AGFO - Standing Committee

Agriculture and Forestry

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37-2 37th Parliament, 2nd Session (September 30, 2002 - November 12, 2003)
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Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry

Issue 12 - Evidence - Friday, February 28, 2003 - Afternoon session

VANCOUVER, Friday, February 28, 2003

The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 1:38 p.m. to examine and report on the impact of climate change on Canada's agriculture, forests and rural communities and the potential adaptation options focusing on primary production, practices, technologies, ecosystems and other related areas.

Senator Donald H. Oliver (Chairman) in the Chair.

[English]

The Chairman: Special guests and witnesses, as you know, this is the resumption of a special study that the Senate Standing Committee on Agriculture and Forestry has been doing now for several months on the effects of climate change on agriculture, forestry and rural communities. We started this week by leaving behind amazing storms in Ottawa and travelling to Regina, where we had a wonderful day and learned a lot. We heard a lot of new evidence on adaptation strategies that they are using, both in forestry and in agriculture, in that province. We then spent a day in Lethbridge, Alberta, and arrived here yesterday. We had some excellent witnesses this morning. Mr. Weaver, perhaps you could introduce your panel and tell us what they will be covering.

Mr. Andrew Weaver, Ph.D., Professor, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria: There are four of us from the University of Victoria. We have been working together on the issues in various aspects of climate change for several years. On my left is Ned Djilali, who works on the issue of technology and mitigation strategies; Steve Lonergan, beside me, works in the area of human dimensions of climate change; and Cornelis van Kooten works in the area of the economics of climate change. I work on the large-scale science of climate change. I will not talk about the local-scale issues of climate, but about the larger scale and some of the misconceptions that I believe are out there. I think it is important to have that grounding because a lot of the small-scale science is not yet ready to make statements.

I will talk about the science and politics of climate change, although I probably have too much material here, because I believe it is important, in any discussions of climate, to set the large-scale framework and also to try to understand what is going on in the media.

I will talk about the media and its role in climate science. I asked if there were any media here but I never got an answer. However, media play an exceptionally important role on the issue of climate and, I would say, an exceptionally important role in confusing everybody about that issue. I will briefly discuss the history of science, the history of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the history of earth's temperature, look quickly at the future, and deal with ``What about Kyoto'' — what Kyoto will do. I will not have time to discuss some of the myths.

This is an article from the front page of The Sun, which is a tabloid in the U.S. ``Oceans Rsising 150 FT.'', shocking maps of ``Will Your City Survive?'' You can imagine going to the supermarket and seeing this. You realize it is a tabloid, so it is probably nonsense, but there are people who actually read those things with some degree of seriousness. However, I put that up because I wanted you to compare it with a page in our Victoria Times Colonist. This was published a couple of years back in the ``Science'' section. The headline is, ``Coastal Flood Feared.'' It says, ``A Rise of Five Metres by Christmas a very Real Possibility.'' We have a so-called ``expert'' here being quoted, and it is making the Sciencesection, so somehow it has a little added credibility, suggesting that 20 or 30 days from November 22, global sea level could raise by five metres. Now, of course this is utter gibberish. There are many reasons why it is nonsense, but the worry is that when articles like this start to appear on pages entitled ``Science'' and the public realizes this is nonsense, they tend to believe that much of the science associated with climate changes is so-called ``junk science,'' which offends those who actually work in the area.

Here is another example from an even more serious piece of literature, Discover magazine. This is quite a reputable magazine published in the U.S., and this article appeared before Christmas. It talks about ``A New Ice Age'' and how global warming might actually lead to that. Many people teach that in their university courses. It starts with a reputable source and then spreads like wildfire to the National Post, which has the headline, ``RUMBLE OF A COMING ICE AGE.'' When that appears in national newspapers, people start thinking, ``Well, what is going on here? Global warming causing an ice age, I do not understand that,'' and they have good reason not to understand it because it is utter nonsense.

Another lovely example, I think my favourite example, of the media and its role in climate science, is again from the Victoria Times Colonist on Sunday, January 14, 2001, with the headline ``Study deflates global warming.'' You can imagine drinking your cappuccino on Sunday morning and saying, ``I knew all those scientists were full of it. They do not know what they are talking about — this is not an issue.'' Nine days later, suddenly we have the headline, ``Global warming severity grows.'' The general public now has the impression that the science of climate change is swinging like a pendulum, from being real to not real, depending on which issue of Nature came out. Of course, this is not what climate science is about. Climate science has a long history going back almost 200 years to Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, French mathematician, who was the first to point out that the earth was warm because of the existence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which allowed incoming solar radiation to pass through them, heat the planet, block the outgoing radiation and re-radiate some of that back. That physics, the essential physics of global warming, goes back to 1824. Over a hundred years ago, Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish Nobel laureate, specifically calculated the role of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas amidst the other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. He went on to make predictions as to what would happen, which turned out to be very close to what did happen over this past century. Therefore, it is not new science. Part of the problem is that when people think about global warming, they are thinking about climate change relative to last year. Right now, anybody working in climate science is getting all sorts of calls from the media saying, ``It is cold in Ontario this year. What is all this nonsense about global warming?'' They are mixing up weather and climate. By its very definition, climate is the statistics of weather. Climate is not what happens today, this month or this year. Climate is the statistics of weather happening over many years. What is happening right now in Canada is a typical response associated with El Niño. That is, you typically have a warm west and a cold northeast.

To people back in 1814, normal climate was one in which the Thames froze over every year and allowed them to hold the annual so-called ``Frost Fair.'' Nobody who was alive in 1814 is alive now, so the definition of ``normal climate'' to the average person does not include the Thames River freezing over. It includes skating on the Rideau one year and not the next, and thinking that that is normal or not normal. They have no sense of the history of climate.

I want to briefly discuss the results from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on which I served the last two times, and will serve again on the next one in 2007. In 1996, a statement was issued that, ``The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.'' This statement is subject to U.N. regulations because it was in the ``Summary for Policy Makers,'' and therefore required word-for-word approval from every member state. There were two countries, of course, that objected and caused a big fuss. Those were Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which at the time were not known for their climate research, but today are known perhaps for other interests that may have some relevance for the issue of climate change. The Kyoto Protocol came about in 1997, and the reason there was so much early fuss is because this was the first time that a U.N. body specifically stated that there is a discernible human influence on global climate. Even though it is a weak statement, it is acknowledging that there is a link between human activities and climate. In 2001, the statement was far stronger and received far less opposition because policy had been made, that is, Kyoto, and since then people have been trying to fight Kyoto, but have moved away from fighting some of what the scientists were saying. In 2001, the statement was, ``There is now new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.''

I will not have time to go over the details of the climate record of the last 400,000 years. I work in this area, which is called ``paleoclimate.'' However, this chart is a record of atmospheric carbon dioxide and atmospheric methane as recorded in Antarctic ice cores over the last 400,000 years. This is measured through the trapped air, ancient air, in the snow that falls year after year and eventually turns to ice in Antarctica. Over the last 400,000 years, climate, and temperature too, has been going in lock step with those levels. When there are high levels of greenhouse gases, it is a warm climate. In the periods of low levels it is a cold climate. The reason goes back to Fourier in 1824, because greenhouse gases allow solar radiation through, but block outgoing long-wave radiation. Within that perspective, of interest is that — this is actually a couple of years old — our current carbon dioxide levels are 370 parts per million, which is higher than at any time over the last 400,000 years, likely higher than at any time over the last 20 million years. The difference between now and then, of course, is that this change has happened over a time scale of decades, or a century, and the earth's system has yet to equilibrate to the levels of greenhouse gases that exist. Climate does not respond and equilibrate right away. It takes centuries to equilibrate to those higher levels of greenhouse gases. This is precisely why Kyoto will have no affect at all on temperatures this century.

In terms of the future, by the year 2100, the scale of the 400,000-year record becomes almost just a noise, because this shows the kind of range to which carbon dioxide is heading over this century, to between 480 and 1,240 parts per million, which has not been seen since the dinosaurs roamed the earth during the Cretaceous, 60 odd million years ago.

The earth's temperature has warmed. There is lots of evidence for that. Perhaps the best evidence is the global surface temperature record as put together by NOAA in this chart, showing the land and ocean, the ocean only, and the land temperature increasing from 1860 to 2001, with the top10 years, counting backwards from today, being 1998, 2002, 2001, 1997, 1995, 1990, et cetera. A couple of years in the 1990s are missing solely because Mount Pinatubo erupted. When volcanoes erupt, they tend to cool the planet for a short time because of the aerosols in the atmosphere.

The warming over this century has tended to be in the winter, as is shown in this diagram. This is the winter. This is fall, spring and summer. It tends to be more over the land relative to the ocean and at high latitudes relative to low latitudes. The regions that experience the most warming are continental interiors. Therefore, with a direct relevance for this particular committee, that is the prairie regions and the North. That is because the ocean acts as a mitigating factor in change. You will know that from coming to Victoria and Vancouver for your meeting, as opposed to having one in Winnipeg, and that is because of the existence of the ocean nearby.

The warming has also been twice as fast at night relative to day over much of the mid-latitudes, and we understand why this has occurred reasonably well.

For the sake of brevity, I will not discuss the issue of validation of models. This is how you try to simulate the past climates, to test that they actually work, and have some confidence in their simulations of future climates. Suffice it to say that you cannot explain the 20th century record of climate change unless you include greenhouse gases as well as — and people do not ignore them — the competing effects of things like changes in solar and volcanic emissions.

IPCC, which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, put together a number of scenarios as to future emissions. When one talks about uncertainty in climate change projections, 50 per cent of that uncertainty resides in assumptions used to estimate future emissions of greenhouse gases. Underlying those assumptions are other assumptions about population growth, energy use, technology paths, et cetera, of which my colleagues will speak more. The other 50 per cent of the uncertainty arises because of what is known as ``model uncertainty'' or uncertainty in the parameterizations of clouds and things like that.

