While we humans continue to fret and argue about climate change, animals have already started to adapt to it. 

That’s really no surprise because some folks, me included, believe that animals are smarter than humans. If not smarter, certainly more team oriented and more together in troubling times.

Animals are better at being flexible and watching out for each other. If the leader of a V of Canada geese gets tired or ill, another goose quickly takes his or her place. When danger is present, musk oxen gather in a circle of group defence.
Researchers say that some wild things already have started changing their behaviour to adapt to climate change. Some birds are migrating earlier, sea turtles are adjusting their routes and caribou are having their babies earlier in the spring. 

These changes are being made because seasons are out of whack. Summers are becoming longer while spring, autumn and winter are becoming shorter and warmer.

Research shows that the summer’s length in the Northern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes increased to 95 days from 78 between 1952 and 2011. Winter contracted from 76 to 73 days, spring from 124 days to 115 and autumn shrank from 87 to 82 days. 

That research is 10 years old but the past decade has been the warmest on record so the changes in the seasons no doubt have become even more dramatic.

This past summer is evidence of that. June’s heat wave, which was particularly extreme out West, has been recorded as the deadliest weather event in Canadian history.

B.C. reports that from June 24 to June 30 its paramedics responded to 772 heat-related illnesses, two-thirds of them age 60 or older. The province’s coroner service reported 569 heat-related deaths during the heat wave.

The warming world is not just causing some animals to change migration routes and other living habits. It also has them shapeshifting – changing their bodies to adapt to temperatures.

In some hotter regions, black decorations are starting to disappear from the wings of male dragonflies. The decorations attract females, but because they are black they draw unwanted heat into the insect’s body.

Dark-eyed juncos, those dark grey and white little birds common in our areas, have been growing larger bills in recent years. The bills of some Australian parrots have seen a four-to-10-per-cent increase in bill size. Some other birds have been growing slightly larger legs.

Bird bills and legs are not feathered and allow birds to dissipate body heat more efficiently. Birds living in hot climates have larger beaks and legs than northern birds but studies are showing northern beaks and legs are getting larger.

Climate change also is warming our waters, creating important changes. Deep and cold lakes once prized lake trout habitat are warming and becoming habitat for warmer water species such as pickerel.

For instance, I’m told that one of my former favourite lake trout fishing spots – Lake Clear in the Ottawa Valley – is becoming a hotspot for pickerel fishing.

Warming also is allowing longer growing seasons, but creates better conditions for insects that can damage crops. Extreme heat also could turn some agriculture areas into deserts.

More heat also will change our forests, changes that will affect birds, animals and insects that depend on trees for food and shelter. 

Some animals will be able to shapeshift to survive the changing climate. Many others won’t. The United Nations reported in 2019 that one million species of animals and plants already are at risk of extinction.

Shapeshifting is not something that will help humans adapt to a changing climate. Unlike elephants we can’t grow larger ears that are waved like fans to create breezes that cool the body.

Human bodies cannot evolve quickly enough to help us adapt to the climate changes that scientists are warning us about. 

We can, however, become more serous about changing our lifestyles to help slow climate change. Being more serious about climate change includes being louder and more demanding of immediate action.

Take it from Al Gore, environmentalist and former vice-president of the United States, who has said:

“The more noise you make, the more accountability you demand from your leaders, the more our world will change for the better.”

You gotta love autumn baseball, especially when the Blue Jays are providing such dramatic late-season entertainment.

Toronto’s team has given Major League Baseball (MLB) - the entire sport in fact - a needed boost out of the gloom that has come with two seasons of Covid constraints.

The youthful Jays have won 18 of their last 22 games, winning series over Oakland A’s, New York Yankees, Baltimore Orioles, Tampa Bay Rays and Minnesota Twins. And, some of those games were won with dramatic come-from-behind scoring outbursts in late innings.

There were difficult games to be played this week with more excitement and a possibility of the Jays making the playoffs. Whatever happens in coming days, these Jays have provided some great baseball watching.

It’s all been wonderful, with one exception: the spitting. Spitting during the deadliest infectious disease outbreak in 100 years.

Why spitting continues to be allowed in baseball is beyond me. One would have expected to see it finally disappear during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

MLB has banned spitting during Covid but no one seems to be paying attention. As far as I know there is no enforcement and no fines or suspensions for any players who continue to spit.

I messaged MLB officials to ask why spitting continues. Is the ban still in effect? I didn’t receive a reply.

