Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) Committee on Feb. 19th, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Laurie Hawn]

Ladies and gentlemen, we have quorum. I'd like to call the meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 11 of the Legislative Committee on Bill C-30.

We have two witnesses with us today in person and one via teleconference. In person today we have Professor Richard Peltier,

from the Physics Department of the University of Toronto, and Mr. John Stone, Adjunct Professor at Carleton University and member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Welcome to you both.

And from the University of Victoria we have Professor Andrew Weaver, from the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences.

Welcome, all.

We'll start off with the usual for witnesses: we give each witness about 10 minutes and try to keep it to 10 minutes, if we can, so that we get maximum questioning in. We'll go through all three presentations and then we'll open it up to questioning from members of the committee.

We'll start in a little different order than that showing on your agenda. We'll start off with Adjunct Professor John Stone from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor Stone, the floor is yours.

[Prof. John Stone, Member, Adjunct Professor at Carleton University, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman and members of this legislative committee, I'm grateful for the opportunity to appear before you today to share with you some of the main conclusions of the recently completed report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Working Group I on the physical science basis of climate change.

First, I have some general comments.

With this report, the debate on the science of climate change is effectively over. There can no longer be any question that the climate is changing. According to this report, warming of the climate system is now unequivocal. According to the Oxford English Dictionary definition, this implies that the science is now unambiguous.

Furthermore, most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the 1950s is, it is now very likely, due to human activities that have given rise to increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. “Very likely”, in the words of the IPCC, means at least a 90% certainty. Scientific results don't often get as clear as that.

The IPCC report is authoritative and well balanced and reflects peer-reviewed work of thousands of scientists around the world. As an assessment, however, it treats new results with caution and is therefore somewhat conservative.

My own reading of the literature suggests that the climate change is actually speeding up and that the trends are no longer simply linear. In my view, this suggests an urgency to addressing the issue of climate change. There is, indeed, a growing body of literature that suggests that the longer we delay tackling the threat of climate change, the greater will be the risks and the greater will be the potential costs.

Let me talk a little bit about what we have observed, and first about the root cause of the threat; that is, the changes we have made to the composition of the atmosphere mainly by the burning of fossil fuels.

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in 2005 exceeds by far the natural range over the last 650,000 years. That is over some six or seven ice ages. In short, we have taken the atmosphere into unknown territory.

More worrying is that the annual growth rate of carbon dioxide concentration is now larger than it has been since continuous records were begun in about 1960, and that is consistent with the continued growth in emissions. We are clearly far from stabilizing, let alone reversing, the root cause of the problem.

We know from well-established physics that increasing the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will affect the climate, and indeed, that is what has been observed. Eleven of the last twelve years are among the warmest in the instrumental record, roughly since 1850, and the linear trend in warming continues to increase.

Global average temperatures have increased by almost three-quarters of a degree over the past 100 years. We now have evidence that the oceans also have warmed and in fact have taken up almost 80% of the heat added to the climate system, which has resulted in temperature increases down as far as three kilometres. This heat in the oceans will take centuries to work itself through the climate system.

Global average temperatures are now higher than at any time in the last 1,300 years, and projected patterns of warming would continue these recent trends. It is extremely unlikely that observed changes over the past 50 years can be explained without invoking the increases in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

In addition, average Arctic temperatures have increased at twice the global average rate over the last 100 years, and Arctic sea ice extent has declined by almost 3% per decade, with much larger decreases in the summer, and there are signs that these rates of decline are in fact increasing.

More intense and longer droughts have been observed over wider areas since the 1970s. At the same time, the frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased. There is observational evidence for an increase in the most intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic since about 1970. Outside the Tropics, mid-latitude westerly winds—the sorts of winds that hit the west coast in December—have strengthened in both hemispheres since the 1960s. That's what we've observed.

