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The Current Transcript for December 15, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I mean I thought this was banned. I thought I remembered this being announced that it was going to be banned and then it was not banned. And I’m mad about that. I’m really angry about it. So many other people are still going to develop this.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Beth Porter was under the mistaken impression that asbestos is banned in this country. She wouldn't be alone. For decades, Canadians have been told of the dangers of materials containing asbestos fibres, but the stuff is still imported for construction, which means it's still around us. The Porter family found out the hard way when Beth's husband was diagnosed with a cancer linked to asbestos. In three short months, it killed him. It affects as many as 2,000 people every year in Canada. Today as the federal government moves to finally ban asbestos, the CBC's Julie Ireton looks at the implications and the complications. That's in half an hour. Also today, Neven Curlin is a bit of a climate change geek fascinated with sea ice. So six years ago, he started a blog, Tracking the Ice Melt. It became so upsetting he had to stop.

SOUNDCLIP

Yeah. It’s as if you're watching a train wreck in slow motion. And just describing the train wreck all the time is not very productive.

AMT: Even as he despaired of the condition of Arctic sea ice, far away at the opposite pole, a research scientist collecting data in Antarctica's dry valleys for the last decade says he fears climate change will make his work more difficult now. Hear them both in an hour. But before we get to that, we are returning to Aleppo today. Yesterday you could hear just how trapped journalist Zouhir Al-Shimale was.

SOUNDCLIP

You know most of the percentage of the people are families, women and children and men stuck here.

[Sound: Bomb blasts]

AMT: We will hear from him again as we ask how Aleppo factors into the Assad regime's end game. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

How will Aleppo's fall factor into Assad's end game?

Guests: Zouhir Al-Shimale, Rolf Holmboe, Bessma Momani

SOUNDCLIP

It's always important in politics to read between the lines. Not to be literal. The translation of their statement is for Russia, please stop the advancement of the Syrian army against the terrorists. You went too far in defeating the terrorists. That shouldn't happen. You should tell the Syrians to stop this.

AMT: Well, that is the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, speaking yesterday with the Russia Today television network. He was reacting to international calls to allow a ceasefire in eastern Aleppo, so that civilians and opposition members can leave with their lives. And you heard his spin on those pleas—that they’re tantamount to telling Syria to stop defeating terrorists. In any event, Wednesday's cease fire had barely come into effect before it crumbled. Today, a truce appears to be back on and the evacuations have finally begun. We're starting today with an update from the ground. Zouhir Al-Shimale is a freelance journalist in eastern Aleppo. We spoke to him yesterday as his street came under attack. He joins us again today. Can you tell me what's happening today?

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: You know the evacuation plan has started. You know as yesterday they declared it but there was some attacks and bombing on the city during the night. But in the morning, the evacuation process took place and there were no bombing and no attacks on the east. The ambulances and all the cars that carry patients were heading towards the regime side. I’ve just got to know that the first group of the ambulances and the cars that carry the patients and the severely injured people have just arrived to the countryside. The other group of the patients and the civilians will arrive, will go from here and head towards the countryside gradually. So the city will be evacuated gradually in maybe two or three days.

AMT: It will take two or three days to do that though.

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: Yes and you know as we have 60,000 people here.

AMT: And so have you seen people getting on buses already?

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: I’ve seen many people where the buses were arriving, starting to carry the civilians and the patients’ families and the civilians injured.

AMT: And the people you see getting on the buses—are they happy to be getting on those buses? What's their mood? Are they a little bit worried about where they're going?

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: No. That’s a good question. It’s cooperative with the regime and with the rebels to evacuate the city. So they’re not afraid. The evacuation process is going really smoothly. But even in the beginning, there was an attack from the Iranian militias against the convoys which caused one people killed and two more others got injured. All of it got smoothly and no attacks happened after the first intentions.

AMT: Yesterday you told us you were fearing executions by pro-government forces. What are you seeing today? Are you seeing anything that would make you fear this today?

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: No, they are the first group of the people who were here today. They are now in the east. They are in the countryside and [unintelligible] and no one has interrupted this movement. So we have no fears right now. We are very, let’s say, optimistic and we are very glad that the [unintelligible] is going and [unintelligible] so far.

AMT: And you will have free movement once you get off those buses?

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: You know once I get to the countryside, I would have free movement in the northern part of the country.

AMT: Who is overseeing who gets on the buses? Are there any independent observers?

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: The Red Crescent members are observing the evacuation process.

AMT: Yesterday when I spoke to you, there was still—you could hear a lot of ordinance falling very close to you. We were very worried when we said goodbye. What was yesterday like for you?

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: It was a nightmare. You know the attacks were very close to us, very close to me, I was feeling so bad. I had a fear that I would maybe die and there would be nobody to rescue me or take me to the hospital and have no treatment. So it was totally a nightmare. And thank God I just woke up today morning and I checked my phone and the news that the evacuation is—the ceasefire is holding and the fighting has stopped and the shelling and the war planes stopped. We couldn’t believe it right now, that we are [unintelligible]. We are so happy that we got our lives back maybe even with us, we will lose our land here in the city, but we got our lives.

AMT: When will you leave, do you think?

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: Maybe tonight or tomorrow morning. It depends on how fast the evacuation will be.

AMT: And you're going to wait till near the end, are you?

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: Yes, of course. I'm going to [unintelligible] last minutes of staying in this land. It’s really heartbreaking being forced to leave. You are being removed from your roots, from your land where you were born.

AMT: Zouhir, before I let you go—the war in Syria is not over. What do you think will happen, now that this has happened to Aleppo? Now that the government has retaken it?

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: There’s going to be some same behaviour from the regime and Russia is going to take over [inaudible] over the civilian people here to take down the opposition. The regime will take control of most of the country like what happened here in the city after three months of siege. And this is what’s going to happen. It’s dividing the cities then taking it one after another. Just like that. Simple.

AMT: Zouhir Al-Shimale, thank you for talking to me. We will try to stay in touch with you. Thank you.

ZOUHIR AL-SHIMALE: Thank you. Bye-bye.

AMT: Zouhir Al-Shimale, freelance journalist. He is from Aleppo. He’s still in eastern Aleppo. Of course what's happening there has deep implications in Syria and beyond. My next two guests are here to share their thoughts on what could happen next, what to watch for. Rolf Holmboe is a research fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. He served as the Danish ambassador to Syria, Lebanon and Jordan from 2012 to 2015. He joins us from our Ottawa studio. Bessma Momani is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. She's a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. That's where we've reached her. Hello to you both.

ROLF HOLMBOE: Hi.

BESSMA MOMANI: Hello.

AMT: Rolf Holmboe, as you listen to him, what are you thinking? He’s talking about Idlib. They’re going there. What does this mean?

ROLF HOLMBOE: It basically means that with the fall of Aleppo, Assad has the opportunity to conquer the remnant isolated pockets of rebels in the country one by one. He can move his offensive forces—which are mostly Shia militias, Russian advisers, Iranian advisers, Hezbollah forces—and then take one pocket after the other. I think the first one might be in Damascus. To the east of Damascus, you have a big rebel pocket which is the one that is most threatening to Assad and it is likely that they will go there first. There has been staging operations too and a bigger offensive around Damascus even for the last month. And right now, they are moving forces down to Damascus. So that might be the next.

