IPCC: 'Canada the Lucky One'

by C. L. Cook
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has good news and bad for Canada within its second of four reports regarding global climate change, released Friday in Brussels. The good news is: Canada is better able to weather global climate change than poorer nations. Other than that, the report is a stern warning to all nations, citizens, and businesses to get serious about changing the way we do things.

Despite what some of the participating scientists who prepared the report say was a "softening" of the message for political purposes, there is little good news contained within "Climate Change 2007" Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for anyone, anywhere on the planet.

Despite Canada's relatively "lucky" positioning in the northern hemisphere, surrounded by three oceans, with still favourable weather patterns providing plenty of rainfall on the coastal regions, and enough for prairie farmers, the country faces some of the greatest challenges a warming planet will present; challenges that will take more than thrown money to address. But even so, money is needed for research and development of the alternative products and processes a new world will require, and at a time when green rhetoric is all pervading, Ottawa is in fact de-funding the very departments of government designed for the purpose.

According to Mike De Souza at CanWest News, the greenhorn Federal Environment Minister John Baird defensively suggested, his government's cutting off of funding devoted to climate change was done to better serve the issue, saying;

"One of the biggest findings (of the UN report) is that these (impacts) can be mitigated, can be reduced, can be delayed by action to reduce greenhouse gases, and that's got to be the first, the second, and the third priority. At some point, it's sort of like the planet's on fire, we've got to throw water on it. We don't need to research it, we need to act."

In the face of the Conservative retreat from climate change leadership, the minister advises Canadians act without thinking about, or researching, where and how to act. Baird would have Canada throw its metaphorical water on a burning planet, by first firing the ones hired to look for the smoke.

Among those losing funding:

Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network; the Adaptation program funding frozen, research program faces March '08 shutdown.

Health Policy Research Program; a program to explore possible health sector scenarios due to climate change; de-funded.

Reducing Canada's Vulnerability to Climate Change; program to study landscape, coastal areas, and infrastructure and community planning; scheduled to be phased out March '08.

Canada Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences; a major foundation, doing research and training the next generation of climate scientists; funding frozen since July 2006.

Again, Baird doesn't seem capable of grasping the ramifications of his party's policies. De Souza quotes the minister saying;

"It depends on what the research is about. We don't need more research to convince us this is a major problem. We accept the science. We accept the global research and it seems that (for) Stephane Dion and the Liberals, all they want to do is more research. We don't need more reports, we need to focus on the big challenge at hand."

If anything, the U.N. report stresses the need to remove politics, both domestic and international, from the climate change challenge; time, they say, is not a luxury we can afford to squander with petty finger-pointing and internecine squabbling. If this is a preview of the Conservative environmental platform for the expected late Spring federal election, the Environment minister's ham-handed explanation of his party's environmental black thumb and retrograde climate policies will prove a godsend to the Liberals.

Ian Burton, one of the Canadian delegation and co-author of the second report to the IPCC, says despite Canada's geographic and financially advantageous position, it lacks a clear vision, and more importantly, any practical plan in place to deal with some of the urgent issues at hand. Margaret Munro of CanWest quotes Ian Burton;

"What is missing, he said, is a comprehensive strategy to cut the country's greenhouse-gas emissions and deal with the "destabilizing" changes underway."

Duane Smith of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, emphasizing the necessity to move, said;

"Let's not just talk about it, let's put a game plan in place. We are bearing the brunt of the changing environment as we speak."

And Smith ain't whistling Dixie; the poles, north and south, are the most effected areas of the planet. The polar ice cap is melting at a rate even faster than the most skeptical scientists believed possible a few short years ago, and the Antarctic has seen major calving of the ice shelves there.

 

We Canadians are fortunate, we're often reminded by the scolding patriarchs of government. Indeed, we are lucky to be living here, surrounded by peace and abundance, but luck isn't enough anymore.

 

As the environmentalist's report warns, we do not have the luxury of wasting time, either arguing, and warring amongst ourselves, or suffering the fools and ass-backwardly obsessed political hacks who have hijacked the instruments of state to serve the ends of an increasingly outrageous global elite, desperate to maintain their extravagances regardless of the costs borne by the rest of us.

 

It is too late to suffer the Stephen Harper's, and George W. Bush's, and John Baird's of the world, who would fiddle while the planet burns; and , it's past time we got to work saving what's left of our only home, planet Earth.

Chris Cook is a contributing editor to www.pacificfreepress.com and host of Gorilla Radio.