As for the future, over the next two decades, at least, further global temperature increases of 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade are in fact inevitable because of what we've already done to the atmosphere. All scenarios of future emissions project that the warming could in fact be twice as large as that. Best estimates of temperature increases by the end of the century range from 1.8 degrees to 4 degrees Celsius, with a forecast sea level rise from roughly 0.2 to 0.6 metres. In addition, snow cover and sea ice are expected to contract, with the possibility that arctic sea ice will be almost entirely absent in summer. Hence, there will no longer be multi-year ice by the latter half of the century. Weather and climate extremes, including heat waves, droughts, heavy precipitation, and winds will continue to become more severe and frequent.

Recent observations of unexpected acceleration in the flow speeds of out-lake glaciers from Greenland and Antarctica, from the ice sheets there, have led scientists to recalibrate their understanding of glacier physics. Contraction of the Greenland ice sheet is projected to indeed continue to contribute to sea level rise.

Current models suggest that ice mass losses increase faster than gains due to more precipitation if the global average temperatures are greater than 1.9 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. I may note that we're almost halfway there. If sustained for several millennia, the ice sheet would completely disappear, with a sea level rise in the order of seven metres. We haven't seen such sea level rise since the last interglacial period some 125,000 years ago.

To conclude, as I suggested, with this report, the debate on the science of climate change is effectively over. We now have to focus on solutions before it's too late. This will be the subject of the next two IPCC working group reports.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Laurie Hawn]

Thank you very much, Professor Stone.

We'll turn now to Professor Peltier, from the University of Toronto, for ten minutes.

[Prof. Richard Peltier, Department of Physics, University of Toronto]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Members of the committee, John has covered almost every single point that's contained in the Summary for Policymakers of the AR4, and I'm not going to go through the process of repeating them once again.

What I thought I would do is focus on the high latitudes of this hemisphere and the comments the report makes about the situation northern Canada can expect to experience, if not in the next one or two decades, then certainly within the next century.

One of the primary fingerprints of the model predictions and surface observations of the process of global warming is that it is characterized by extremely high amplification at high northern latitudes. I think John has mentioned that we are observing, and models are correctly predicting, a difference by about a factor of two in the increase in mean surface temperature between the globe as a whole and the polar cap.

This has enormous ramifications for our country. For example, two years ago, in the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report, which was precursory to the present AR4, there were detailed analyses performed of expectations about what the coverage of the Arctic Ocean by sea ice is liable to become before the end of this century.

It's very clear that by 2050—perhaps a little later, but about the middle of this century—there will exist for a significant period of time in the Arctic Ocean a continuous seaway. This has enormous implications for Canadian sovereignty. It has become much discussed in the popular press over the past month or so.

But it is just one of the issues we have to face in our most northern regions. We're beginning to observe very significant areas of permafrost degradation, and the ice cover in the Queen Elizabeth Islands and the Canadian archipelago is also experiencing a very significant decline.

I want to point especially to something that is not covered in the AR4, because these are results that have really come into the scientific literature only in the past six months or so. These results have to do with an experiment that is presently flying in space. It's an experiment called the gravity recovery and climate experiment. It's a two-satellite NASA–American–German collaboration that is flying a tandem of satellites over the pole, which are used to measure the time-dependence in the planet's gravitational field. This system has been focused very strongly on Greenland. One thing that has been very clearly established, based upon only four years of GRACE gravity field observations, is that the Greenland ice sheet is beginning to lose mass at an accelerating rate. Over the past four years, the rate of mass loss has increased by about a factor of four. This reinforces the comments in the AR4 to the effect that outlet glaciers on Greenland have begun to speed up.

This is an extremely important fact of the ongoing change in global climate: high-latitude amplification; increasing rates of mass loss in both alpine glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet.

And the report draws attention to a very important piece of observational evidence from the earth's past, specifically to a time in the past about 120,000 years ago, which is the so-called Eemian interglacial. This is the last time in Earth's history when the northern regions of the planet experienced a degree of warmth similar to the present. In fact, during the Eemian interglacial, the temperature within the polar cap was about five degrees warmer than it is at present. Our AR4 projection is that we should hit that increase in temperature in the polar cap again by about the middle of this century.