AMT: Okay. And you're saying he's using militias more than his own soldiers?

ROLF HOLMBOE: Yeah.

AMT: Other people’s soldiers.

ROLF HOLMBOE: Yes. I mean he has very few units of his own army that he can use for offensive operations. His army is basically run down. He uses forces like the Tiger Forces and the Desert Hawks, which are two units that do have offensive capabilities and they have been taking part in the operations in Aleppo. But it's also a Palestinian militia known as Liwa al-Quds, which is the Jerusalem Brigade if you want, and thousands and thousands of Shia mercenaries coming from Afghanistan, from Pakistan, from Iraq and even from Yemen to fight, paid by Iran and under Iranian leadership from the Revolutionary Guards.

AMT: Okay. So given all of that, Bessma Momani, how do you see this fall of Aleppo and this evacuation?

BESSMA MOMANI: Well, I mean I agree that it's definitely going to be difficult for the Syrian army to hold territory and to regain it. There's this enormous amount of foreign mercenaries being brought in. The Syrian army really collapsed about a year or two ago. The reality is even if we look at Palmyra today—which the Russians and the Syrian government celebrated to no end because of the liberation from ISIS—they were quickly run over once they had their backs turned, particularly once the Russians left. So the Syrian army is not, I think, powerful enough to hold territory. But clearly, with you know having air superiority and having them be able to siege and basically choke and starve many communities like Aleppo, with the bombardment from the sky they're able to get these rebels to go to the point of submission or to exterminate them. Either one of those is the strategy. But I think we're far from seeing the end of the Syrian conflict even with the fall of Aleppo. We are just, I think, seeing a new phase of the conflict from it being a rebellion and an opposition to a more insurgency style tactic with, I think, a very now emboldened insurgency after seeing so much blood lost, particularly at the hands of the regime.

AMT: So what's the significance of Idlib? Who's got that right now? Who holds it?

BESSMA MOMANI: Well, Idlib, right now the rebels hold and they also hold parts of Deir ez-Zor. Now that's a countryside in the northwest. Of course it's not heavily populated. It doesn't have a major city per se, and Aleppo is the closest major city. So that of course is preferable for the regime, but again, it's not going to be you know a country free of rebels. I think there’s still going to be these pockets being held. They’re similarly in the south outside Daraa, right near the Jordanian border. There's also some rebellion happening there. But for the Assad regime, I think they've made the calculus several years ago that the key goal is to have the north-south corridor, particularly Aleppo to Damascus—that's the major two cities—and to the coast of the West, the Latakia, which is their basically the homeland or the received sort of real bastion of support, particularly from the Alawite minority in Syria. And if they hold on to the north-south corridor into the West, then they feel very much, I would say comfortable, with the other situation and slowly the international community would give up on supporting the rebels and eventually come to terms with the end of the rebellion.

AMT: Rolf Holmboe, that corridor that would get them to the coast and get them access right through, has implications for Russia and its energy. What's the connection?

ROLF HOLMBOE: The connection is that even from the first day the Russians arrived in Syria back in 2015, they had oil engineers come in the wake of the troops. And one of the first offensives that was guided by Russian advisors was towards Palmyra, as Bessma said, and they took Palmyra from ISIS at that time. And the interesting part about that is that Palmyra is in the middle of the desert and there's a small regime garrison in the town that Bessma mentioned, Daraa, that is still holding out against ISIS pressure. So if that corridor can be established, that would have a Shia control, a regime control in Syria and Shia control in Iraq. It would create this corridor, recreate this corridor from the Mediterranean through the Syrian desert to Iraq and to Iran. And that is a very big Hezbollah priority. It is a very big Russian priority for the fact that they will be able to establish pipelines and Russia would be able to sponsor, if you want, oil and gas deliveries to Europe from Shia areas in the Middle East. And that would strengthen the role of Russia on the European energy market.

AMT: So I have to ask then, given what you've just said, what are the implications of the CEO of ExxonMobil going to become secretary of state in the United States?

ROLF HOLMBOE: Very interesting.

AMT: But you're telling me that oil, big oil, has a role to play with Russia and Iran in this war that really hasn't been talked about much as we've been watching all of this fighting.

ROLF HOLMBOE: Assad has been contracting off a lot of the offshore oil and a lot of the oil and gas concessions mostly to Russia, also a little bit to Iran. So that is an interest of Russia. They have always wanted to be able to control at least some of the oil and gas coming out of the Middle East and they can do it through the pipelines. They wanted a pipeline through Turkey, initially Turkey said no then they said yes. But that would always be a more difficult one but one that is controlled by the Shia states in the Middle East would be more under Russian control. Russia has positioned itself to be the sponsor of the Shia groups and the Shia states in the Middle East, where the Sunni states and the Sunni groups more have an orientation towards the west.

AMT: So Bessma Momani, can you pick up on this then? We're looking at a transition to a new president in the United States who has been very vocal about ISIS and has been a supporter of Russia. How does all of this—what pieces of this puzzle do you see?

BESSMA MOMANI: Well, definitely. There is a big part of this incoming Trump administration that has a lot to do with why we're seeing the assault on Aleppo intensify. I daresay there's been a conversation between Putin and Trump that says look, we have what, 135 days, a little less than that till the next incoming president. The US President Obama is a lame-duck president, won't do anything. Take care of Aleppo. Get rid of the problem there and let's make this an ISIS problem, only an ISIS problem, because that's exactly the way the Trump administration has always framed the Syria dimension, which of course it's not because the insurgency is not about ISIS. And of course the regime has killed far more people, civilians than has ISIS, and does very little to actually fight ISIS directly, both the Russians and the regime. So I think it's really important to note that there is, I think, a gentlemen's agreement here sadly, at the expense of the people, whereby basically the Trump administration is telling the Russians and the Syrians to just get the job done so that we make this only an ISIS problem by the time the inauguration comes in. I really do think that is a big part of the cards.

AMT: Rolf Holmboe?

ROLF HOLMBOE: Yeah, I agree with Bessma on this. I mean clearly, I think that Putin, after 20 January when President-elect Trump comes into power in the US, will present something that looks like a political solution but a political solution with Assad. And the offer would be to make a deal on Syria and then for Russia and the US to fight ISIS together.

AMT: So you know we see this in very black and white terms from afar. There are people for Assad, against Assad. Everybody's got sort of one shade. But what do you know about the civilians on the ground? How anti-Assad? How pro-rebel? Is there some meeting place there for regular people?

ROLF HOLMBOE: There is. I mean there is something in Syria called the third way or the third force which basically is somebody or a lot of people that are not actually for Assad, but they are afraid of the alternative. I mean they are afraid of the chaos. They're afraid of the sectarian aspects to this conflict. You have many people on the regime side that I know that are very unhappy with Assad but they can't say it and they don't know how to do something else. Who should come in his place? How would it play out? So they're worried. So everybody's worried, both on the regime side and on the rebel side. But all those I know on both sides, I would say the big bulk of people in Syria just want peace and they want a political solution that will settle the score in Syria in a way that all the sectarian groups can continue to live in the country.