In any event, all of these models that are used around the world have been integrated under a variety of scenarios of future growth in emissions to come up with estimates of global mean temperature change of between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees and sea level rise of between 9 and 88 centimetres this century. In a scientific sense, you can say that there is very little uncertainty in the lower band and great uncertainty in the upper band. It is very unlikely it will be below this, but it is possible it will be above this. However, the best estimate is that it will warm by something in the order of 2 degrees by the year 2100, with a sea level rise of about 30 centimetres. Just as has already happened, that will be amplified at high latitudes because of something known as the snow or ice albedo feedback. When the land surface changes from white to dark, it absorbs more solar radiation and will warm further. It will happen more in the interior of continents relative to the exterior, that is, regions that are distant from the ocean. It will happen most in winter relative to summer, and night relative to day.

I will briefly discuss the effects of Kyoto because it is the only piece of policy that exists on the international level. I say this with all seriousness: The term ``the science of Kyoto'' is an oxymoron. There is no science behind Kyoto. Kyoto is a policy that was made in a scientific void. It used numbers that were arbitrarily negotiated by people in a room. Of course, its importance is that these were the first such numbers ever negotiated and agreed to by the nations around the world. If we look at an increase in global mean temperature over the hundred years in one particular scenario and using one particular model, that would give us 2 degrees warming, which is a best estimate, by the year 2100, and a 50-centimetre sea level rise. Well, it is actually 2.08 and 50 centimetres. Suppose we do nothing. This is the baseline. Suppose everybody actually meets the Kyoto target, including the U.S., everybody who signed on meets it, what happens to that warming? Well, it is 2 degrees and the sea level is 48.5 centimetres. Let's suppose we get Draconian, that beyond Kyoto, we make a further one per cent per year reduction after 2010 through to the end of this century, and that is everybody, not just Canada. Well, now we are at 1.8 degree warming. The reason, of course, is that climate system takes centuries to respond to the levels of greenhouse gases that are already there. Therefore, I like to say in public lectures that we are largely constrained here anyway, in terms of climate policy, and the issue really is one of adaptation and moving to techniques and methods of adaptation to climate change, because it is a reality. Mitigation involves posing the question what level do we finally deem to be acceptable? And let us suppose we deem an acceptable level of climate change to be one in which the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are four times what they were in the pre-industrial era. Now, those levels have not existed for over 60 million years, at least since the dinosaurs roamed. If we do that, this is year 2000 to 2300, eventually those emission levels have to reach about 50 per cent of 1990 levels. That is not just the developed nations. This is China, India, everybody. Global emissions must be reduced to half of 1990 levels in order to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse levels at four times pre-industrial.

We can talk about other climate change if you have questions on it. In terms of Kyoto, you all know that if the Russian Federation comes in, it will meet its targets.

One statement I will leave you with is that in 1987, the Montreal Protocol was signed then modified and came into force around 1990. This is showing the CFC, or chlorofluorocarbon, concentration in the atmosphere as a function of time. It has continued downward. It shows the direct atmospheric response to international policy. That is, instead of going up, it is now coming down. The decay time of these chemicals is in the order of several decades, so it will start to drop much more rapidly in the future. Prior to 1987 and the Montreal Protocol, there was a view that the science of ozone depletion was junk science. The same people who are out there saying climate science is junk science were saying ozone depletion science was junk science, but guess what? By the date of the protocol, people were speaking for the immediate ban of these CFCs. They were suddenly in favour of them. The sceptics went away — why? Because people had patents on the substitutes that now existed for these chemicals. The same thing is going on now with climate, and suddenly all the sceptics have gone away. Why have they gone away? Not because they have changed their minds, but because the issue of Kyoto has been dealt with.

I will finish by saying that climate science is on very firm footing. The statements you have heard from people across Canada, including people like Gordon McBean, are grounded in solid science that has been around for centuries, and it is not something that we are going to solve overnight with one policy like Kyoto. It will require much more extensive policy options in the future.

Mr. Steve Lonergan, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Geography, University of Victoria: Mr. Chairman, as Andrew was speaking, I thought of something we probably should put into your hands, and that is a volume that Andrew and Harold Coward have edited and is going to be published this fall called Climate Change in Canada. Andrew wrote the first introductory chapter and I wrote the second one, and then there are other articles, including one by Cornelis, behind me, on various aspects of climate change in Canada. I think it would be a very useful document for you to have.

The Chairman: We would be very gratified if you could send it to the clerk or the researcher.

Mr. Lonergan: I think we can probably arrange to do that. We thought about it earlier. We should have put it in your hands right away.

I also have a PowerPoint presentation. Like Andrew, my specialty is not in the area of agriculture or forestry specifically, and I explained that to the clerk when I was invited here, but much more broadly, in the context of the human dimensions of global change. I thought I would try to provide you with a similar type of overview and framework, not of the science, as Andrew did, but of the human dimensions to complement that. It is also an extremely broad area that can touch on many issues, but I will try to cover a few of them that I think are important in setting the context for some of the things that you are discussing. Knowing the fallibility of technology, I have provided everybody with the slides that I will be presenting to you. These are just a lot prettier.

There are five topics that I would like to touch on fairly briefly today and they range from ones that you have heard about already, I think, in some detail, that is, some of the socio-economic impacts of climate warming, to a topic that I think is probably the key one to be considering when it comes to human dimensions, and that is issues of vulnerability. What are the most vulnerable regions and states? I will talk a little about policy, again carrying over from what Andrew said about Kyoto. Fourth, I want to touch on something that is very important to me in the context of human dimensions of climate change, and that is social justice issues. These issues are being raised primarily by the developing countries and I think need to be addressed to bring the entire international community into a kind of post-Kyoto agreement. Lastly, I have put together just a few constructive responses.

I can almost sum up my entire talk with a line from the IPCC report in 2001 that goes as follows, ``The impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing countries and the poor persons within all countries and thereby exacerbate inequalities in health status and access to adequate food, clean water and other resources.'' This will be a theme of my discussion of the human dimensions of global change, that the groups and the individuals who feel the impact the most are the poor in all countries, not just in developing countries.

Let me talk a little about the socio-economic impacts. I am going to go out on a limb and probably say something different from what other people who have talked about impacts have told you, and that is, we do not know what the impacts will be. As Andrew discussed, the possible variations in what temperature and precipitation projections show mean we really have little sense of what the impacts will be. A good example of this is the recent Canada Country Study, which, taking one of the general circulation models, the geophysical fluid dynamics model, and applying it to agriculture on the Prairies, showed that the yields in Alberta would decline by seven per cent. Taking a slightly different model, the Goddard Institute model, and applying the same methodology showed that agricultural yields in Alberta would increase by seven per cent. Therefore, when somebody asks what will be the impacts on agriculture or forestry or social systems or skiing in Quebec, I have to say, ``We do not know.'' There is definite uncertainty about the impacts, as there is with some of the science. As you move down the path, the uncertainty, if I can use this term, actually becomes greater. That is the first thing.

The second thing I would like to say is that quite a lot of work has been done on the direct impacts on agriculture on the Prairies and on the Great Lakes. I worked for some considerable time with Stuart Cohen on impacts on the Mackenzie in the North. There has not been a lot of work done on indirect impacts. That is, what will happen down the line? It is a little like talking about the potential U.S. invasion of Iraq and what the indirect and long-term ramifications might be. I think the same is true when we look at the socio-economic impacts of climate change. We do not know what the longer-term impacts or the indirect impacts will be — what is going to happen to global food grain prices; what is going to happen to global oil prices, and so on. My feeling is that the indirect impacts will be greater than the direct impacts. Since we do not know exactly what the direct impacts will be, the indirect impacts are questionable as well.

There has been a lot of discussion and study of impacts, including the increase in so-called ``environmental refugees,'' the impacts on specific communities, on transportation, on buildings and so on. However, as you just heard Andrew mention, it is very difficult to get micro- or even meso-scale data on the changes that will occur in climate and in weather systems. Therefore, it is impossible to translate this into what is going to happen to specific communities. All we can give you is a general sense of what the impacts might be, not what will happen to the community of Wrigley in the Northwest Territories. It is just impossible to say.

We could almost look at the human dimension as a three-legged stool. That is, we have some sense of what the environmental stresses will be under climate warming and other issues such as environmental degradation, poor water quality and so on. We do not have a very good sense of what the normal conditions are. Andrew again talked about the normal climatic conditions 200 years ago. That is not very well understood. We do not have a good sense of what is normal, of what are the baseline conditions, for society. Thirdly, and most importantly, I think, we have no real sense of how resilient and adaptive individuals are. We know that humans and other animals are very resilient to environmental stresses, but we do not know how they would respond to the types of changes that will occur. This is a very productive area of research for most of us, but it is very difficult to say anything about it except in a broad sense.

I already mentioned indirect impacts, and as I said, I think these will be some of the major impacts that will occur as a result of climate change, as we see changes in oil prices and changes in the price of grain. One of the issues that I work on extensively is the effect of climate change on national security and human security. That might sound a little strange, but when you start thinking about changes in permafrost and some of our defence systems in the North and training areas, it will have an impact on some of those issues.

The Chairman: There is another Senate committee that would be very interested in having you appear before them. Senator Day happens to be on that committee and they have been looking across Canada for witnesses to deal with those issues of the effects of climate change on security.

Mr. Lonergan: I actually started about 12 or 15 years ago working for the Department of National Defence in this area, on issues of climate change in the Middle East, which is my specialty area, and how that might affect national security. It is an area that is quite fascinating to me and I would be more than interested in talking about that in more detail.

The second area that I wanted to address is the issue of vulnerability. This is also an area where I think it is crucial, when talking about the human dimensions, to look at what the vulnerable populations and vulnerable systems are. I mentioned three items under this. The first is that we have to think of vulnerability in two ways. One, there is biophysical vulnerability of the systems with which we deal. That includes the forests, agricultural lands and so on. There is also socio-economic vulnerability. I believe it is very important to initially identify vulnerable populations, probably far more important than worrying about these impacts of climate change. The impacts and the changes that will occur are important, but more important is identifying the vulnerable communities, and then we can get a sense of how they will react to those changes.

Vulnerability should not be seen in isolation. A group of us have been talking about double exposure or multiple exposures. It is not just climate change. It is not occurring in a vacuum. It is not just a single stress; in fact there are multiple stressors out there. Globalization is occurring. There are other economic, social and environmental changes. It is important to understand how these relate to one another and that we do not have just a cause and effect. We have a higher temperature so we will have a shorter ski season in Quebec, but indeed we have other types of changes in society that may either exacerbate that negative impact or counteract it. Not enough has been done in this area.

