One-Tonne Challenge

Have you taken the one-tonne challenge?

From the government of Canada’s website on climate change:

The ScienceThe international scientific community has concluded that there is compelling evidence that human activity, particularly activities associated with energy use and deforestation, is accelerating the concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. There is general agreement that the global community faces the likelihood of increases in the earth”™s average surface temperature ranging from 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius by 2100, with serious implications for global food and freshwater supplies, as well as many other implications.

In Canada we are already feeling the effects of climate change, in the form of

• Increasing number and intensity of heat waves and related health problems
• Declining water levels in the Great Lakes
• Changes in fish migration and melting of the polar ice cap
• Insect infestations in British Columbia”™s forests
• Hotter summers and higher levels of smog in major urban centres
• More extreme weather events such as droughts on the prairies, ice storms in eastern Canada, flooding in Manitoba and Quebec.

As climate change-related events such as these become more frequent, they will have an increasingly profound effect on our economy, our health and our quality of life.

The science that the government is using to build its case is really a theory. And a controversial one at that. Here is one counterpoint from Climate Search:

In the eight years since the Kyoto Protocol was first introduced, there has been a revolution in climate change science. This is not surprising given that the industrial world, including Canada, has spent around $30 billion on climate research over the period.

What we have learned is that many of the scientific assumptions underlying Kyoto are false. Climate is not naturally constant and global warming is not evidence of human interference. Climate is just like weather, only bigger. It changes all the time, on all scales–over decades, centuries, millennia and more.

The Government of Canada should recognize this scientific revolution and act accordingly. Climate change is natural so it cannot be stopped by car-pooling or turning down the thermostat.

The science is, at best, inconclusive. And, the more I read about the issue, the less certain I am about the merits of pursuing objectives like Kyoto. And, of course, there was also last summer. Global warming skipped a year in our area of the world.