AMT: Okay. So before I let you go, Bessma Momani, what are you watching for then, in the weeks and months ahead?

BESSMA MOMANI: I guess I'm looking to see what happens with the Russians. I think they are clearly near what they think is close to the end game for them. But of course, as I pointed out, the country cannot be taken over by the Syrian army. It just doesn't have the units anymore. Much of it’s been depleted and many of it are Sunni themselves who are tired of killing fellow Sunnis. So there is a vacuum here and the real challenge is who's going to fill the void? Even if we have what is sort of a low grade insurgency, there still needs to be some sort of troops on the ground to sort of keep the regime in power. And is this going to be now completely sold to the mercenaries that are being paid for by the Iranians? That's extremely problematic. These are non-Syrians and most importantly, we've seen—when you have these sort of foreign occupiers—the kind of low-grade violence on and abuse of civilians on the ground is going to intensify and that means you know, I think, the real seeds of another insurgency, another rebellion. So that's something that I'm going to see in terms of the next phase of the conflict.

AMT: So next phase of conflict is key because this is not over.

BESSMA MOMANI: Absolutely.

AMT: Thank you both.

BESSMA MOMANI: Thank you.

ROLF HOLMBOE: Thank you.

AMT: That is Rolf Holmboe. He's a research fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. He served as the Danish ambassador to Syria, Lebanon and Jordan from 2012 to 2015. Bessma Momani is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. Stay with us. The news is next. And then—

SOUNDCLIP

Unaffected by fire, unchanged by weather, untouched by time’s dark captains—rust, rot and decay—asbestos possesses rare qualities.

AMT: Once a wonder material, mined in Quebec. Today, asbestos is officially relegated to Canada's dustbin of history with a comprehensive federal ban. But sweeping away the last traces of the stuff will take years to come. We'll tell you more right after the news. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One.

Thought asbestos was fully banned in Canada? Not until 2018.

Guests: Julie Ireton, Sharon Porter, Beth Porter

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come—

SOUNDCLIP

Radio collars have a different signal. If animals are moving, it is a little signal that goes a little slower. Something like beep, beep, beep. But when we went looking for him that morning, I heard the mortality signal—beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep—and that just froze me.

AMT: A moment of disruption amongst the jaguars in half an hour. But first, think asbestos is already banned in Canada? You may be surprised at just how common it still is. It has been part of the fabric of Canadian life for at least 130 years—a wonder fibre that turned out to be a carcinogenic fibre. Today, asbestos is finally being officially banned nationwide, although the ban won't kick in until 2018. This morning's announcement of an asbestos ban marks the beginning of the end of a long chapter in Canadian history. For decades, Canada was a world leader in asbestos production. It's touched the lives of tens of thousands of Canadians in one way or another, from miners to construction workers, to homemakers and office workers. Canada's asbestos mines are actually no longer operating. But today's announcement involving four federal cabinet ministers will go further. The government plans to change workplace health and safety rules and to create new environmental regulations protecting people from asbestos. It will ban the import of goods containing asbestos and it will change national building codes to prohibit its use in new projects. Julie Ireton is a CBC reporter in Ottawa who's covered the asbestos stories for years. She's been talking to people anticipating this announcement today and many of them say banning asbestos is the easy part. Julie joins me from Ottawa. Hi.

JULIE IRETON: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: Well, how significant is this announcement today?

JULIE IRETON: Well, I think it's fair to characterize this as a historic day, historic announcement because you know you outlined a bit of the country's long history with asbestos. At one point, Canada's asbestos industry was massive and over the years and up until 2011, the government actively supported asbestos mining sales and the export of asbestos, often to poor countries where regulations were lacking.

AMT: You say 2011. That's when the mines in Quebec were closed, huh?

JULIE IRETON: Right. The last mines closed in 2011. But there's always been uncertainty over whether they would reopen. And even though the exporting of asbestos stopped, imports did not and I suspect that many people in Canada are surprised by the announcement of a comprehensive ban today.

AMT: Well, tell me more.

JULIE IRETON: A lot of people I've talked to think asbestos was banned in Canada years ago but it wasn't. It's still being imported today and used in new construction, mostly in cement pipes. Schools and hospitals, arenas, government offices, homes contain asbestos and you know you can buy brake pads and clutches in Canada with asbestos to fix your car.

AMT: Well, that surprises me too. It's still ubiquitous. How much of a health risk does that pose, Julie?

JULIE IRETON: Well, it could be a huge health risk because you know inhaling these tiny little fibres is painless but that can cause potential problems decades down the road. So if you think this is an issue that couldn't touch you or your family or that it's just a thing of the past, you'd be wrong. And that's what Robert Porter and his family thought.

AMT: And who are they?

JULIE IRETON: Well, Robert was a pipe and steam fitter in Hamilton, Ontario. He died in August. Earlier this week, I spoke to two members of his family.

SOUNDCLIP

SHARON PORTER: Well, my name is Sharon Porter and Robert Porter was my dad.

BETH PORTER: Yep. I’m Beth Porter and Bob, Robert, was my husband.

JULIE IRETON: Okay. I know it’s still—it wasn’t very long ago you lost him.

BETH PORTER: No.

JULIE IRETON: No. Tell me about him, Beth.

BETH PORTER: Well, I can tell you that I'm 62 and I met him when I was 19. So he was with me most of my life you know. And he was a quiet man but he worked really, really hard and he loved me and I loved him.

AMT: Hmm. There’s so much emotion there, huh?

JULIE IRETON: Mhm. You know his death is very raw for them. It all happened so fast and he really did suffer. It was only back in May on the Victoria Day weekend when they realized that he was sick. He was admitted to the hospital with fluid in his lungs. And after a couple of weeks, there was a diagnosis.

SOUNDCLIP

SHARON PORTER: The doctors brought my mom in so they could talk to her and my dad and said that they were very certain that it was probably mesothelioma. And at that point, it was kind of a new thing for them and for all of us. The doctor had to like write the word down for my mom.

BETH PORTER: I mean you hear it on the TV but I just didn't really associate it with him.

AMT: Mesothelioma is the kind of lung cancer associated with exposure to asbestos.

JULIE IRETON: Yeah, that's right. It shows up in the lining of the lungs. It is caused by exposure to asbestos. There can be, you know a 10 to 40 year latency period between exposure and diagnosis and dying from mesothelioma is, by all accounts, a terrible death. The person essentially slowly drowns to death. They suffocate.

AMT: Do Beth and Sharon know how Robert was exposed to asbestos?

JULIE IRETON: Not really. Beth and Sharon say he remembers working in places where there was asbestos but he felt safe because he wasn't working directly with the material.

