Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.
My thanks to all three of you, Professors. Is that right? All three of you are certainly doctors. Anyway, thank you very much for coming.
I'd like to go back, revisit with you, and get your advice on two separate matters, the first of which is what appears to have been put to bed.
The pro-science and anti-science factions have been battling each other internationally and domestically in this country for decades. This is the first point to which I'd ask all of you to respond. Isn't it clear that the Kyoto Protocol itself calls for all signatories to invest heavily in the science of climate change, and that the notion of the science being certain or uncertain is in fact a mug's game? Science ought to be seen instead in terms of being complete or incomplete. For average Canadians who are watching, when is science ever complete?
As point number two, can you help both us and Canadians who are watching to understand what the linkage is between the scientific work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the work that has been ongoing on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and particularly the Kyoto Protocol, which sprang forth from the Framework Convention on Climate Change?
I'd like to remind everyone here that it was our government that created the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, in response to our Kyoto obligations. It's headed up by Dr. Gordon McBean and is just a stone's throw from here, on Sparks Street.
Can you help us to understand those two things. Someone opened by saying the debate over the science is dead, but from elected officials, unelected officials, and industry representatives, we're still hearing doubts and aspersions being cast upon the science. In the past, it has come more principally from the oil and gas sector, the energy world. It's less so from there today, but it's still emanating from that sector and other sectors.
So can you help us to understand those two questions: one, the completeness and incompleteness of science; and two, linkage to the IPCC and the Kyoto Protocol.