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By Metta Spencer and AI
Every five years, the Government of Canada is legally required to take stock of how its climate is changing. The latest edition of that exercise, the Canada in a Changing Climate Report (CCCR2026), landed this year with a stark and simple message: the country is warming fast, some of the damage is already locked in, and the choices we make now will determine how much worse it gets.
Around the same time, a group of internationally respected climate scientists published a very different kind of document—not a government inventory of trends, but a pointed argument about how humanity is thinking about climate risk in the first place. Read together, the two publications tell a story that should worry—and perhaps also mobilize—every reader of this magazine.
CCCR2026 is dry in tone, as government science reports tend to be, but the numbers inside it are anything but mild. Canada has warmed by 2.0°C over the past 75 years—a figure that would, on its own, exceed the entire globe’s Paris Agreement guardrail. In the Canadian Arctic, the warming has been even more extreme: 2.6°C over the same period, occurring at roughly three times the global average rate since 1970. This is not a subtle shift. It is one of the fastest sustained regional warming trends on the planet, and it is unfolding within Canada’s own borders.
the two publications tell a story that should worry — and perhaps also mobilize — every reader of this magazine.
The report walks through the downstream consequences methodically. Total annual precipitation across the country has increased by nearly 10% since 1949, with the biggest jumps — almost 19% — occurring in the North. More rain and snow might sound harmless, or even beneficial, but the report is clear that this shift is arriving alongside more extreme swings: heavier downpours and flash floods in some seasons, and worsening drought in others, particularly across central and southern Canada. Fire seasons are already longer than they used to be, and the area burned by wildfire each year is projected to keep climbing. Summer water supplies in the south are under growing strain as snow melts earlier in the year and mountain glaciers — which act as natural water reservoirs — continue to shrink. Perhaps the most sobering material in the report concerns what scientists call “committed change” — warming and its effects that are already baked in, regardless of what we do next. Canada is projected to warm by about another 1°C between now and 2040 no matter which emissions path the world follows over the next fifteen years, simply because of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and the slow thermal inertia of oceans and ice sheets. Some of the changes underway, the report states plainly, are “effectively irreversible on human timescales.” Sea level will keep rising for generations. Mountain glaciers in western Canada are expected to largely disappear by the end of this century. Permafrost across the North will continue thawing, destabilizing infrastructure, releasing stored carbon and methane, and reshaping Indigenous communities’ relationships with land they have stewarded for millennia. There is one piece of good news buried in the report: if the world does reach net-zero emissions, warming in Canada would eventually stabilize rather than continue accelerating indefinitely. But — and this is the crucial caveat — stabilizing temperature does not mean reversing the damage already done. Sea level rise, glacier loss, and permafrost thaw would continue for decades or centuries even after the thermometer stops climbing. Canada’s land and oceans currently function as “carbon sinks,” absorbing more carbon than they release, but the report flags real uncertainty about how long this will last, as wildfires and permafrost thaw increasingly work against that natural absorption. Read on its own, CCCR2026 is a report about consequences: what is happening, what is coming, and what can no longer be undone. It is thorough, careful, and — in the understated way of government science documents — genuinely alarming. But it is not really a report about what to do. That is where the second document comes in.
In July 2026, a team of scientists — including glaciologist Peter Wadhams, coral reef specialist Thomas Goreau, atmospheric scientist Daniele Visioni, and land restoration expert Dennis Garrity, among others — published a paper in the journal Frontiers in Climate with a title that sounds almost bureaucratic: “Managing climate overshoot: a risk-based strategy for climate stabilisation.” The content, however, is a genuinely provocative reframing of how climate policy ought to be decided.
CCCR2026 is a report about consequences: what is happening, what is coming, and what can no longer be undone.
Their starting point is blunt: the world’s dominant strategy — cutting emissions and eventually reaching “net zero,” supplemented by technologies that pull carbon back out of the atmosphere — is necessary but not sufficient. It is not that mitigation is the wrong approach; it’s that it is far too slow relative to how quickly the danger is arriving. Emissions are still rising globally. The years 2023 to 2025 were the hottest three-year stretch ever recorded. And warming itself, the authors note, appears to be accelerating — not simply continuing at a steady pace, but speeding up. Why can’t emissions cuts alone solve the problem quickly enough? The paper offers a physical explanation that is worth sitting with. Because of built-up greenhouse gases, the Earth currently absorbs significantly more energy from the sun than it radiates back into space — a growing “energy imbalance” that will continue driving temperatures upward for decades even after emissions stop, due to the enormous thermal inertia of the oceans and the long atmospheric lifetime of CO2. Atmospheric CO2 passed 420 parts per million in 2025, compared to roughly 285 ppm before the industrial era. When you include all greenhouse gases together (expressed as CO2-equivalent), concentrations reached 539 ppm in 2024. Using the IPCC’s own best estimate of how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gases, that level of concentration corresponds to an eventual equilibrium warming of roughly 2.8°C — and paleoclimate evidence suggests that, factoring in slower feedback effects over centuries, current greenhouse gas levels could ultimately commit the planet to 3 to 7°C of warming. The last time atmospheric CO2 was this high, around three million years ago, global temperatures were 2.5 to 4°C warmer than pre-industrial levels, and sea levels stood 5 to 25 meters higher than today. The authors argue that avoiding the worst of this — particularly preventing catastrophic ice sheet loss — likely requires bringing global temperatures back down to around 1°C above pre-industrial levels, not merely stopping them from rising further. Yet even under optimistic assumptions, the global transition away from fossil fuels — which still supply roughly 80% of the world’s primary energy, with consumption still rising — will simply take too long. According to the World Resources Institute, none of 45 tracked indicators for a 1.5°C-compatible transition are currently on pace to meet their targets. Sectors like heavy industry, aviation, shipping, and agriculture still lack proven, scalable ways to decarbonize at the necessary speed. Meanwhile, the paper warns, the Earth system does not wait patiently for policy to catch up. Climate change is not a smooth, gradual process — it is punctuated by tipping points, thresholds beyond which change becomes self-reinforcing and, in practical terms, irreversible. The authors point to coral reef ecosystems, large sections of which have already collapsed. They point to the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has lost over a trillion tonnes of ice since 1985. They point to Arctic warming feedbacks and methane release that can unfold over mere years, not the decades that emissions policy operates on. Physical thresholds, they observe dryly, “cannot be negotiated” — ice melts at a fixed temperature regardless of political timelines. Perhaps their sharpest criticism is aimed not at fossil fuel companies or reluctant governments, but at the models climate policy relies on. Standard economic models used to weigh climate policy costs and benefits, the authors argue, tend to smooth over extreme, low-probability, high-consequence outcomes — treating them as statistical noise rather than as the central danger they represent. When the IPCC and other bodies talk about the “cost-effectiveness” of a policy path, the costs being counted rarely include the catastrophic damage of blowing through a tipping point. This, the authors say, systematically biases policy toward gradual, incremental responses — precisely the wrong instinct when facing a system capable of abrupt, cascading, irreversible failure.