SOUNDCLIP

SHARON PORTER: I think he said something about like the job sites that he worked where there was asbestos present or being put in, there was like another team that did that and they came in after. So he was thinking, I wasn't working with it personally so I wasn't exposed. But all it takes for it is something to become airborne or one fibre and I think he didn't realize that that could still mean that he was exposed even if he wasn't the person that was actually installing it himself.

JULIE IRETON: And you know this is the tricky thing about asbestos. There tends to be a perception that it's an old issue or something that's been taken care of or if it’s not disturbed, it's fine. But there are still thousands of tradespeople who can potentially be exposed to this every day.

AMT: And does today's announcement from the government deal with that?

JULIE IRETON: Well, the ministers talk about raising awareness about the health effects of asbestos to prevent new cases of the disease and cancer. But we're trying to clarify exactly what that is going to mean.

AMT: Did Robert Porter work with other people who were also exposed?

JULIE IRETON: His former union has actually hired a paralegal to help members because the union was getting so many inquiries from workers and families who've discovered that they were exposed and they just didn't know it.

AMT: And what about his family? Is there a chance they may have been affected?

JULIE IRETON: Well, that's something that's top of mind for Beth and Sharon. Asbestos fibres can be carried in the clothing or the hair of people who have been exposed and then that goes home with them.

AMT: So what do Beth and Sharon think about the government banning asbestos now?

JULIE IRETON: It's actually something that Sharon has been working towards. She doesn't consider herself an activist but she started a petition calling for a ban right after her dad died. And you can hear how much her mom Beth wants a ban too.

SOUNDCLIP

BETH PORTER: I mean I thought this was banned. I thought I remembered this being announced that it was going to be banned and then it was not banned. And I'm mad about that. I’m really angry about it. So many other people are still going to develop this. And I was so busy. We were all so busy trying to take care of him, to explain to him why he couldn't come home from hospital. He kept saying if I just get home, I'll be fine. And we knew he wasn't going to be. We didn't have the chance—I didn't have the chance to express all my anger back then.

SHARON PORTER: I just find it ridiculous that we're even right now like talking about the ban. Like I truly thought—I feel so naïve now—like I truly thought it had been banned back in the eighties, back when I was a kid in elementary school and they were you know covering up asbestos in our schools around the pipes and everything. Like this should have been a priority like 50 years ago.

BETH PORTER: And it's a present thing too. I was talking to my youngest son the other day and he has been working around asbestos. Now they take all the safety precautions and everything now. But it's really worrying and bothering him too, especially with what he saw his dad go through. So it's still out there. It's still an issue. So now I have to worry about my children too. All of them really, but especially him.

JULIE IRETON: The Porter family really illustrates how much of an issue this is going to be for years to come and you know Beth and Robert's son works in the trades. He’s potentially at risk with the work that he's doing. So in many ways, today's ban is really just going to be the beginning of the story, not the end.

AMT: And so what do the advocates you talked with want to see happen now?

JULIE IRETON: They want to see a number of things. For starters, right now no one is keeping track of all the people who are sick with asbestos related diseases, let alone those who may get sick in the future. Hassan Yussuff, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, is one of the people calling for a national registry of workers who may have been exposed to asbestos.

SOUNDCLIP

So somebody like myself could go and register myself because I have worked in a facility in General Motors where we were exposed to asbestos. Should I die of the disease somewhere down the road, at least my family and others would know that you know, and if it was related to asbestos, at least it’s a public record. And there are thousands and thousands of Canadians who have been exposed to asbestos and of course don't quite remember where, but they know they have been exposed to it. Someone dying of it right now and I think it will be very, very useful for public policy to ensure that we have a national registry, so at least we have a public record of people who have been affected by this substance over the years.

AMT: Julie, why would it be important to have that information in one registry?

JULIE IRETON: Keeping track of the data. But it's also important because there's evidence that if the disease is detected and treated early, the person can live longer. Robert Porter died so quickly after being diagnosed with mesothelioma, you know just three months. Beth Porter says he coughed for years but his doctor didn't catch it.

AMT: Hmm. So just a few months, huh?

JULIE IRETON: Mhm.

AMT: So they want a registry of people exposed to asbestos. What else?

JULIE IRETON: The other thing advocates want is an inventory of public buildings with asbestos.

AMT: And how much do we know about where these buildings are now?

JULIE IRETON: Not nearly enough. Remember that asbestos is in private homes and hospitals and schools, hockey rinks, office buildings, on and on. Knowing where it lurks is important because that way of tradesperson is going in to do work behind the walls somewhere, they know where the risks are to both themselves and the people around them.

AMT: So there is no list of buildings with asbestos?

JULIE IRETON: Well, right now, the only one federal department that has published a list—Public Services and Procurement. They have a list of buildings that contain asbestos but it's not searchable. It's not user friendly yet. So I took it upon myself to call dozens of federal departments and created my own map and registry of federal buildings with asbestos and that now exists on www.cbc.ca.

AMT: Hmm. Is the government's announcement today going to address that?

JULIE IRETON: It is. In today's announcement, the government says it will now develop its own list of buildings that contain asbestos in all departments across the country.

AMT: And they can start at www.cbc.ca, I guess.

JULIE IRETON: Exactly.

AMT: But that's federal buildings. What about the schools and the hospitals?

JULIE IRETON: So those buildings fall under provincial jurisdiction, so provinces will continue to be pressured to produce their own inventories. That's something that Jesse Todd lobbies for. Jesse took over as the chair of the Saskatchewan Asbestos Disease Association to take up the fight that his stepfather began.

SOUNDCLIP

Well, my stepfather, his name was Howard Willems. He was an inspector with the federal government. And you know in a job that really did not have the traditional you know exposure to asbestos. You know this was something that he was exposed to unknowingly and 30 years later, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma. So he passed away in November of 2012.

AMT: So that's another story of someone who didn't even realize he was exposed to asbestos.

JULIE IRETON: Right. An all too common theme here. That's why Howard started lobbying the government of Saskatchewan to create a registry of buildings and he was successful and a law was passed, called Howard's Law. Now Saskatchewan is the only province with a public building inventory but it could be a model for the rest of the country.

SOUNDCLIP

I think it really shows other jurisdictions that this is not something that's impossible to do. It doesn't happen overnight. Of course you have to do the inspections. However, most jurisdictions in this country have occupational safety regulations that actually require building owners or building managers to actually conduct annual inspections on their facilities. And if they do have asbestos, they’re supposed to keep some sort of a list on site or with their health and safety committees to actually monitor this asbestos. So really if they're doing their due diligence to begin with, it's just a matter of the government collecting data and information to build the registry. And really, you know we did have some trial and error here in Saskatchewan about how we're going to report it and it was kind of a jumbled mess at the beginning, but then it moved on to something that we have now, which is a very easy, user-friendly searchable database.

AMT: And once that database exists, then what?

JULIE IRETON: That's a great question. There are no clear answers on that. The government says it will prohibit the use of asbestos in new building projects, so that’s something. But advocates want to see a plan for dealing with asbestos that's already out there in thousands of buildings including many of our homes.

AMT: Well, that sounds like something that will take decades.

