Mr. Speaker, it is pretty amazing that the government keeps trying to play these games.
We came back here for a throne speech and in the throne speech the government promised all kinds of weird and wonderful things. We have not seen anything. All we have seen is reintroduced bills. Committees have just been studying old bills. The government has been playing games month after month and now all of a sudden, as we get close to Christmas, it starts introducing things like the Romanow report and Kyoto. What kind of a game is the government playing?
Why would we agree to do things differently for it when in fact it has had nothing on the agenda? It has had to filibuster its own motions and has had to close the House on several occasions because it did not have any speakers here. For the most part quorum could be called here a hundred times a day and there would be no one here. Those are the kinds of games that the government plays. It has its nerve to stand up and do that sort of thing. Canadians are getting pretty sick and tired of that kind of non performance from their government and the kind of dictatorial nonsense that it is trying to impose on us.
Let us get back to talking about Kyoto and the issues. I will wrap up at a point and at that point we will have all kinds of opportunity to hear other members, unless the government is so afraid to hear the facts that it would use something like closure.
I said that there was a lot of data available on what kind of CO
2
levels there were, and so on, in the past. I do not think there is too much point in stressing the sources of many of these. There are many scientific studies and I do not think a lot of parliamentarians or Canadians want to hear about them. Let me summarize some of this work. This work has been collected by the IPCC, which is a United Nations group of 200 different scientists. I will not read this into the record, although some members might like me to. However, I would like to quote little pieces of it.
In the study done from 1000 to 1900, which was the first block the IPCC looked at, it found in that period that there was a trend of lowering temperatures. It got that information from ice cores and samples from the bottom of the ocean. Samples were taken from the mud going down into the earth's core, through glaciers, the rings on trees and so on. That is how all this data was collected.
The scientists found that in the 20th century there has been an increase in temperature. There was a decline and then there was an increase. They also found that there was a period of major cooling between 1400 and 1900. The minister may have even published some of the work in another life. The big threat in the 1970s was that there was an ice age coming. Of course that was another Chicken Little thing. Running across the country talking about that is similar to the Chicken Little that we see now.
There was also a period of time in the 12th century when we had a two to three degree Celsius warming. We have had an ice period, a cooling period, and in the 12th century a major heating. The models show that, and the scientists have developed those models and tried to analyze why that all happened. According to the data the snow line in the Rocky Mountains was about 300 metres higher than it was in 2001.
Everyone says that the ice caps are melting and the mountains are being exposed. That is something that happened once before in the 12th century. Through modelling it can be shown why that happened. Moreover the data seems to indicate that there has been a regular recurrence of episodes like the little ice age and the medieval warm period in roughly 1,500 year climatic cycles over the last 140,000 years.
For our minister to all of a sudden come running through the fence saying that the sky is falling, that we have floods, ice storms and droughts, and that when we sign Kyoto they will all be gone is not the way it works. None of the IPCC models say that. None of the data says that. None of the science says that. Not a scientist would agree with that, yet the minister uses that as his number one prop, that if we do not do this, these are the disasters that will befall all of us.
The next major analysis period was from 1856 to 2100. What is going to happen in that period? The interesting part is that they have broken it down into 40 models. These 40 models, determined by what is put in, determine the predicted outcome. One model says that we will actually have a decrease in temperature of 0.4°C to 0.8°C. Another model, using the same data but forgetting about the cloud factor, shows that we could have a 5°C increase. The models on which the government counts, from those 200 scientists and many other scientists, have a range of reduced temperature or raised temperature. I do not know. I think we should err on the side of caution.
We should get CO
2
levels under control. They are higher than they have been for the last 100 years, but there were periods when they were much higher. Let us err on the side of caution and say that we will deal with climate change, but really what Canadians want us to deal with is pollution.
Pollution is killing people in the Fraser Valley and southern Ontario. Pollution is the big problem in Toronto and why it has 45 smog days. Canadians think that signing Kyoto will fix that problem. Well it is nothing about that. Kyoto is about climate change. I am even saying that we should deal with that.
