Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources
Issue 18 - Evidence - March 27, 2012
OTTAWA, Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources met this day at 5:36 p.m. to study the current state and future of Canada's energy sector (including alternative energy).
Senator Grant Mitchell (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Deputy Chair: Good afternoon everyone. I am calling to order this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources.
[English]
Welcome to all the people who are here observing and to those observing on the telecast. I am Senator Grant Mitchell, the deputy chair of this committee. I am from the province of Alberta and I am sitting in, acting as chair tonight, because Senator David Angus, the chair, is regrettably not able to be with us today. He would have liked to have been with us tonight but he could not be.
I welcome senators and viewers all across the country who are watching us on the telecast.
I will now introduce the senators who are members of this committee. I will start on my farthest left with Senator Paul Massicotte, from Quebec; and Senator Linda Frum, from Ontario. We welcome her back. She is sitting in for Senator Brown from Alberta who is unable to attend. We have Senator Daniel Lang, from the Yukon; Senator Janis Johnson, from Manitoba; Senator Richard Neufeld, from British Columbia; and Lynn Gordon, our clerk of the committee, who makes this operation run smoothly, as always.
On my right we have Marc LeBlanc, the Library of Parliament analyst who is the "key pen," as we say, in writing this report. You can see the bags under his eyes because this is a big task. We also have Sam Banks, also a Library of Parliament analyst, who supports all of us along with Marc. We then have Senator Bob Peterson, from Saskatchewan; Senator George Baker, from Newfoundland and Labrador; and Senator Nick Sibbeston from the Northwest Territories.
Today we are continuing to examine the current state and future of Canada's energy sector, including alternative energy. Since the fall of 2009, the committee has been studying this important national subject. To date the committee has heard from over 250 witnesses on this subject and we hope that by the middle of July or late June, we will actually have compiled and produced a report that will make a significant contribution to people's understanding of energy and energy strategy issues in Canada and that will further the debate that we all know we need to have in a concerted and rigorous fashion.
I should say that we have a special energy study website, and it can be found at www.canadianenergyfuture.ca and at www.avenirenergiecanadienne.ca.
This evening it is my pleasure to welcome two witnesses, Dr. Andrew Weaver and Dr. Richard Peltier. I will give you a bit of background on these two gentlemen.
Dr. Weaver is the Lansdowne Professor and Canada Research Chair in Climate Modeling and Analysis at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria. He has authored or co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers in climate, meteorology, oceanography, earth science, policy, education, and anthropology journals. He was lead author for certain phases of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was the chief editor of the Journal of Climate from 2005 to 2009. Dr. Weaver is, among many other things, a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Canada, the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, and the American Meteorological Society.
Over the years, he has received numerous awards including the NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship and the Killam Research Fellowship, and a CIAR Young Explorers Award as one of the top 20 scientists in Canada under the age of 40. Judging by your face, that was not that long ago.
Dr. Peltier's current position is University Professor and Professor of Physics at the University of Toronto, where he is Founding Director of the Centre for Global Change Science, and the Scientific Director of the SciNet Facility for High Performance Computation. His research is focused on the processes that control the evolution of the atmosphere, the oceans and the solid earth, and long-time scale climate variability.
In 2011 he was awarded the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal in Science and Engineering, Canada's highest scientific award. He has also received the Vetlesen Prize of the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation of New York, which is often referred to as the earth science equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Gentlemen, I want to thank you both for being here. You have supplied us with background and other material that you will be referring to. I believe that Dr. Peltier will start and then Dr. Weaver will follow up. We will then open it up to questions and discussion, as these committees tend to do.
W. Richard Peltier, Professor, Department of Physics, University of Toronto, as an individual: Thank you very much for the introduction and thank you very much for the invitation to speak to you here.
I will speak for about 15 minutes, perhaps 20 if I lag a bit. I will be speaking to the PowerPoint presentation that I believe you have a copy of. It is called "Canadian Global Warming Futures."
If you would bear with me and follow along with the presentation, I will follow 1, 2, 3 through the slide deck, discussing the issues, which I hope you will find interesting and illustrative of many of the issues that have arisen over the past decade or more as the debate continues on the truth or otherwise of the IPCC conclusion that humankind is responsible for the global warming that has continued to take place over the past roughly 150 years since northern hemisphere industrialization began.
I will start with slide 3 in the deck, to which I will refer you. This is the most recent compilation of the variation through time, since the beginning of northern hemisphere industrialization, of the average temperature of the surface of the planet. This is a figure I am sure many of you have seen, though perhaps not this most recent example. You will notice that, over this roughly 150 years of earth history, globally the average temperature has increased by about eight tenths of a degree centigrade.
To start, I want to draw your attention to the last decade or so of this time series, because this has become a major source of debate concerning this fundamental question as to the origins of the clear warming of earth's surface temperature, which is captured in this time series.
These are actual observations. Before I poke at particular pieces of this time series, I want to draw your attention to the fact that this record has now been reproduced by a program at the University of California at Berkeley under the acronym the BEST Project, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature. Berkeley likes to choose excellent acronyms. This was a program sponsored in part by the Koch Brothers in the United States. Many of you will know they are primary sponsors of the debate on the side of the argument that global warming is not caused by human activity.
In the Koch funding of this BEST project, it was the hope that the Berkeley team under Richard Muller would discover that this time series used by the IPCC as a talisman of the subject of global warming was seriously flawed. What was actually found by the BEST project — and you can go on the web to discover its conclusions — is that the time series was precisely reproduced by Richard Muller and his colleagues. There is no debate whatsoever on this issue as to whether this data set is the truth. It has been rigorously analyzed by multiple groups and therefore cannot be construed to be other than reality.
As I commented earlier, if you look at the last 10 years of this record, you will see that the global warming has somewhat slowed down. Many people imagine that, in spite of the fact that carbon dioxide has continued to increase but global warming has not increased, this somehow demonstrated that our understanding of carbon dioxide producing global warming is not to be seen as credible.
If you look at the next slide in this deck, I am showing you the most modern data that have come to us from satellite observations on the effective intensity of the sun. You should understand that, although many people in the past have tried to argue that global warming is entirely a consequence of increasing output from the sun, this argument is totally undercut by these direct satellite observations that show basically three roughly 11-year cycles of solar activity.
You will notice that in the last cycle the period of solar minimum output is exceptionally long. It is at least two — going on three — years longer than we have any record of having occurred in the past. One of the most rational explanations of this slowdown of the rise of mean surface temperature that is captured in the record I showed you previously is that it is a consequence of the exceptional length of the solar minimum that we are just coming out of. There is a phase lag involved in this connection between solar forcing and climate response of something like 2,000 years. We are only just now beginning to emerge from the cooling associated with this otherwise tiny change in solar forcing.
You will notice on the right-hand side of this time series that there is an amount, a strength of the solar forcing which is a quarter of a watt per square meter. You will notice on the left-hand side of this document that the effective change in total solar output is by an amount of roughly 1.5 watts per square metre. The reason for this difference is a consequence of the fact that most of the solar variability comes into the planet in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum which is totally filtered out by ozone in the middle atmosphere. The amount of the forcing that actually gets into the climate system is extremely tiny but not so tiny as to be entirely negligible. This is the most probable clean explanation of why it is over the last decade or so that the otherwise rapid warming forced by carbon dioxide increase has slowed down a bit. We are now going into a period of solar maximum and we will come out of this solar minimum with a vengeance now as the warming is forced to accelerate by the combination of solar input and carbon dioxide concentration.
Drawing your attention next to the fifth slide in this deck, again, this is data. We are not talking about models at all; this is all observational constraints on the climate system. This is basically showing four panels of average temperature at every point on the earth's surface through the decades of the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. What you will see looking at these data, these direct observations, is that there is a progressive amplification of the warming of the surface of the planet at high northern latitudes.
This is a well-known consequence of the fact that an intense ice-albedo, snow-albedo feedback operates in the climate system as a consequence of the fact that, as the climate warms, the area of the surface in high northern latitudes covered by sea ice decreases; the area during winter that is covered by snow decreases and the area covered by highly reflective surface, either snow or ice, diminishes. More incoming solar radiation is forced into the system, therefore more highly reflective surface melt. This is just called positive feedback. This is a very well-understood characteristic which is accurately captured by the climate models we use to make global warming projections. We know at high northern latitudes there is an intense amplification of the warming process.
