Thank you, sir.
As an introduction, I was an assistant deputy minister in Environment Canada for many years. Then I worked as the deputy secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, where I helped establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
I'll be speaking about a few of the major impacts of climate change in Canada and try to drive home the costs of inaction on this issue.
While it has been clearly demonstrated that up to about the mid-1960s, natural factors such as changes in the sun's energy, the earth's orbit, and so on had a significant influence on the rise and fall of the global mean temperature and climate, since 1970 the rapid warming we've seen is almost entirely due to greenhouse gases. It is the only reasonable explanation. The climate changes in the coming decades will also be driven overwhelmingly by increasing greenhouse gases in the world's atmosphere.
It is not just air temperatures that signal the changing climate. With a warmer atmosphere comes warming oceans in the upper layers of the atmosphere. The ocean warming has two unfortunate or even devastating effects.
First, as the water warms, it expands and the sea level rises. The second effect is more intense hurricanes and tropical storms, such as Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Juan, which hit Halifax. Their intensity increases, since the source of their energy is the warmer surface temperatures of the oceans.
How do these changes affect Canada? They do so in many ways, most of which are negative, but not all. Sea level rise has already resulted in increased shore erosion, forced relocation of buildings in the north, in Inuvik, and of roads on Quebec's north shore. Charlottetown and Delta, B.C., are particularly vulnerable to sea level rise, especially when you get a storm.
The changes are also manifest in the declining flow of most rivers in southern Canada where people live, because of increased evaporation, with higher temperatures overwhelming the small changes in precipitation. Most of the rivers and lakes, which we share with the United States, are showing declining flows, and that's increasing the stresses in trying to deal with the sharing of those waters and dealing with water pollution.
The Prairies are being particularly hard hit with the retreat of glaciers, and the headwaters of rivers are rising in the Rocky Mountains—in addition to the increased evaporation.
For example, the flow of the Athabasca River at Fort McMurray, the main source of water for the tar sands projects, has been declining rather steeply and will continue to do so. The tar sands projects use large amounts of water, about 2 to 4.5 litres for every litre of oil produced.
The $125 million estimated investment in the tar sands projects will produce a situation, ten or twelve years from now, when there will not be enough water in the Athabasca River's low flow periods to support both the oil sands needs and the requirements that Alberta has specified for protecting aquatic ecosystems and the people downstream on the river's system.
On the Great Lakes, levels have been falling, with more evaporation in autumn and winter when the lakes are warmer and more ice free. As a result, flows of the Niagara have been declining since 1970, with about a 17% projected loss of hydro power by 2050, both in Ontario and Quebec along the St. Lawrence.
An estimated value of the lost hydro power is somewhere between $350 million and $500 million per year.
Climate-related disaster losses have been on the rise in Canada, with heavier rains causing floods—especially in urban areas—water back-up, intense droughts, and more severe autumn and winter storms, especially in Atlantic Canada.
Forests are increasingly attacked by insects and diseases, such as the mountain pine beetle in B.C. and now in Alberta, and by forest fires. The area burned in Canada has increased in an average year by 800,000 square kilometres since the 1970s, as temperatures rose.
Arctic sea ice is rapidly disappearing, a threat to the way of life of indigenous people and wildlife as well as a challenge to Canadian sovereignty.
Permafrost is melting, particularly up the Mackenzie Valley, and usable winter ice roads are available for a much shorter period than they were twenty, thirty years ago. These will make the proposed Arctic gas pipeline $12 billion investment much more costly and much more difficult to construct safely.
Agriculture is a mixed story. With the longer growing season there are some positives; however, recent research suggests higher nighttime temperatures, and that's a hallmark of climate change; the nighttime temperatures go up more than the daytime temperatures, and higher nighttime temperatures will reduce wheat yields.
Health issues are a serious threat worldwide due to heat stress and the spread of tropical diseases like malaria, dengue fever, and increases in diarrheal diseases. These are currently estimated to be causing 150,000 deaths worldwide per year—this is the climate change component of these—and five million additional illnesses.
I think Quentin Chiotti, if he gets a chance, can tell you a lot more about the health impacts in Canada.
While many of these and other negative impacts can be reduced with suitable measures to adapt, and some of these measures are already under way in some of our larger cities and across Canada—cities are ahead of almost every other level of government, I might say, on this matter—adaptation will be much less costly if the rate of change can be slowed by slowing the input of greenhouse gases into the earth's atmosphere.
This has to be an international enterprise. Canada's climate will be very strongly influenced by the decisions taken in countries like India and China, and even the United States. North Americans currently contribute the most per capita per person in the world, but Canada cannot expect developing countries like India and China to help reduce the greenhouse gas burden if we are not ourselves, if we do not even try to live up to our international commitments under Kyoto and the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Thank you.