A rchive Date
[ 04-09-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur_london.html
Naive Kyoto stance will hurt Canada
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the London Free Press
September 4, 2002
Now that Prime Minister Jean Chretien has informed the world from the podium of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, that he will seek ratification of the Kyoto Protocol by the Canadian Parliament, Canadians must brace themselves for shocks to their existing and future economic situation, about which they have neither been fully informed nor adequately consulted.
The Kyoto Protocol on climate change of December 1997 was an agreement to set legally binding targets for reduction of greenhouse gas emission by industrialized nations to five per cent below the level of 1990.
This agreement was reached by 160 nations that had ratified the UN Framework on Climate Change, also known as the Rio Convention, at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, or popularly referred to as the Earth Summit, held in Brazil.
The premise of the Rio Convention on climate change was given in the report, Our Common Future, prepared by the UN-based World Commission on Environment and Development. It reads: "The burning of fossil fuels puts into the atmosphere carbon dioxide, which is causing gradual global warming. This 'greenhouse effect' may by early next century have increased average global temperatures enough to shift agricultural production areas, raise sea levels to flood coastal cities and disrupt national economies."
The policy agreed upon at Rio was to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide to the 1990 level by cutting back on emission and that the burden of this reduction would rest primarily on the industrialized nations.
The problem with the Rio Convention and the Kyoto Protocol was their policy proposals were based on the unproven science of climate change. This point was emphasized in a statement by a group of atmospheric scientists, mostly based in the United States, in a statement released ahead of the 1992 Earth Summit. They wrote: "Such policy initiatives derive from highly uncertain scientific theories. They are based on the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action. We do not agree."
Freeman Dyson, a highly respected physicist, in a lecture given in 1990 on the subject of climate change, published later as a chapter in his book From Eros to Gaia, observed, "It is much more comfortable for a scientist to run a computer model in an air-conditioned supercomputer centre rather than to put on winter clothes and try to keep instruments correctly calibrated outside in the mud and rain." These computer simulations are useful and necessary to a point, Dyson noted, but they are "harmful when they become a substitute for real-world observation."
These simulations, according to Dyson, have dominated political discussions of climate change, since "computer results are simpler and easier for politicians to understand than the vagaries of the real world."
In the absence of a scientific consensus, U.S. President George W. Bush indicated in March 2001 that the United States would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol. The Economic Report of the President earlier this year stated, "The uncertainty surrounding the science of climate change suggests that some modesty is in order."
Moreover, the idea that UN bureaucrats can administer successfully as complex and intricate a system as that of the world economy, and additionally that of the global climate based on unproven assumptions, is incredible. How well bureaucrats can administer economy, or protect environment, may be ascertained by the abysmal record of the former Soviet Union.
The politics of Rio and Johannesburg has to be taken, if at all, as a matter of faith, instead of acceptance on the basis of sound theory and proven record of real world observations on climate change.
Chretien, in search for a personal legacy, has swallowed the politics of the Kyoto Protocol, leaving economic costs to be paid by Canadians in higher fuel taxes and lower living standards as the loonie predictably slides downward and the Canadian economy is placed at a disadvantage in relation to that of the United States and Mexico, operating outside of the agreement.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays. Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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