This past week, Canada earned the Fossil of the Day Award from the Climate Action Network, a group of 700 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at the UN Climate Talks in Durban, South Africa.  

Our country's refusal to sign a new international agreement and our rumoured withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol put us in first place, above the United States, for our lack of action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, three reports released recently suggest the climate change issue is only getting worse.

One study, from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria, says that current trends for reducing greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.  That target is considered by many to be a tipping point for the climate, whereby the planet will not reduce its temperature for perhaps another millennium.

The second report, published in Nature magazine, showed how the current loss of sea ice in the Arctic is unprecedented in the last 1,450 years. And yet another report,  from the Permafrost Carbon Network at the University of Florida, raised concerns over the increased melting of permafrost in the Arctic and subsequent release of methane gas, which is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Warming in the Arctic is happening faster than other parts of the planet, causing not only the ice to melt, but the ground as well. Thawing permafrost is causing shorelines to change, buildings and pipelines to sink, trees to lean at odd angles, and most importantly, allowing plants and animals that have been frozen in the ice for thousands of years to thaw out and rot. The decay of all that organic matter is where most of the methane comes from.     

This release of methane into the atmosphere will add an extra boost to climate warming, which itself will cause more permafrost melting, more methane release and so on, in an upward spiral known as a feedback loop.

That means that even if we were to curb all of our carbon emissions, the methane will still provide an extra foot on the accelerator towards greater climate warming.

Despite our agreement under the Kyoto Accord to reduce our emissions below 1990 levels, and subsequent promises by governments to reduce them to 2000 levels by 2020, they have actually gone up by 17 per cent. That's more than the increase seen in the United States, which did not sign onto Kyoto.

When you look at clearly visible signs of climate change in Canada and around the world and see a lack of action from governments to do something about it, you feel sort of like someone flying in an airplane who notices that the propeller has stopped turning.  If the pilot says, "Don't worry, we're still flying," that attitude only works for so long.