Drawing your attention to the sixth slide in this deck, we know that in high northern, and in southern latitudes as well, there are what I call polar "canaries" in the system. These are massive accumulations of land ice primarily in the northern hemisphere of Greenland but also in the high mountains of North America, both in Alaska and in the Canadian province adjacent. This is an additional canary, if you like, in the warm mine. In the southern hemisphere we have all of Antarctica which is covered basically by land ice.
I have already demonstrated that the warming process is strongly amplified at high northern latitudes, and we would expect that if this were the truth we would begin to see these canaries singing. We can listen to them using highly sophisticated instrumentation to ask what is happening to these ice-covered regions. Do they reflect what we expect to happen as a consequence of the continuing warming process?
Looking at slide 7 in this deck, you will see a picture of the instrument that is being used to monitor the singing of these canaries. This is called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite system. There are two satellites in the train of satellites that constitute the GRACE. These satellites fly at a height of something like 450 to 500 kilometres above the earth's surface. What is measured in the physics experiment that allows us to see what is happening to the ice is just the difference in the distance separating the two satellites.
Measuring the time dependence of the distance between the two satellites, we can measure the time variation in the planet's gravitational field and determine whether mass below the satellite at any point on the earth's surface is increasing or decreasing, and we can watch this. For example, in the case of Greenland, which you will see a picture of below the two satellites in the grey system, we can measure the time rate of change of the mass of ice on Greenland.
If you look at the next slide in the deck, number eight, you will see what GRACE sees. Look at the raw GRACE data in the top left-hand corner in this set of six frames. You will see three extremely strong anomalies in the gravitational field of the planet. The first and most obvious one is the huge positive anomaly that overlaps right on top of Canada covering almost the entire Canadian land mass. This is surrounded in the northwest and the northeast by negative anomalies. The dominant anomaly in the middle of this figure, which overlaps the entire Canadian land mass, is associated with continuing ancient Ice Age influence.
You will know that 20,000, 25,000 years ago all of Canada was covered by an ice mass with the thickness of about 4 kilometres to the north and west of Hudson Bay. The southern boundary of this ice mass was almost on the present U.S.-Canada border. This mass sat in place on the surface of Canada for something like 80,000 to 90,000 years. As it sat on the surface, the Canadian land mass was continuously depressed under the weight of the ice. When this ice was eliminated, beginning around 14,000 years ago and finishing around 7,000 years ago, the land began to rise out of the sea. If you look in the Hudson Bay region today, the land continues to rise out of the sea at the rate of about 1.5 centimetres every year. This is increasing the amount of mass below the satellites over the Canadian land mass, so I have developed a theory which enables me to predict what the GRACE satellite should see as a consequence of this effect.
If you look in the top right corner of this set of six plates, you will notice what happens when you simply subtract the predictions of the theory from the full GRACE signal in the top left. You will notice that all that remains are these two negative signals, one over Greenland, one over Alaska and much of the northwestern parts of Canada. These residual, negative signals are a consequence of the fact that land ice in these regions is being eliminated by the global warming process. These canaries are singing the song we expect them to sing if global warming is proceeding at the rate which models predict to be occurring. It is another piece of data, if you like, to underpin the understanding of the global warming process that has been developed over the past 20 years of activity of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
I want to draw your attention now to the ninth slide in this deck which takes us in a slightly different direction. This is actually a single frame from an animation of the water vapour field on the planet under modern and projected into the future conditions. It has oftentimes been argued in defence of the notion that carbon dioxide does not matter at all; it is all water vapour. I know this committee has heard that argument presented to it in the past.
I think it is important for you to understand what many in the climate denial industry do not understand at all, which is fundamental physics. It is true that water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas, but what is also true is you cannot increase the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere until you warm it up. Water vapour is a feedback. You need to warm the air before it can have more water vapour. In order to do this, you need carbon dioxide. This is the agency which allows the atmosphere, forces the atmosphere to warm and makes it possible for it to hold more water vapour. There is a fundamental misunderstanding in the presentations which you have heard on this committee as to how water vapour increases. It is a feedback, not a prime mover in the system. This is very important for you to understand. The notion that it is not CO2 but rather water vapour is just silly from a physics perspective.
Next I will take you in a direction that is a sort of modern climate science direction of trying to downscale our understanding of the global warming process into the regions for which you have to develop policy. The problem with global representations of the global warming process is that it does not really give you the information that you need to make policy decisions, because policy happens at the regional level, not at the global level. It does not just matter which continent you are on; it matters where you are on a given continent.
I want to show you some results that have been obtained recently in continuing work in my own group to try to downscale modern global warming projections to the regional level. I will show you the specific example of Ontario and the Great Lakes Basin.
If you look at slide 10 in this deck of roughly 15 pictures, you will see in the leftmost picture a projection of the amount of warming that would have occurred globally under what we call the "A2 business as usual trace gas scenario." It is what would happen if we keep loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide at the same rate we are doing now without introducing changes in policy that would allow us to push down the rate of emissions and thereby minimize the amount of warming that will occur going forward. This is basically business as usual. That is the picture global models produce. The point is that these models do not really provide you with what policy-makers need in order to make decisions as to what to do in a region going forward.
Slide 11 in the stack takes us into Ontario and the Great Lakes Basin region and uses modern, technical capability to actually downscale these global warming projections into a region the size of a given Canadian province, one that happens to be host to one of the largest freshwater accumulations on the planet. In order to understand what the presence of these huge accumulations of fresh water will do to the global warming process, we need to come down not to the roughly 150-kilometre scale of resolution that we capture in typical global warming projection models, but we need to get down to at least a 10-kilometre scale where we can actually see the lakes and see the impact on the local warming process associated with the presence of those lakes.
The process we use is called dynamical downscaling. I will not get into the details of the technology, but suffice to say we can project the global warming predictions of these models down to a very fine scale by using a technology that enables us to, first, tune the capability in order to reproduce the instrumental record with very high accuracy so that, going forward, we have good reason to believe that the projections will be useful to us from the perspective of policy development.
I will focus on the region of Ontario and the Great Lakes Basin, which you will see in the left-hand frame of plate 11.
I will show you results for this region based on two contrasting trace gas scenarios, one called A2, that is, business as usual, and one called A1B. That is a scenario that does not limit the amount of global warming to the famous 2 degrees centigrade that some have argued is a must-do in order for us to prevent the catastrophe that might otherwise occur, but is a trace gas scenario, which in the limit of long time, going further into this century, limits the amount of warming to something on the order of 3 or 3.5 degrees.
The trace gas scenario is shown on the left-hand frame in slide 12. If you look at the right-hand frame on slide 12, you will see mean temperature projections on the top for the earth as a whole for these two trace gas scenarios. Red keeps going up — that is "business as usual" — and blue eventually saturates at global scale.
The next frame is the entire Canadian landmass, and you will see that the projections become jitterier because we are doing less averaging over a smaller area. Finally we come down to the area of Ontario, where the projections become less smooth still than those for the entire Canadian landmass. Still, the impact of the change in policy — red goes to blue — is readily apparent.
Slide 13 shows the projected changes in temperature from the average temperature over this region from 1950 to 1980 that would occur under either one or the other of these two trace gas scenarios for either the annually-averaged temperature, the winter temperature averages — over December, January and February — or over summer temperatures — June, July and August — in the right-hand column.
I want to draw your attention to something without belabouring a detailed discussion of any one of these frames. The things that are most apparent are, first, that the impact on temperature is much stronger in winter than it is in summer. In the business-as-usual scenario, by the end of this century, which is by 2090 to 2100 — the annually-averaged temperature over Ontario will go up by approximately 5 degrees centigrade. This is huge.
In December, January and February — the winter months — it is basically the same as the annual average. Even in the A1B scenario that imagines we will introduce a policy regime that will reduce the amount of warming — not such a strong policy regime as to reduce the average increase in surface temperature of the planet as a whole to 2 degrees letting it go up above 3 degrees centigrade — even then, the temperature increases over the landmass of Ontario are on the order of 3 degrees or so centigrade. Even at mid-latitude — not the poles — the expected impact on surface temperature is profound.
To make the point even clearer, one of the main impacts of warming over the Great Lakes region is a marked diminution in the lake ice covering in winter. That means there is a greater amount of evaporation occurring of the water in the lakes and a strong impact on lake levels. Therefore, one can do detailed projections, for example, of lake levels under these varying climate regimes, and we have a good deal to be concerned about from that perspective, as well.
Slide 14 in the deck contains predictions of the impact on the precipitation regime. It is extremely interesting. You will notice that the Great Lakes themselves sit on a strong gradient in which, to the north, precipitation is increasing and, to the south, precipitation is decreasing. The lakes are sitting on a region of very steep gradient and this makes the projection of the detailed impacts on the lakes especially challenging.