Given all this, what do the authors actually recommend? Their central argument is a shift in how the decision itself should be framed. Rather than asking “is this new technology risky?” in isolation, they insist we must ask a comparative question: how does the risk of a given intervention compare to the risk of not intervening — that is, of allowing warming and overshoot to continue unaddressed?
their sharpest criticism is aimed not at fossil fuel companies or reluctant governments, but at the models climate policy relies on.
This is a subtle but important pivot. Much public debate about emerging climate technologies — particularly proposals to deliberately and temporarily cool the planet, sometimes called solar radiation management or climate cooling interventions — treats those technologies as uniquely dangerous, a leap into the unknown that should be approached with extreme caution or avoided altogether. The authors do not dispute that such interventions carry real risks and require careful, transparent governance. But they argue that continuing on the current path — relying solely on emissions cuts and carbon removal while temperatures climb past dangerous thresholds — is not the safe, default, low-risk option it is often assumed to be. It is, in their analysis, arguably the riskier path, given how close we already are to irreversible tipping points and how slowly conventional mitigation operates relative to the pace of change. Their proposed strategy is not a replacement for emissions cuts, but an addition to them: a three-part approach combining rapid decarbonisation, expanded carbon dioxide removal, and carefully governed interventions to reduce near-term warming directly — buying time and limiting temperature rise while the slower work of transforming the global energy system and drawing down atmospheric carbon continues. They are careful to frame this as requiring rigorous oversight and international governance, not unilateral experimentation. But their essential point is one of risk accounting: given that current strategies are on pace to allow the crossing of catastrophic and irreversible thresholds, refusing to even study or carefully deploy additional tools carries its own serious risk — one that current climate governance frameworks, in their view, systematically underweight.
It would be easy to treat CCCR2026 and the Frontiers in Climate paper as separate conversations — one a domestic accounting of physical changes, the other an international scientific argument about strategy. But laid side by side, they reinforce each other in an unsettling way. Canada’s own government report confirms, in granular, homegrown detail, exactly the kind of committed, partly irreversible change that the international paper warns about at a planetary scale: glaciers that will vanish regardless of future emissions, permafrost thaw that will continue destabilizing northern communities for decades, sea level rise that will not simply stop once warming does. CCCR2026 does not weigh in on solutions like carbon removal or cooling interventions — that is explicitly outside its scope — but it provides Canadian readers with a concrete, close-to-home illustration of the very phenomenon the riskanalysis paper is most concerned about: a climate system that does not wait for policy to catch up, and changes that, once triggered, cannot simply be reversed by later good behaviour. For Canadian readers in particular, the stakes outlined in these two documents are not abstract. The Arctic warming three times faster than the global average is Canadian Arctic. The glaciers projected to largely disappear by 2100 are in Canada’s own western mountains. The permafrost thaw reshaping landscapes and threatening infrastructure is unfolding in Canadian territory, disrupting Indigenous communities whose knowledge and case stories are, notably, now being incorporated directly into the government’s own climate assessment.
None of this is comfortable reading. The scientists behind the Frontiers in Climate paper are not offering an easy technological fix or a reason for optimism; they are arguing, essentially, that the safe, comfortable, incremental path the
time, in climate policy, is not a neutral backdrop against which we can deliberate indefinitely.
world has largely chosen may itself be the dangerous one — and that avoiding a harder conversation about additional interventions, including deliberate cooling measures, is not a neutral or precautionary choice, but a decision with its own serious consequences. Whether or not one agrees with every element of their proposed strategy, their core methodological point deserves serious attention from policymakers, and from citizens trying to make sense of the climate debate: any serious decision about new and unfamiliar interventions must be weighed not against some imagined risk-free alternative, but against the real, accumulating, and increasingly well-documented risks of continuing on the current path. Canada’s own climate report, grounded in decades of careful measurement, makes it painfully clear what “continuing on the current path” actually means for a country already warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. The two reports, born of very different processes and mandates, ultimately converge on the same uncomfortable truth: time, in climate policy, is not a neutral backdrop against which we can deliberate indefinitely. It is itself one of the scarcest and most consequential resources we have left.
Metta Spencer is the Founder of Project Save the World and Peace Magazine