We can do better on global warming

By GERRY WARNER
Cranbrook Daily Townsman
Nov. 17, 2006
It's been called the biggest challenge facing mankind, yet there are skeptics that deny it exists. But the voices of the skeptics are growing fainter every day as the evidence of global warming becomes overwhelming. Numerous stories in the past few months paint a grim scenario of a planet with a bad fever.
The Dead Sea is drying up. Yes, the Biblical site of Sodom and Gomorrah is dropping more than a metre every year and former beach-front resorts are now more than a mile from the water. It's the same sad story for the Aral Sea which has dropped so much in recent years that it's started to break up into separate bodies of water. Water diverted for agriculture has been blamed in both cases but many scientists insist the real culprit is global warming.
Meanwhile the North Sea is warming up, according to a study by the German government. The heavily-used waterway studded with oil drilling platforms was 2.4 C warmer in October than it's ever been before. During a July heatwave, it rose a startling 4.1 C and has yet to cool off to its normal temperature. Then there was the shocking story a few weeks ago predicting that the ocean's fish stocks could collapse within our lifetime. The story was based on a study reported in the journal Science where a team of Canadian and American scientists did the first comprehensive study of world-wide fishfood stocks and found that 29 species of fish are already on the verge of collapse, like the Grand Banks cod, and the rest of the food stock fishery could be gone by mid-century. "There is an end in sight and it's within our lifetime," said lead author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax.
Some of you may have seen the recent showing in town of "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary on global warming by former U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore which has now been nominated for an Academy Award. The film showed giant chunks of ice breaking off the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland and glacial valleys in the Swiss Alps where the ice has retreated over the last 100 years and the valleys are now lush and green. Which brings up the great paradox (two of them actually) of the global warming issue. If ice-covered valleys are turning lush and green again is global warming necessairly a bad thing? And given the fact that Greenland was once green when the Vikings lived there, to what degree is climate change a natural phenomena and to what degree is it caused by the carbon-spewing factories of mankind?
I don't think anybody can say with certainty they know the answers to either of these questions. So where does that leave us? How about erring on the side of caution? Only the most Neanderthal of thinker would deny the world is warming up. As already pointed out, the evidence of climate change is overwhelming. What we don't know is how much of global warming is caused by natural means and how much is caused by man. But does it really matter? Quite likely the global warming we're now experiencing is being caused by both natural and man-made factors. The real issue is that it's happening and it has the potential to wreak havoc on a world-wide scale. We, of course, can't do anything about the natural factors causing global warming, but it's manifestly within our powers to do something about the man-made factors.
So how are we doing? Not too well actually if we're talking about Canada as a nation. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Canada ranks second in the world in per capita carbon dioxide emissions tied with Australia and second only to the U.S. Man-made carbon-dioxide emissions are acknowedged by almost everyone as the primary cause of the green house effect which is believed to be the main factor contributing to human-caused global warming. It was this this fact more than anything else that led to the Kyoto Protocol, which laid down conditions and specific limits for countries producing green house gases. Canada, under the previous Liberal government signed on to Kyoto, but under the current Conservative administration we are walking away from it. This doesn't exactly make one proud to be a Canadian. The Conservatives have criticized Kyoto for allowing "carbon trading" and other means for heavily industrialized countries like Canada to get around the carbon limits the treaty prescribes and these may well be legitimate criticisms. But what are the Conservatives offering in place of Kyoto? A Clean Air Act that will allow "business (pollution) as usual" with no specific carbon-reduction targets for as much as 40 years.
Surely we can do better than this?
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