Mr. Speaker, I thank the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment for her comments and question.
It is true. I have listened carefully to the Reform Party. I am very wary of people who depend on authority, who depend on the name of a scientist. In general, we have to look at the literature, as the parliamentary secretary has said, weigh it up for what it is worth, where it came from, whether it was peer reviewed.
The peer review process is quite simple. It is when a scientist submits an article to a journal. That article is sent to a range of experts, not just experts who have one opinion, but to a range of experts, and then the paper is returned with comments and is either published or not.
I mentioned three papers of my own. Two of those are refereed and will appear in international journals. The other is not refereed. I think it is important to distinguish between those two.
With regard to my own work, I have worked now for 30 years. I have mainly worked on glaciers and on lake ice. If I can give the example of one of the papers because I deliberately mentioned the fact that these recent papers of ours do not demonstrate global warming. No doubt that in some other house people like the Reform members opposite will use those as examples of the fact that global warming is not occurring, but in the case we looked at, if I can give one example, we studied two glaciers for 30 years. At the end of that time, the glaciers were smaller, but in all honesty, with the methods that we were using and over the time period that we had, we could not demonstrate a trend. It is in fact a trend that we are talking about.
The member opposite was talking about the fluctuations of climate. The climate of the globe continually fluctuates. The discussion today is about whether since the industrial revolution human changes, and I mentioned the very well established increase in carbon dioxide which has now been measured since the middle of the last century, are systematically moving the climate in a particular direction.
If greenhouse warming is true, the climate is going to continue to get warmer and get colder in a natural way, but when it is getting warmer the warming will be reinforced by the artificial changes which are occurring, the greenhouse effect, and when it is getting cooler the cooling will be reduced by the artificial warming which is occurring.
We are not debating whether the climate was going up and down a thousand years ago. We are debating whether since the industrial revolution there have been changes which have significantly affected the way climate varies.
We would not expect climate with the greenhouse effect to simply keep warming and warming and warming. It is going up and down and the greenhouse effect would gradually steer it toward higher temperatures.
I would say one more thing if I might because the member opposite spent some time on this matter. It is not just a matter of statistics and gathering figures and putting trend lines to them. There is also the matter of physics. I have mentioned the changes which have been measured, CO2, nitrous oxides, methane and so on. It is true those gases have increased in the atmosphere.
The physics of that is that interacting with radiation they will warm up the atmosphere. We do not just have to depend on figures and trends. We have to use the science which is available to us in this century to support our opinions. That is in fact what the scientific community is doing at the present time.