And the third area, about which I will say more later on, is the distribution of impacts, where the negative impacts fall. We have had a very contentious debate over the past few months, prior to the Kyoto ratification here in our own country, about Alberta bearing the brunt of the negative costs associated with meeting our commitments under Kyoto. This distribution of impacts question is true globally and is an important one to consider.

I will try to identify some of the more vulnerable systems and anchor this down a little.

The first, of course, is food-insecure areas that may be negatively impacted by a global shift in agriculture that will probably occur.

Secondly, there will be changes in the global food supply, and I will not project what those changes will be, except to say that they will affect the global output of food. I would also add that when it comes to malnutrition, which is one of the biggest health problems worldwide, the global food supply is not as crucial as issues of poverty.

Thirdly, of course, my work in the Middle East shows that 70 per cent of the water that is consumed in the world is consumed by the agricultural sector. There are very large water projects taking place in the Middle East involving huge surface water reservoirs, such as in Turkey. Egypt is now building a New Nile Valley, or Toshka, Project, to redistribute population into the Western Desert. This is all based on surface irrigation canals. There is almost no consideration of climate change or climate warming in that type of planning, which is extremely important when it comes to the future design of irrigation systems.

I put in a map that was published in one of the policy briefings that I do at the University of Victoria on chronic malnutrition. Take a look at this, because it will indicate a trend in all the maps that I show you about the most vulnerable areas of the world, and I am probably not telling you anything that you do not already know.

Of course, there is going to be a tremendous increase in population in water-scarce regions, and this is the area in which I do most of my work. We know that is the case. We know that the availability of water is going to change with climate warming, but in different ways in different countries. There will be increased runoff in a lot of areas, but that will be more than outweighed by the increased demand for water. One of the most telling things here is that the population in countries under water stress is going to increase quite rapidly over the next 20 years or so, and more so by year 2050.

Marine ecosystems will be affected in terms of the loss of land, storm surges and salination of aquifers, which we are already seeing in a number of regions in the world, including Southeastern United States, the Middle East and so on. Fish-dependent societies will be affected. These are all vulnerable systems, and so they are going to be the most affected by even small changes in climate. Andrew showed maps of where climate change is expected to be the greatest, but that does not mean the impacts will be the greatest in those same areas. It is where the populations are the most vulnerable. There are threats to human health, and I hope you will have somebody come and talk about that because the increase in malaria, dengue fever, in particular, and other infectious diseases are and have been linked to increasing warming of the global climate. Small island states like the Maldives present an issue of their own, since they will be inundated through sea level rise.

The question is who are the most vulnerable, and that has not been answered yet.

One of the things we put together at the University of Victoria is the Index of Human Insecurity, which comprises 16 different indicators made up of economic, social, political and environmental factors. It shows much the same as the Human Development Index that the UNDP puts together, except for the poorest countries. These countries are very insecure, much more so than the Human Development Index shows.

On the policy environment, Andrew talked a little about Kyoto. I think there are a number of issues there that obviously affect human systems and are very important to the human dimensions of climate change. I will not talk too much about those. The CDM, or Clean Development Mechanism, relates to some of the things I think Mr. Djilali will talk about in a few minutes in terms of technology.

The fourth issue I want to talk about is social justice. Now, Kyoto and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change have explicitly recognized the need for equity in the consideration of policies related to climate warming. In fact, the Clean Development Mechanism has two objectives. One is to reduce the global emissions of carbon dioxide, and the second is to explicitly promote sustainable development in the south. Of course, a keystone of sustainable development is equity. The one thing that I like about Kyoto probably more than anything else is that it is an explicit recognition of the fact that we as Canadians care about future generations. We do not have many long-term policies about which we can say that, and that is one of the main reasons that I was very supportive of Kyoto. There is no question that the policies we are developing are important steps towards meeting intergenerational equity issues. However, there are other equity issues that are very important for developing countries in particular, and I raised four or five of them. Who bears responsibility for the problem? Well, it is pretty clear that it is the developed countries. Five countries alone are responsible for 50 per cent of the CO2 emissions in the last 50 years.

Then there is the distribution of impacts associated with the problem. As I have said, the most vulnerable regions and peoples are those primarily in poor countries.

The ability to pay to mitigate or adapt to climate change is much greater in the north, in countries like Canada, than in Angola and Nigeria.

Fourthly, what are the opportunities or options available to make changes? This is an interesting one. Countries like China and India have tremendous opportunities to reduce greenhouse gases because of their inefficient industrial and transportation systems, and Kyoto actually embodies that.

The last issue, which has come up on occasion, is the distribution of benefits from an agreement. There is some feeling on the part of developed countries that since developing countries are going to benefit more from Kyoto, they should be putting in more than they are and buying into the agreement. That is an interesting argument.

The last issue I want to touch on under equity is should there be an equal per-capita quota on CO2 emissions internationally. Developing countries are raising this one. Should you and I and every person in the world be allocated an equal amount of CO2 emissions, and should we move towards that in our policies over the next 50 or 60 years? That is through an equity policy that we call ``contraction.'' We would contract our own emissions, developing countries could increase their emissions, and eventually they would converge at a particular point. That is a contraction- conversion equity issue, and one of the main ones that I think will be discussed in the next few years when it comes to developing countries buying into the Kyoto agreement or post-Kyoto agreements.

I will finish with a few recommendations I put together, rather at the last moment. One I have already told you about. We need to spend more time identifying vulnerable societies. I have done a little of that and showed you some examples. Of course, we can do that nationally, by looking at vulnerable agricultural regions, for example, and internationally, by looking at the ability to cope. I am involved in a large project in West Africa looking at the coping mechanisms that have been used by communities to deal with extreme variations in climate over the past 30 years. It is rather interesting to then use those to develop policy.

The second is to expand the programs on poverty reduction, which will have a direct impact on a number of the human dimension factors I have mentioned today.

Expand technology choices and technology transfer to developing countries. That is an issue that Mr. Djilali will deal with very shortly.

Strengthen the local institutions, which is probably the best way to decrease vulnerability.

Lastly, transfer knowledge. Many of the African negotiators with whom I deal are doing a lot of capacity building in the area of negotiations. They all know how to negotiate very well. The trouble is they do not have the knowledge base on which to negotiate, and this has been one of the problems. There needs to be much more knowledge transfer in this area, as well information on how to negotiate.

I will end with this photomontage that I particularly like. I am sorry if I went over my time.

The Chairman: No, you did not go over your time at all and it was a very useful presentation.

When it comes time for questions, I will have one for you. We are a parliamentary committee, and one of the things that parliamentary committees do is hear evidence, listen to witnesses, do some studying and as a result, come up with new, innovative public policies. One of the key things you said repeatedly in your presentation is, ``We do not know what the impacts will be. Therefore, we cannot do this; we do not know this.'' Since we are a group interested in developing and recommending new public policies, my first question to you will be, in view of the fact that we do know what the effects will be, please give us some guidance on the kinds of things that we might usefully recommend.

Mr. Ned Djilali, Director, Institute for Integrated Energy Systems, University of Victoria: Mr. Chair, thank you for inviting us to provide some outlook and perspective on these complex issues.

I am with the Institute for Integrated Energy Systems, and one of the things we promote and in which we believe very strongly is that in order to develop effective, technologically based solutions for clean energy and greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, you have to adopt an integrated approach that considers all the elements, both from a technical and an economic viewpoint. For example, it is recognized now that in order to assess the impact of a particular transportation technology, you have to do what is referred to as a wheel-to-well analysis that considers everything that is upstream. You do not consider just the tailpipe emissions from a car. You consider also what has been emitted by transporting the fuel to the car, what was emitted by producing the fuel, by extracting it. It is only by taking this global perspective that you can truly assess the impact on greenhouse gas mitigation, efficiency gains and so on. We also develop new, clean energy technology that has great potential for penetrating the marketplace.

I would like to provide you with an overview on a few issues and I will start by talking about energy sources. I will then go on to provide you with a fairly unconventional view of the architecture of the energy system because it is important to understand how things connect across the spectrum. Then we will talk about the framework for introducing successful new technologies in the energy system. Finally, I will discuss a little of what many of us see as the emerging energy system for the future that is likely to have a huge impact on our efficiencies and emissions and lead to sustained, long-term greenhouse gas mitigation in the 21st century. That is, the emergence of the hydrogen economy.

It is instructive to first examine where our fuels come from, since fuel sources are intimately linked to energy systems. If we examine the sources of fuel for energy over the last couple of centuries and those that come from fossil fuels, we see that back in the 1700s, wood was the primary source. As the Industrial Revolution started first in England and then spread everywhere else in Europe and around the world, there was a shift from wood as a primary source of energy to coal. At the turn of the century, coal was gradually displaced by oil, which became the dominant source of energy throughout most of the century. Over the last 15, 20 years, we have seen the emergence of natural gas. In fact, in Canada, natural gas has now overtaken oil as a primary fossil fuel source. Therefore, there is not only a shift from solid to gaseous fuels, but there is an underlying trend that is much more important and much more significant for us around the table considering greenhouse gas emissions, and that is the shift from high carbon content to low carbon content fuels. This shift is a key to sustainable, long-term solutions and is what we refer to as ``decarbonization'' of the energy system.

In examining the various chemical compounds associated with these fuels, coal has a ratio of the number of carbon atoms to hydrogen atoms of 2, or hydrogen to carbon of 0.5. The key element in decarbonization is to reduce the number of carbon atoms in any fuel and increase the number of hydrogen atoms. It is interesting to see that in fact our society has been naturally evolving in that direction. When you go from coal to methane, you go from a ratio of 0.5 to 4, and that is the type of evolution that we want to see. There are far fewer emissions associated with methane, at least when it is combusted, than with carbon.

The ultimate evolution is to go to pure hydrogen, and we have to keep that on our horizon. With hydrogen as a fuel, there is the potential emergence of this so-called hydrogen economy, which would see, currently and into the next 50 years, the gradual displacement of fossil fuels by hydrogen, a fuel that has zero emissions associated with it.