I should say that these pictures are about to appear in a peer-reviewed journal — the Journal of Climate that my colleague Dr. Weaver was chief editor of.
Slide 15 has one of the most profound statements to make for the politics of this country and international politics, in general, about the ability of the system to actually introduce the variations in policy that will be required in order to minimize the impacts I have just detailed in a very brief way.
In this diagram, you will notice projections from 1900 of mean surface temperature going forward to 2300, so a period of basically 400 years of earth history. On this diagram, you will see projected variations in global surface warming for the A2 scenario that I have been discussing for Ontario, business as usual. Also shown is the A1B scenario going forward. This is that shown as green in which by the end of 2300 we are up by something like 3 degrees Celsius in globally averaged temperature.
The thing I want to draw your attention to in this diagram, which is from the fourth assessment report of the IPCC, is basically that there is no divergence of these projections that is visible in the projections, statistically significant in the projections, until about mid-century.
If you are a policy-maker interested in introducing variations in environmental policy that would seek to mitigate the harmful impacts of the warming process, you have to understand that there will be no glory that will come your way probably in the time that you serve as a member of the political class which is responsible for making the decisions that we need to make in order to mitigate the harmful effects we see coming towards us.
Sitting at 2012, if you know that there will no reward for your good works for 30 or 40 years, the tendency is to imagine, I expect, that little is to be gained by making the decisions which we believe are necessary. This is one of the most profound facts of the global warming process, that the various trace gas scenarios which we believe have been constructed to properly capture the variations that policy can produce on the outcomes will not become visible until sometime around mid-century or thereafter.
I thank you for your attention.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Peltier.
I think I can push this meeting to 7:15 and I would like to give members at least 45 or 50 minutes. I am not trying to rush you, Dr. Weaver. I know there is a lot of interest in this presentation.
We do not often get MPs here, and I would like to introduce Elizabeth May who is visiting from the other side. It is great to see her here. She of course is the Leader of the Green Party.
Andrew Weaver, Professor, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, as an individual: Thank you for the honour of inviting me here. It is a great honour to be able to testify before your committee. I would like to start with the deck I have handed out, the blue one here, with slide 2. I will start off with some public opinion surveys because it sets the social context for the discussions we are having.
A number of surveys have been done at the Centre for Local, State, and Urban Policy over the last few years. The survey asked a specific question to Americans. There is solid evidence for global warming or there is not solid evidence for global warming, and there you see the results before you from fall of 2008 moving to 2011. The recent ones from 2011 also came up, but you see there is quite a large proportion of Americans who do not believe there is solid evidence for global warming. The same survey was done in Canada. At the bottom of page 2, you see that 14 per cent of Canadians believe there is not solid evidence and 80 per cent believe there is solid evidence.
In the last IPCC assessment referred to earlier, the word "unequivocal" was used to describe the evidence for the existence of warming. Scientists do not use words like "unequivocal" very often, so the fact that we have a scientific community, as Dr. Peltier showed here with his best data, using the word "unequivocal" to define the warming where you see within the public large proportions do not even believe that the warming exists, we have a problem.
That problem is amplified, turning to slide 3, where you see how the disbelief in the existence of warming is falling very much along party lines. Canada is the first one, and you see those who self-report as having a tendency to vote Conservative, 64 per cent believe there was solid evidence for global warming whereas most of the other parties had higher percentages. If you flick over to the U.S. on slide 4, it is very similar comparing Democrats to Republicans.
Science does not know whether or not you happen to vote NDP, Liberal or Conservative, and the global warming temperatures that are unequivocally observed also have no idea what party affiliation you have, yet it is very clear in our society that this has become an issue that is highly politicized. Some of that, of course, can be blamed on a very good spokesperson for this issue, former Vice-President Al Gore, who by being so effective as a spokesperson and being a former vice-president has in some sense, particularly in the U.S., lent this to be associated with a Democrat issue, as if the science is somehow Democrat as opposed to Republican.
Part of the problem is where we get our scientific information. As a society, most of us get our information from the media, indicated in slide five. The media in general has a tendency to try to portray all sides of an issue, and this is very important. The role of the media in a democratic society is to provide the citizenship with a sense as to what the issues are. For example, if Canada will enter a free trade agreement with Japan, as media reporting that, you would want to write a bit about the story. You would want to get comments to give the reader some idea of what the issues are. You might quote a high-tech firm in Vancouver and their CEO might get excited about this policy because there is a new market opening up and great jobs, so you would include a pithy quote from them. Then perhaps you get a quote from a union leader in Ontario concerned about a potential loss of union jobs. There you get the policy being discussed in the piece, you give the reader some quotes, and the reader then determines whether or not they support the policy and hence those making the political decisions based upon the issues that have been brought to them.
The problem comes when you take this journalistic ethical norm and apply it to science. As an example, if I take my pin here and drop it, and if I have been tasked to report upon such a story, I might report on this pin falling, but then I would have to give you, the readers, a sense of what the issues are. I might go to the local physics department at the University of Ottawa and get a quote from a physicist who might mention something pithy about Newton being inspired by apples, but I would have to give you the balance, so I might go to the local chapter of the Anti-Gravity Society and talk to their executive director to see if they can give me some quote about a parallel universe where gravity actually operates the opposite way.
Now of course that is absurd, but this is very much what is happening in the field of climate science today. We have an overwhelming scientific understanding, as I will allude to shortly, and a very small dissenting voice that is not actually represented in the peer-reviewed scientific literature but is represented in people's opinions giving a disproportionate share in the local media which ultimately forms the opinions in the public.
There is a general tendency within human nature to seek information which validates your pre-existing belief or notion. If you do not believe or want to believe that warming exists, despite the fact that the climate community believes it is unequivocal, you might go and find such information which is readily available that supports or reinforces your initial belief system.
Max Boykoff, shown here on slide 6, actually tried to quantify this in the U.S. prestige press. This is the New York Times, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times and The Wall Street Journal, and on slide 7 you see the findings of his analysis over the years 1998 to 2002.
He found that 53 per cent of articles gave approximately equal emphasis to human activity versus natural fluctuations being able to explain global warming; 35 per cent were more focused on human causation but still presented a balanced view; 6 per cent reported only deep suspicions of any human contribution to global warming at all, this is just some kind of hoax, and so on. Only 6 per cent expressed the notions that humans were contributing to global warming as a central tenet of the actual article. That means that 94 per cent of the newspaper articles in the U.S. prestige press either gave the balanced opinion as to the cause of warming or argued it was not occurring at all or was some kind of hoax. Six per cent gave the scientific consensus view.
Naomi Oreskes, as illustrated here on slide 8, wanted to see whether there was a large dissenting voice in the peer- reviewed literature that was being ignored in international assessments. That issue was looking specifically under the words "global climate change" to see to what extent scientific publications existed that contravened the kind of underpinnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
She found none. Her analysis was that there was no study. In fact, I passed to you as one of my assessments an article written by Rosemarie Came, John Eiler, Jan Veizer and colleagues who testified to you on December 15. This article was referred to in testimony by Dr. Veizer in December. I would ask you to read the last sentence of his abstract of his paper. It says:
Our results are consistent with the proposal that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations drive or amplify increased global temperatures.
This article was referred to in that testimony, but for reasons that I do not understand, the conclusion was quite the opposite in the testimony as opposed to the paper that was referred to.
Another study was done by the late Steve Schneider and colleagues, one of whom is at the University of Toronto. They wanted to see to what extent the opinion of scientists was whether humans were causing the warming — not whether it was warming or not. This is shown on slide 9. These scientists examined 1,372 climate researchers who have been out there signing various things or writing letters to the editor or being on a "100 scientists would support a letter" or this, that and the other. They were looking within the general popular media as to what extent those climate scientists believed the central tenet that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, largely because of human activity.
They found that 97 to 98 per cent of those climate researchers most actively publishing supported the tenets of anthropogenic climate change as outlined by the IPCC and the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of those unconvinced was substantially below those of the convinced researchers.
Therefore we have a clear picture here: A very balanced reporting of the science in the media arguing, as I showed, invariably that somehow there is a great debate happening within the scientific community. The peer-reviewed publications are clear on the issue, including publications by people testifying themselves to your committee.
