In this part of Cana­da, you don’t need a cal­en­dar to know autumn has offi­cial­ly arrived. Pret­ty much every con­ver­sa­tion­al encounter with a local incud­es an opin­ion or spec­u­la­tion on how colour­ful the leaves will be this year, and whether cli­mate change will have an effect.

Pre­dic­tions range from mut­ed to more vibrant than usual.
So far, they’re more pas­tel than bright, and some trees seem to be shed­ding them faster and ear­li­er than usual.
It will be mid-Octo­ber before a defin­i­tive ver­dict can be pro­nounced, but what­ev­er it is, there will be no fin­ger-point­ing, smug strut­ting or acri­mo­ny over who got it right, wrong, or why.
That may seem like a “so what” thing to point out, until you jux­ta­pose it with what colours dis­course over admit­ted­ly more con­se­quen­tial issues elsewhere.
Sci­ence is scorned, igno­rance pass­es for wis­dom, ill-man­ners are  praised and emu­lat­ed,  civil­i­ty is equat­ed with cow­ardice, inchoate ram­blings are laud­ed as rhetoric, obvi­ous lies are accept­ed as unques­tioned truths. Humour is derid­ed as dan­ger­ous, unpre­dictabil­i­ty pass­es for pol­i­cy, uncouth­ness is unre­mark­able, tol­er­ance is intol­er­a­ble. Prag­ma­tism is mocked as pathet­ic, prof­it super­sedes social responsibility.
Polit­i­cal appointees claim more exper­tise than experts who have spent years study­ing and work­ing on infi­nite­ly com­plex med­ical mat­ters like vac­cines and autism.
That’s the equiv­a­lent of being a prac­ti­tion­er of one of those Inter­net “five-min­utes-a-day” fit­ness work outs, and labelling your­self an elite athlete.
                      UNCOMMON GROUND
The one thing you’d expect oth­er­wise sen­tient human beings to agree on, giv­en the evi­dence, is that cli­mate change is real, urgent and requires inno­v­a­tive think­ing, as opposed to busi­ness as usu­al indifference.
Instead, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion  “,…is apply­ing pres­sure to lenders to drop restric­tions on projects con­tribut­ing to cli­mate change.”
In what the Guardian news­pa­per char­ac­terised as “a long and humil­i­at­ing rant”, the pres­i­dent of the biggest emitter of green­house gasses in his­to­ry told world lead­ers at the UN Gen­er­al Assem­bly this week that cli­mate change was “…the great­est con job ever per­pe­trat­ed on the world, in my opinion.”
Trump fur­ther informed them: “You need strong bor­ders and tra­di­tion­al ener­gy sources if you are going to be great again.” A bit long to make an acronym that will fit on a base­ball hat, but maybe he fig­ured there wouldn’t be enough mon­ey in it anyway.
By way of per­spec­tive, accord­ing to a study by the think tank Influ­ence Map, thir­ty-six major fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies are respon­si­ble for over half of the world’s plan­et-heat­ing car­bon diox­ide emissions.
In the unlike­ly event Trump  would like a sec­ond opin­ion on his cli­mate opin­ion, he could check with Kenyan Pres­i­dent William Ruto on his country’s view: “Droughts made mil­lions of Kenyans go hun­gry.  Nobody can per­sua­sive­ly tell any Kenyan that cli­mate change is abstract. It is not”.
West­ern coun­tries have expe­ri­enced record floods, increas­ing for­est fires, extreme heat, more pow­er­ful storms. Maybe when they get hun­gry they’ll get the message.
More like­ly, how­ev­er,  the glob­al warm­ing deniers will ask God to solve it, although there’s a risk that he (or she, if you pre­fer) might be fed up with what’s already been invoked in his/her name.
That includes claim­ing God-giv­en rights as an excuse for ignor­ing the obvi­ous need for gun con­trol in the U.S., per­se­cu­tion of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty in self-pro­claimed “Chris­t­ian” coun­tries, sup­pres­sion of minor­i­ty reli­gions in just about any coun­try you choose, “holy” wars, cults of as many kinds as Joe­sph sup­pos­ed­ly had colours in his coat, and dis­plac­ing Pales­tini­ans from the West Bank on alleged Bib­li­cal grounds.
The U.S. won’t recog­nise the Tal­iban regime in Afghanistan because of   “…abhor­rent treat­ment of women and girls (which the Tal­ibs insist is what the Koran requires) and its per­se­cu­tion of ex-gov­ern­ment offi­cials are unlike­ly to stop any time soon”
Replace “abhor­rent” with a slight­ly milder adjec­tive —“rep­re­hen­si­ble” would do –and change “ex-gov­ern­ment offi­cials” to “oppo­nents of the regime” and you’ve got Sau­di Arabia.
But its mur­der­ous leader Mohammed bin Salman  is treat­ed as an invalu­able ally by West­ern leaders.
There’s enough reli­gion-based hypocrisy going around to make an athe­ist out of a Pope.
                   AND THE LESSON IS… 
As for what comes next, accord­ing to my favourite win­ter prog­nos­ti­ca­tor, the ven­er­a­ble Old Farm­ers Almanac, pur­vey­or of “time-test­ed wis­dom” and “long-range insight”, the com­ing win­ter will be: “Most­ly wet and mild, but Cana­di­ans should still brace for snowy stretch­es, chilly snaps, and the occa­sion­al polar surprise.”
The pair of young male mer­ganser ducks in the pho­to were lead­ing a  group of six, band­ing togeth­er in prepa­ra­tion for the gru­elling migra­tion to warmer climes.
They instinc­tive­ly know what humans seem to have for­got­ten, sur­vival depends on heed­ing real­i­ty, and get­ting along together.
(BTW — does their dis­tinc­tive “hair­do” remind you of any­one who hasn’t fig­ured that out?)
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