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Time to listen to all expert opinion on global warming

Canada skips important climate conference



Over the past 20 years, the Government of Canada has spent millions of dollars sending representatives to United Nations climate change conferences. While the rest of us are told to walk, bicycle, and take the bus more to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, hundreds of civil servants have enjoyed tax payer funded flights to exotic locations across the globe to take part in U.N. negotiations to ‘save the climate.’
It makes no difference which party is in power. When the Kyoto Protocol was created in 1997, the Liberal government of Jean Chretien sent no less than 43 representatives to the two week U.N. meeting in Japan. Twelve years later, Conservative Environment Minister Jim Prentice led a Canadian delegation of about 100 federal employees to the U.N. Copenhagen climate change conference. That didn’t even count representatives from the National Research Council, Canadian Space Agency, and the Assembly of First Nations, all of whom tagged along. Current Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq continues this tradition, leading delegations of 24 to the U.N. climate conference in Peru last December and 32 to Poland the year before. At least 50 federal government workers will likely accompany her to Paris for the big U.N. climate meeting in December. With expenses of over $10,000 per participant for the ten day event, meeting costs will easily exceed half a million dollars. Clearly, the sky is the limit when it comes to paying travel expenses for our high flying climate bureaucrats. Unless, that is, the meeting in question disputes the notion that we control the planet’s climate. Despite activists’ assertions that the ‘science is settled,’ debate rages in the science community about the extent to which human activity affects climate. While some scientists think we are a major driver of global warming and that expensive mitigation actions are needed to prevent catastrophe, others believe the effects will be manageable through adaptation measures. Still others, perhaps a majority of experts, maintain that the science is too immature to make meaningful forecasts. An increasing fraction of researchers claim that human-caused warming is small in comparison with the impact of natural phenomena such as changes in the brightness of the Sun. Some scientists even say that our emissions cause cooling.

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All of these points of view must be considered if the government is to make rational policy decisions. It makes no sense to send our delegates only to meetings that support the point of view held dear by the U.N. and David Suzuki. Yet that is precisely what the Canadian government does, completely ignoring, for example, the important series of climate conferences coordinated by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute. Not a single Government of Canada representative attended the Heartland climate conference held on June 11 and 12 in Washington DC. Dubbed the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-10), 350 people assembled to listen to presentations from leading climate science, economics, and policy experts about how global warming and extreme weather concerns have been vastly overblown. Presenters hailed from major universities such as Princeton, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Alabama, and Canada’s University of Victoria. The U.S. Senate, state governments, and prominent international think tanks provided speakers as well and several dozen U.S. state legislators attended as observers. Although official delegates from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic have also taken part in ICCC conferences over the years, no Canadian government representatives are known to have ever shown up. When asked why this is, representatives from Aglukkaq’s office, as well as that of Greg Rickford, the Minister of Natural Resources, would not answer the question. Are they embarrassed that they spend vast sums sending their employees to conferences to hear about climate catastrophe but are afraid to be seen listening to experts who take a different perspective? When the Conservatives were in opposition, Senior Environment Critic Bob Mills told the environment committee, “To just hear one side of an issue is certainly not what I think a committee should do and it's not in good conscience that we can do that.” Mills declared in the House of Commons, "Only through encouraging open-minded investigation into the field do we have any hope of understanding what is really happening.” With $1 billion dollars now being spent every day across the world on climate finance, tens of millions of it by Canadian governments, it’s about time our leaders followed Mills’ advice. The stakes are too high to do anything less.


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Tom Harris -- Bio and Archives

Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition at http://www.icsc-climate.com.


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