However, then we have people who actually may believe something — that they are entitled to believe — but a belief system is not science. There are those within my community who believe that perhaps God will take care of us, that we do not have to worry about global warming because, as a matter of faith, "I believe in a greater higher being that will take care of us," and that is fine. That is your belief system. That is not something that you would obviously publish in the peer-reviewed literature, but it is a belief system that would lay itself into a reason why some climate researchers — no names in particular — but there are people who sign things that say they believe they do not have to worry about it. There is nothing wrong with that, and I am not trying to denigrate that at all. However, it is a belief system that we have to remember is separate from science.
Science is disseminated through scientific journals, as is shown on slide 11, where I show five typical examples. Something like 10,000 scientific journals are assessed by the Thomson (ISI) Web of Science. Over the period from 1955 to 2011, 70,986 studies have been published using the terms "global warming" or "climate change" — 70,986 peer- reviewed publications. You can imagine, if there was somehow this great conspiracy of scientists with this whole hypothesis out there, it would be somewhere within these 70,986 publications, but it is not there.
In fact, the history of science, when we go back to slide 12 and, in particular global warming, was not something dreamed up in 1988, as many believe, when Jim Hansen testified before the U.S. Senate when he was certain that global warming was occurring.
It goes back to Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, the French mathematician who in 1824 was first to recognize that the atmosphere was very important in allowing radiation from the sun to pass through it but very effective at blocking outgoing radiation back to space.
In 1861, John Tyndall — slide 13 — made elaborate measurements of the individual absorptive properties of various greenhouse gases, including water vapour and carbon dioxide.
In 1896 — slide 14 — Svante Arrhenius went on to calculate what would happen as a consequence of doubling carbon dioxide. He made the first what is an estimate of what is called "climate sensitivity" or the globally-averaged surface warming for the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Back then he projected there would be a 5 to 6 degree warming as a consequence of doubling of carbon dioxide.
In 1936, Guy Callendar went on to make multi-century predictions as to what he thought would occur as a consequence of human activity and the combustion of fossil fuels, in particular the increasing greenhouse gases accordingly.
In 1979, the first major assessment report was undertaken in the U.S. by the National Research Council, led by a distinguished meteorologist named Jule Charney. The task of the assessment report was to assess the scientific basis for the projection of possible future climate changes resulting from man-made releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
I was graduating from high school in the year that report was released.
In 1979, the report made the following estimate, among many things: That the climate sensitivity was about 1.5 to 4.5 degrees, with a best estimate of 3 degrees. That means that for doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from pre-industrial values, the best estimate of the warming would be 3 degrees Celsius, with a range from 1.5 to 4.5.
In 1896, Arrhenius made the slightly higher projection. Models in the context of what climate science is about are based on physical principles. In the field of geology, the word "model" and "hypothesis" are often interchangeably used. A model is an explanation for an occurrence. In climate physics, a model is something where you are able to make predictions using the physical equations that govern the properties of the actual subject or object you are studying. You make a projection or prediction, and test those predictions.
In 1975, the first such climate model projections were made by Manabe Wetherald where they estimated 3 degrees warming for a doubling of carbon dioxide.
In the first assessment report of the IPCC in 1990, the best estimate of warming was between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees for a doubling of carbon dioxide. The second assessment report in 1995: best estimate 1.5 to 4.5 degrees. The third assessment report in 2001: best estimate 1.5 to 4.5 degrees. The fourth assessment report: best estimate somewhere between 2 and 4.5 degrees.
This is 30 years of many scientists around the world working hard on this problem, and you see that the central estimate has hardly changed. This is because science does not change depending on the latest issue of a particular journal or magazine.
The issue we are faced with here is the warming since pre-industrial times, illustrated in slide 17. The warmest year on record in the historical record is 2010, tied with 2005. As my colleague Dr. Peltier pointed out, this was at a time when the sun was at its solar minimum. The previous warmest year was 1998. All of the top 10 are in the last 12 years or so.
When you try to explain this record, you not only look at the surface record but you must look at the lowest troposphere record as illustrated here by the weather balloon record on slide 18. Weather balloons are showing warming in the lower troposphere that is almost identical to the warming we see at the surface. If you look at the upper ocean heat content as shown in slide 18 on the right, you would ask the question: Where is the heat going? Consider that 70 per cent of our earth is covered by water. There we see the upper ocean is warming as well, as it takes some time for it to warm up.
Then you might say, "Ah, but I have heard it is because of the sun." I refer you to slide 19. Invariably, you will see the figure on the top left hand side of slide 19 that shows a stunning correlation between sun spot cycle length and temperature anomaly as published in a prestigious journal in the early 1990s.
You should notice a number of things when you look at that. You will see that figure shown to you today in the year 2012. We have actually had satellites in space since 1979. Why, in 2012, would you continue to show a figure that stops in 1980?
Another thing you might say is why are you not showing the figure as corrected, because of arithmetic errors in it, which is on the bottom panel on the left of slide 19? In fact, part of that correlation does not exist because of simple arithmetic errors in the original calculation.
When you take the whole record, which is shown on the right, the blue dash there is a temperature record and the orange is a sun spot cycle. You see how there is virtually no relationship at all between them. Certainly in the last 30 years, at precisely the time that the warming has accelerated, precisely the time we have had satellites in space to directly measure incoming and outgoing radiation, the sun has been cooling the earth. That is shown on slide 20. On slide 20 you see the warming and there you see the sun.
If you ask solar scientists Mike Lockwood and Claus Fröhlich, as shown in slide 21, they pointed out in a rather informative and prestigious journal publication in the proceedings of The Royal Society of the U.K. that over the last 20 years all the trends in the sun that could have had an influence on the earth's climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the rise in global mean temperatures. These are from direct measurements.
We also have many long records of climate going back from ice cores, from geological records, one of which I slow on slide 22. Slide 22 shows a 650,000-year record from Vostok in Antarctica of carbon dioxide, methane, a temperature proxy and ice volume from sediments nearby.
What we know with a high degree of certainty is that high levels of greenhouse gases have historically been associated with warm climates, and low levels have been associated with cold climates. High levels of greenhouse gases are associated with low ice volume and low levels of greenhouse gases are associated with high ice volume. The bottom curve in this figure illustrates how woeful scientists are communicating what they do, because you should invert it to think about high versus low ice volume. This is an isotopic ratio shown on the right.
If you turn to slide 23, which shows an extension of this going back 800,000 years, and you look carefully at this record, you will see that, in fact, temperature led carbon dioxide by 800 years in this record. You might have heard people tell you, that in, fact that is proof that carbon dioxide is not causing global warming. We understand this.
As a community we understand and have understood this for quite some time. There were not coal-burning electricity plants back 21,000 years ago when we came out of the last glaciation, but there was something called Milankovitch cycles which were happening then and continue to happen today. That is, in the earth's orbit around the sun — and you heard this in testimony in December — the earth wobbles and tilts and the eccentricity of its ellipse changes on a variety of time scales. These act together to change the amount of radiation the earth gets in the summer versus the winter.
In the past what was happening is small perturbations in the seasonal distribution of radiation in the summer versus winter are amplified by processes within the earth's system, including processes which increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's system. I do not have time to go into them, but I do cover them in the book that I have given you as a reference.
We understand this, as it must be. We must have carbon dioxide acting as a feedback on the past. Its role as a feedback on the past is identical to its role as a driver today. That role is based on the greenhouse effect and elementary principles of physics, as outlined by Fourier, Arrhenius and others, that warm climates cannot be maintained unless there is an excess of greenhouse gases. Cold climates cannot be maintained unless there is depletion of greenhouse gases. If the amounts of these gases increase, a positive forcing occurs and the earth must warm until a new equilibrium is reached.
Whether that release happens naturally as a feedback, for example you get thawing of permafrost and decomposition of the organic matter that is now able to be exposed to oxygen and produces more carbon dioxide, or whether you burn coal and put it in the atmosphere, it has the same effect.
We know that the earth has warmed in the last 1,000 years. Slide 24 shows a dozen reconstructions of the warming over the last 1,000 years, including reconstructions that illustrate a warm period, known as the medieval warm period, between 900 and 1108 AD. Some of you might have been told that the Vikings settled in Greenland and their settlement collapsed as a consequence of natural climate variability. That is true, but what you are often not told is if you go to the same Viking settlements today, page 25, they are farming in these Viking settlements and vegetables are being grown there because it is warmer today than it was in the medieval warm period.
We actually have evidence that climate has varied naturally over the past, but we also understand that the climate variations in the last 100 years are well above anything that can be explained from natural variability.
