Environment committee  Thanks, Andrew. Just to answer your previous question a little bit, one has to look at adaptation and mitigation--emission reductions--as working together. We need them both. Clearly the more successful we are at reducing emissions, the less adaptation we need to do, and the mor

Environment committee  Thank you. Climate change is a global issue. It's a global issue, as Andrew Weaver said, because the CO2 that we emit stays in the atmosphere for a long time. It is well-mixed, and it doesn't matter where it comes from. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a couple of small points. This document, the summary for policy-makers of working group two, which looks at impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, also contains something called the technical summary. In there is a condensation of the anticipated

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Could you allow me just to add a little bit to an answer from the previous question?

Environment committee  It's not my assessment that the public in general is becoming inured to this. Certainly that's not the case in Europe, and certainly not if you go to Africa. In fact, it's quite the opposite. I think science and the scientists have done a marvellous job raising awareness of this

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

Environment committee  This is my own assessment, which is a personal one, and I think I already mentioned it: the lowest hanging fruit is simply energy conservation, that is, making do with less energy. There are many ways in which one can achieve that. We have technologies that we know can reduce fue

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  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  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