Rough air ahead

Staring out a window at Sky Harbour Airport in Phoenix, AZ I become increasingly edgy.

Outside that window, baggage handlers toss dozens of bulky bags onto the conveyor belt crawling up into the belly of the aircraft I am about to board. The stream of bags appears endless, and very, very heavy.

I shift my glance to the outside thermometer. It is 101F and only 9:30 a.m. My flight is delayed, as many are these days, and the longer the delay, the hotter it is going to get. The hotter it gets, the harder it will be for my airplane – cargo hold jam packed and every seat booked - to get off the ground.

Airplanes roaring along a runway need lift to get airborne, and the warmer the air flowing across the wings, the less lift. The less lift, the less chance of getting into the air before the runway ends.

Temperature, airport elevation, weight, type of aircraft all figure into the calculations that determine whether an aircraft will get off the ground.

At 104F the people who make ‘fly’ or ‘no fly’ decisions start to get concerned. At 118F some smaller regional flights are not allowed to fly. Larger, longer distance jets, like the one I am about to board, probably will be given flight clearance until the temperature gets into the 120s.

Dozens of flights were cancelled during the summer of 2017 when temperatures in the U.S. southwest soared into the 120s. In some world hot spots, such as the Middle East, flights often are scheduled for evening when temperatures are cooler.

I’m sure the computers, and the people who make the decisions, know what they are doing so I am not too concerned about the increasing heat and my flight. However, the experience widens my perspective on our changing climate: Changing weather patterns are making air travel less reliable, more uncomfortable, and more costly.

Hotter temperatures, more wild storms, stronger and more frequent winds are increasing delays, cancellations, rerouting, and rocky, uncomfortable flights.

Two of the four flights I have taken recently have been among the roughest in my lifetime of air travel. Both were strapped in flights with little or no service.

The University of Reading in England expects that in-flight injuries caused by rougher flights will increase three-fold over the next 30 years.

A study by the university predicts that severe turbulence on North Atlantic flights will increase by as much as 180 per cent. Flights over North America will see a 110-per-cent increase in turbulence and flights over Europe 160 per cent more.

Meanwhile, the leader of a union representing flight attendants says that rough air incidents caused by shifting air currents and clear air turbulence will double over the next 30 years.

In-flight turbulence could reach strengths that could “catapult unbuckled passengers and crew around the aircraft cabin,” Sara Nelson, international president of the 50,000-member Association of Flight Attendants, said in a column written for Vox.

Not all flight problems caused by climate change will be in the air. Many airports are located on flat, low-lying ground that is subject to flooding during storm surges. A U.S. federal assessment has found that 13 major U.S. airports are at risk from storm-driven ocean surges and heavy downpour flooding.

Also, warmer temperatures are melting permafrost in Arctic airport locations. The airport at Iqaluit, N.W.T. is built on permafrost and its runway and taxiway have had to be redone because of the melting.

Average global temperatures have been increasing, notably since the 1970s. Eighteen of the earth’s warmest 19 years have occurred since 2000. Last year was the fourth warmest year ever recorded on earth.

Global temperatures are not expected to stop rising any time soon. A study in the journal Climatic Change has said that heat waves will become more frequent and that annual daily highs at airports worldwide are projected to rise seven to 14 degrees Fahrenheit by 2080.

Airline pilots do their best to go above or around rough air. But climate changes are producing more super storms, and more frequent thunderstorms that reach higher altitudes. Avoiding rough weather can mean longer flights and added fuel costs.

So folks, tighten your seat belts and hope that the drink cart makes it to your row.

Gladiators not needed

 Molto bene, Italia! Perfettamente!

Indeed Italy has done a wonderful thing in disrupting a Steve Bannon extreme right project aimed at converting the world to his white power conservatism.

Bannon and a British Conservative acolyte named Benjamin Harnwell had leased an 800-year-old monastery in Collepardo 70 kilometres east of Rome. They planned to use it as an Academy of the Judeo-Christian West, “a modern gladiator school” that strengthens the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian western world.

Translation: gladiators who will join the war against Muslim advancement.

Really cool. A return to the Crusades to save the holy West from the Muslims. Exactly what the world wants and needs – more hatred, more violence and less diversity.

The Italian culture ministry, listening to protest groups, has cancelled the lease, citing irregularities. The protest groups noted that the monastery had a history of improving humanity: During the Middle Ages, monks conducted scientific research there and cultivated 2,500 types of plants for medicinal purposes.

In case you might have forgotten the name, Bannon is Donald Trump’s former chief election and White House strategist and promoter of Breitbart News, an alt-right news and opinion distributor. Some critics call him a crypto-fascist.

Harnwell, 43, isn’t known for much except being a helper to conservative thinkers and leaders.

Steve Bannon is not stupid as a stone, like some of the folks he hangs out with. Actually, he is considered brilliant, able to turn mind and hand to any number of intelligent undertakings. His gladiator school definitely is not one of them.

The last thing our world needs now is more extreme right-wing politics. In fact, the last thing we need is any extremism, right or left. We are stuffed with that junk, especially in our political systems.