In terms of the formal detection and attribution, this is a complicated field and I cannot do it justice in the last three minutes of my presentation. I will point to slide 26 where we show that what is done in our community is that we have an observed record, the Hadley CRUT3 is the example here, which is the observed temperature anomaly record. You have one realization of what has happened in the real world, but climate models can be run many times. We can get a multiple realization, because there is some chaotic behaviour over our weather systems. When we run many simulations we get an envelope. We would hope that the black curve, the observations, would be framed within the envelope of the multiple integrations being done by a variety of models around the world.
We try to explain the observed record by including all forcing, including only natural forcing and only anthropogenic or human-produced forcing. When you look at the blue curve with the blue shading there, you see that it is not possible to explain the observed warming trend by any known mechanism, whether it be solar or volcanic or natural variability itself, whereas we can explain the observed temperature record, based on increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases, as well as including the natural variability.
In fact, on slide 27 I point out that climate change detection and attribution is now such that we can say we see the signal of global warming at every scale, every region in the world. We can start to do detection and attribution of things like increased area of forest fires burnt, increased contribution of humans to more intense precipitation, to drought and so forth. There are many examples.
The final example I will conclude with is on slide 30. This, I think, is an absolutely beautiful illustration of the change that we have seen in the last few decades. This will appear in a paper written by Jim Hansen and colleagues in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
He was looking at the extent to which the area of the earth is being covered by really extreme summer heat waves. You would expect that if you have a normal summer, plus or minus one standard deviation, that you would have most of your summers captured by that. The force standard deviation events are those that we expect to occur only six one thousandths of a per cent of the time. It is very rare. The five sigma here, there are a lot of zeros in front of it, is extraordinarily rare.
If you look in 1955, 1965, 1975 and the last few years at the percentage of the globe that has been covered in the summer by more than three standard deviations above normal warm events, you find there are more and more areas of the globe, such that between 5 per cent and 13 per cent of the globe, in the last five years, have been covered by more than three standard deviation warm events. This does not mean it is warming everywhere, but you can see some blue there, even in 2007. There is some blue in 2009. It means that, on average, more and more of our planet is being covered by more and more extreme summer warming events.
I will conclude with the last three slides, slide 38, 39 and 40. I would like to conclude on this because it builds on what my colleague Dr. Peltier mentioned with respect to intergenerational equity and the difficulty, from a policy perspective, in implementing decisions today when the results of those actions today will not be seen in the political lifetime of those putting the decisions place.
The analogy or metaphor I will use here is the classic "tragedy of the commons." This, as you all know, and perhaps some of the viewers on the Internet may not, goes back to a time when we used to think about grazing cattle on public lands.
The traditional tragedy of the commons is you have the public land, farmers are allowed to graze their cattle on the public land and each farmer asks themselves if they should put another cow on the land or not. They do an economic cost-benefit analysis and they think quietly to themselves, "Well, if I put a cow on this land, I get 100 per cent of the benefit; but the costs of me putting a cow on this land are distributed among every other farmer." Cost-benefit analysis, "I better put another cow on the land because I come out ahead."
Now every farmer starts thinking the same way, cost-benefit analysis. "We should all put cows on the land." If everyone follows this way, collapse is inevitable because the land can only hold so many cows before overgrazing occurs and all the cows die.
Let us suppose we realize this was happening and we elect a very wise city council. As illustrated on slide 39, they might come up with a number of ways of realizing this. In the language of economics, they might say something like, "We need to internalize the externalities associated with our behaviour." They might do one of three things. They might be heavy-handed; they might want to regulate the number of cows on the land and say, "Farmers, we shall allow 100 cows on the land. Fight amongst yourselves, but there will only be 100 cows on the land."
On the other hand, they might say, "We know that this land can support 50 cows, so we will cap the number of cows on this land and allow you farmers to bid amongst yourselves on the right to put a cow on the land and will let you, the market, set the price to put this cow on the land. If we see we actually cannot have so many cows on the land, we can lower the cap and then make the price go up."
They could allow farmers to trade the right to put the cows on the land, and in fact we do this regularly in cities with taxicab permits. Cities will allow so many taxicab permits. You can bid on rights to have a taxicab and trade them amongst yourselves. Alternatively, the farmers could say, "We like to have some price certainty so we will put a price on the cows. If you want to put a cow on this public land, you will have to internalize those externalities, pay the true cost of having that cow there, and it will cost you and the price is this much and you pay it to city council and we will distribute how we will give it back. Maybe we give you all a dividend back or maybe we reduce your income taxes or something else."
What I have done here, obviously, is outlined the three years of dealing with the mother of all tragedy of the commons — the atmosphere which is viewed as an unregulated dumping ground for anything we want to put into it. Whether in Canada, China, Britain or anywhere else, everyone says the same thing. Everyone does their own cost- benefit analysis, whether it be me, my city, my province, my country or my world, and it is always in my interest to use that as an unregulated dumping ground because I do not pay the costs; the costs are distributed. The only means of dealing with this is to actually internalize those externalities and to recognize that we need to put a price on emissions. Whether that be through the cap system or tax system is irrelevant to me, but in terms of trying to deal with the overarching method, I think you will find economists will agree worldwide that pricing emissions is the most effective way to do that. With that, I will stop.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Weaver and Dr. Peltier. Those were powerful presentations; we appreciate them.
We will begin with Senator Neufeld.
Senator Neufeld: Thank you, gentlemen, and thank you for being here. That is an awful lot of information to digest in a short period of time.
Dr. Weaver, you have used IPCC in part of your presentation. I do not know how much of your presentation is from the IPCC. Are you comfortable with the information that the IPCC puts out, understanding that there has been a lot of discussion, I understand, that it is not peer-reviewed correctly, is not done by actual folks like yourself, that there are new graduates that are trying to start out? Tell me your opinion. I think I know your opinion, but I would like to hear it.
Mr. Weaver: I very much appreciate the question. I have been involved I think probably more than any other Canadian in the last four assessments. Let me take you through the process.
The first process is the process of nomination. The federal Government of Canada nominates its scientists to the bureau in Geneva. I have been nominated by Liberal and Conservative governments. There has never been a political process in terms of the nomination because the nominations may come outside of the secretariat.
Senator Neufeld: I am not talking about politics.
Mr. Weaver: With regard to the process of nominations, these are the best scientists in most of the countries. The UN rules do require that there be representation from a diversity of parts of the world, so you will have chapters, and each chapter will ensure that it has representation from most parts of the world. That means you will always get a couple of North Americans, a couple of Europeans, a couple from Asia, a couple from the Oceania and a couple from Africa, a couple from South America; but these will be scientists who are experts from their countries.
There is no political interference in the writing of these 1,800 pages which make up the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report. These are scientists putting their necks and reputations on the line. These are the very best scientists in the field who have been nominated by their governments and vetted through committees in Geneva who actually ensure you provide a CV. They check your signed citation record. You have to have published in the field. They cannot just be anyone.
We are not told what to write. We are told the chapter titles because only the chapter titles are approved at plenary, not the actual subjects within the titles themselves. Even there, there are scoping meetings, meetings before the UN plenaries where experts get together and suggest what should be made.
Because the IPCC is a UN organization, every single word must be approved line by line, word for word in the summary for policy-makers at the plenaries that occur at the end of the process, but they cannot change the science. If anything, what happens is it is watered down.
For example, if you go back to the 1997 report, two countries, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, spent an awful lot of time knocking back language in terms of their first climate change detection and attribution studies to ensure that that language would not actually make it into the summary of policy-makers, despite the fact that it was embedded within the body of text itself. In the end, science wins because politics cannot trump science, even at the plenary. They cannot say something that is not backed in the report.
I describe them as the most rigorous peer-reviewed process I have ever been part of. I say this as the Chief Editor of the Journal of Climate from 2005 to 2009 where typically we would get three, sometimes four reviewers to review each paper. I remember getting something of the order of 1,700 pages of reviews on our chapter. The number of reviews is absurd, and anyone can review. If you are an expert reviewer, that only means you have applied to review. Historically, anyone could review. We have reviewers who were commenting in. Coal lobbyists would write in and comment and write pages of review. We would have reviewers on the science from economists and on all sorts of areas. We could not dismiss the comments. I tell you, it was very frustrating at times because you would have assertions and statements being made that you would still have to respond and rebut to.
I reject unequivocally that this is actually not a rigorous process. I will say, because the IPCC now is assessing so much, it is becoming a very unwieldy process because there is simply so much science out there. For the next meeting we are going to Marrakesh in April. Several hundred scientists will be meeting to go over the next first round of reviews. It is getting difficult to actually keep abreast of this diversity of information out there because there is so much of it.