Newsday, the Long Island New York newspaper, reported earlier this year that the MLB spitting ban remains in effect for the 2021 season.

The league, reporters who cover professional baseball and the folks who broadcast the games apparently are content to ignore the spitting issue.

Spitting has been a major part of baseball since the first pitch crossed a home plate. Spit has been used to soften new gloves, to get a better grip on the bat and to give pitchers a better feel and grip on the ball.

Spitting is believed to have started early in baseball history when games were played in hot, dusty locations. Players chewed tobacco to keep their mouths moist, spitting as they chewed. 

About 10 years ago, players and MLB agreed tobacco would not be chewed in the presence of fans. Then last year when Covid struck, MLB banned spitting and spitting paraphernalia like sunflower seeds, shelled peanuts and tobacco.

Some argue that spitting on the baseball diamond is not a serious problem in terms of spreading disease. Players are well separated for much of a game and other Covid protections are in place.

Some catchers certainly are not comfortable with the continued spitting. 

“People spit at home plate when I’m squatting and it blows in my face,” Washington Nationals catcher Kurt Suzuki said in a newspaper interview. “That stuff happens all the time. It’s nuts.”

Baseball park grass and sand are dotted with spit, and baseballs pick it up when they roll across the field. Pitchers continue to lick their fingers to improve grip.

Whether spit presents Covid dangers or not, spitting is a disgusting habit that does nothing to improve game viewing for fans.

It’s a habit that many players don’t want to give up. They argue it is a traditional part of the game, helps concentration and is difficult to stop.

Some observers say MLB is slowly adapting to changes that one day will see spitting eliminated from the game. However, they note MLB is a traditional institution, always slow to adapt; slower than the rest of the world adapts to any change.  

I accept that spitting is a traditional part of the game and that some efforts are being made to control it, or perhaps even eliminate it.

If the professional baseball leagues can’t eliminate it now, perhaps it’s up to the TV broadcasters to act to prevent viewers from having to see it. Perhaps they could be more diligent in cutting out frames in which players are spitting.

This baseball season has been a terrific one, and a great distraction from the Covid nightmare we have been living through. But it doesn’t make sense to see players spitting while the disease continues to spread.  

However, little in this Covid horror show has made any sense, including the confusing government attempts to bring it under control.

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 Dusk is falling over the federal election campaign. Soon it will be dark, the campaigning over, and an election result presumably known Monday night. 

But after listening to all the promises, all the hyperbole and examination of the issues, I’m still wondering why one of the real issues troubling Canada has not been whispered.

That issue starts with ’se’ and ends with ’ism’.

If you are thinking separatism, you are wrong. Talk of Quebec separation has been around since the beginning and will be with us long into the future.

I’m thinking sectionalism, in which groups of us huddle tightly into our own sections, thinking less and understanding less, about the lives our fellow Canadians huddled in their own sections.

Canada is one of the world’s most sectionalized nations. Look around. There’s Atlantic Canada, Central Canada, the Prairies, British Columbia and the North. All sectionalized by geology or language, culture or climate.

Atlantic Canada is off on its own, separated from Ontario and the West by Quebec with its French language and culture. The Prairie provinces are sectionalized by the vast wilderness of Northwestern Ontario and the Rocky Mountains which leave B.C. perched alone on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Above all this is the barely populated North, separated mainly by geology and climate.

None of this is new. Canada always has been like this. 

However, it seems that the different sections, or regions, of our country are losing touch with each other. We don’t know each other as well as we used to and each section has been going its own way with less thought about the concerns, problems and dreams of the others.

This certainly has affected our politics. Our federal politics are controlled by one section – Central Canada. Sure, we elect MPs from all parts of Canada, but the power and decisions really lie with people from Central Canada, which is southern Ontario and Quebec.

For instance, the three politicians with any chance of becoming prime minister next week – Justin Trudeau, Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh - all are products of the Central Canadian core: Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal.

In the last 100 years, 11 of 14 prime ministers have been from Central Canada. Richard Bennett was from New Brunswick (1930-1935), Alberta’s Joe Clark served less than a year in 1979-80 and Kim Campbell of B.C. did less than six months in 1993.

What our country needs is more ideas and more leadership from all sections of the country. We also need to know more about each other, and understand each other, so it becomes easier for us to work together.

Despite the marvels of modern communication technology, Canadians know less about each other than in the past.

Two years ago, Historica Canada, an organization dedicated to enhancing awareness of the country's history and citizenship, conducted a survey that shows just how little we know about ourselves and our history.