JULIE IRETON: It will. Removing it—something called asbestos abatement or remediation—will happen over the coming years and there are still a lot of questions about who will pay for it, how it will be done and when. Right now, the job of removing asbestos is often done by people who can't get other jobs, often people coming out of prison. By some accounts, it's not a well-regulated or controlled industry.

AMT: So that's pretty troubling but it's costly as well to have asbestos removed from your home.

JULIE IRETON: It is. Of course many companies out there are doing it properly. But when I talked to the Canadian Labour Congress’ Hassan Yussuff, he told me better rules are needed.

SOUNDCLIP

Disposal of asbestos happens at the local level and we need to have stricter guidelines to ensure when a building had been remediated, those products are taken out of the building, doesn't get dumped in the regular dump because it is a hazard that will cause a huge problems for human health in the water tables across the country. We will turn our efforts, of course, at the provincial level right across this country to try to regulate the disposal of asbestos of course and the remediation effort to ensure workers who are involved in remediation should be in the licensed trade. And more importantly, stringent provisions should be there to protect those workers so they don't endanger their health or endanger the public as they’re remediating buildings across this country.

AMT: Okay. Well, it is a dangerous business. Julie, what else do we know about the problems associated with removing asbestos?

JULIE IRETON: I can tell you about someone who contacted me recently and told me his story. He works in asbestos abatement and he started when he was in university. He told me that the quality of workers doing the abatement is an issue. There are concerns that the industry hires vulnerable workers who can't complain. He told me many of them were ex-cons. There was a high turnover rate. The contractor told me, he said you see a lot of things you don't want to see. Workers must work very quickly. Rules are seldom followed he said, and I have heard these concerns from more than one source.

AMT: What sort of rules are they supposed to be following?

JULIE IRETON: For instance, regulations require workers to shower at the end of every shift. And the rules say that the employer must have clean towels for workers. But this worker told me that they are often just given a bag of rags. So men will bring their own towels from home and then take them back home to wash them and of course that means that they could be exposing people in their own home. Then he says that tools are sent out uncleaned and that there are other incidents of exposure that go unreported.

AMT: How will the government's new plan to address those issues?

JULIE IRETON: Well, the government did commit today to put in place new workplace health and safety rules. That will limit the risk of people coming into contact with asbestos on the job so that is a start. And we'll have to see what the specifics are and how that's enforced.

AMT: How easy is it to come into contact with asbestos on the job?

JULIE IRETON: Well, I've done many stories in the past about electricians and contractors, plumbers, even IT people who were exposed to asbestos at work. We often hear that asbestos is only dangerous if it's disturbed, but so many buildings in this country are past their best before date. Construction workers are definitely on the front lines. You know renos and demolitions are being done as infrastructure is repaired and replaced, and then that means that the asbestos is being disturbed and the workers going into those buildings aren't always told where the asbestos is.

AMT: So that means people can continue to get sick.

JULIE IRETON: Absolutely. Right now, you know more than 2,000 workers a year die from asbestos related diseases. Unfortunately, deaths will continue in the coming years. There's a long latency period for asbestos disease so people that were exposed 20, 30 years ago will be dying. Yet there's just one long study into asbestos disease at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. Pat Martin is part of that study and he would like to see it better funded. You might remember—he's the former New Democrat MP who worked in an asbestos mine many years ago.

SOUNDCLIP

If we were a world leader in the production and the export and even the promotion of asbestos all this time, we have a moral obligation to be a world leader in the diagnosis and treatment of asbestos related disease, so that Canada is a world leader in trying to remediate this “made in Canada” epidemic that we've unleashed on the world with our enthusiastic promotion of asbestos for most of the century. I think it's an international disgrace the way Canada not only promoted asbestos, but tried to stop other countries from protecting themselves from it. I mean this was to sabotage the requirement to put a warning label on it so our unsuspecting customers would at least have a fighting chance to protect themselves. We have a lot to answer for.

JULIE IRETON: Pat Martin wasn't the only person who raised this point with me. Many advocates want Canada to sign onto the Rotterdam Convention.

AMT: Remind us what that is.

JULIE IRETON: It's an international treaty of more than 150 countries that want to see asbestos listed as a hazard. Canada actually fought hard against that categorization for years.

AMT: And is there any sign the government will change their position then?

JULIE IRETON: It is. The government says it will now review Canada's position ahead of next year's meeting of the Rotterdam Convention.

AMT: So we have to keep an eye on that and make sure it happens.

JULIE IRETON: We will and generally speaking, today's announcement was a big step. It just doesn't go as far as some advocates would like to see.

AMT: How did the government people you spoke with describe this ban?

JULIE IRETON: Well, I was able to interview the Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan. She described this as a good day for Canadians and she said it was a way of ensuring the health of Canadians.

SOUNDCLIP

This is a first step. It's an important step. But we have a two year process to go through and we will have in place a ban by 2018 and it will be comprehensive. It will be effective. And this is the fastest way we could do it.

AMT: And Julie, is that enough for people like Beth and Sharon Porter?

JULIE IRETON: Well, Sharon Porter was also hoping the government would apologize for its asbestos policy or lack thereof.

AMT: Did she get that?

JULIE IRETON: I asked Minister Duncan about an apology and this is what she said.

SOUNDCLIP

I just want to express my heartfelt sympathies for everybody who was affected by an asbestos related illness. And I hope they feel today there is action and that it will lead to a ban and that future Canadians will be protected from asbestos related illness.

AMT: So interesting, huh? I mean as you said, 2,000 people a year. We began by hearing Robert Porter's story. Can we give his family the last word on this?

JULIE IRETON: That's a good idea. I'll leave you with Robert's wife, Beth, and daughter Sharon. They both see a ban on asbestos as a good way of honoring Robert's memory.

AMT: Okay. Well, we'll take that clip in a second. Thank you for bringing us this story, Julie.

JULIE IRETON: You're welcome.

AMT: Julie Ireton, CBC reporter in Ottawa. Here is Beth Porter followed by her daughter, Sharon Porter.

SOUNDCLIP

BETH PORTER: At my husband's funeral, my sister, who is a minister, she did the service. And she said about him that he didn't make headlines. He wasn't famous. He didn't make headlines and he would be truly amazed that his name is out there right now. But he was a good, hard-working man and he was young and he didn't deserve this. And I don't—I just don't want other—there will be other people going through this but I just want it to be known that he was a good man.

SHARON PORTER: He was too good and he was too important to us for this all to have happened in vain. And I've heard people say things like that before and I've never really understood what they meant. But this was hell that my dad went through. Like I can't sugar-coat it. My dad was living through a nightmare. It was just—I'm just upset and I'm mad. And the only thing I can think of to do, to make any of that better, is by saving somebody else's dad or mom or uncle or themselves going through that, that he went through. And I think that that would make him feel better too, to know that his sacrifice has you know maybe helped other people.

BETH PORTER: Yeah.