The Deputy Chair: Dr. Peltier, do you want to add to that?
Mr. Peltier: I have a follow-on comment to what Dr. Weaver has said. Many people may not understand that the IPCC process actually reviews published peer-reviewed papers. It does not produce original science. It simply assesses the peer-reviewed science which has already been published. There is no attempt or possibility for anyone involved in the writing process to insert material which has not already been peer-reviewed by the community.
This is something which may not be well understood by the committee, but it is an extremely important fact. There is no attempt in these documents to insert new material. Sneak it in, if you like, as someone's special idea that they are keen on. However, that can never appear in documents of this kind. All that can appear is that which has been seriously peer-reviewed and published already.
The Deputy Chair: Dr. Weaver, do you have anything else to add?
Mr. Weaver: Yes. I want to point out that on slide 37 of my presentation — I skipped over it — I put in the mandate of the IPCC, which actually puts in exactly the words that Dr. Peltier mentioned there.
Senator Neufeld: When you look at a list of CO2 emissions of different countries, I think we are number 10 or something, at least on the list that I have. I see it is a little different from your list, Dr. Weaver. I believe we are about 2 per cent of the world's total emissions.
If you were to wipe that right out, let us say we had zero — this is hypothetical — do you think everything will be okay and we will not rise by 2 degrees, understanding that the population will increase by 2 billion in the next 25 to 30 years? Those countries that are not anything close to us in having the services that we enjoy in Canada, places like China and India and those places that are all driving toward trying to live the same life that we do, can you comfortably tell me that we will actually solve the world's problems if we decrease Canada's emissions to zero?
I do not say that we should not. I am pretty darn proud of Canada. I have said that on this committee many times. Our electricity generation is 75 per cent clean. Most countries would love to have that, other than a couple that I know of.
When we go by per capita basis, I think we drive it a bit askew. We have a big and diverse country. I live in the northern part of the country, not as far north as some senators here but relatively far north, and we use natural gas for heating our homes and to keep them warm — not to keep them cool; we do not need that because we live in a cold enough climate. When I look at all of that and I try to think it through and listen to what you people say, if you change a whole bunch of things, the economics will have to change tremendously.
What are we doing to ourselves? At the end of the day, will we really keep it at 2 degrees? Can you guarantee me that we will keep it below 2 degrees if, in Canada, we were able to eliminate it to zero?
Mr. Weaver: There are two things. First, I want to stick to the science. I can give you my opinion or the science. It is pretty clear scientifically that if every country met their voluntary target submitted as part of the Copenhagen Accord, we will guarantee to break 2 degrees. Canada's target is equivalent to something like 2.5 per cent above 1990 levels by 2020. If every country who put in their voluntary target met it, we would break 2 degrees. In fact, we would have a 50/ 50 chance of breaking 3 degrees this century and 4 degrees shortly thereafter.
The question then becomes, if everyone takes the position that we should not do anything —
Senator Neufeld: I am not saying not do anything because Canada is doing a lot, even though we are very clean already.
Mr. Weaver: Canadian emissions have pretty much leveled off in the last few years in terms of the total amount.
If you look at slide 43, you can see there is a difference across Canada as well. I, too, am a proud Canadian; I am a really proud British Columbian, as you know. In British Columbia, I was blown away at the policy leadership we showed as a province when we stepped ahead of the world. We are now finding South Africa and Australia moving ahead with carbon pricing, copying models that were first implemented in British Columbia. To me, that showed leadership, and I do not think it hurt our economy to do that.
In answering your question straight up, if Canada were to go to zero emissions, we would still break 2 degrees. I agree with that, but does that mean we should not do our best to show leadership? We have good brand recognition internationally as brokers of deals and as stewards of international agreements. I think as Canadians we would like to show some leadership on this issue, and I think the way to show is through some kind of pricing model.
I know — I talk to industry all the time — that they want that as well. They want to know what the rules of the game are. They know that the playing field is changing. They are seeing things happening in Europe with low carbon fuel standards coming in and pricing emissions happening. They are worried because it is affecting them.
This is opinion, not science. Why are we spending all of our time lobbying against change instead of trying to put in consistent policies that allow us as a society to move in the direction we need to if we want to globally deal with this problem? If everyone takes the same position that we will not do anything more than we have done, the tragedy in the Commons tells us where we will end up.
Senator Neufeld: You would agree with me that Canada is moving ahead fairly well in trying to eliminate —
Mr. Weaver: I would say that the province of Quebec is a leader. Quebec has reduced emissions by 12.5 per cent in 2009 over 2000. Already in 2000 they had the lowest per capita emissions and then they further reduced substantially.
I would say that British Columbia has had some innovative policies. They have a lot of work to do because there is a sector of the economy in your area that is growing and not being captured in some of the policies. I would say that Ontario has shown some leadership. However, I do not think it is Canada wide. I think there is leadership in Canada, but I think we can do better.
In my own opinion, I do not really know what the policy at the federal level is because we have heard things like we will have reduction targets by 2020, but I have been following closely, and I do not know what policies will take us there because those have yet to be put in place. I do believe we will put them in place, but they do not exist at present.
Senator Peterson: Thank you for your presentation. I learned an awful lot of information.
You indicated in your remarks we are moving towards an irreversible situation or time frame. Where is the global warming clock today?
Mr. Weaver: Sorry, we missed that.
Senator Peterson: All these things are adding up to more CO2 in the air and everything, and we are all talking about what we can do about it. A lot of countries do not want to do anything. I am asking you, where are we on the global warming clock where it will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse?
Mr. Peltier: That is a very good question.
Mr. Weaver: It is a greet question. The number of 2 degrees has emerged initially out of European Union discussions back in the 1990s as an estimate of climate sensitivity, and it has now become entrenched. If society as a whole believes that 2 degrees is a number that we need to meet, then we have to start reducing emissions globally in the next decade.
If society believes that it is not a number we want to meet, if we say we do not mind that 50 per cent of present species will get committed to extinction and we do not mind 3 or 4 degrees warming, then that is a different question.
There is no point of no return unless you define what you want to do. With the 2 degrees, if you define it as that, then this decade we have to get emissions going down. If we would like to see 3 degrees, it will not be this decade but a couple of decades from now.
Senator Peterson: You are prepared to lose to do this, but do you not think that is the type of information we should get out there so the man on the street can understand what we are dealing with? When you talk about stuff like this, people's eyes glaze over. They like warm days. What will you give up if you do not do something?
Mr. Weaver: I have one final example I would like to give you, which is why many of the cost-benefit economic projections you have seen are fundamentally wrong. Many of these economic models make estimates of damages associated with increasing temperatures. They are some function that goes up, but they do not have an upper balance. They make estimated damages associated with a 30-degree global warming temperature, and it would give you some number, some reduced GDP. However, I can assure you that if global temperatures increase by 30 degrees, there would be no life on earth.
Having a percentage reduction of GDP based on some economic model running out with some temperature change is meaningless. In some sense, you know the end point. The end point is, "Sorry, civilization, you are gone." The point is with respect to where we are today; and the question as a society that we have to define is where in this trajectory we will end up.
Mr. Peltier: That is a good question. I think it is incumbent on science, in the way that I tried to allude to in my presentation, to actually make direct projections at the regional scale of what is expected to happen as a consequence of one or the other emission scenario so that people in local regions have a basis on which to understand what is at risk. That is why the modern work going on in the global warming world of science is so important to regionalize the projections of warming so that we can make explicit comments as to what is at risk as a function of region. Basically, it is those effects to which politics and policy have to react; and this is a complexity in the science when it stops short of regionalizing the expected impacts. I see your question as being important from that perspective.
Senator Massicotte: I have a couple of questions; let me go to 4.3 on the technical side. You referred to it and said we have shown some good progress.
As you know, 2009 was the year after a significant decrease in economic activity in our country. How much of those results are influenced by that? I see Ontario down 26 per cent, but the auto industry was way down that year. How much are these numbers influenced by the economic slowdown?
Mr. Weaver: You are right. I update these numbers every year. This is the latest reporting by the UNFCC, which is the 2009 year. In 2008, the ordering was similar. The numbers are a little larger because, as you point out, the manufacturing industry in Ontario is down even more during that year. Ontario was quite down because of the collapse of the manufacturing industry. Alberta is down per capita but Saskatchewan is way up, as it was way up in 2008.
Senator Massicotte: Why they are up 65 per cent?