When we examine direct CO2 emissions in Canada, this data from Natural Resources Canada gives a breakdown according to the major economic sectors in our society. We see that by far the main culprits are the industrial and transportation sectors. In fact, a good deal of what is emitted in the industrial sector feeds into secondary emissions that are associated with agriculture, transportation and residential use. If you take into account the processing of fuels, for instance, transportation accounts for over a third of emissions because fuel has to be extracted and processed. In Canada, for example, one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters are the tar sands in Alberta because of processing of the bitumen, which requires some very intensive energy usage.

The Chairman: That was a 1997 slide. Do you have anything more current?

Mr. Djilali: I do not have any data that is more current.

The Chairman: That showed agriculture, for instance, at three per cent. Has that remained constant?

Mr. Djilali: Agriculture is currently more or less at the same level; however, it is anticipated that with the kinds of measures that have been proposed, and if we stay on track, the agricultural sector, because it has not been addressed properly, will probably account for a greater percentage of the overall emissions 20 years down the road. The projections that I have seen from NRCan show values of up to 8 to 10 per cent potentially coming from the agricultural sector, if it is isolated.

The climate change plan proposed by the federal government recently contains a number of measures. These are broken down on this slide into measures that are currently being implemented, in the first four or five bullets, and measures that are anticipated to be implemented over the next half-dozen years or so. With these total measures, we see a potential reduction, in the transportation sector, of only 20 per cent or so, which is woefully inadequate considering that the demand for transportation is going to increase and that it accounts for over a third of the sector.

To have a significant impact on energy systems and greenhouse gas emissions, we need much more radical measures than the ones that have been currently undertaken. Most of the approaches are essentially transitional incremental improvements to existing technologies. Combine that with, as has been discussed, the rather low levels of reductions associated with the Kyoto accord, itself. That is the key message.

In order to introduce radical measures and radical approaches, it is useful to have a different perspective of our energy system and how it is structured. We often think that people care about energy as such. That is not the case. For example, farmers do not care about the electricity or the oil supply as such, but about whether they will be able to drive their tractors, whether they will have enough heat for their homes, whether they will have the proper supply of fertilizers and these type of issues. These are what I call ``energy services.'' As long as you can supply these energy services, which are at the core of society's requirements, then you do not typically worry too much about where the energy comes from. This illustrates the type of services that we commonly expect in a modern society. Transportation, illumination, food and clean water — these are the things that ultimately people want. These things are at the core of the economic prosperity of most of the Western countries, and the quality of life. Most people, if they have illumination, do not really worry whether the power that comes by flicking the switch is from a coal-fired, nuclear or hydroelectric power plant. In fact, there is a mix of these. The key is that we supply them with these things.

In order to obtain these services, we have developed a host of technologies. I show services and transformer technologies here. The telephone serves for communication, methane is an energy currency, and we have a number of means of producing that power. All of this comes from sources. We have services, which are what people want. We have the currencies and the service technologies; this is what energy system developers have created, and we have the sources that nature provides. We should try to disassociate ourselves from the enslavement of sources to services we currently have.

To provide you with a few specific examples, let us look at a couple of energy services that might be required by, for example, the typical prairie farmer. In order to harvest, you need a combine. Typically, this combine will use diesel fuel, which will come via a process of drilling and refining, and the source is, of course, an oil field.

I have chosen to illustrate the production of potable water because one of the looming issues that is intimately associated with energy and will raise its head within this century is water. There are signs all around the world that there is lack of water of sufficient quality. Purification and treatment of water is a highly energy-intensive process, and our ability to provide that is linked to energy systems. There are a number of ways to provide the power for a water treatment plant. You can provide it via diesel fuels or electricity. I am showing you next a couple of different paths. I have highlighted in orange the fact that the process of harvesting has currently only one possible source of energy, and that is crude oil. It is an energy system that is very difficult to wean from fossil fuels, from greenhouse gas-emitting technology. On the other hand, we have a number of possible paths for potable water. I have highlighted here the fossil fuel paths, one through the diesel fuels, the other one through electricity and the generating power plant that uses coal or natural gas as its primary source. There is, however, a second, greener path, which is to obtain that electricity via renewable energy, either wind turbines, hydro, or generating stations fed from geothermal or nuclear power. There are different paths. This highlights something very important, in that there is a sector of energy systems, the stationary sector, where we have means of introducing green, zero-emission technology. We do not have that means currently with the mobile sector, and there are a number of structural reasons for that.

To summarize, we have these two sectors. Currently, the stationary sector is primarily fed via the grid. The grid draws its power from a variety of sources, some renewable, some non-zero emission and some non-renewable, depending on where you are. There is a trickle of renewable energies into this main power grid. Parallel to that, we have a broad sector of mobile technologies, including transportation, which is segregated from this main grid and totally enslaved to fossil fuels and energy.

Where do we go from here? The emerging energy system is a one where we would be able to mix and match, creating a hybrid system that can draw on the powers of nature and to which we can transfer renewable and nuclear energy, as well as a host of other energies, into the transportation sector. For example, power generation is a very cyclical system. You boost up your power generating stations to 100 per cent capacity during peak demand and operate them at 60 or 70 per cent during off-peak times. In order to meet peak demand, you need to build more power generating stations, and there is a lot of spare power available. One way of dealing with this is to link the grid to renewable sources. Renewables, which are not always available to us because of the transient nature of the sun or the winds or the tides, feed any extra power into hydrogen production. That extra hydrogen can be either stored or fed into fuel-cell energy transformation technology, and you would then have a path for using renewable energy systems in a stable manner within the overall energy system. You could transfer renewable, zero-emission energies into the mobile sector, and have a means of blending your technologies in the best possible manner, given local conditions.

The key thing here is the move to hydrogen technology, and the technologies that enable us to do that are primarily hydrogen production, hydrogen storage and fuel-cell technology. In addition, you can still feed natural gas, for example, into a transmission system.

How do we get there? A number of technologies are required in order for us to make the transition to the hydrogen energy system. These are, essentially, the technology to harness natural, non-emitting energy such as wind turbines, micro-power and nuclear power. The technologies are to produce hydrogen reformers and electrolysis. The technology is to store it and to transform it. I would like to emphasize that all of these technologies exist and have been demonstrated to work, often very well. There are challenges associated with them, primarily of an economic nature, economies of scale. The other point I would like to emphasize is that Canada is a world leader in many of these technologies, so we have the expertise and the resources. The key issues in terms of successful introduction are cost and infrastructure.

A number of initiatives are being undertaken around the world. We are not the only ones who have recognized that this is the only feasible path currently for systematic, radical reductions in emissions. These initiatives exist California, which, of course, has been a leader in this field. The Europeans have greatly enhanced their investment in this sector, as has Japan. The UNDP, for example, has launched a program to introduce fuel-cell technology in developing countries around the world, so there is much going on.

It is said that the Kyoto accord is a giant baby step. It might not be sufficient, but it is symbolic of the will, the political will, to do something. The political will, the techno-economic opportunities of hydrogen and fuel cells and the know-how that we have can be translated into huge environmental and economic opportunities for this country. Something needs to be done to grasp that opportunity and aggressively pursue it.

In closing, I would like to convey that we are at the beginning of nothing short of a revolution in terms of our energy system, and to best illustrate this, let's examine one energy service, transportation, and its evolution through time.

It is perhaps unconventional to think of hay as a fuel, but that is what it was for people who used a horse and buggy back in the 1700s. Gradually, as we moved into the Industrial Revolution, coal replaced hay, and the mechanization of transportation began with the steam locomotive. The ultimate source of hay was sunlight. Steam was generated from coal, which was extracted from coalfields. We move to the 20th century with automobiles and gasoline, which is extracted from crude oil. Now we can see a hydrogen economy emerging. The key thing about the hydrogen economy is that you have liberated yourself from a single source. Hydrogen is a good solution because it offers a variety of possibilities. You can extract hydrogen though a process known as ``steam methane reforming'' from natural gas. You can extract it from a variety of natural, renewable resources, and you can adapt the solution or the pathway to your local circumstances, whether you are in Alberta or Thailand or Africa.

The three points I would like you to retain: Successful, radical mitigation will require a move to total decarbonization of our energy system. This is best achieved currently, as far as we know, with a move to a hydrogen- based system because it is flexible, adaptable, and not a one-solution-fits-all strategy. You can adapt it to the local circumstances. Finally, this system would liberate us completely from enslavement to one source only.

The Chairman: Thank you very much for an innovative and different approach from what we have had before. When I get a chance to ask you a question, I will ask about some of the downsides of moving to an all-hydrogen economy.

I would like to advise those here that we have in our audience today Professor Greg McKinnon, from C-CAIRN Forestry. He appeared before us when we were in Alberta, and we are very happy that he is continuing to show his interest in our deliberations. Welcome.

Mr. G. Cornelis van Kooten, Professor, Department of Economics, University of Victoria: Thank you very much for inviting me. I should point out that I am probably not just the only economist that you will hear from, at least for now, but I am also likely the most experienced in terms of my work in agriculture and forestry. I started my career at the University of Saskatchewan, where I spent eight years studying soil conservation, summerfallow rotations, and farm management more broadly. I subsequently went to the University of British Columbia, where I spent some 10 to 12 years in the Department of Agricultural Economics. I held a joint appointment there with the Faculty of Forestry, where I also worked in forest economics. I have been doing climate change work since about 1985, when we had a team of soil scientists, meteorologists, climate scientists, economists and a variety of other people from the Saskatchewan Research Council, the University of Manitoba, PFRA and the University of Calgary. Unfortunately, for some reason or another, in about the mid 1980s, Canada decided to get out of studying climate change and did not get back into it until the early 1990s.

I want to talk today about the basic economic issues related to carbon sinks. First, I have one slide on the Kyoto Protocol. Then I want to talk briefly about what we economists call ``governance structures.'' I want to turn to Canada's implementation plan, on which I have done some calculations. I bring that up here because it relies heavily on terrestrial carbon sinks, forest and agricultural sinks. I want to talk in particular about the use of terrestrial carbon sinks and its costs. I do not have any slides on adaptation, but I will talk about that briefly. I think you have before you quite a long document of 80-plus pages. As you can see, it is still a work in progress, and we keep adding to it. I will finish with some brief conclusions.