[Music: Bridge]

AMT: Well, we got a lot of feedback to yesterday's program for our coverage of Syrians in Aleppo and those who fled to Canada. Catherine Beck of Ottawa wrote: “Your interview today with the young man in East Aleppo must surely have been a call to action for many listeners. It was for me. He said all of us in Canada and the US still have the freedom to speak out on behalf of those like him trapped and facing lawless death by armed squads in East Aleppo. I've done my best to keep the faith with him.” She's talking about Zouhir Al-Shimale, who we did speak to again today, who feels he will be able to leave Aleppo as part of that evacuation. So an update: we did talk to him earlier on the program today. Dawn Bassett wrote from Summerland, BC: “Every single day my heart breaks for the people of Syria. Hearing those beautiful children who now live in Toronto talk about how much they are enjoying being here fills my heart with joy for them, but sorrow for the hundreds of thousands dead or stuck in the hell of war. My wish for 2017 is that we continue to welcome refugees to this country with open arms and that those of us against doing this somehow recognize there is room for all of us.” Roger Khoueiri in Laval Quebec wanted to respond after hearing the little girl tell us she and her family were treated poorly in a camp in Lebanon. He writes: “Even though in Lebanon you will find those who are rude to Syrian refugees, you will find many more who are very kind and hospitable with refugees.” And Vivian Zelazny of Fredericton wrote: “Stories from Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa don't represent the whole picture when it comes to resettlement of Syrian newcomers in Canada. New Brunswick has accepted more Syrian immigrants per capita than any other province.” Well, we always like to know what you think as you listen to us. You can find us through our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, post on Facebook or find us on Twitter—we are @thecurrentCBC. Stay with us. Coming up next, we're going to share another one of your personal moments of disruption. This one involves some big cats—Jaguars to be exact. This is The Current.

How a dead jaguar changed Sergio Avila's life

Guests: Sergio Avila

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: Sci-Fi]

The disruptors.

AMT: Throughout this season, as part of our project, The Disruptors, we are sharing some of your own personal moments of disruption. Today's comes from Sergio Avila. Since he was a child, growing up in Chihuahuan desert in central Mexico, he's always dreamed of working with big cats. He even kept an imaginary African lion in the backyard as a child, feeding him chicken bones. Sergio Avila grew up to be a conservation scientist and one day, he finally got a chance to fulfill his dream. As a PhD student in the Mexican Sierra Madre Mountains—a 10-hour drive from the nearest town—he was working on a project to snare and collar jaguars to learn more about them. After months of fruitless tracking, they finally spotted jaguars but suddenly, that dream was shattered. Here is Sergio Avila now with his moment of disruption.

SOUNDCLIP

The idea was to capture and radio collar cougars and jaguars in order to set these devices that send the signal to a satellite and you start plotting dots on a map for where these cats are moving. The first jaguar we captured was a female. She was extremely energetic and it was clear that this jaguar was not happy. However, we process her, we put a radio collar. We could tell after a couple of readings that this jaguar was safe and was moving. That happened March 30th of 2003. On April 1^st, we discover another jaguar. We found another jaguar in a different snare in a different area. This was a male jaguar. This was a huge, enormous, strong, fierce jaguar. Just being in front of him, he was just pushing and pushing to try to get us. He was roaring. He was hitting the ground and he was pulling his leg in the snare. And we felt the urgency to mobilize this guy and release him because really, he was being so fierce. He was almost hurting himself. And he finally went down. We were able to approach him, cover his eyes, release the leg that was captured. His claws were huge. His paws were on one of my forearms and I remember feeling the claws. Just like a tiny little bit he stuck them out and I could feel them in my skin. Their fur is very soft. There's no smell. There's no grease. They are very clean. But at the same time, you can see in them the scars of life. So the male jaguar had a scar in its cheek and the ears were a little bit scratched. So we put more drugs in this guy and we process him. We put the radio collar and we left him under a tree sleeping. And we saw him move a little bit. He picked up his head and so we thought he was okay. He's okay. But the next day we went. That was the day we went on our way out to town. The car was packed. My little dog was in the car with us. And we were closing all the snares and we just went to check on this guy to make sure that he moved. And radio collars have a different signal. If animals are moving, it is a little signal that goes a little slower, something like beep, beep, beep. But radio collars also have what is called a mortality signal, which comes off when an animal stops moving for a determined number of hours. When we went looking for him that morning, I heard the mortality signal. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And that just froze me. This cannot be. Something's wrong with the collar. And little by little, getting close, I was able to see the jaguar under a tree laying down. The jaguar was just not moving and he wasn't moving. And so we discovered that the jaguar was dead.

[Music]

And that was exactly the thing that we did not expect to happen—a big roaring cat, the largest cat in our in our continent, in our hemisphere—the cat that I have had dreams of protecting. And I wanted to study and I was going to get my degree and I was going to write a great thesis. The jaguar didn’t make it because we never considered what the jaguar wanted. I never stop thinking about it. I really think this jaguar died of a combination of too much drugs, too much heat, too much excitement. I think it was just a heart attack. And seeing this dead jaguar just changed my life. It was the subject of my research and the subject of my research was dead. I could not protect jaguars if they were going to die when I studied them. And I really stopped caring about my own degree and my own research and my own science.

[Music]

And I realized that even when we have the scientific background and the technology and the best goals and the best plans and we can talk about how marvelous this research is going to be, we have to consider our study subject because what do they want? I mean they want to follow, keep living their own life and yeah, they want to be protected, but mostly they want to be left alone. I think I've thought about this a lot. I think that jaguar was there to teach us a lesson and not to teach us, the two people in the field crew, but to teach conservationist and scientist. And I was able to use this story to train citizen scientists and interested people in how to study jaguars and other animals without ever having to touch one. We follow their tracks. We can use those wildlife cameras. We can collect their scat and learn what they eat. At the end of the day, even if they don't give us much information as a radio collar, you don't fear for your life or you don't fear for the life of your study subject. I don't care I don't have my PhD or my degree or anything, but there's more people involved in this. There's more people paying attention. And I respect the sacrifice of that jaguar and I honour that jaguar for the lessons that he taught us.

AMT: Well, that is Sergio Avila, conservation research scientist at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. He sent us some photos from the field of him and the jaguars. We're always interested in hearing your personal moments of disruption. Have you had a moment that's completely turned your life upside down? Email us by going to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, and click on the contact link. Make sure to put “Moment of Disruption” in the subject line.

Climate change is threatening Earth's best place to study Mars

Guests: Joe Levy

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Here's the rub. It's going to be four years for another mission to reach me. And I'm in a hab designed to last 31 days. So I've got to make water and grow food on a planet where nothing grows. But if I can’t figure out a way to make contact with NASA, none of this matters anyway.

VOICE 2: Mark Watney is still alive.

VOICE 1: Woo. In your face, Neil Armstrong.

AMT: You might recognize the trailer from the movie, The Martian. Matt Damon's character has to start almost from scratch to find a way to survive on the red planet. If humans ever do reach Mars in real life, however, it would be nice to arrive someplace where they already know there's water. And my next guest today is working on a reliable way to locate that Martian water in the form of underground ice deposits. Of course travelling to Mars is not an option for this kind of work yet. So instead, Joe Levy spends months at a time working in the most Mars-like environment he can find on Earth—the dry valleys of Antarctica. Even there he says the effects of climate change are being felt and that could have a big impact on his work. Joe Levy is a geologist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and he joins us from Austin. Hello.