Sixty-seven per cent of those who completed the survey got a failing grade. 

Scores were particularly poor for questions about Canadian science and innovation. Most test takers did not know that the world’s first Internet archive and the Jolly Jumper baby exercise swing were Canadian inventions.

I suppose it is not critical that we all know that, or that most Historica survey takers did not know that the first recorded instance of Hallowe’en costume dressing in North America was documented in Vancouver in 1898. But knowing more about other regions and their people, even if it is just trivia, helps us to understand each other.

Complicating Canada’s sectionalism problem is the fact that most of the sections hug the American border. A majority of Canadians live within 160 kilometres of the U.S. border and have a huge amount of their facts, opinions, and ideas influenced by American culture.

We need to work at ensuring a unified Canadian identity and increasing sectionalism will not help us to do that. Allowing sectionalism to grow will make Canada a series of islands that do what they think best for themselves instead of the overall country.

Sectionalism is not the biggest issue we have considering what we’ve been going through with Covid and climate change. It is, however, something worth thinking about.

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The storms of a globally warming summer have passed and hopefully we can settle into a more relaxed autumn of stable weather patterns, blue skies and gentle breezes.

It’s been a crazy weather year. It was an early spring with little runoff, then a long dry spell that could have qualified as a drought. Garden soil was powder dry and there was much anxiety about forest fires. 

Then came the rain, 16 days of it in June In Haliburton County, another 16 in July and an almost daily shower in August. Interspersed in the rain were days of high heat and suffocating humidity.

We got off easy. Other parts of the world, the United States in particular, suffered unprecedented damaging events caused by extreme weather - wildfires, storms that caused massive flooding and winds that tore apart communities.

Damaging weather events no longer are few and far between. In 2020 in the U.S. there were 22 billion dollar extreme weather events. 

From 1980 to 2020 the annual average of extreme weather events totalled 7.1. The average for the past five years (2016-2020) was 16.2 extreme weather events per year. 

A Washington Post analysis of federal disaster declarations shows that almost one-third of Americans live in a county hit by a weather disaster just in the past three months. And, almost 400 Americans have died in hurricanes, floods, heat waves and wildfires just since June.

Weather analysts say this is only the beginning of changing weather patterns and extreme weather events as global warming intensifies.

Canada has not been as severely affected, yet. However, global warming is heating the north and bringing new risks. Black-legged ticks, which carry serious Lyme disease, have been reported just north of Orillia and are continuing their northward march as our climate becomes warmer.

In 2009 only 144 cases of Lyme disease were reported across Canada. In 2019, the number of confirmed and suspected cases totalled 2,636.

A warming climate also is making new homes for a variety of mosquitoes. The Asian tiger mosquito is believed to be established now in the Windsor area. That mosquito is known to carry chikungunya and dengue and other viruses that we have never had to worry about before.

Some research indicates that climate change will bring the risk of malaria to millions of people, including Canadians, who seldom had to be concerned about it.

“The one thing we do know is slowly the distribution of mosquitoes is changing,” Robbin Lindsay, a research scientist with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) told Global News two years ago. “And we do see events and we see species here that we haven’t seen before.”

At the same time, the environmental magazine Yale Environment 360 reported that by 2050 climate change will expose one-half of the world’s population to disease spreading mosquitoes.

Climate change brings warmer weather that brings earlier springs that allow mosquito eggs to mature faster. It also brings more flooding which means more water in which the bugs can multiply.

Many experts say, however, that the main focus now should not be mosquitoes, but controlling global warming itself. Slowing climate change will slow mosquito population growth, and transmission of the viruses they carry.

Some people are finding advantages in our warming climate. Some companies are considering introducing afternoon siestas into their workplaces because climate change is increasing summer temperatures.

The National Trust, a British charity, is giving workers and volunteers Mediterranean-type working hours in southern England because of increasingly hot summers.

“It’s fair to say that as we experience more extreme temperatures, we will be looking to offer Mediterranean working hours, especially in the east which is likely to experience more frequent higher temperatures to ensure the health and safety of our staff and volunteers,” said a spokesman for the charity.

Mediterranean hours already are being offered at one National Trust property south of London, where the afternoon temperature went above 40 Celsius for the first time ever.

Meanwhile, more mosquito-borne disease and more Mediterranean working hours are serious signs that we all have to get together, believe that climate change is seriously real and do our part to help control it.  

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