On the Kyoto Protocol, Mr. Weaver has pointed it out that it fails to address climate change, even if fully implemented. The degree of warming that is prevented is really marginal, and as a result, there are no real economic benefits. What is interesting about the Kyoto Protocol is that it places great reliance on these, what I will call ephemeral or short-lived terrestrial carbon sinks. You will notice that, having done a lot of study on terrestrial carbon sinks, I have come to the conclusion that they are not the way to go, that they are a waste of time.

There is also a lot of talk in the protocol about relying on international emissions trading. Currently, there is no such thing, and I do not think it can ever exist except among the developed countries. It would be very difficult to bring in many countries for the simple reason that the institutions to permit international emissions trading do not exist there. I want to talk briefly about emissions trading because somehow, you have to fit into it these carbon offsets that come with the sinks.

I also want to point out that the majority of ratifiers, including Canada, but also Japan, will fail to meet their obligations. Some of the European countries will also fail to meet their obligations. The reason is that there is no effective penalty for failing to meet your obligations under Kyoto.

Turning now to governance structures, this is the way in which economists would bring about these things. The thing we want to avoid is what we call ``command and control,'' or, simply, regulation. This is where the government says to every company or every economic actor, ``You shall do this,'' and they have to meet those regulations or they are subject to some kind of a penalty. The second point concerns common values and norms, which would include voluntary measures and moral suasion. Finally, and the one economists love, of course, is market mechanisms, that is, the carbon taxes and emissions trading.

I have a diagram here that shows you the downward-sloping curve, what we call a demand curve, or the marginal benefit, if you like, of emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. On the vertical axis, we have dollars, prices, costs and that kind of thing. These numbers here are for Canada. Canada is expected to have 811 megatons of carbon dioxide emissions. We have to be careful here because I will switch back and forth. Here we are talking about C02, but sometimes I present figures in terms of dollars per ton of carbon, and there is a relationship between the two. You would have to multiply by a factor of 44 divided by 12 to convert from CO2 to carbon, and vice versa. Canada's target, and I will show that a little later on, is 571. The difference is that famous number, 240 megatons of carbon dioxide per year. If you do this through regulations, you set 571 as your target and force companies and individuals to meet that, one way or another, through the use of penalties. The other alternative is to either set the price through a carbon tax or set a quantity at 571 through emissions. Therefore, you allocate emissions to the order of 571 megatons of CO2. The problem is, if you set the quantity, you are not 100 per cent sure — although in this diagram it looks as if you are — that you will meet that price because of uncertainty. If you set the price, you are not 100 per cent sure you are going to hit the target of 571. There is a cost to society in missing either the target or the price. In other words, if you set the target at 517 and your cost is much higher than you thought, there is a cost to that, but there is also a cost if you set the tax and end up being way off target. Either one can create problems. The question is what is the better thing to do? Economists have come down on the tax in this particular case. With SO2 emissions, it turns out it is better to use a quantity restriction. In other words, issue emission permits. However, in the case of CO2, it is the opposite.

Let us quickly review these. Command and control, as I mentioned, means setting the level of permitted emissions. It turns out to be most inefficient because you are forcing an industry or a company to reduce emissions by, say, 10 per cent and you do not take advantage of the fact that there are other companies that can reduce emissions by, say, 25 per cent for the same cost. It would be more efficient to have the company that can reduce emissions quite easily do so, as opposed to the company that will have a lot of trouble. That is true not just in companies, but industries as well.

An example of common values and norms is the government's implementation plan that calls for a one-ton of CO2 emissions reduction per person. I do not think anybody really knows what that means. Because it represents about 20 per cent, or one-fifth, of what average Canadians emit, I have heard people say, ``Well, do not drive your car for one day a week.'' Yes, but there is a lot more to it than that. It means also turning down the thermostat in your house and so on. I was at a conference the other day that the leading economist from Japan attended, and he noted that despite the fact that they were in a recession, and had been for 10 years, emissions per person had been increasing in Japan.

Further, voluntary initiatives are a very dubious way of achieving emissions reduction. We did a study a number of years ago of Canadian firms participating in or knowledgeable about the Voluntary Climate Registry. We found that firms in general, even firms that had signed up, were not about to meet the Kyoto target. Firms that were not signed up expected that, even with the kind of incentives that are in place in the implementation plan, emissions would rise some 2 per cent. The federal government is relying quite heavily — and I will show a slide a little later on subsidies to aid compliance — on these voluntary initiatives by industry, individuals and communities. It is interesting that the Central Planning Bureau of the Netherlands, in comparing the performance of the German and Dutch economies a number of years ago, pointed out that common values and norms would work well in a homogenous society such as the Netherlands, but not in a heterogeneous society like Germany. There, they said, they had to rely more on market instruments, to which I will turn now.

Economists have also, as I mentioned, come down on the side of carbon taxes rather than emission permit trading. There are a number of reasons for that. One is that in this case, it turns out that carbon taxes are cheaper. They could be substantially cheaper than emissions trading. The advantage of taxes is that you get what is called the ``double dividend.'' This is where you keep your tax revenue the same and you recycle the revenue from carbon taxes into a reduction in income taxes, thereby reducing distortions elsewhere in the economy. Now, you can achieve some recycling if you auction off permits rather than grandfathering them. If you grandfather the permits, the government receives no income and there is no recycling, so there is no double dividend there. If you go back to that diagram, there is that box that constitutes what we call a ``rent,'' and the question is who collects that rent, the government or the firms or somebody else?

Even though we talk a lot about emissions trading, carbon taxes are still the best way to go. They have a big advantage when it comes to carbon offsets. When you are creating terrestrial carbon sinks, you are better off with carbon taxes than with something else. If you use emissions trading, for example, you have to set not just your emissions level, but also a level on carbon offsets. If there is a difference between the marginal costs of the two, you could create a gap between the carbon offset price and the emissions price. That leads to rents, and then it becomes a question of how do you distribute those rents and who collects them.

If we take a look at Canada's implementation plan, you will see here that the targeted reduction is 240 megatons of CO2 equivalent, and I have converted that here to 65.45 megatons of carbon. Canada had the highest increase in emissions between 1990 and 2000 of any of the industrial countries. The Japanese have asked me why Canada has ratified. Japan was questioning whether or not it should ratify Kyoto because the only other countries whose emissions have gone up are the U.S. and Australia, along with Japan. Of the four, Canada had the greatest increase in emissions that year, illustrated by that vertical line.

If you analyze the made-in-Canada approach, the implementation plan, it calls for about one-third of the total emissions reduction to occur through forest and agriculture sinks. Part of that, about 38 megatons of CO2, is coming from what we call ``business as usual.'' The problem with business as usual is it is exactly that. It does not help to reduce climate change. All it does is help Canada meet its goal, but it is like buying Russian hot air. If we buy Russian hot air, that does not help the global situation. Those Russian reductions in emissions are already there. It really does not matter if nobody buys them because the reduction has already occurred. It is the same thing here. If you look at current forest management practices, we are basically saying that if we subtract what grows in a forest area in a period from what we harvest, we can claim the difference — and one of my students is responsible for that number 20. He works for Forestry Canada now. He was a little afraid to take the full 44 for the simple reason that you run the risk, if you take a bigger area and you have a fire, of getting a negative number. However, you do not have to do anything to get this number. You just have to show that you are growing more than you are harvesting, which is the case for much of Canada's managed forests.

Sink activities in agriculture since 1991 have included such things as reduced tillage and summerfallow, moving toward what we call conservation tillage or zero tillage — and I will talk about that a little more — and the use of more hay and crop rotations. That is a big area, which we have already covered, and which really does not give us a Kyoto ``kick.'' It does in terms of Canada being able to meet its obligation, but it does not help the world in terms of reducing climate change.

Subsidy programs for transportation, housing and industry are a very large component, at 85 megatons of CO2. Voluntary initiatives account for about 50 megatons of CO2 emissions. With emissions and carbon offset trading, we come again to terrestrial carbon offsets. These will be primarily, in my view, afforestation programs to plant trees on marginal agricultural land. I will show in a few minutes that that is not going to happen. It is too expensive.

The Chairman: They are not going to plant trees or they are not going to pay for them?

Mr. van Kooten: They are not going to plant trees without massive subsidies. In fact, we did a study a number of years ago in which we sent out a questionnaire to farmers. We found that farmers living in those areas where they could plant trees had a negative attitude toward the idea, because this is in the transition area between the grain belt and the northern boreal forest — up in the Peace River country, for example. They still recall their fathers or grandfathers removing trees and now you are asking them to plant them. It does not go over very well.

The Chairman: They did it in New Zealand. I was there and had a look.

Mr. van Kooten: Yes, you can do some of that.

That clean energy exports credit is a kind of ``fudge'' factor that the government plans to use if it does not meet anything.

Let's turn to the next slide, where I have done some calculations on the cost of this particular implementation program. I think this is the only data you will have seen to date. I do not think anybody else has done these cost estimates. I have put a question mark next to forest sinks.

For agricultural and other sinks, I have put in numbers based on the costs of generating them. Total cost is about $630 million to $1.8 billion.

Subsidy programs to transportation, housing and industry will cost the government about $850 million. That is based on their own numbers.

Voluntary initiatives I assume are free, although there will be costs to the individuals.

Emissions trading and carbon offset trading will cost somewhere between $1.3 billion and $3.5 billion. The reason for the large variation in those numbers is that we do not know where that will settle out. That goes from the low estimate of what emissions will to cost to my own estimates.

Total cost of the federal government's implementation plan is somewhere between $2.8 billion and $6.1 billion a year.

I tried to compare that to some of the numbers generated by various people before ratification. I calculate that we if purchased one-quarter of our emissions requirements offshore, it would cost us $1.6 billion to $3 billion annually, which is quite a bit less. My colleague, Peter Kennedy's estimate falls right in the middle of that range, and it is $1.3 billion to $3.2 billion less than my forecast of the costs under the federal government plan. Why the difference? We will be relying, under the federal plan, on very expensive agricultural and forestry sinks and the heavy arm of regulation, which, of course, leads to higher costs.