In the Eemian interglacial, when temperatures in the polar cap reached this level, the Greenland ice sheet was significantly smaller than it is today. And there was a very significant rise in mean sea level associated with that time, somewhere between four and six metres of sea level rise; we think about four metres associated with the loss of Greenland ice and as many as two metres associated with the loss of west Antarctic ice.

The interest here is a consequence of the fact that during the Eemian interglacial era, these changes, this shift in the temperature in the polar cap, took place on a very long time scale. The system moved very slowly into this new state of a relatively large diminution of polar ice. The experiment we're performing today is an experiment that's being performed on a very much shorter time scale. Our system is way out of radiative equilibrium, we call it. It's never been in a state like this before. The changes in greenhouse gas concentrations have occurred so rapidly that heat is being trapped out of radiative equilibrium primarily in the earth's oceans.

What this means in terms of the ability of Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheet to maintain stability is an open question. Our climate models have no skill at all in predicting how ice sheets should respond to this out-of-equilibrium radiative regime. This really reinforces the fact that we are performing an experiment on the planet on which we have no way of predicting the outcome. And it should be a cause of great caution in terms of how we approach this from a policy perspective.

Thank you, Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Laurie Hawn]

Thank you very much, Professor.

We'd like to welcome again Professor Andrew Weaver from the University of Victoria's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences.

Professor Weaver, the floor is yours for about 10 minutes.

[Prof. Andrew Weaver, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.

I'd like to echo what Dr. Peltier said regarding the very wonderful summary that Dr. Stone made about the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.

Let me say I've been involved in the last three IPCC assessments: the second one, which appeared in 1995-96; the third that was published in 2001; and the last one that appeared, at least the Summary for Policymakers, in 2007.

I would rather not be prescriptive as to the type of things the government should do, so I'm going to make myself available for questions on the science.

But I want to raise one small issue that was touched upon by John Stone, and that issue is the commitment to warming that is already in the cards for change that has occurred. If you look at the report, what you'll find is that even if we were to maintain and stabilize emissions immediately--and it's not even emissions, but levels of carbon dioxide immediately--we're still committed to a 0.1-degree-per-decade warming, up to a total of about half a degree warming in the centuries ahead.

Every policy option that's on the table, that is, all of the various scenarios put forward by the various working groups of IPCC, leads us to about a 0.2-degree-per-decade warming over the next couple of decades. The difference between the scenarios lies after that point, so the decisions we make today are really coming to effect on time scales greater than two decades.

We have decisions that lead us to paths where atmospheric carbon dioxide levels can stabilize, or those business-as-usual type scenarios where it doesn't stabilize. The time scale over which this occurs.... And if you ask the question, what levels of carbon dioxide or emissions do we need to get to as a globe, the working number is that if we get below 60% to 90% global emissions reductions, then we will stabilize carbon dioxide levels at greater than the level that is above a two-degree warming, and that's not necessarily an acceptable level.

So the types of targets that people are looking at are the targets greater than 60%, of the order up to 90% by the year 2050, in order to stabilize levels of greenhouse gases at a level that is not deemed to be “dangerous”. That level of dangerous is often defined to be two degrees or so, and the reason why it is defined to be that is because our estimates of when Greenland ice sheets, for example, past the point of no return, are shortly above a two-degree warming, about a 2.5- to three-degree warming.

I'll stop there and be ready for any questions on any aspect.

[The Chair, Conservative, Laurie Hawn]

Thank you, Professor Weaver. That'll give us a bit more time for questions, and we appreciate that.

We will start our questioning with Mr. McGuinty for seven minutes.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

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.

[Prof. Richard Peltier]

I'll try to respond to the first of these questions concerning the completeness of science.

I very strongly agree with you that science is an ongoing enterprise. I commented at the end of my presentation, for example, that we are unable to predict what may be one of the most important impacts of global climate change, namely the stability of the cryosphere. The implication of that is that our scientific understanding is incomplete. We're unable to embody sufficient understanding in our models to make credible predictions.

What we can say on the basis of the AR4—and I don't think I would go further than this, and I don't think my colleague intended to go further than this—is that the science is unequivocal. I think what he meant to say was that it is unequivocal in the sense of the conclusion reached. With a high level of confidence, humankind is responsible for the majority of the warming that has occurred over the past four decades.

