Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to what my colleague had to say. The Canadian Alliance has been casting doubt on the science of climate change. Nobody disputes that it is much warmer now than it was 50 or 100 years ago. The doubt comes when we project forward, as to whether it would continue to get warmer.
There has been an increase in CO
2
which no one denies. There have been increases in particulates in the atmosphere such as nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds such as benzine, toxic metals such as mercury, ground level ozone which is a powerful poisonous greenhouse gas, and various other things.
Those things are in our atmosphere. They are causes, which someone questioned, of climate change. People say not to worry, that the effect is not serious enough yet to project forward. The world population would likely double in the next 30 or 40 years, so we would be up to 12 billion people. People say it might be twice as bad.
However, with the present technology, what if countries like India and China, with roughly a billion people each, come up to our level of consumption? We are not talking about inputs compatible with today's 12 billion people. We are talking of inputs compatible today in 30 or 40 years for 50, 60, or the equivalent of 80 billion people if the technology remains the same. Then the doubts over here about whether human beings are having sufficient effect to change the climate would disappear. I would be grateful for my colleague's comments on that.