I will briefly mention a couple of other problems with Canada's plan that are the result of the government having to appease people, because if you cap it at $15 per ton of CO2, it will cost taxpayers between $825 million and $1.38 billion a year. Whatever happened to ``polluter pays''? We know that Ontario's automotive sector is exempt and that there is a limit of 15 per cent for all industries. As long as they limit reductions to 15 per cent below business-as-usual 2010 emissions intensity, they are off the hook.

Let's look quickly at the costs of using terrestrial carbon sinks. The big problem is that they are short-lived and will have released nearly all of the CO2 after 2012. Economists and the IPCC are looking at ways to deal with potential loss of stored carbon, including having to purchase insurance against release, purchase other offsets or permits at the time of release, or build in buffers. In other words, when you plant a tree on agricultural land, you only count the carbon that is sequestered for that one year, which is measured as one ton-year. Then there is some kind of a conversion factor by which so many ton-years is equal to one ton of permanent sequestration. That number varies anywhere from 50 to 150 and is very much like discounting. Then there is the subsidy tax scheme, which I have proposed in another paper, for handling agricultural and forest sinks.

The evidence that I have is that sinks are more expensive than we ever thought, and I will talk about that briefly. I will look first at forest sinks.

Forest management that enhances sinks, and use of fertilization, in particular, should count, but not business-as- usual forest management. Reforestation of cutover land is not an additional contribution and should not be counted. Afforestation of agricultural land should be counted, but it is very expensive. We looked at 28 studies and well over 600 observations of calculations of the costs per ton of carbon for various regions and under various kinds of conditions. These are given here. On the second last line from the bottom, you see that in the Great Plains, which in this study included both the U.S. and the Canadian Great Plains, the cost is $43 to $47 per ton of carbon. That is carbon, not CO2. You multiply by 12 over 44 to get the number for CO2.

If we look at it in terms of regions, you can sequester between six and a half and seven tons of carbon fairly cheaply on this land over all of time, but then the costs begin to rise rather rapidly. The cheapest place to do that is in regions other than the Great Plains or the tropics. If we look at just the Great Plains, including Western Canada, it depends on what you do with the wood once it is harvested. For example, the lowest cost turns out to be our baseline, and as you take into account the opportunity costs of land, your costs go up. If you appropriately account for the cost of land, your costs are significantly higher. The lowest cost in that case is achieved if you can use product sinks. However, again, after about six and a half tons of carbon per hectare, costs begin to go through the roof.

Agricultural sinks, which would be of interest to a large number of people, are more short-lived than forest sinks. There have been a lot of studies that suggest that going from conventional to zero tillage, or simply reducing summerfallow, will lead to added storage. However, in the studies we have been looking at, and we have looked at a lot of them, soil scientists do find this to be the case, but not on the Prairies, not in cold regions. We did a meta-analysis of 52 studies, or 544 observations, of carbon uptake by soil scientists, and a further meta-analysis of 24 economic studies with 213 observations to compare conventional and zero-tillage systems. Our results confirmed what some of the soil economists in Swift Current are saying. You will notice that the cost is very high for the Prairies. It costs anywhere from $100 to well over $200 per ton of carbon to store that in agricultural sinks. What is the problem here? The deeper you measure the soil, the more it begins to flip-flop. Conventional tillage has more carbon in the soil than no-till if you measure to a depth below 30 centimetres, and the reason should be obvious. When you leave the crop residue on the surface, some of it gets into that first layer of soil, but a lot of it decays and goes into the atmosphere. When you plough it under, you send it down deep, where it stays and becomes soil carbon. That is not as true in the corn belt and in the U.S. south. We found that in the Prairies, and what we call the ``other,'' which includes any other studies outside of the three regions noted here, it costs money; it just does not pay to switch to no-till from conventional till.

While I have this slide up, let me just briefly say something about adaptation.

The Chairman: I think there are going to be a lot of questions on your analysis of no-till.

Mr. van Kooten: Canadian and American studies now seem to agree on one thing. If farmers are allowed to adapt, in other words, if they respond to prices, Canada is a net beneficiary from climate change on both the agricultural and forestry side. However, for the U.S. it is very questionable and can go either way. The most recent study out of Berkeley indicates that the U.S. could be a net loser from climate change on the agricultural side, but that Canada will be a net gainer. Canada will benefit if farmers are allowed to adapt, if markets are such that they can change their crop systems and so on.

Let me just conclude.

First, my studies show that the costs of terrestrial carbon sinks, especially in agriculture, are much higher than was thought. Terrestrial sinks are not the answer in the long run, and maybe not even in the short run. We have to deal with emissions and the focus must be on energy. In my view, perhaps contrary to what Ned is saying, nuclear power will fill the gap in the short term. I do not believe for one minute that Canada will be able to meet its Kyoto obligations. Or at least if we appear to meet them, it will be smoke and mirrors. The good news is that others will also fail. The Japanese delegate at the meeting I was at said there is no way Japan can make it unless it builds 20 new nuclear power plants, which I do not think they will do.

Mr. Lonergan: Why is that good news?

Mr. van Kooten: Well, that is not good news. It does not bode well for future agreements if we cannot even get Kyoto off the ground. Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Thank you. All senators have questions to ask. I want to do something that I normally do not and ask a couple of questions first. I have already given a hint about some of the questions I will ask Mr. Djilali, and I will put all the questions on the table first. Mr. Djilali, what are some of the downside effects if in fact we do move to a hydrogen economy? What are the dangers to health, food, the environment and so on?

Mr. Weaver, you mentioned that ``climate'' means the statistics of weather, and that the IPCC has said that there is a discernible human influence on the global climate. You went on to say that it is not just what humans have done, but volcanic emissions and other events also have an effect on this change. I would like to know what is the effect of volcanic emissions compared to the discernible human influence on global climate change.

Mr. Lonergan, I have already indicated that you said on several occasions, ``We do not know what the impacts will be and not enough studies have been done.'' The committee has been told, not just by you, but also by many other witnesses, that further research into the effects of climate change is needed before we can give specific advice to the forestry industry and farmers on, for instance, the kind of crops to grow and the technology to use. Who should be responsible for conducting the research on the effects of climate change? Is it the government, universities, the industry? What policies or programs should the government implement to foster that research? One witness suggested a minimum of one funded research chair for each of the six regions in Canada. Would this be a good way to foster research on the effects of climate change? The committee was also told that the resolution of the current models is too broad to give us the confidence that we need to begin developing adaptation options and provide specific advice. In other words, models cannot tell us today what effects will be felt locally. Who is best equipped to model regional effects, adaptation requirements and strategies? Is it federal ministries, universities, provincial governments? We have heard conflicting evidence on whether our researchers need more money or resources, such as graduate students, to examine climate change adaptation issues. What is your opinion?

Mr. Djilali: I will respond directly to the first question: What is the downside of moving to a hydrogen economy? The introduction of the hydrogen economy faces barriers. The downside is very small in terms of proper risk assessment, and let me elaborate. In order to successfully introduce the hydrogen economy, there are some major issues that need to be addressed and some major progress that needs to be made, on a couple of fronts in particular. The first one is reduction in cost of the technology associated with the hydrogen economy. That means the cost of producing hydrogen and converting it into electricity where it is required, that is, through fuel-cell technology; also the cost of distributing and storing hydrogen. These are the major issues. One issue that is commonly put forward is the notion of infrastructure, in the sense that there will be no systematic deployment of hydrogen infrastructure until there is demand for it, and the demand will not exist until there is an infrastructure. Therefore it is a chicken-and-egg type of situation.

I think there are pathways to overcome that chicken-and-egg situation, and many of them are embodied in policies and measures that need to be undertaken and that you were trying to address with the last question. There is no major hurdle in that area. There are barriers, but they are not insurmountable. They do require a clear vision. I think that is the key. The connection of the Maritimes to the West Coast via a national railway link had a major impact on the development and maturity of this country two centuries ago. Something in the nature of that vision, of where we want to take Canada, is needed. We need to think of what kind of impact we want to have in the world, and to grab onto an opportunity that offers prospects of not only gaining environmentally, but also benefiting from an economic viewpoint. It is extremely rare that you have the opportunity to do well and to do good at the same time.

There is one thing that we have to realize. Currently, the only feasible path to a systematic hydrogen economy, whereby we would supply 80 per cent or 90 per cent of our energy requirements through such a system, is by the widespread introduction of nuclear power. That has to be made clear, and it has some implications. In particular, I think it behoves us to re-examine the role of nuclear energy. There is a clear need to assess nuclear energy in a proper context and do a risk analysis. The big issue is that the assessment of and the approach to risk in society in general are not rational. I will give you a very specific example. A few years back, the B.C. Ferries Corporation had an accident. It was the first fatal accident in the history of the corporation, which operates the largest fleet of ferries in the world. A ferry left the dock half a minute earlier than usual, a van fell into the water and three people died. The B.C. Ferries Corporation people were nearly hanged for their incompetence. Nobody put that accident in the context of, for example, how many fatalities would have occurred if there had been a bridge connecting Vancouver Island and Victoria. That is to say, people are willing to take considerable risks with certain things like driving a car, but there are some perceived risks in other areas that they are not able to accept. The issue here is, do we deal with the perception of what to do with waste in 50 or 100 years' time, or do we deal with the uncertainty of the direct impact of climate change, but the certainty of some impact? It is clear right now that there is an impact and that it is negative. We just do not know exactly what will occur, when and where.

Mr. Weaver: I had a slide on the question of volcanoes. Volcanoes are insignificant in terms of their long-term impact. Only those volcanoes that put aerosols into the stratosphere have a measurable effect on climate. I say ``measurable,'' because an aerosol that is a solid particle in the atmosphere is taken out when it rains. If it is in the stratosphere, where there is no rain, it stays for a while until it falls, through gravity, into what is known as the troposphere, the lower 10 kilometres of the atmosphere, in which case it is taken out the next time it rains. Pinatubo in 1991 is a lovely example, where the globe cooled slightly for about 18 months, and then bounced right back as soon as these things went away. Many groups, including the British group that I have on the slide, have looked at the effect of changes in the amount of volcanic activity on warming in the 20th century. There are periods in the 20th century when there has been more or less volcanic activity, which means there are more years where there is cooling versus fewer years. Changes in solar activity have accounted for about a third of the warming in the last 150 years. However, the sun has been going the wrong way for the last 10 years. That is, the sun has actually been cooling slightly. Volcanoes are a cause of some of the blips in the record, but not in any systematic manner. Shown here is one particular model that was run in the U.K. The red curve is the observations. The grey shading is a number of integrations using the same model. The top left shows changes in volcanic and solar activity only. The top right shows only changes in greenhouse gases and aerosols. The bottom area shows all of them. Other people have done similar studies. It shows that you can explain much of the variability in the record when you include all of them, but you cannot explain the warming in the latter part through solar and volcanic activity.