Here are the questions that the IPCC raises. How much effect does CO
2
have on the temperature? We have this greenhouse gas around the earth. It is made up of 97% water in the form of clouds and water vapour, and 3% is made up of things like CO
2
, ozone, methane and various gases. Kyoto has decided to target one of the major greenhouse gases representing part of that 3% as CO
2
At townhall meetings a lot of people think that carbon monoxide is CO
2
. A lot of people who do not have chemistry or biology backgrounds do not understand that. Carbon monoxide also comes out of cars but that is not what this is targeting. This protocol is targeting CO
2
We have the greenhouses gases around the earth that keep us from getting too cold. The model says it would make a 37°C difference if we did not have the greenhouse gases. The reason that the climate would warm up is because the greenhouse gas sheath becomes too thick.
So the first question is, how much effect does CO
2
have on temperature? The important question is not whether the climate is affected by human CO
2
but by how much. If the effect on the climate of any increased amount of CO
2
in the atmosphere is slight, global warming may not be particularly important. This is sort of like the premiers' endorsement of this whole proposal. These scientists are quite a long way from really endorsing.
Second, they ask, could there be other causes behind the increased temperature? They are asking. They do not know for sure that it is CO
2
. They do say further on that they believe that within 10 years they will have perfected the science to understand global warming much better and will be able to really get the model right and know that they have the answers.
They go on to ask, “Are the greenhouse scenarios reasonable?” They then examine all of them, asking what the consequences are of a possible temperature increase. What are the consequences if the temperature goes up? What about cost curbing? What is it going to cost us to reduce those emissions and how should we choose what to do?
Obviously in Kyoto it was decided that CO
2
is the thing to target. Is it the right thing to target? Obviously the modelers are saying they do not know.
It is important to point out that all of the IPCC's predictions are based on such climatic computer model simulators, and it has found that many of its models are not accurate now. Every year it changes the model and comes up with other answers.
The IPCC basically tells us that its previous models were wrong. Either it will not be warming up as much as previously claimed or something is hiding the warming. The scientists are saying that maybe it was not CO
2
that was causing this global warming.
We are about to embark on a signing of the Kyoto protocol, ratifying it and committing every man, woman and child in this country to a 20% cut in the use of carbon products. We are committing to do that when the scientists are saying that maybe the models this whole thing is based on are not accurate.
I think that maybe going a bit slower and waiting until after Christmas might be a pretty good idea. I do not know that after Christmas the scientists will know if they have it right or not, but I sure as heck know that they do not feel that they have it totally right now.
So what is wrong with a made in Canada program? It would not be held up by problems if the scientists say, “Yes, definitely it is CO
2
and we have to deal with it”. Obviously then Canadians would get behind that, but when they read stuff like this I just cannot believe that they will be as solidly behind it as the government says they will: “...most...modelers still believe that accurate models are a decade away. Moreover, the simplistic models used by the IPCC appear to overestimate” climate change. It is changing every day. At this point, turning to the 40 new IPCC scenarios, the modelers have explicitly abandoned the idea, and if I can repeat that, they have explicitly abandoned the idea of predicting the future and instead they talk about projections and possible futures. As one of the modelling groups fairly honestly points out, the IPCC scenarios are an attempt at computer-aided storytelling.
We are about to embark on this major impact on Canada and we are dealing with something that may not be totally accurate. How can we do that? How can we as politicians in the House in good conscience say that we will be going ahead because of a potentially incorrect model?
How can we do that? How in conscience can we do that to the people of Canada, to our constituents, to the single family mom, to the people on fixed incomes? It is not possible. Even scientists do not agree that we should be doing that, yet the minister cherry-picks these ideas and says they are fact. Again, I really think that Canadians need to ask some serious questions.
I want to come to what I consider a very well written letter from a person who has many questions about Kyoto, who has examined it and has brought in experts to speak about it. These experts have not convinced her that Kyoto is the way to go, much as we look at those models, which would hardly be convincing as I quote various parts.