Environment committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Let me introduce myself. I was for thirty years of my life a public servant. I retired eighteen months ago and have been on the Bureau of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, first for Working Group I, which is on science, and now for

Environment committee  Let me just say a few words about the urgency of addressing climate change. Last year, in preparation for the chairmanship of the G-8, the United Kingdom government organized a conference on dangerous climate change. The reference to “dangerous” is from article 2 of the framewor

Environment committee  I will try, with some trepidation. I am not an economist. The issue, in my view, is climate change. As Dr. Villeneuve said, Kyoto is a first small step. Tackling climate change requires long-term, medium-term, and short-term targets and actions. As Professor Villeneuve mentioned

Environment committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I have a couple of points to help with this discussion. As I said earlier, I was a federal civil servant for a long time. I was actually part of some of the negotiations and policy development. I can remember at least seven years ago having s

Environment committee  Yes, you understood correctly. Being part of the IPCC and in my job in government I've actually worked with and have sat with scientists who have done these calculations and these experiments, and I've rigorously questioned them. In the end, I've been convinced that they're right

Environment committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, members. I was only asked yesterday afternoon if I would come to speak to you, and I am always delighted to do that. It didn't give me very much time to prepare a presentation specifically for you, I'm afraid. At lunchtime today I gave a lectur

Environment committee  Yes. I've almost finished. The IPCC fourth assessment gives a lot of information on what countries can do to reduce emissions. Perhaps most interestingly, it seems that after conservation--which everybody understands because it's the lowest-hanging fruit--looking at making build

Environment committee  Thank you, Andrew. Yes, there are two big scientific unknowns, and Andrew mentioned them. One is the carbon cycle, which will actually tell you how emissions translate into atmospheric concentrations. The other one is how do ice sheets behave? Both of them will have feedbacks o

Environment committee  Let me say something that is somewhat ancillary to that. Canada and Canadian scientists have made remarkable contributions to the IPCC over the twenty years of its existence. We've produced some of the best model results, we've done some of the best process studies, we've colle

Environment committee  As I said, a lot of the impacts are now inevitable, but how we respond will require more information, more knowledge, the sorts of things that we can get through systematic observations and good solid research. I think it's in our national interest to ensure that we've got the sc

Environment committee  Allow me to answer in English. As I understand it, your question is on the role of ozone in the climate system.

Environment committee  We've known the physics for quite a long time. That is simple molecular spectroscopy, but you have to be careful to distinguish between tropospheric ozone, which is at the ground and is associated with smog, and stratospheric ozone, which is much higher up. Ozone itself is a gr

Environment committee  I am waiting for the graphic.

Environment committee  I will try to answer that. The A1, A2, B1, B2 and the like do not refer to models. They refer to IPCC emission scenarios. Some have low emissions. Some have much larger. But the modellers, the Francis Zwiers and Andrew Weavers of the world, will then take those scenarios that ar

Environment committee  Yes, of course. As I've said, there is no silver bullet. There is no one technology that will get you there. You're going to have to use a portfolio of technologies. What I was intimating was a result of the work of a scientist at Princeton, Robert Socolow, who showed quite conv