A few weeks ago, I did some junk science — as the Bush/Harper people used to call studies about global warming. I was gazing out the window, avoiding writing, and saw one arm of a V of Canada geese flying north. Alarmed, I went looking for normal migration times, wondering whether this could be due to global warming. The science wasn’t conclusive (unlike that on climate change, which the Harper government suddenly decided this week is), but I got scared and global warming is where I went.

In fact, the science on global warming (now called climate change because it sounds vaguer and less scary) is no more conclusive than last month. What is newly conclusive is the polling. The issue frightens people, and there’s something to make it do so in almost everyone’s life. You go to Collingwood to ski and there’s no snow. You see people in shirt sleeves on New Year’s Day.

Or I’m on the treadmill this week watching TV, and there are aerial shots of a polar bear swimming from floe to floe as the ice recedes. He looks small and spread-eagled, like a little turtle that arrived here Christmas morning.

We went and got a bigger aquarium for him and the resident fish, but the heater broke during transfer, the new one was hard to operate, the thermometer didn’t seem to register as the water got hotter, the sides looked steamy and one started to worry that the little creatures might fry or suffocate and holy mackerel — I’m in trouble regulating a 10-gallon tank and what do you think happens when you mess with the planetary atmosphere?

That’s what I mean about everything evoking global warming. Columnist Andrew Coyne says it’s too complicated to determine an election (unlike, say, a higher minimum wage having the obvious effect of killing the economy). But most people seem to think it’s not impenetrable, it keeps popping up in their lives, and they’re drawing conclusions.

For instance, I’m walking an eight-year-old home from school. He asks what global warming is, it came up in class. I try to explain; then, not wanting to overly alarm him, add that lots of people are working to get it under control.

He asks who could be against that. I say some people make a lot of money from it. Like who? Well, oil companies, energy firms.

“Oh, great,” he says, “this is your choice: Make lots of money and die. Or be alive with less money. That’s a hard one!”

I repeat this because he, like all his peers, is an environmentalist (their word); but it’s different now. Canadian kids have been ecological since David Suzuki’s heyday 20 years ago when they all got his books on their birthdays. Now it’s verified for the rest of us by direct experience like the geese or turtle. My eyes used to glaze over when I saw the word “environment.” But I’m a Suzukian, too. It’s no longer him or Al Gore trying to scare hell out of you. It’s events in your own life, multiplied by everyone else’s.

That’s what hit the polls, turned Conservatives into sudden ecomaniacs (along with the fact that Liberals stumbled into Mr. Green as their leader), and led the government to “scramble to play the green game.” Now they not only want Canada to be an energy superpower, as Stephen Harper intones, but a clean energy superpower, as Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn said this week.

In politics, motives usually don’t matter. Maybe Stephen Harper will do the right thing for the sake of votes, or more likely because the Bush government sees the writing, too. They move in lockstep. But watch the language. Neither government wants to cap or curb emissions; they’ll focus on research and innovation in cleaner energy.

Radio-Canada, meanwhile, reports the U.S. wants us to quintuple the output of the tar sands, our main contribution to Armageddon, because its Mideast policies are going badly and threatening oil supplies. Now there’s a link to lose sleep over: failed U.S. foreign policy with greater global warming, by way of Canada.

George Bush keeps repeating that failure is not an option in Iraq. But failure is usually an option in life and only an idiot won’t recognize it. Except with global warming. There, as our kids can teach us, failure really isn’t an option.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.