Hyper-partisan politics, saturated with mad dog conservatism and mad cat liberalism, are damaging the ability to govern in places that have been models of democracy. In Canadian federal, provincial, and municipal politics, we are just not getting done the things that need doing.

Listening, considering other views and compromising for the common good are missing too often in today’s politics.

In the U.S. the situation  is out of control. That country has entered a stage of devolution that could turn to outright civil war. It is no longer the “United” States.

Canada is rolling along a similar road. Party leadership controls everything, from what its members say in Parliament to vetoing a local riding’s selection of a candidate. For instance, Jane Philpott and Jody Wilson-Raybould, once among Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s best cabinet ministers, have been barred from running for the Liberals in this fall’s election because they did not accept the party line on the SNC-Lavalin scandal.

Instead of tossing out anyone who disagrees with them, political leaders should be inviting challenging opinions. They need to take a lesson from Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln, facing the greatest crisis in U.S. history, did not surround himself with yes people – friends and allies who would support blindly any policy that he proposed. He gathered ambitious people with conflicting personalities who would question and challenge and in the end do things that benefitted the people, not just the party.

Lincoln’s approach is documented in the 2005 book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Our political leaders should read it.

We, the citizens, need to reconsider our political party system. It is rotting at its core. It  puts party before principle and party before the people.

What’s needed is for us all to move to the calmer centre where we can sit and discuss, thoughtfully and without yelling at each other, solutions to our problems.

Certainly what we do not need are gladiator schools to harden our political beliefs. We need more intelligent political discussions and debate that explore options. We need ideas – whether they come from thinkers on the left or right of the political spectrum.

Politicians need to listen to and respect the thoughts of all parties. They need to find common ground in that thinking and be willing to compromise to achieve solutions that will be good for the people, not the political party.

A country in which politicians cannot work together for its people is a country doomed to fall apart.

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Congratulations graduates of 2019

No matter the weather, no matter what is happening, June is the best month.

It is a time of hope. A time to believe that the world can overcome its problems and become a better place.

That’s because June is graduation month. Tens of thousands of young people in Canada and the U.S. are graduating from various levels of education, many moving on to even higher levels. These are the graduates who will shape the future.

I am at a grad ceremony at Miramonte High School in the Oakland Hills outside San Francisco, and not far from where the Toronto Raptors have been embarrassing the Golden State Warriors.

Here 300 students are graduating from Grade 12 and entering a new, important stage of their lives. The grad class is so large that the ceremonies are being held on the school football field.

When I look into these bright and smiling 18-year-old faces I see hope for the future. These are kids who will not stand by and watch the breakdown of society as we - their parents and grandparents - have.

These are not teenagers typical of those of the past. Sure, they are teenagers who act like typical teenagers, but beneath their typicalness is a socially aware generation.

They are acutely aware of America’s gun insanity that has taken the lives of so many school students like themselves. (As of the start of this week there have been 23,543 shooting incidents in the U.S. in which 6,215 people were killed and 11,959 wounded, according to gunviolencearchive.org).

They see the homeless living in cardboard shacks in underpass villages, and the thousands of people dying on the streets from drugs,.

They see the growing devastation of climate change: Communities inundated by flood waters. Communities ripped apart by unprecedented wind storms. Over the last month or so more than 500 tornadoes have ripped apart areas in the U.S., a record number. Canada also is seeing an increasing number of extreme weather events.

Climate change has made wildfire outbreaks a serious threat to some Canadian and American communities. These California kids live with the knowledge that the neighbourhoods they grew up in could be destroyed by wildfires at any time. It is only early June but temperatures in the 100s are forecast here for this week.

This is a generation of kids who have paid attention to these increasing threats to our world. And, although they don’t talk openly (at least to adults) about them, they do take them seriously and do not see existing political systems fixing them.

Like many of us, they see growing political tribalism blocking solutions. Politicians bark party lines and slap down anyone who does not agree with them. Political parties have become more important and powerful than the people.

But most importantly, whether their high school years were lived in the Oakland Hills, Haliburton or Mississauga, today’s graduates are among a new generation of people who place inclusion ahead of exclusion.

They understand diversity and live it daily. They are well read  (even if not on paper), are familiar and comfortable with new technology and have a globalized view of life. They are driven more by values than status and material things.

They also understand and accept change, and unlike many of us, have no yearning for the way things used to be. They yearn for open societies, not walls.

Education has been a key in shaping who these young people are. Thankfully, increasing numbers of them are getting more education as high school graduation rates are increasing in many countries.

Canada’s high school graduation rate stands at 85 per cent, still far behind Korea, Japan and the Netherlands, but better than the U.S., Sweden and Italy. The U.S. high school graduation rate is roughly 84 per cent, up four per cent since 2011, a rise attributed to the Obama presidency’s focus on education.

So congratulations graduates of 2019! Go out now and change a world burdened with problems that can be overcome with open minds and positive attitudes. You owe it to all those teachers, parents and others whose financial and moral support got you this far.

The world needs you.

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