It’s been at least 15 years since I filed my first story on global warming. There was still some debate then about whether we were witnessing a man-made event or just another in the earth’s endless cycles. The story ran on the front page, over the objections of some editors who didn’t see its relevance to readers of a metro daily in the heart of Alberta’s oil patch.

If there’s anything funny about willful ignorance, I might enjoy the last laugh.  But there isn’t much that’s amusing about global warming, unless it’s the black humour that a visitor from Florida stirred in the crowd that turned out Friday night to the Jasper Activity Centre. They heard some chilling facts from novelist Thomas Wharton, Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean, and Shaun Marshall, an expert on glaciers and climate change. It was like sitting around a campfire, listening to scary stories that we’ve all heard before, but want to hear again, just for the thrill of fear.

The panelists threw up some slides to illustrate their tale -  mostly unintelligible swirls and shadows that purported to show the retreat of grey or black glacial tongues between the grey or black mountains. The most arresting image was a photograph taken by Jasper writer Paulette Dube, in Maligne Canyon: a fragile curve of melting ice that floated above the panelists like the wing of an angel.

The Floridian lives in a home that is just 10 feet above sea level. How long would it be, he wondered, before he would have to move inland, to higher ground. MacLean was sympathetic, but there were no definitive answers to be had – other than that the 16,000 glaciers in Alberta and British Columbia are melting away, like the polar caps and the Icefields of Wharton’s novel. 

Even more alarming, said Marshall, for most of the past several years, much of the snow that has fallen on glaciers in the Rockies has melted as well.  The volume of annual accretion is not enough to slow or compensate for the loss of ice. We are headed for a time when the Rockies will be ice-free. It is the same throughout the world. Glaciers are in decline, and have been for 10,000 years.

As all the ice becomes water, the oceans of the world will rise 200 feet - bad news for the 40 per cent of the world’s population that lives below the advancing tide line. Goodbye Vancouver, Venice, London. MacLean was personally relieved to be back in Canada after living for years in Houston. Like New Orleans, Houston is protected from storm surges by levees, which he confused with bayous. Problem is, he said, so much oil has been drawn from beneath the Gulf of Mexico that the land has subsided by five feet, so the actual protection from the levees is just 15 feet.  

But don’t dump that waterfront property on the market just yet. Climate change is a dynamic process, MacLean advised. Enlarging the hole in the ozone layer sets forces in motion that eventually slow the rate of melting. And then there are volcanoes, said Marshall. One big bang is enough to chill the air. Just ask the dinosaurs.