Mr. Speaker, I cannot support this motion because the framer has used the old debater's trick of setting up a straw man in order to knock it down.
The motion is predicated on the assumption that because there has been a recent warming trend, that we have entered into a period of global climate change. This is alleged to be due to intensification of the greenhouse effect by increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide due to combustion of fossil fuels. If that sounds convoluted, I guess it is because it is convoluted.
The framer of the motion, the member for Davenport, has inferred that this hypothesis is universally accepted by climatologists. I would hasten to say this is not true. In fact, I believe that the concept of catastrophic global warming has a lot more popularity in the press than it does in scientific journals. We are now confronted with doomsday scenarios. The hon. member for Cumberland-Colchester repeated a few of them.
It reminds me of a quotation from Goethe who said: "The phrases that men are prone to repeat incessantly end by becoming convictions and ossify the organs of intelligence".
Climatic changes have been observed throughout recorded history and they have been a feature of life on earth for millennia. I am not talking about the gross shifts which resulted from continental drift many millions of years ago. I am referring to changes that have recurred throughout the Pleistocene period.
There have been a series of ice ages and some climatologists suggest that we are still living within a warm cycle of one of them. In any event, it is only a few thousand years ago that this site was overlaid by many hundreds of feet of ice.
On a smaller, more humanly comprehensive time scale there is much evidence of climate change within the last couple of thousand years. For example, I have examined ancient mine workings in the deserts of North Africa and Yemen. These mines date from the very early days of the Islamic period. They come complete with very large piles of slag and piles of water-washed tailings which to me is absolute proof positive that there were, within recorded historical time, large numbers of trees and lots of water available in what is now desert. I am not talking about simple desertification of the sort that we have going on in the Sahel today. I am talking about massive climate change. This has been within the last 1,200 or 1,300 years at most.
There have been cold periods too. The Norse settlements of Greenland, which existed between the 11th and 14th centuries, disappeared because of a climate change. The glaciers actually advanced out over the settlements. They lost all contact with the old country and some hundreds of years later when people came back they found some genetic vestiges of them in the Eskimos. It is only in very recent years that they have begun to find their ancient stone and earth works because the glaciers have been receding again.
Less than 300 years ago Europe had what was called the little ice age, when hundreds and thousands of peasants died of exposure or starvation because their crops failed. We had this terrible cooling period.
Cores of ice from Greenland and the Himalayas prove that carbon dioxide levels on earth have varied radically over time. Curiously one peak period of atmospheric carbon dioxide corresponds to the period of the little ice age.
How much time do I have left, Mr. Speaker?