You wanted to ask Mr. Lonergan about grid resolution and modelling and where the science should be done. I cringed when you said that somebody is recommending a research chair in every region. This is fundamentally the wrong way to do it. It is so Canadian — spread the money out everywhere, but nothing gets done. This is why large- scale research on climate is a disaster in the U.S., because of this dispersal of resources. Britain is without question the leader in all aspects of climate change science, impacts and adaptation. Why? It is because Margaret Thatcher ran a very conservative government — and she is a scientist. I sometimes make a joke about that because some have drawn analogies between Conservatism and anti-climate science, at least some of the skeptics, and that is not the case. The person who started this in Britain would have been viewed as right of centre in the political spectrum, but she was a scientist, she understood the issue, and created the Hadley Centre, which is a national facility dedicated to climate science and integrated assessment.

It is no good having people in Regina taking the output from a climate model run in Victoria and trying to predict impacts, because what you get is often utter nonsense. The reason is that the scientists generating the output understand what it can and cannot be used for. If you do not have those scientists in continual contact, you find people running away with the output, doing inappropriate things with it and saying some tree is going to die 50 years from now because the output from the Canadian model says so. You cannot do that. You cannot even talk about regional climate change on the scale of a province with any degree of certainty. What you can say, and where you can make policy, is that the Arctic is going to warm a lot; huge regions of permafrost will melt; it is very likely that large regions of the Arctic will be ice free in summer by the end of this century, but not likely on the Canadian coast. The shipping lane will be around Russia because of the way the winds blow. There is likelihood of an increased number of extreme precipitation events across Canada, but you cannot say when or where. There will be more droughts, but you cannot say when or where. You can only look at this in terms of the continent. The level of scientific knowledge is such that you can only make informed policy decisions on the continental scale. You cannot say that there will be some change in the frequency of extreme events in Thunder Bay, because precipitation and things like that are very small-scale processes dependent on very small-scale phenomena. If you run these projection models with exactly the same input except the initial condition, you will get changes in the regional-scale climate projection. It is dangerous to develop policies of adaptation specific to individual localities as small as Southern Alberta. I also think it is very dangerous to spread resources, because Canada needs a central facility where social scientists, economists, hydrogen fuel cell people and scientists can work on the problem in an integrated manner.

The Chairman: Thank you for that excellent answer.

Senator LaPierre: I find this rather startling. What am I supposed to do, put you in a spaceship to orbit the globe? In other words, you say we have finite resources.

Mr. Lonergan: Yes.

Senator LaPierre: This is an immense country.

Mr. Lonergan: Yes.

Senator LaPierre: You hardly talk to each other. You seldom talk to the people in a way that they can understand. Our diversity implies, therefore, that someone has to study us where we live, not some mythical kingdom. Therefore, if you do not approve of the idea of establishing research chairs around the country and having people talk to each other —

Mr. Weaver: However, it does not happen.

Senator LaPierre: I know, but that is your fault. That is not the fault of the policy. You people should talk to each other.

Mr. Weaver: No, it is the fault of human nature.

Senator LaPierre: We Liberals always talk to each other.

Mr. Weaver: No, I would argue that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the way science is done. Science is done by accident. Science is not done through planning and people telling you how to do it. Science is done through meeting someone in the hallway and saying, ``I just saw this stupid thing,'' and the other person saying, ``Well, I saw it too.'' Science occurs spontaneously. Science is not planned, and that is why attempting to advance it through Canadian regionalism never works. The whole idea of centres of excellence in universities is to throw people in together. They will bump into each other in the coffee room. They will bump into each other in the hallways. That is how scientific advances occur. You cannot do it through spreading resources.

Senator LaPierre: Therefore, we can have six centres around the country.

Mr. Weaver: But what are the six questions? What are the questions that you would like to ask them? If you are going to look at a centre to examine an integrated climate problem, having six of them goes right back to my initial argument. It is spreading the resources six times too thin. You will get six times as weak a job than if one centre does it properly. They do it that way in France and Germany. They spread the funding in the U.S., and they are well behind the rest of the world in terms of climate modelling and science.

Senator LaPierre: Thank you.

The Chairman: Mr. Lonergan, do you wish to say something?

Mr. Lonergan: Sure, and I will be brief.

I did not mean to imply when I said it is very difficult to do projections or estimates of impact that we cannot do anything. Following on from what Mr. Weaver said about modelling, much of the impacts work has been this kind of cause and effect model that we have. We have a general temperature, a precipitation projection for a broad area, and we translate for a ski slope in Quebec and sat that the impact is going to be such and such. This is not the way we should proceed now.

There are things we can do, one being to flip it around and look at vulnerable regions and vulnerable populations. I think that is crucial. So instead of just following from the climate models in a very kind of random way, we need to look at it from the other perspective and try to identify vulnerable resources.

The Chairman: We are a Canadian parliamentary committee spending Canadian dollars and you have told us from your map that one of the most vulnerable poor areas of the world is Africa. We cannot, in this committee, be making a lot of recommendations to do something for those poorer areas like Africa. We have got to do something for Canada. We have got to come up with a national public policy for this country.

Mr. Lonergan: If you think back to my quote from the IPCC at the start of my talk, it said not only poor nations but also poor people within developed nations are generally the most vulnerable. We also have vulnerable sectors in society. What are those vulnerabilities? They are vulnerable because of biophysical impacts, like the agricultural sector, or they are vulnerable because they do not have a lot of options. They do not have options because there are limited opportunities or they do not have options because there are command and control approaches that have been imposed on them that limit their adaptation responses.

I draw internationally because that is where my experience is, but I do not mean to imply that we do not have vulnerable sectors and vulnerable populations within our own country. We certainly do.

The question then becomes: Is there any relationship between their vulnerability and climate variability? Certainly street kids in Victoria are vulnerable. Is there any relationship between that and climate change? Well, probably very limited. That would be the approach I would take.

The other one is that since we do not know the extent of the impacts, we need to develop various scenarios. That is the work that a lot of people are doing now — for example, looking at scenarios of various prices for grain and so on — as opposed to drafting a cause-and-effect approach. That is all I was implying there.

In terms of Mr. Weaver's argument about investments, and who were the best groups to undertake climate research and what regions are most appropriate, we have all found that the federal government, the provincial government, NGOs, research institutes and universities have tremendous capacity and strength in this area. We are not going to say that the universities are the best place to be; in fact, we have found tremendous research capacity across the spectrum.

Two things are important here. First of all, we must adopt more of an integrated approach — in other words, the four of us getting together to discuss things. When we do, it is tremendously rich and fruitful. We need more integrated approaches. I would not even say there is inadequate funding for climate research. I think the funding is adequate. It is extremely difficult to get funding for integrated approaches. I can get it for socio-economic impacts, Mr. van Kooten can get it for economic costs of carbon sinks, and Mr. Weaver can get it for the modelling he does. However, when it comes to putting together an integrated proposal, generally we are not very successful in Canada — and not just our group — in getting integrated assessment studies done.

The second thing is that we need much better partnerships. We have tried to develop partnerships with the federal government agencies, CCCMA, the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, and the National Water Research Institute on the area of climate change so that we were not just limited to university researchers. Those approaches, the integrated approach and the partnership approach, which is being done in other areas too, are definitely the most fruitful way to invest the dollars we have.

The Chairman: Which is what C-CIARN is doing now.

Mr. Lonergan: C-CIARN focuses on community levels, but it would be another partner in broader networks, and they have tried to put together a network, as has the Canadian Climate Research Network and a number of networks. They have been marginally successful. However, in terms of core research, it has got to be based at university and federal centre partnerships and involve the other groups.

Senator Day: How did all of you happen to yourselves at the University of Victoria?

Mr. van Kooten: I was recruited out of the U.S. I am a Canadian who went to the U.S. and was recruited back under the Canada Research Chairs. Most of this came from the administration and the university.

Senator Day: So the university's vision was, ``We want to do something in this area of climate change and let us bring an integrated approach to it''?

Mr. Lonergan: Mr. van Kooten was recruited after a group of us got together and decided to put together a large proposal for an integrated assessment on the climate change area and decided that we were lacking an economist, and so we recruited him.

I came to the university mid-career, about 12 years ago, from McMaster. I was enticed here, not because of climate change research, which I was doing at the time, but more because of the development of new research centres at the university. I came in and started one in the area of sustainable development. The University of Victoria was promoting a kind of entrepreneurship, which is the reason I came. A number of mid-level, senior people came to the university who dealt with earth and ocean science, climate change issues at the time. As well, the location of the federal climate modelling lab in Victoria in the middle 1990s was a major boost to our expertise in climate change. So the climate change just really evolved over time into what has been I think an extremely powerful group.

Mr. Weaver: I actually was born in Victoria, and the most important thing to me is family. I wanted to have children. I came from Quebec; I was at McGill beforehand. I wanted to have my children to grow up near their grandparents, as did my wife, both sets. So that is why I am there.

Environment Canada had a group that was based in Downsview, near Toronto. It was actually a superb initiative taken by the Environment Ministry. They wanted to develop the next generation of coupled model, but they could not attract ocean people, such as myself, to Toronto. There is no way an ocean person would go to Toronto to do ocean research, because there is no ocean there. Hence, they decided, wisely, that if the ocean people will not come to Downsview, then they would go to the ocean people. As a result, they moved the lab out in dribs and drabs to build the next generation coupled model. The whole government lab is in the same hallway as my group and me.

Mr. Djilali: It is really a combination of strategic thinking on behalf of the university, which has only really occurred over the last three or four years, but a lot of the synergies have occurred because of convergence of interest between various people and various faculties. I started my career as an aerospace engineer; I only started working in energy systems about seven years ago.

