Madam Speaker, my colleague mentioned science and agriculture. Anyone who lives in the west and has seen for example the way the Athabasca glacier has behaved over the last 100 years knows that the climate is warmer now than it used to be. I do not think anyone denies that.
There is some discussion about what will happen in the future, but there is no discussion about the cause of that heating. The cause is that our atmosphere is different than it was 100 years ago. One change is CO
2
, which is the one that everyone mentions simply because it is easy to measure and has been measured since the 1850s. However there are other greenhouse gases and most of them are poisonous. My colleague mentioned nitrogen oxides and other acid bases.
With respect to farming and the member's experience of science in farming, one of those gases is ground level ozone. Ground level ozone is produced. It is there on smog days. Peterborough, which is a rural area, is the most polluted place in Ontario on smog days. Ground level ozone reduces agricultural production. I regret that my figures are 10 years old because I am sure these figures are much larger now. However ground level ozone, at a conservative estimate, and conservative is not a work I use lightly, costs farmers in Ontario $14 million a year in production. Ground level ozone poisons human beings and slows crop production.
Let us address the changes in atmosphere which are irrefutable. We do not have to debate--