Mr. Weaver: In Saskatchewan it is the oil and gas sector and the burgeoning potash sector; and there are not a lot of people in Saskatchewan.
Senator Massicotte: They should all be held accountable.
Let me go to the essence of the issue. We listened to you and read this thing. I think you can appreciate that we cannot be real judges of the scientific argument, whether it is climate warming or other. It is beyond us. Look at the arguments of those critics who are the deniers, if you wish. They do not deny that it is warming but they deny that it is caused by CO2 to some degree. We, as senators, cannot contest the science. We have to rely upon the community of scientists to see where they are coming from and where the cream rises to the top.
On page 9, you say that 97 per cent of all climate researchers basically support and accept that climate change is caused by human activity. Would everyone agree with that high percentage?
Mr. Weaver: Yes. I do not know a single person in the meteorological, atmospheric or climate science community in Canada who would not agree. I do not know a single person. I know probably three in North America, two of whom would not believe it because of religious reasons.
Senator Massicotte: What is their substantial argument and why is it not relevant? They are making a lot of noise.
Mr. Weaver: It is human nature for us to find voices that we want to hear. This is why we go to websites. When you go to the web to look at the news, some might go to CTV, some might go to CBC, and some might go to The Globe and Mail and some might go to the National Post. They go to the site they are comfortable with. We hear what we want to hear. There is a voice out there — a very receptive voice to this. It is the same voice. Many of the same people argue that second hand smoke does not cause cancer. You will find the same names in that argument. CBC did an episode on that called the Denial Machine about the same names and the same people.
Senator Massicotte: They are seeking attention.
Mr. Peltier: They are upstream swimmers.
Mr. Weaver: In science you make your name by discovering something that is so profoundly different it revolutionizes conventional thinking. That is how DNA was discovered.
It is like a legal defence team that knows they lost their case. They know they are guilty but they want to get a not guilty verdict so they throw out a whole bunch of stuff and hope there is some doubt left.
In testimony last December, somebody said that it was cosmic rays; somebody said it was the sun; and somebody said it is not warming at all. I heard three different statements.
Senator Massicotte: You are referring to the committee hearing we had.
Mr. Weaver: Yes. You get everything. The answer is already decided. The answer is that it is not humans.
Senator Massicotte: Most of us here would say that we are not experts but most would agree there is a problem, so we succumb to you that there must be a problem. We would love it to be not real because society would save billions of dollars. Do not forget: in 2000 most scientists thought we would face a computer glitch, which did not happen.
Mr. Weaver: I work in the area of computer modelling. I have millions and millions of dollars worth of computer hardware. Do you know how much prevention I did for that? Zero.
Senator Massicotte: You were in the minority.
Mr. Weaver: Many people in the computer field did not worry. There is an issue in the way in terms of the way that they were counting time based on integers. Those machines will be long gone before we reach, I believe, 2012.
Senator Massicotte: It simply shows you that we make major mistakes as a society.
Let me go to page 3.3. We recently heard from the chief economist of the International Energy Agency. He said that if governments did everything they said they would do, which frankly they often do not, we would achieve a 3.5 degree Celsius increase in average temperature.
If we continue to go as we are going now, the trajectory we are looking at is more like 5.5 degrees Celsius. I interpreted his comments as saying forget 2 degrees because we are a long way past 2 degrees and we have to deal with reality and start accepting that maybe it will be 3.5 or 4 degrees.
Having said that, explain to me how to read this table on page 3.3. You start with a 3 per cent further warming. Is that 3 per cent more than it is today? Then you go back to 0.9. Let us say we achieve 3.5 or 4 per cent; what does that mean to us?
Mr. Weaver: If we took 3.3 degrees further warming from today, it is a total of about 4 degrees from pre-industrial times. That would be the 4 degrees that you hear. Most are referred to pre-industrial times. In my table, I refer from today. Warming of 4 degrees from pre-industrial times means that between 40 per cent and 70 per cent of world species would become extinct.
Senator Massicotte: In that scenario, 40 per cent to 70 per cent of the world's species would become extinct.
Mr. Weaver: No one is talking about humans being extinct.
Senator Massicotte: That is serious stuff.
Mr. Weaver: Of course it is.
Senator Massicotte: Talk to me about other consequences. I hear Bangladesh would be flooded and millions of people would have to go to other countries. Is that real?
Mr. Weaver: Absolutely — environmental refugees.
When I am asked for reasons for concern, I put them into two broad areas: one is the ecosystems, which are typically not valued in any economic sense; and the other is global security and political instability. What do you do when Lake Chad, which straddles four countries, dries up? Do people quietly die there because there is no more water left or do they get upset and recognize that the problem they are living the consequences of was not created by them? That becomes an issue of political instability. The problem caused by the developed world is compounding itself on the developing world, which do not have the technological or economic ability to deal with it. It is a huge issue.
Senator Massicotte: It is a very serious matter and we, who are trustees of the earth for our kids, are obviously failing.
Mr. Peltier, you said that the problem is that the consequences may be 30 or 40 years away and in the political world we want to deal with today's environment and seek election one or two years from now. Is that the crux of the issue?
Mr. Peltier: It is a very serious fact of political live. This is an extremely serious problem we are facing, but the people who have the ability to make decisions to ameliorate the situation have no strong incentive to do so. It is the tragedy of the commons writ large and in highly political language.
Senator Lang: I want to follow up on what Senator Neufeld asked about with respect to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have done some reading, as I think everyone around this table has, about what has happened over the past number of years with regard to questioning of the validity of the science that is the foundation for what we are talking about today. I am thinking of the misrepresentation of some of the information that was brought through the science community and also the issue about the hockey stick which was proven not to be the case.
Mr. Weaver: That is not true.
Senator Lang: I want to go a little further, if I could.
I think a lot of people around the world are questioning whether the information that is being provided has been peer reviewed. It has been reported that 30 or 40 per cent of the information that has been provided as science has not been properly peer reviewed. I do not know if that is true, but it has been reported. There is also a question of conflict of interest by those involved in the internal workings of the panel. My understanding is that conflict of interest guidelines were brought in to answer that question in 2009 or 2010.
Have the conflict of interest guidelines been accepted and do they apply to everyone who is working on the next panel review?
Mr. Weaver: Absolutely. The conflict of interest guidelines that are in place are just formalizing that which has been around. I would argue they are absurd at some level because people have resigned from editorial boards of journals because of conflict of interest. That makes no sense to me. Who do you want to be writing these documents? You would not want a document on brain chemistry being written by labourers at the local mill. You would want brain surgeons to write it, so why would we have the top climate scientists, who have been running journals, step down from their journals in order to participate because of a potential conflict of interest? This is what is happening. It has become silly in terms of accommodating some of the requests out there.
The whole debate about the hockey stick is perhaps one of the most disingenuous debates in science in the 20th century, because there always was a hockey team. There are 12 reconstructions in the 2001 IPCC report. For whatever reasons, one is picked up as this iconic symbol. You build up the iconic symbol, you attach an issue to the symbol, and then you knock down the symbol and hope the issue goes with it. The exact same thing is happening with the IPCC.
In the 1995 assessment, Ben Santer worked on the first climate change detection. You build that up as a symbol, attach the individual to a symbol, attach global warming to the individual and you try to knock down the individual. You do the same thing with Mike Mann and his hockey stick, conveniently forgetting that there are 12 things showing the same thing. Now you do it with the whole IPCC, because you realize these other arguments do not work. You attach an issue to some symbol and then knock down the symbol and hope the issue goes away.
The statements about the hockey stick are not correct. This quibbling debate is huge in the blogosphere but totally inconsequential in the climate community. This was a paper published by Michael Mann in 1997 or something like that. It is ancient history, yet we are still harping on that. Even in that report there were 12 reconstructions. It is ludicrous.
Mr. Peltier: As an add-on to this, it should be seen and acknowledged as a mistake by those who chose what to put in the summary for policy makers not to make it clear that the actual report did contain this large number of different hockey sticks.
I believe it was an administrative mistake to take Michael Mann's more perfect looking hockey stick and put it in the summary for policy makers. If anything is to be faulted in the hockey stick story, it is that. It should never have been singled out because it was the best looking hockey stick and been promoted to such a position of superiority by appearing alone in the summary for policy makers. It was a big mistake on the part of the IPCC.
Senator Lang: I want to clarify the conflict of interest guidelines that you spoke of in respect of whether they apply to the authors of the next report that is coming out. That is important because there was a question as to whether they apply.
Mr. Weaver: Every author had to fill out a conflict of interest guideline before they could be part of it, yes.