I think that's the guts of the comment in the AR4 report, but that doesn't mean the science is over. There is still a great deal that we have to understand if we're able to make credible predictions of very important aspects of the climate system.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

I'd like to hear specifically about the linkage between the IPCC process, the UNFCCC, and the Kyoto Protocol.

[Prof. John Stone]

I'll try to answer that, if I may.

Both are creatures of the United Nations. The IPCC was created by governments in about 1988 in order to provide them with authoritative information assessments on the state of knowledge of the science—and I use that word very broadly—of climate change.

Its first assessment was completed in about 1990, and this coincided with a large intergovernmental meeting in Geneva called the Second World Climate Conference. The results of the IPCC's first assessment were presented there and led to the desire to create a negotiating body. This led to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The second IPCC report was completed in about 1995, and it is probably no exaggeration to suggest that in fact this led and gave a considerable impetus to the completion of the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol.

The third assessment was completed in 2001, and to some extent it's still a little too soon to understand exactly what the implications of that report will be on the UN framework convention process.

Now we've come to the fourth assessment that will be completed this year, in 2007.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Dr. Weaver.

[Prof. Andrew Weaver]

May I add to that? Thank you.

I wouldn't want the impression to be left that there is any political interference in the actual writing of the IPCC documents. In the three assessment reports, which I've been part of, the actual writing was left up to the authors. What must be discussed was not dictated; what was done was a review of the various aspects of the climate system under broad chapter headings. Everything from the beginning to the end of a chapter was up to the authors of the chapter, who are practising scientists in the field.

IPCC does not do research. It assesses existing research, and that's very important to get across. IPCC is not conducting studies; it's not going out and running models. IPCC is like a massive attempt at writing a review article that assesses our current understanding of the science of climate change, which is then passed to policy-makers.

The people doing it are not the policy-makers; they pass the best science available to the policy-makers, so they can make the best policy decisions that they deem should be made.

[The Chair, Conservative, Laurie Hawn]

Thank you, Professor Weaver.

We'll move on to Monsieur Bigras pour sept minutes, s'il vous plaît.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Welcome to the committee, and thank you for the information you've given us. We're read it, but it's always pleasant to hear it in person.

Since we've been studying Bill C-30, we have focused more — and will continue to focus a great deal — on reducing greenhouse gas emissions at source. How can we achieve our Kyoto targets? What technologies can we put into effect? What tax or regulatory instruments should we use to combat climate change?

We talk a lot about reducing emissions at source, but your presentations lead me to talk to you more about adaptation to climate change. Government policy, whether it be that of the current government or that of the previous government, contains no policy on adaptation to climate change.

You spoke about a risk of rising sea levels and impact on populations farther north. What aspects should a policy on adaptation to climate change address? Should the maritime regions be included in such a policy? Should more vulnerable Aboriginal populations located in northern Quebec, where the permafrost will be melting, be given special attention? In a Canadian perspective, what fundamental aspects should a policy on adaptation to climate change include?

[Prof. Andrew Weaver]

I could address some of that, if you wish.

First off, I'm loath as a scientist to discuss which policy options should be taken. We're here as scientists to give you the best available science, so that you can make the best-informed decisions as to a policy.

What is it that the science is saying? The science says, for example, that if we cut emissions of carbon dioxide by 50% globally towards the end of this century and stabilize it, we end up equilibrating at a level with atmospheric carbon dioxide that is four times pre-industrial levels. That's a level that has not been seen since the Jurassic, the Cretaceous, the Triassic, when the dinosaurs roamed. That's not acceptable.

That's one extreme that is not acceptable. Emissions must be cut much more than that and on a time scale of the middle of this century for us to move to a climate that will not have major catastrophic effects on large ecosystems both here and abroad.

The question, then, is what we do. That's up to you. We need to cut emissions. We know what the problem is; the problem is carbon dioxide. We know where it's coming from; it's coming from emissions in the combustion of fossil fuels. It's now up to the engineers, the policy-makers, the economists to put forward the ways by which we can eliminate those carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

[Prof. John Stone]

Thank you very much. Permit me to répondre en anglais.

