The big chill of ocean warming “I have very bad news for you.
Are you man enough to take it?” “God, no!” screamed Yossarian.
“I’ll go right to pieces.” —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 In 2001, Ian
Walker, a 40-year-old associate professor of geography at the
University of Victoria, began walking the desolate, kelp-strewn
beach south of Rose Spit, the northeasternmost tip of Haida
Gwaii. And each year that followed, he returned. An expert in
coastal erosion, he’d look at 1990s Geological Survey of Canada
air photos of the place and look at the modern shoreline bluffs
and feel amazed. In places, 30 metres of land had disappeared in
a year. Could it be connected, he asked himself, to anecdotal
reports from local Haida that North Pacific storms were getting
worse? Or that the sea level was rising? The latest predictions
were a rise of one to two metres this century. If these things
were so, what did it mean for the more than 300,000 people who
live below sea level and behind dikes in Richmond and Delta? The
news gets wo