Not so long ago, on Valentines Day 1899, on a planet quite different from our own, the crew of the Belgica finally cut their ship free of Antarctic ice. The ice was seven feet thick and it would take another full month to chop and blast their way to open water. The sailors had been trapped in the ice for 13 months.

Among the crew was a certain Roald Amundsen, as well as the photographer Frederick Cook. As ice gripped the Belgica in 1898, Cook wrote in his diary:

"We are imprisoned in an endless sea of ice... We have told all the tales, real and imaginative, to which we are equal. Time weighs heavily upon us..."

Approaching that same region aboard the research vessel Polarstern on Valentine’s Day 2023, scientist Karsten Gohl described a very different scene: “I have never seen such an extreme, ice-free situation here before.

“The continental shelf, an area the size of Germany, is now completely ice-free. It is troubling to consider how quickly this change has taken place.”

The Belgica trapped in the Bellingshausen Sea. Photo from the Norwegian Polar Institute / National Library of Norway

View of the Bellingshausen Sea from the Polarstern, 2023. Photo by the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research

For most of the period since the Belgica’s unhappy voyage, there hadn’t been much change at all. But over the last six years, sea ice around Antarctica has undergone intense melting.

This year set a record low, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, a perverse Valentine’s Day present from the fossil fuel industry.

“Much of the Antarctic coast is ice-free,” the NSIDC announced on Feb. 14 and, since the austral summer is not yet over, “further decline is expected.”

Antarctica’s vast glaciers like Thwaites, dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier,” are now cracking and melting from below as the ice shelves holding them in place disintegrate.

At the other end of the Earth, Arctic sea ice should be expanding and thickening at this time of year. But it, too, is tracking below its previous record low — one of those tipping points that keep scientists up at night as less of the sun’s energy is reflected back into space and a hotter Arctic creates havoc and extreme weather across the globe.

It’s an insane, uncontrolled experiment to conduct on our only home. And it should be front of mind for the political leaders now finalizing their plans and budgets. You imagine Chrystia Freeland peering down from Parliament Hill at the Rideau Canal, its beloved Skateway still unsafe for skaters on the last weekend of Winterlude.

Is Canada’s finance minister fending off requests for climate spending or trying to pack in as much as she can? And what would a federal budget look like if it took the climate emergency seriously?

Invest two per cent of GDP is the answer, according to Climate Action Network Canada and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. An average of $57 billion per year over the next five years.

The authors of Spending What It Takes tallied climate spending since the Paris Agreement and found the Trudeau government has significantly boosted the budget, as you can see for the years between 2016 and now:

Those calculations are a valuable service because it is devilishly difficult to make sense of all the overlapping announcements, reannouncements and pledges covering different multi-year periods. Canada is now spending about $10 billion per year and plans to hike the number to $15 billion. The feds are also adding new support to the oil and gas industry, like the carbon capture tax credit, which will run about $1.5 billion per year.

Federal investments now run about 0.5 per cent of annual GDP. It’s a big jump up to two per cent — one that Freeland is almost certainly not going to deliver. But distilling things down to simple numbers provides another valuable public service: a clarifying and useful measuring stick.

Despite the recent budget increases, the authors argue that “Canada’s current plans fall far short of what is necessary to compete amid the accelerating global shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy, and massive climate spending in the United States under the Inflation Reduction Act.”

The giant sucking sound of money heading for the incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act might weigh more heavily on Freeland’s mind than slush on the Skateway or the polar seas. Finance ministers and CEOs from Europe to China have already begun to roll out their strategies.

Minister Freeland has already indicated her budget will address the Inflation Reduction Act, prioritizing health care and the transition to green energy, while staying “fiscally prudent.”

She can’t refreeze the Rideau Canal with a federal budget, much less the poles of the Earth. But we will soon find out how high climate investments rank for this federal government.