EDITORIAL — Climate change poorly understood — The Doomsday Club

Remember the 1960s and early 1970s? Woodstock, Pierre Trudeau and those wild-eyed doom-and-gloomers perched on street corners warning us repeatedly that rampant consumerism would soon exhaust the world of its resources. And some prophesized that our use of aerosols would block the sun’s rays, cool the Earth and inhibit plants from doing the photosynthesis thing.

Twenty years later, we have an army of aging, bespectacled baby-boomers warning us of the next horrible catastrophe: global warming. We are told that unless we change our selfish ways, the stability of the Earth’s climate will be threatened by a warming blanket of heat-trapping gases building up in the atmosphere; low-lying areas will be submerged by rising sea levels; and horrible storms will sweep around the world, turning deserts into floodplains and floodplains into deserts.

Canadians are particularly chastised for having one of the highest levels of emissions, per capita, of any industrialized nation. Unsure of what to do about our collective guilt, Canada sent a negotiating team to Kyoto, Japan, to take part in a meeting aimed at reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by the year 2012. The team arrived with a proposal that we would try to cut emissions by 3% from 1990 levels. It was a bit of a farce, as we haven’t exactly lived up to the promises made at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (Canada actually has increased its emissions by more than 10% since 1990). But after 10 days of negotiations, the Canadian team agreed to cut emissions by 6%, which shocked the heck out of those who had argued that the original 3% proposal was too ambitious.

The Australian team, meanwhile, negotiated an 8% increase in emissions.

Canadians may be nice guys and all, but something is wrong with this picture. Last time we looked, Canada was much colder than Australia, unless global warming is taking place at a faster pace than we ever imagined. What were our negotiators thinking? We need our fossil-fuel-burning furnaces more than those sun-baked Aussies. And we need our cars, too, with the nation being so darn big and all.

And what about this global warming thing? Isn’t the world supposed to be getting warmer? Aren’t we coming out of an Ice Age? Haven’t scientists been telling us that the sun has been getting hotter? And let’s not forget that this Earth had been through some pretty drastic climate changes and other cataclysmic events long before we humans appeared.

And why do humans have to take the blame for all those emissions when those darn Canadian beavers are out there building dams that generate large volumes of methane (which breaks down into carbon dioxide). Cows, too, should be made to accept their share of the methane guilt-trip.

The United Nation’s panel of climate change acknowledges that there are “inadequate data to determine whether consistent global changes in climate variability or weather extremes have occurred over the 20th century.” While regional changes have been noted, the panel also acknowledges that “to date, it has not been possible to firmly establish a clear connection between these regional changes and human activities.”

So who are we kidding? Let’s accept the fact that the climate change probably has more to do with forces beyond our control than with things we can control. Let’s take on problems we can do something about, like polluted air, soil and water, directly at their sources. Let’s start designing transportation systems that will reduce smog in cities. Let’s clean up polluted waterways and improve sanitation. Let’s provide incentives to help the developing world invest in cleaner technologies and energy sources. And let’s stop allowing the doom-and-gloomers to make us feel guilty about being alive.