Environment committee  When I was talking about neutral, I meant that in undisturbed forest over a very long time, as trees grow, they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and as they die or burn or otherwise are eliminated, they put that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. So forest fires

Environment committee  I'm not quite sure how one would measure damaging. On the long time scale, it doesn't really matter whether a tree dies and decomposes, or whether it dies a fiery death.

Environment committee  In general terms, anything one does to reduce the net amount of carbon dioxide that's going into the atmosphere reduces the concentration, and therefore reduces the climate change that's associated with it. So, yes, in a general way anything you do to reduce emissions is a benefi

Environment committee  I guess I would just have to reiterate what I said before. In terms of climate science, I think it would be demonstrably true that we play a leadership role and that the climate science that is done in Canada is very highly regarded. That's probably as far as I could go, from a s

Environment committee  It is the case that an undisturbed natural forest does achieve a balance in which the carbon that is taken up by photosynthesis is returned through the mortality of the trees. It's the difference that is relevant to the net budget in the atmosphere.

Environment committee  At least over what we call the Holocene, the warm period since the last ice age, the warming we see now is unprecedented. You would have to go back to previous warm intervals and ask whether this rate of warming was as large then as it is now. Unfortunately, the information we ha

Environment committee  The unequivocal statement is actually that the temperature is increasing. The planet has warmed. That's unequivocal because that's an observational fact. The attribution to human cause is a slightly more complex thing, and that involves the combination of observations we have a

Environment committee  We participate in a bigger community, so the model we developed in Canada is one of roughly 30 or so around the world. There are about 30 centres like ours in other countries that develop and use the kinds of models that we have. One thing we do is compare one to another and ask

Environment committee  My expertise, of course, is in climate science. I can speak to the stature of Canadian climate science internationally, which is very well regarded. We have a very well regarded global climate model. We have a lot of research undertaken in Canada that is published in very high-pr

Environment committee  Perhaps most relevant to that region, which is not far from where I live in Victoria, is sea level rise. Sea level rise is in part directly associated with warming of the ocean. As the climate warms, the ocean takes up a lot of the excess energy that is associated with increasing

Environment committee  It has a direct impact on sea level in that sea level rises. It has a direct impact on other aspects of the ocean ecosystem. One thing that's highlighted in this report is the consequence for corals in the tropics. I realize that is not really an issue for coastal British Columbi

Environment committee  The kind of modelling we do does provide information about emission pathways that would lead to certain temperature consequences and other changes in climate. The pathways that were used in the last IPCC assessment, which was published in 2014, did have a low-emission pathway th

Environment committee  Thank you, Nancy. As they said, I'm a senior research scientist and manager of the Canadian centre for climate modelling and analysis, located in Victoria. I was also elected vice-chair of working group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, in 2015. I'm t

Environment committee  I'm Greg Flato. I'm a senior research scientist in the climate research division under the science and technology branch at Environment and Climate Change Canada.