JOE LEVY: Hi.

AMT: What makes the dry valleys so useful for studying Mars?

JOE LEVY: The dry valleys of Antarctica are about as close to Mars as you can get without a spaceship. So they're an extremely cold, extremely dry environment—minus 18 degrees C on average, three millimetres of precipitation a year, and all that falls is snow and most of it sublimates away. It actually never melts in most places. So if you want to understand a cold desert like Mars, this is really the best place in the world to go.

AMT: So how does that research get used? How would it be used for future human missions to Mars?

JOE LEVY: Sure. So you know geologists have an important role in Mars exploration and that's prospecting for important resources. Resources on Earth might be things like oil or coal but on Mars, the most important resource is probably going to be water. Water is something that you can use for fuel by cracking hydrogen and oxygen. You can drink it. You can grow crops with it. And it turns out that Mars is covered in ice in the form of debris-covered glaciers and ice rich permafrost. But the big challenge is figuring out where it is from orbit or even from a lander, they can't dig very deep. And so one thing that we do in Antarctica where there is an abundant amount of ground ice—so ice that's in buried glaciers or in ice rich permafrost—is trying to find ways to use imagery from satellites and from the ground and radar to locate the ice and try and figure out if we can tell from the surface where the ice is buried, how much it is, how deeply it's buried and most importantly how it got there. You know this is an important climate history archive that exists in Antarctica and probably on Mars too.

AMT: So when you say where it's buried, so what is over it? It's just years of accumulation?

JOE LEVY: The ice is buried by sand and rock. Sometimes just very silt. So if you're in a valley, debris rockfall, avalanches down and slowly buries the ice and so you could have 100 metres of ice immediately under your feet. But you would never know because it's buried by 50 centimetres of sand and rock. And this is the same thing that happens on Mars. You know when you look at Mars today, it's a red planet. It's rocky. You wouldn't know that there's oceans worth of ice buried under the surface because it's covered by rock and debris. And so we can actually only see it with orbiting radars.

AMT: So as you work in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, what's it like to be in such an isolated place for long stretches of time?

JOE LEVY: It's a little bit Martian. You know we don't have the same beautiful astronauts that Matt Damon was hanging around with, but we make do. You know it's possible in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica to be one of three or four people in an entire valley. As far as you can see, there's no one there. So on the one hand, it's very isolating especially when you're deployed for months at a time. On the other hand, exploration and science in Antarctica is run a lot like a Mars mission. There’s a Mission Control at McMurdo Station. We check in on the radio every day. So there's a sense that we're always going to be reasonably close to resources we need to do our science to rescue if something goes wrong. But it's also a place that's at the limits of life. And so everyday can be a struggle just to keep life support systems going, to melt the water that we need to drink, to cook our food, to keep the stoves going, to heat the tent when you're trying to analyze a sample. It's just a bit like being in a Martian habitat. You know everything has to be planned and coordinated and you have to hope that the weather cooperates.

AMT: And how long have you been going there?

JOE LEVY: I've been working in the Dry Valley since I was a graduate student. So I started going in 2004 and worked my way up to being a post-doc and now the PI of my own program here at UT Austin.

AMT: How have you seen things change in those Dry Valleys since you first visited?

JOE LEVY: Well, the Dry Valleys span incredible range of elevations and locations. So at the coast, it's comparatively warm and wet. It's what’s called the coastal thaw zone and that's where the biggest changes have been happening. These are places that have buried ice that's been pasted on to the mountainsides—like cream cheese on a bagel—by ice sheets during the last ice age and that ice is beginning to melt at an accelerating rate. We've been measuring where this ice is located for the last five or six years and everywhere we look, we see accelerated melting. We see big thermokarst pits forming—places where debris and sand gets on the ice that makes it darker—it helps heat up the ice and then it melts it away. As you move inland, you get higher and drier and colder. And by the time you're in a place like Beacon Valley or University Valley at the highest, driest, coldest, saltiest, windiest place on earth, there hasn't been a lot of change and that's because these areas are protected by the cold. It never gets above freezing in these valleys. There's never any real thaw on the ground. And so if you want to understand modern Mars, this cold, dry, salty, irradiated environment, you have to head to those inland locations and those are relatively safe. But it's places in the coastal regions where we can look to try and understand a warmer, wetter, early Mars—a place where you could actually get rivers flowing and deltas being deposited and paleolakes that we're seeing really rapid change. And we're simply losing the archive of past climate change on Earth. And also we're losing the landforms that we want to study to understand whether Mars was really warm and wet or maybe cold and wet in the past and what could have lived there and how it could have survived.

AMT: You're losing them because of climate change.

JOE LEVY: Yeah. I mean what we're seeing is melting that’s unprecedented in the last 11,000 years.

AMT: And you say you're also losing climate records. How so?

JOE LEVY: As a geologist, you know I look at land forms that form under different climate conditions like for example during an ice age, to try and understand what size the ice sheets were, how much snowfall was occurring and how much melting was occurring. And so these are useful climate indicators. They tell you something about how Antarctica was, say, during the height of the last ice age around 18,000 years ago. But a lot of the land forms that are left behind by these glaciers—things like moraines, things like paleolake deposits that formed when the ice dammed the tiny little streams and rivers in Antarctica— these are all landforms that are cored by ice. That's something that I think a lot of people might have trouble envisioning, is that ice is actually an important part of the landscape around them in Antarctica and certainly in the high Arctic too. And as soon as temperatures get above freezing for an ice cored or ice cemented landform, it starts to melt and turn into so much mud. And so you know the record of where these paleolakes were, where the glaciers were, where the moraines were, are all useful for piecing together the puzzle of past climate. But when they melt and turn into mud and flow out into the sea, they just become a big pile of gravel.

AMT: So you're seeing this now. What do you expect to happen? What are you fearing?

JOE LEVY: Well, if you look at the best models that are predicting what's going to happen in the Dry Valleys, we're talking a few degrees of warming—few degrees Celsius by the end of the century—which is certainly coming faster than anyone would expect. And that might not sound like a lot, but that average temperature, that average warming comes in the form of potentially hotter summers which means deeper thaw into the ground and more melting of the ice. And what's not in those models is necessarily feedbacks for how the landscape is going to respond. So one thing that my work has shown is that wetted soils, you know places where you have nice, beautiful, dry, cold desert soils, those are great insulators. They help keep the ice solid, unmelted and stable. But as soon as you wet those soils, they become much better conductors of heat. So if you've ever pulled a pizza out of an oven with a dry potholder, you know that dry is a good insulator. But if you pull it out with a wet dish towel, that's when you start licking your fingers. Those are much better conductors of heat. And so if we get just a little bit more melt and just a little bit more warming, it might be a large feedback where these wetted soils actually accelerate the amount of thaw. And so the deposits that we thought were stable and are going to be insulated, may not be.

AMT: Hmm. So you've been doing this for so many years, since 2004. How is your work changing?

