Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I'd like to bid you all good afternoon and thank you for requesting this appearance by the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, which I am representing today.
CMOS is the national society of individuals and organizations dedicated to advancing atmospheric and oceanic sciences and related environmental disciplines. We're the major non-governmental organization serving the interests of meteorologists, climatologists, oceanographers, limnologists, and a whole slew of scientists across the country. We have more than 800 members from research centres, universities, private corporations, and government institutes. Many of the scientists involved in leadership positions within the IPCC review process are members of CMOS.
The Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which is associated with CMOS, will distribute $110 million between now and 2010 in the form of research grants to university researchers in atmospheric and climate sciences. Funding for that foundation runs out in 2010. We would certainly like to see it continue.
As many members know from our previous appearance before this committee, CMOS endorses the IPCC process and its conclusions. We urge all segments of Canadian society to act upon the recommendations that flow from the science revealed by that process.
This bill would seem to be a step in the right direction. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which Canada has ratified, requires nations to act in such a way as to avoid what's called dangerous anthropogenic interference, or DAI, with the climate system, without actually defining what that is. Hence, much of the work of the IPCC has dealt with quantifying the extent of human interference with the climate system and its consequences for local climates, and the impacts of those changes on local ecosystems, both natural and managed. This has refined our knowledge of the likely consequences of human-induced climate change and helped us understand which of those should be considered dangerous.
The IPCC has also refined estimates of the probability of various outcomes, and hence it has improved our understanding of risk, which is defined as probability times outcome. We think that risk analysis should be the basis for all policies dealing with risk.
In 2005 the U.K. hosted an international conference in Exeter on avoiding dangerous climate change. Papers at that conference took us closer towards a definition of dangerous interference, in terms of what is dangerous to whom and by how much. The result was that there's now a long list of outcomes, both global and local, linked to various degrees of warming, which make clear that even the amount of climate change already experienced satisfies the definition of dangerous to at least some people, somewhere, on the globe.
Some of these physical outcomes, such as a shutdown of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation or a collapse of the ice sheets of Antarctica or Greenland, may well have thresholds or tipping points, while others may simply become more and more serious as time goes on. So the judgment of what is dangerous really depends on what you are interested in, who you are, and where you are.
Both the Exeter conference and the recent fourth assessment report of the IPCC provide strong evidence that a global temperature change larger than about two degrees Celsius from pre-industrial values should be avoided in order to avoid what we've called DAI. The science provides a way to link that value with a range of values of CO2 concentration or, equivalently, to link a target value of CO2 concentration with a range of values of temperature change, with probabilities for values within the range. Finally, the science provides a way to link the target value of concentration with the mission targets that must be achieved.
The result is that there's reasonably good agreement that in order not to exceed this two degrees Celsius limit with at least a 50% probability, the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration should not be allowed to exceed about 450 parts per million, except perhaps for a temporary overshoot—but it should be temporary. In order to assure that, global emissions need to be reduced—and the estimates vary from about 40% to 95%—from the levels they were in 1990. Large reductions are certainly required, but there's still a fair amount of uncertainty.
The so-called annex one countries--that is, the developed countries--according to the IPCC, should reduce their emissions by about 80% by 2050 and even further after that.
It's also clear that the sooner emissions are reduced in the short term, the easier the targets will be to achieve. In fact, the price of delay beyond, I would say, 10 or 15 years will be failure because you simply won't be able to reach the target. The target is not easy to reach. It's going to require a number of different measures. There's no one measure that will solve it. A number of new technologies and a number of existing technologies will have to be deployed.
Some will argue that because Canada only contributes about 2% of global emissions right now, it won't make much difference what we do. Why should we feel any great obligation to solve a problem created largely by others? However, on the basis of emissions per capita, Canada is the worst performer in the world, and getting worse with every increase in energy expenditure required to extract bitumen from the Alberta tar sands and upgrade it to synthetic crude oil.
But it's not just our current performance that is bad. In terms of accumulated per capita contribution to the present burden from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the present, Canada ranks just behind the U.S.A., the U.K., and Germany and well ahead of Russia, Japan, and China. So we're already major contributors to the current problem, and if we continue on our current path we'll soon be the worst in the world in terms of accumulated per capita contribution. We're not in a good position to argue that others should solve the problem. We have to do our part.
Thank you very much.