A recent piece by Skeptic Tim Ball in the Financial Post argues a warming climate will bring all kinds of advantanges to Canada in the form of lower heating costs, increased Arctic Ocean shipping and reduced construction costs. What Ball doesn’t tell us is that Canada will also be unrecognizeable. As NASA scientist James Hansen emphasized recently: “Further warming of more than one degree Celsius will make the Earth warmer than it has been in a million years…That implies practically a different planet.” Or as the chair of the IPCC noted, humanity has about a decade to make very deep cuts in its carbon fuel use “if humanity is to survive.” Or as famed British Ecologist James Lovelock declared recently, we may have already passed “a point of no return” in terms of staving off climate chaos.
Ball’s thinking mimics that of the Hudson Institute which recently declared that the shrinkage and disappearance of glaciers around the world is due to changes in the intensity of the sun.
What these characters don’t bother to tell you is that more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries, long ago determined that greenhouse warming had overwhelmed the warming from solar variations. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2001: mankind is responsible for global warming through its burning of coal and oil rather than changes brought by the sun or other natural factors. Said then IPCC chairman Robert Watson: “We see changes in climate, we believe we humans are involved, and we’re projecting future climate changes much more significant over the next 100 years than the last 100 years.”
That includes practically a different Canada as well.