JOE LEVY: I think there's definitely a recognition that we need to prioritize what's an important landform, what's an important study to do. And you know there is a finite resource for certain things. There's a finite clock on, for example, little valley corners up in Beacon Valley and University Valley that are thought to be at the cold, dry and salty limits of life. There's evidence there is simply no microbial activity there. That's a really special resource on earth. Our planet is otherwise teeming with life. So if we don't understand how you know the limits of life on somewhere like Mars, [unintelligible]. We need to go to those places before they get warmer and wetter and become colonized. And I think that's changing the kind of research that people are proposing to do. They recognize that time is not necessarily on our side and that we need to pick the priority targets now.

AMT: So if the research about Mars is not done in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, where else could you do it?

JOE LEVY: You know Antarctica is simply the gold standard for all terrestrial analog research. It's as close to Mars as you can get without needing a habitat and a spacesuit and all those accoutrements. Martian research is done in the Canadian High Arctic and Alaska, certainly high alpine areas. But what makes Antarctica special is there are places in Antarctica that simply haven't had a good soaking rainstorm in hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. And that's a kind of cold, dry, salty environment that exists nowhere else on earth. And so it's a countdown. It's a race against time to study those environments before they get too wet. But I think a lot of us have our eyes on you know the 2030s and the 2040s and the first human mission to Mars and we're trying to do everything we can to help make sure that those astronauts ask great questions, do great research and of course, have the resources and the tools they need to survive.

AMT: Joe Levy, good to talk to you. Thank you.

JOE LEVY: Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show.

AMT: Joe Levy is a geologist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. We reached him in Austin, Texas.

'Like watching a train wreck': Blogger quits writing about climate change

Guests: Neven Curlin

AMT: Well, let's go now from one pole to another from the Antarctic to the Arctic. Climate change continues to have a devastating effect on northern sea ice. This past year has seen the hottest average temperature in the Arctic ever. There's simply no sign of that slowing down. Neven Curlin knows this all too well. His Arctic Sea Ice blog began as a hobby about six years ago. It's since become a second home on the Internet for sea ice enthusiasts—amateur and professional alike. All the bad news has been too much, however. He's finding it too depressing to continue. Neven Curlin is on the line from Fürstenfeld, Austria. Hello.

NEVEN CURLIN: Hi there.

AMT: Tell us about your blog. Why did you start it?

NEVEN CURLIN: Oh. Well, that was back in 2010 and my hands were itching to do something and I was very interested in online discussions on global warming and climate change. And the Arctic, I found it really fascinating, especially the sea ice. And I thought that maybe it deserved a place of its own.

AMT: How many people use this?

NEVEN CURLIN: Well, if you look at page views, during the summer melt when attention is greatest, maybe five to 10,000 people or page views is what the blog receives. And the graphs page, I think maybe 1,000 people every day or more.

AMT: In your last blog post, you announced you needed a break from it. Why is that?

NEVEN CURLIN: Well, two things actually. In the end, I just don't have time enough to give it the attention it deserves. And on the other hand, as fascinating a subject as it is, it's also somewhat depressing if you think about the consequences of Arctic sea ice loss and everything. At some point, I had to decide to just step away so I can refocus and also because I need that time to continue reducing my impact on the climate and everything. So what they call walking the walk, I believe, in English.

AMT: Hmm. So you found it depressing because you're actually tracking it over time and there's not a not a good ending here.

NEVEN CURLIN: Well, we don't know exactly what the ending will be. If you can be certain how bad the ending will be you can at least prepare for it. But yeah, it's as if you're watching a train wreck in slow motion and while you're doing it, you have these denial mechanisms where you just focus on the analysis or when something exciting happens that hasn't happened before. But when you sit back and you think about okay, geez, this is going really, really fast. It's going much faster than what mainstream science anticipated even 10 years or maybe even five years ago and it just keeps going. And if you then look at what the potential consequences are, yeah, it makes you swallow. And also, like I said, just describing the train wreck all the time, it's not very productive. So I just need some time to step away from the weekly duty to write about it so that I can develop maybe new ideas or new perspectives because I'm convinced that the Arctic will go ice-free at some point. Maybe soon, maybe a bit later. It's not really relevant. And I'm already thinking about what happens after that. And what do we need for that time also, from the science side.

AMT: How discouraging is it for you when you see people voting for politicians who express real skepticism about climate change?

NEVEN CURLIN: Yeah. That's a good question. You could consider me an activist so that should interest me. All I care about is raising awareness. So I don't know about voting for politicians, what's the right thing to do. But I firmly believe that if enough people are aware of the seriousness of Arctic sea ice loss and global warming in general, that maybe then things can move towards a more positive direction. And in this sense, the Arctic sea ice is so important because we have the satellite images and we can see, we can see how fast it is going. And in that sense, the Arctic could be considered an iconic image that maybe opens the eyes of anyone who—even if he's not willing to look at it—cannot be denied.

AMT: Neven Curlin, thank you for speaking with me.

NEVEN CURLIN: Thank you for having me.

AMT: Neven Curlin, the creator of the Arctic Sea Ice blog which is now on ice. He's in Fürstenfeld, Austria. We'll put a link to it to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, to the blog, not Fürstenfeld. [chuckles] After hearing about the effects of climate change at both ends of the globe, it might be fitting to hear from British naturalist Sir David Attenborough. His parting words on the final broadcast of BBC TV's Planet Earth 2 went viral online. He stood atop the 95-storey London Shard skyscraper to deliver this heartfelt plea on the future of the planet.

SOUNDCLIP

Over half of us live in an urban environment. My home too is here, in the city of London. Looking down on this great metropolis, the ingenuity with which we continue to reshape the surface of our planet is very striking. It's also sobering. It reminds me of just how easy it is for us to lose our connection with the natural world. Yet it’s on this connection that the future of both humanity and the natural world will depend. And surely, it’s our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth.

AMT: Sir David Attenborough on BBC Television this week. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for q. Tom Power is speaking to Jason Paige, who's the voice of the original Pokémon theme song from the 90s. Tom wants to find out how Jason Paige is benefitting from the Pokémon revival. Listen for that coming up next. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SHANNON HIGGINS: And now it's time to give credit where credit is due. I'm Shannon Higgins, one of the producers here at The Current. My colleagues who helped put the show together this week are Idella Sturino, Howard Goldenthal, Ines Colabrese, Lara O’Brien, Julian Uzielli, Sujata Berry, Liz Hoath, Karin Marley, Kristin Nelson, John Chipman, Pacinthe Mattar and Willow Smith. Special thanks this week to network producer Michael O’ Halloran in Calgary. The Current’s writer is Peter Mitton. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, this week with help from Ruby Buiza. Transcriptions are provided by Eunice Kim and Rignam Wangkhang. Our technical producer is Gary Francis and our documentary editor is Josh Bloch. Senior producers are Richard Goddard in Toronto and Cathy Simon in Vancouver. The executive producer of The Current is Kathleen Goldhar.

[Music: Ending theme]

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December 15, 2016 full episode transcript

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