One of the things the IPCC Working Group I report is saying is that indeed there is inertia in the climate system. We are seeing impacts now and we can expect to see impacts continue for the next two, three, or possibly four decades. What that says is that in fact the history is already written, and therefore we have some obligation to respond to those potential impacts. An adaptation no longer is simply a policy option; in my view, it now becomes a policy imperative.

Having said that, however, I think we have to be careful not to use adaptation as an excuse not to reduce our emissions. We have to understand that the root cause of the problem, as Professor Weaver was saying, is human emissions that are changing the balance of the climate. It is important to recognize that emissions have to be reduced not by 6% but possibly by as much as 60% if we're going to stabilize the concentrations and stabilize the climate at a level that is not dangerous to our livelihoods.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

We agree on that. We have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at source, but that reduction must also be accompanied by a policy on adaptation to climate change.

The Ouranos Consortium in Quebec told us that the impact of climate change can be estimated at $1.5 billion for the St. Lawrence corridor alone. I don't want us to believe that adaptation is a pretext for inaction. It's quite the contrary: we have to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But if we disregard the fact that those emissions will continue to increase despite concrete action, we risk incurring enormous economic costs. There could be an impact on infrastructures in the north and on the Aboriginal populations living there.

What aspects should Canada focus on in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at source and to be able to adapt in future?

[The Chair, Conservative, Laurie Hawn]

Who would you like to see answer in 45 seconds?

[Prof. Richard Peltier]

Forty-five seconds?

Clearly there is a problem here that requires adaptation to the inevitable effects over the next two to three decades. As John and my other colleague have said, there's nothing we can do about this. This is inertia that's built into the system. The differences, however, beyond two to three decades are huge, depending upon the greenhouse gas path we choose to travel.

But there are steps we have to take as well to try to protect ourselves in the short term against the impact we'll undoubtedly feel during these first few decades.

So I agree with you; it's a two-stage process that we have to follow.

[The Chair, Conservative, Laurie Hawn]

Thank you very much.

We'll move on to Mr. Cullen for seven minutes, please.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, Chair, and thanks to the witnesses.

This is a quick question for Dr. Weaver. Having been involved with these reports before and having seen the UN at work, if I can put the term that way, is there not a consensus required with the authors who are present before anything gets printed?

I know there are authors from over 113 countries in this last report. Does this report represent, if there were a spectrum, the more alarmist end of interpretation of the science or the more conservative end of the interpretation?

[Prof. Andrew Weaver]

Thank you for that question.

Yes, in every individual chapter you must have agreement. Some people will make a big deal that there's no such thing as consensus in science, but in fact there is. There's consensus that we're going to use words such as “likely” and “very likely”, which have a probability attached to them. You'll find that when you come to consensus, the extremes are not there. This is a very conservative report.

In fact, people have actually studied the results and the predictions, projections, from the IPCC, since its first report in 1990. They looked at what has actually happened over the last two decades, since IPCC started issuing their projections. You'll find that what happened was within the bounds projected by IPCC, but at the upper end of those bounds.

So you should view the IPCC projections as being very conservative, although not in the political sense. It's conservative in that it's not alarmist; it's very middle of the road and good science by the world's best scientists.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you.

I have a question for Professor Stone. I know that you folks are not here today to debate policy options, but when policy options are discussed, costs are attributed to options on a gradient.

Do you know of any studies in this country that have assessed the costs of mitigation, as Mr. Bigras mentioned, with a one, two, three, or more, just on the sea level rise? Do we know of any research that's been done to figure out how much this costs our economy?

[Prof. John Stone]

Thank you very much.

Generally speaking, it's been very difficult to engage economists in the climate change debate. Some work has been done by several academics in Canada on the costs of reducing emissions and also of responding to the impacts.

The problem for both of them is the baseline. What would happen if you did nothing? That's the challenge that many of them face.

But at the moment, if this is the intent of your question, I'm not aware of any report of the magnitude and extent of the one produced recently by Nicholas Stern.