and Kings University in Edmonton, and VIU in Nanaimo from 1999-2017.

In the early 2000s, he recognized the increasing threats of climate change, and started devoting most of his time to this, providing public education on climate change through invited public lectures, writing newspaper and magazine articles, and authoring several novels on climate change. He even developed a bible study on ‘climate and weather in scripture’ titled Questions of Environmental Stewardship Theology (QuEST), and is presently writing a book by the same title.

Geoff is active in several climate-related organizations, especially the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome (CACOR), for which he is a Board Director with his attention focused on advocacy for climate mitigation and adaptation. He is presently writing his third novel on climate change.