If death takes a holiday in Canada, it's not during January.

I know that because a Statistics Canada website tells me that the average daily death rate peaks in January — in some years 10 per cent more a day — and bottoms out in summer — sometimes six per cent less than average.

Part of this seems due to the ravages of flu during the winter months, but it is also true that between 1965 and 1992 cold killed 2,875 people while heat did in a mere 183. The deaths may also be a reflection of the dangers of winter walking for the brittle elderly. While the number of falls in the general population peaks in the summer, for those 65 and older, StatsCan tells me that January and February are the direst of cruel months.

Death's rise may also be due to the treachery of winter driving. A study in the Montreal area between 1995 and 1998 showed an oddball relationship between traffic accident numbers and traffic accident mortality. While the accident rates in general peaked during the summer, fatal and severe accidents occurred twice as often during winter and early spring.

Why, with spring not just in the air but in many places actually arrived, am I going on about the perils of winter?

Well, I have been much thinking about it while trying to make sense of a recent spate of news reports following the release of a new document prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

Headlines told me: "IPCC: 'Canada the Lucky One'" and "Canada catches a break on global warming." But the one that truly caught my attention was one from the Financial Times of London that declared: "Climate change is not a global crisis — that is the problem."

This means that in this country, with its maybe 12 climate zones, there are real advantages that come with warming in some places.

But if advantages do exist, they are generally reported by being bracketed in with evil otherness. For example, while there was mention of warmer weather increasing tourism in some parts of the country, we were warned by the Globe and Mail that, "by 2050, snowmobiling could be history in Eastern Canada." There was exactly zero — let me underscore and bold face — zero mention of winter-related deaths and injuries.

Report partly to blame?

Part of this is a function of the document that created the stir in the first place. It wasn't the actual report by a collection of the world's 1,000 best climate scientists; it was a "summary for policy makers."

If you read the document you'd find clankingly little about this country by name. "Climate change is considered in the design of infrastructure projects such as coastal defense in the Maldives and The Netherlands, and the Confederation Bridge in Canada," was the single reference I could find.

Why release a summary before you release the actual report?

Well, the summary was something that government officials and scientists agreed upon after a marathon negotiating session in Brussels. As a consequence, the science-dense chapters that the scientists originally penned now have to be somewhat rewritten to reflect the political compromises that underlie the summary paper.

John Stone, the retired Environment Canada scientist who is vice-chair of the working group that was putting out the report, assured me in a recent interview that the revisions won't compromise the scientific validity of the final report. But the release of a summary before the final report has been completed reveals much about the IPCC process. Even with all the scientific muscle that was mustered into creating it, these studies tie into a fundamentally political process.

And, as former U.S. speaker of the house Tip O'Neill famously remarked, "all politics is local."

Grassroots opinion

And so let me speak not as a citizen of the world, not as a citizen of Canada, but as a mere Torontonian.

Generally I believe — with the IPCC's scientists — that human-induced climate change is quite, quite likely to be occurring. And if predictions are right, it is likely to cause misery in many parts of the planet.

But I am very much less clear that, at least at the level of the two-degree-Celsius increase predicted by the end of the century, it is not going to make my life in Toronto better. Because what I don't believe, IPCC reports or not, is that we have in this crevice of the universe a perfect climate, and thus that any increase in temperature here has to be calamitous to everything. By way of comparison, a two-degree C rise would still see Toronto's average July temperature slightly lower than present day Tokyo, and our average January temperature eight degrees lower.

Rather, I look at a variety of statistics that affect me personally — in addition to health, say, the fact that global warming might cut into the $1.3 billion used to control ice and snow on highways in Canada, might let us reduce the 50 million litres of chemicals sprayed on aircraft and runways each year in this country — and admit those are actually true goods. And so is the possibility that spring planting might advance 18 to 26 days, and so more locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables might be available for longer periods of time in my local grocer.

I look at them and think: for me here in Toronto, this global warming thing isn't good versus evil. It's goods versus goods and evils versus evils — at least, if we are talking about a two-degree Celsius warming.

Climate debate must consider benefits as well

The truth of the matter is that if you made me god, I'd give this country a climate more like Sicily's than Winnipeg's. And I don't think I am alone here.

I have run the idea that some amount of warming doesn't seem such a great evil for Toronto past friends and neighbours, and their heads nod. "Oh, yeah," said one in a voice bathed in a vat of sarcasm heated to about 150 degrees. "Everybody here just loves long, cold winters. That's why so many of us go ice fishing on Lake Ontario."

What this means politically is that the climate debate in this country is going to have to be much more nuanced than elsewhere to make a lasting impact on the average resident. It is going to have to seriously take into consideration benefits. It's going to have to accept that some of the benefits are genuine improvements and not some oil company's propaganda.

It's going to have to recognize that hardly any of us live in the Arctic, and that most of us don't live in coastal cities. And it's going to have to tell Canadians specifically what they have to win or lose as a result of climate change.

This is not the politics of "shrug, not my problem." This is real Canadian politics where you argue that benefits in the south will help pay for detriments in the North. Where Torontonians can accept a certain amount of change, but fight like mad to avoid, let's say, a 10-degree temperature increase.

Because if we don't make global warming less worldly and more local, my suspicion is that at the first flutter in our national economic heartbeat, many members of the populace are going to put worries about global warming aside, as they have in the past.

They'll put on their shorts and take up their golf clubs and let the IPCC worry about the planet.

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LETTERS:

An interesting twist to the above article may be the following:

As a young undergradate in a Physical Geography course at the Univ. of Alberta in 1971 being taught by two Welsh PhD.'s in Geology I was taught that when the polar icepack recedes this is a 'trigger' for a new ice age as the air currents moving over the open water pick up the moisture which results in increased precipitation in this region i.e. snow accumultation and its consequences in the longterm.

The pioneering work of the Scottish scientist 'Lovelock' points out that climate and weather patterns are a closed self-regulating system which has consequences. He pointed this out on one of Dr. David Suzuki programs on global warming. His thesis would appear to bear this out.

A continental glacier moving south would shake up an indifferent Canada somewhat and for that matter anyone else living in the Northern Hemisphere on our globe. What is the latest "science" on this and what kind of a Canadian landscape will be leaving for our great-grandchildren?

Thank you for your time spent on this.

— J. D. Donoghue | Vancouver