My badbeekeeping blog has largely avoided the topic of global climate change. It’s contentious. Some insist it’s happening; other insist that it ain’t. I have purposefully tried to limit my conversation on the topic because I didn’t want to alienate any readers who have deep convictions on the subject. But opinions – and deep convictions – sometimes change. Especially when facts are staring at us.

Should a beekeeping blog discuss climate change? Of course it should. If climate change is really happening, it can have an enormous effect on our honey bees’ survival, production, and pollination. A good beekeeper, especially one who leads a boy scout troop, is always prepared. Be ready for strange weather is going to help you stay in the bees.

A bit of my backstory may help before I continue. Most readers know that I owned and operated small commercial honey farms, chronologically, in Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Dust, drought, and boredom pushed me out of my business in Saskatchewan thirty years ago. Looking for income for my growing family, I dropped by the University of Saskatchewan, and four years later came away with a high honours degree in geophysics. (Geophysics is a typical career move for bored commercial beekeepers.) That was 1991. The geophysics credentials led me to Calgary, the oil-centre of Canada and the place where nearly all geologists and geophysicists in the country ended up at that time. I was hired by the world’s largest oil company and worked there for five years.

During my years at Exxon, I learned that climate change is real and is man-made. I learned this from the scientists, engineers, and economists working for Exxon in the 1990s. As one example, our Arctic exploration team knew that high-water, low-ice scenarios would impact exploration of the Arctic Ocean during climate change. Exxon fully understood that anthropogenic heating was coming. As our boss’s boss’s boss, Rex Tillerson (who became Donald Trump’s first defense secretary) once said, “Climate change is real and it’s partly man-made.” But Tillerson was confident that we could engineer our way out of the problems fossils fuels were causing. (By the way, although we understood that fossil fuels caused climate change, Exxon’s message to the public was a bit different.)

I told my Exxon experience to a family member. He told me that he disagreed. He liked to do his own research, he said. And his research led him to the opinion that climate change is a hoax, created by governments as a way to control us. I was surprised that his research led him to different conclusions than what the men and women at Exxon had discovered. I told him that I appreciated that he was interested enough to do his own research and I respect him for that.

So, let’s assume that climate change isn’t happening. Let’s assume that burning eight billion tonnes of coal and nine billion tonnes of oil each year has no climate effect. We can at least agree that the pollution is real. When I lived in Pennsylvania, many years ago, acid rain from industrial burning of high-sulfur coal was killing lakes and forests around the Great Lakes near our home. When the Canadian and American governments put an end to that dirty fuel, the lakes recovered and the forests grew back. Pollution is a killer. When men worked the coal mines of West Virginia, they died young from black lung disease. The dust wasn’t confined to the mines, it travelled across the country in open train cars. And cities from London to L.A. had dangerously unsafe air for generations, due to fumes from vehicles. Changes to car emissions has improved that pollution problem enormously. Cutting back on coal and oil saves lives. For that alone, we need to move away from the fossils.

2023 was smoky in Calgary.

This is my son, Daniel, trying to enjoy a few moments outdoors.

The smoke was from huge forest fires that are consuming western Canadian trees. These unprecedented fires are due to a combination of poor forestry management, drought, and heat.

Let’s now assume that the climate is heating up because of fossil fuel use, something that the world’s largest oil company knew. In addition to the indisputable health issues caused by exhaust ingestion, what if the recent strange disruptive weather is due to man-made global changes in weather patterns?

We may argue that changes in climate are nothing new. Changes are cyclical. That’s true. But that’s like telling folks on the Titanic that other ships have been sunk by icebergs and it’s natural. Stuff happens. If you are on the sinking ship, it matters to you. Earth has gone through “Snowball” periods and hot phases many times in the past. These can be partly explained and predicted by models built from astronomical data. The models, using the Earth’s obliquity (tilt), eccentricity (orbit), precession (wobble), and Milankovitch cycles, help explain past climate conditions and predict that the Earth should now be entering another ice age. Imagine how hot the globe would be if we were headed into one of those hot phases right now. But astronomic forces are pushing us toward another ice age. We don’t feel that way because we hit the gas – literally and figuratively. It’s heating up instead.

We have left now 2023, the hottest year on record. We can hope that this was an anomaly and things will soon chill. However, such hope is akin to a retirement plan based on someday winning the Lotto. Recent climate changes have been more dramatic than the folks at Exxon predicted, and perhaps not reversible. When we should have been saving for our future, we were banking on some celestial lottery. Now, we are old and almost penniless.

Variation of Earth’s global average temperature, past 2,000 years. These data are normalized on the 30-year average temperature for the period 1961-1990. Note that from the year 1000 to about 1850, temperatures were about 0.5 °C below the 1970s period. But by 2019, the temperatures were about 1.3 °C above pre-industrial values.

To put these small numbers of degrees in perspective, in 2020, the Earth was only 5 °C warmer than it was during the last Ice Ages. It doesn’t take much to knock us off balance.

I didn’t intend for my first blog posting of 2024 to be nihilistic. But last night, at midnight, when the neighbours were merrily popping their fireworks on our front lawn, I could hear heavy rainfall. It was plus 6 °C and raining! Rain and mild temperatures on New Year’s Eve is rare as hen’s teeth in Calgary. It should be cold here. This is a kilometre-high city, hours north of Great Falls, Montana. The weird New Year’s Eve weather made me want to write about the cheerless topic of climate disaster. Sure, my house and yard are a single data point, at a single time, at a single place, so as it’s not to be confused with proof of global climate change. Nor is the fact that Calgary just now experienced its warmest December ever recorded. Nor even the fact that Canada had its warmest year ever recorded. But when a million global data points, from oceans to mountains and continents to islands, average out to being the warmest ten years we’ve ever know, we should pay attention.

I’m not going to tell anyone to use less energy. I don’t have to. Energy costs money – money that’s burned and gone. It causes pollution. It changes the climate. Becoming more efficient and using fewer resources is simply logical and even self-serving. You don’t have to be an altruistic do-gooder: even psychopaths watch their coins.

As beekeepers, we need to think about how climate change will affect our bees. That’s a topic for another screed, which I will reserve for the near future. Meanwhile, beekeepers can derive some assuaging of their conscience by knowing that the production of honey is perhaps the most energy-smart food-making activity we can do. Sunshine and plants give nectar that honey bees gather and turn into energy that we can eat by the spoonful. Calories consumed by the hot bee smoker, the metal extractor, the honey-shop electricity, transportation, and human muscle power is recovered a dozen times over by the honey we produce. We will do better, I think, but we have a rough patch ahead.

If you’re inclined to do your own research, NASA has the raw data online, for free. Meanwhile, make the best of what you’ve got. And good luck to everyone in 2024.