Senator Lang: I want to understand exactly how the organization works and to ensure that it is meeting the guidelines that it says it is, because in some quarters, and in many parts of the scientific community, they say that they have not.
Mr. Weaver: It is also important to note that many countries, particularly the U.S., have undertaken a completely independent assessment process that mirrored the IPCC and have come to the exact same conclusions. The U.S. climate change program under the synthesis and assessment products did a whole lot of these assessments which appeared over the last few years that mirror the IPCC report but were done completely independently and had stringent conflict of interest guidelines even before they started.
Senator Lang: I understand, Dr. Weaver, that you have just completed a study on oil sands greenhouse gas emissions versus those of coal burning in the rest of North America. It is important to get your findings on that on the record.
Mr. Weaver: I suspected that this would be asked and I put the actual table on page 45 of the handout notes. We looked at the relative warming potential of a variety of hydrocarbon reserves and pointed out the total effect they would have on global warming, be it coal, oil, unconventional oil or natural gas.
There was some good reporting of the actual substance of the story, but I got a whole new appreciation for headline writers. Some of the headlines were rather remarkable.
Senator Sibbeston: I come from the Northwest Territories where there is evidence of global warming. We are seeing animals and birds there that we have never seen before.
The greatest change is predicted to be in the middle of the century. What can Inuit peoples look forward to in 30, 40 or 50 years? Up to now, it has always been thought that because of extreme climate and cold winters that there will not be very many southerners going to the Arctic, so the North has been an enclave to the Inuit and native people up in that area.
With the likely excess of warming likely to occur in the middle of the century, do you think the North will change substantially? I have been up in the Arctic area, and it is not an area that has a great deal of soil. It is just gravelly and sandy, so not an area likely to be farmed in the future. What can these people up in the Arctic expect in the next 30, 40 or 50 years?
Mr. Peltier: This is a question as to whether in the North there will be environmental refugees from the south moving on to the landscape. I tried to make the point in my discussion that the warming is significantly exacerbated in the North. If you compare the globally averaged amount of warming to that which will be experienced along the northern coastlines of Canada, the impact is by a factor of two to two and a half; that is, two to two and a half times warming that will occur globally will hit the northern part of this country. That is bound to have an impact on permafrost, and, therefore, on the stability of the built environment, if you like. We are already experiencing large impacts in the northern parts of this country: the impacts on the coastal erosion as consequence of the elimination of land fast ice and the impacts of sea level rise on our Arctic Ocean coastline. Those will be and are already seen to be, as you have noticed, very significant impacts of the global warming process on the North.
There will be positives and there will be negatives. Some see great positives in the opening up of the North for further resource exploitation and the continuing diminution of Arctic sea ice cover.
Senator Wallace: You mentioned lawyers having differing opinions, which they do from time to time, and scientists do as well.
I listened to your presentation. We know your backgrounds. The conclusions that you have arrived at are the result of much detailed work and study. You obviously have not taken the subject lightly. This is your livelihood.
However, we do hear from others that have voiced other opinions on the matter, and as we know, when you arrive at your conclusions, they are based upon the assumptions that you place in your models. There can be differing assumptions and variables, especially when you are looking at climate change over thousands of years, and the beginning of your data is based on that.
I am not asking you whether there is something that would immediately revert your opinion on what you have said here today. However, when I hear your presentation and reflect on what we have heard from others, have you examined thoroughly all of the other hypotheses that have been put forward that would account for climate change, that would differ from your opinion? Do you feel you have analyzed them in the detail that you feel comfortable in saying there is not an element of doubt? I know there is margin of error in any conclusion that any of us arrive at. Have you examined all of the other proposed hypotheses that have been put forward in a way that you are satisfied, or is there more work to be done to consider some of it?
Mr. Peltier: I start by noting my brother is a litigator who works in California, so I know where you are coming from.
Science is a highly competitive environment. I am sure you understand this. There are careers to be made by proving that any particular piece of this argument concerned with the global warming process is wrong. If you imagine that there is not continuous struggle within this community by bona fide scientists, who have an idea, for example, that there is some lynchpin in the global warming argument that could be wrong — if you think that is not happening, you are quite wrong.
These arguments are continuously subjected to detailed tests by all of us who want to make our name.
You have to realize that the scientific community is a highly competitive environment.
Senator Wallace: I understand that.
Mr. Peltier: Yes, any legitimate argument or argument that looks to be legitimate is investigated not by one or two scientists, but by legions of different scientists seeking to prove or disprove the validity of the argument, and this is something that I think is not generally understood in the community of non-scientists as to how the scientific process actually works. It is a highly competitive process in which all ideas are tested because it is in the best interests of any scientist who can prove that something which is generally accepted wisdom is wrong. If that generally accepted wisdom can be demonstrated to be untrue, there are careers to be made.
Senator Wallace: Scientists may use different assumptions in proceeding with the model; that is a fact.
I guess the short of it is we heard from others that have come to other conclusions. You have been very emphatic and, I would say, very dismissive of the work that they have done, but I realize you have done that based on the scientific approach that you have taken, but there is no element of doubt.
Mr. Weaver: Normal scientific analysis of this problem is published in journals like the Journal of Climate and in climate science journals, so I am aware of no research done by the people that you have had testifying on this problem. That is relevant. I am not aware of any.
I have shown you one where the conclusion was a geological conclusion that actually supported it. I would like to show you an example here. I handed this out. I think, again, one has to realize what a model is. In the geological term, a model is often used to say a hypothesis: I see something and I explain it, and I call it a model. In physics, that is not a model. Physics has equations that can make predictions that can be tested.
This is one of the loveliest predictions ever made, and I refer you to this handout in Physics Today, an article written by Ray Pierrehumbert, page 36. He is showing here satellites that have been put in space measuring directly the outgoing infrared radiation, and that is the red here. He has shown in blue the output from the radiative transfer code in a climate model. This was done independently, so the climate model makes the prediction, and the prediction can now be tested because we have infrared detectors up there. The climate model radiative transfer code has carbon dioxide, ozone and other molecules in there that actually trap different bands of radiation. When you look at the red and blue in the figure A, the comparison is truly stunning, which is saying that our radiative transfer codes — and I do not think many people who criticize it know what these radiative transfer codes are — they are so well tested that they produced these remarkable results, which I show here published in a top notch physics journal.
Senator Johnson: I learn something every day when I talk to people like you or when we hear from people like you and the work you are doing. I think we all want the best for our world and our climate. I certainly do, for my kids and grandchildren.
I was hit by your comment, Dr. Weaver, that conventional and unconventional oil is not the problem with global warming. The problem is coal and unconventional natural gas.
Can you put that on the Canadian scene?
Mr. Weaver: I have always said that the oil sands are a symptom of the problem. The problem is our society's addiction to fossil fuels. The oil sands are like the poppy fields in Afghanistan producing the product we require. We can criticize and pass blame on the oil sands and not look at ourselves, but we are demanding that product.
In Canada, as a civilized western society, we should not be allowing coal burning fire plants. There is time when you go to the tragedy of the commons and my metaphor there, where regulation on coal burning fire could be enforced and sooner than later.
There is no reason we cannot put stringent regulations on the unregulated fracking that appears to be going on. Quebec has stepped in and said there is a moratorium until we get this right. There is more regulation that can be done there. There are vast reserves. If we continue to exploit all of them, particularly the unconventional natural gas and even more so coal, we are in trouble.
Regarding oil, there are many environmental issues associated with the tar sands, the oil sands. There is water quality, the rights of the indigenous people, loss of natural habitat, biodiversity and many issues. I am not dismissing those issues and people need to focus on them. However, it is a product that I believe people will need. The thing we should be doing is shaking our heads and wondering why we are burning it. Oil is an extraordinarily valuable product. It is used in everything around us, yet we are taking the pathway of burning the last bit that we are getting in more and more extreme environments as we use the easy stuff up.
Senator Johnson: I hear people talk about clean coal but there is no such thing, right?
Mr. Weaver: Clean coal is the most wonderful oxymoron that I have ever heard.
The Deputy Chair: On that note, I want to thank both Dr. Weaver and Dr. Peltier for intense, outstanding, committed, engaged testimony to us.
I want to thank all the members of the committee for their engagement here. It has been a long process and a long evening, but it has been worthwhile. Thank you for your participation.
Dr. Weaver and Dr. Peltier are being hosted at a reception to which we are all invited, if you wish to attend. It will give the information as to where that is off camera.
Thank you very much. We wish you all the best.
(The committee adjourned.)