Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston for his very thoughtful words and address. He has identified something without putting a label on it, so I want to ask him about the label.
I am not quibbling with the member, because there was a massive amount of greenhouse gases emitted from the fires that occurred in Canada in 2023. The figure I found from NASA was 640 million metric tons. He is right, it outstrips the emission of an industrialized country for a year.
He is quite right that the mountain pine beetle epidemic was brought about by warming winters, which meant that we no longer got the cold snap that stopped the pine beetle. British Columbia lost an area of forest two times the size of Sweden. Ironically, in British Columbia, that led Gordon Campbell, who was pretty much known as a right-wing premier, to develop North America's first carbon price and put a tax on carbon in B.C. at that time. He was trying to get ahead, bend the curve and reduce greenhouse gases.
The name for the thing he is talking about is a “positive feedback loop”. As the climate warms, certain natural processes accelerate. We get drier, hotter conditions that lead to a fuel load in the forest. The insect outbreaks that would normally be knocked back are not. The melting permafrost is the big kicker of a positive feedback loop, with a vast risk of mass amounts of methane reaching the atmosphere.
Does my hon. colleague believe that we should have a proper discussion in this place about the science of the real risks we face in the climate crisis?