Mr. Weaver: It almost goes back to my statement about bumping in the halls and an evolution. We got together by no other means than by bumping in the halls and seeing each other at meetings.

Senator Day: It is apparent to me that this kind of integration is necessary over a broad range of expertise. I am wondering whether we can make recommendations that might improve the interface, moving it down the line into sectors from agriculture, forestry. Obviously, you need some of those people interfacing with you as well.

Mr. Djilali: To do these types of things, you need a means. Currently, in Canada, the funding available for university-based research and, perhaps, national institutes is probably sufficient. The problem is that it does not address the key notion of critical mass. Many funds are dispersed into high overheads; therefore, there is a less effective impact.

The second important thing — and I would convey this as a key message to this committee, in terms of developing strategies for effective funding — is the lack of recognition in policy-making for funding of new initiatives that a fit-all type of solution does not work. So there are a lot of frameworks for funding initiatives that are well adapted, say, to the communication sector or to the forestry sector, and so on, but that are not well adapted to other areas. In the area of new clean energy technologies, there are a number of funds that have been injected over the last three, four years. Many of these, however, rely on partnerships, which is a good thing, but they rely on partnerships in the form of saying: ``You have to partner a government lab, with a university, with an industrial partner. And to show that the industrial partner is a real partner, we are going to require them to put 30 per cent of the cost on the table.''

When you are dealing with a sector that has to get its money from venture capital, it is not possible for the partner to invest 30 per cent of the cost in the initial phases. It is something that is well adapted to a sector that is currently making products and selling them, but it is not well adapted to this particular area. And there are funds.

For example, for example, I would ask you to look at the new Sustainable Development and Technology Fund. It is woefully undersubscribed. The fund has $100 million. In the first year, only 10 per cent of that was used because of these unadapted-type of frameworks.

Senator Day: We could discuss that subject all afternoon, and I would like to be able to do that, but unfortunately we will not have time. I have a couple of other areas that I just wanted to explore very briefly.

In Canada, are there any other centres of excellence that have developed similar to the University of Victoria?

Mr. Weaver: There is an attempt, albeit it is at a very fledgling stage, the Ouranos project in Quebec. It is one involving Hydro-Quebec, which has a very real need to try to understand better the issue of climate change for their water storage. Hydro-Quebec is an obvious partner. There are very few others. Wildlife Service has one — but it is not really climate. There is Ouranos and there is the University of Victoria group.

Another consideration is that I would refuse to partner with an industry in my area of research. I could not. If I were to partner with an oil company, I would be tainted. If I were to partner with the Suzuki Foundation, I would be viewed as tainted. I cannot be associated with an issue of societal relevance, an area of climate that has become politically charged, where there is a lot of ``spin doctoring'' taking place. I cannot approach these organizations for partnership funding, which excludes me from any such pots of money that were mentioned, including CFI and others.

The other consideration, problem, in developing these partnerships is the issue of space — and it is a problem. Universities are provincially funded, and there are funding formulas for the amount of space a university is allocated. The formula is based on numbers of students and professors, all professors being equal. We could not get money from the university for a building to actually house us. We would have to go elsewhere, but there is no pool to do that kind of stuff.

Senator Day: Do you find that with the Internet and, say, with scientific journals there is a good transfer of technology from your area to the more applied technology and research?

Mr. Weaver: Absolutely. You can hardly pick up an issue of the paper without the issue of climate science being discussed. In terms of public consumption, I have done hundreds of media interviews over the last few years and have published scores of journals. Our medium of communication is the journals, and then the media will convey that to the public at large. Issues of societal relevance can only be conveyed through that medium. We have to be careful that the message coming through the final outlet, which is the media, is an accurate one and is not spun in some way.

Senator Leonard J. Gustafson (Acting Chairman) in the Chair.

The Acting Chairman: I cannot remember whether you referred to partnering with the government.

Mr. Weaver: We have many, many partnerships. The federal government lab is a wonderful example of a partnership. The Canadian Climate Research Network, which used to exist, was also a wonderful example of a partnership. In fact, it was used as a model for the Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network.

The Acting Chairman: You might recall that we had scientists appear before this committee, under oath, who, quite frankly, said that the only independent scientists were retired ones because they worked neither for government nor industry.

Mr. Weaver: You have seen me speak. I can assure you I am an independent person. I do not hold back, and no one is going to tell me what I am going to say. That is just not true.

The Acting Chairman: Very good.

Senator Tkachuk: We had some discussion earlier this morning about the causes of climate change. I am going to ask you the same question I asked the people this morning. Is the peak on your graph caused by natural events and exacerbated by CO2 emissions, or are CO2 emissions entirely responsible.?

Mr. Weaver: You can absolutely prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it is atmospheric carbon dioxide and it is linked to human emissions. Absolutely. The problem is that many people get their information from the media. There is no mechanism that we know of that could have caused the warming.

Senator Tkachuk: We have 1 degree in 100 years.

Mr. Weaver: That is right, but that is enormous. That is 1 degree globally averaged. The difference between the depth of the last ice age and the present is only 3.5 degrees global. Over the last 10,000 years, that is since civilization has evolved, there has never been more than half a degree variability globally. That is the maximum global variability.

Often, people will talk, say, about civilization in northern Europe adjusting because of waning and waxing and waning of climate. They will talk about Vikings and moving to Greenland. This is local climate they are talking about. This is not global climate. By its very definition, global climate change is a change of the global average temperature, and that you can say unequivocally is due to the build-up of greenhouse gases.

It is very simple physics going back to Svante Arrhenius. You can ask: How do we know where it is coming from? Well, where did those fossil fuels come from? They came from the atmosphere at the time. Dinosaurs roamed the earth, during the Cretaceous, the Jurassic and Triassic period. Oil is basically — well, it is not quite dead dinosaurs, but it is dead biological material. That process took millions and millions of years. It was much, much warmer back then because of the existence of greenhouse gases. We are turning that around and releasing the slowly sequestered carbon, which happened on millions of time scales on the time frame of the century. That is the difference. But it takes a long time for the climate to warm.

Senator Tkachuk: When you read articles in the paper — and you talked about a couple of them — it seems that there are scientists who disagree with you. Global warming and CO2 is in the news. There is a hell of a propaganda campaign underway. Every little change in climate, every little disaster, is blamed on climate change.

Mr. Weaver: Right.

Senator Tkachuk: After a time, it wears thin on people. You have yourself to blame or others like you to blame for it.

Mr. Weaver: You are absolutely right. For example, people will link the ice storm in Quebec to global warming. The Badger River flood is going to be linked to global warming.

I have written pieces in national newspapers trying to point out that you can never point to a weather event and say that it occurred because of global warming. You will never be able to do that because by its very definition climate is the statistics of weather; it is the frequency distribution of many such events. You have a likelihood of a precipitation event. Climate is the distribution of the likelihood of precipitation events and how it moves as climate changes. Climate is not the individual event. Hence, a person who says that any event is caused because of climate change, any individual event like a flood or whatever, is wrong because that cannot be proved.

Senator Tkachuk: Then you do not even concede that there is a possibility that this particular time in our history is partially related to natural events perhaps being speeded up by CO2 emission?

Mr. Weaver: No.

Senator Tkachuk: You do not buy that at all?

Mr. Weaver: No. If you look at the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the last 20 million years — let us ignore the time scale of when continents are moving, let us say the last 400,000 years — they have never exceeded 300 parts per million. Never. We are now at 370 parts per million.

We are talking about a global problem here. I cannot give you any information on something the scale of a province. I can talk about a global problem.

I should like to address the sceptics. There was a piece in the National Post, a full-page piece on 10 myths of climate change. I will put it up on the screen here. The reason I show this is that the strategy taken is very similar to the strategy taken during the ozone depletion issue. It is a shotgun approach to stop policy development. It is a shotgun approach, hoping that one of the pellets will stick. It is analogous to a legal defence team that knows it has lost its case and throws out all these disjointed things hoping one will stick and leave an element of doubt.

Senator Tkachuk: Is it possible that this is just good honest debate, or in your opinion is there no room for that?

Mr. Weaver: No, because good honest debate in the scientific community does not happen through the op-ed pages of newspapers. Good honest debate in the science community happens in the journal pages. We are not having this debate in the journal pages. The scientists by and large do not stand up in public and talk about their science. Scientists by and large are a shy bunch.

Senator Tkachuk: So you are saying that there is no debate among scientists about this issue at all, that this is a dead issue?

Mr. Weaver: No. In fact —

Senator Tkachuk: I do not buy that.

Mr. Weaver: You should buy this. The debate within the scientific community is about the regional implications of climate change, the feedbacks. How do clouds feed back? The debate is not about whether global warming is taking place, whether carbon dioxide keeps changing temperature.

Let me give you another example. Canada AM wanted me to be a guest on the show, to participate in a debate about climate science. I agreed that I would be a guest, but I told them that I would not participate in the debate with just any scientist. Bring me an atmospheric scientist, and I will participate in the debate. Well, guess what? They could not find one.

The only time this happened was a debate I had with Dick Lindzen, who is a very fine scientist at MIT. It was published in the L.A. Times; it is a matter of public record. In that debate, we agreed on most of the things.

Coming back to the newspaper article I referred to, it says, in part: Carbon dioxide ``prevents Earth from being locked into a perpetual ice age.'' This is what they are saying in here as support that it is not a pollutant and why it is important that carbon dioxide be there. I replied, ``Why is that?'' It is because it is a greenhouse gas. It makes no sense. They are saying, as part of the counterargument, that carbon dioxide naturally is good because it ``prevents Earth from being locked into a perpetual ice age.'' They just shoot down their own argument by acknowledging that carbon dioxide warms the planet. That is precisely because it is a greenhouse gas. This is the level of inconsistency of the arguments using the shotgun approach. Five myths later, they say it is important to stop the earth from being in an ice age. And why? It is because it is a greenhouse gas, which is why this is so silly.

Senator LaPierre: The moral of the story is never to read the National Post. I have always believed that, so thank you very much.

Senator Tkachuk: I think the point was that that was probably one of the better pieces across the country of which you participated in.

Mr. Weaver: Do you know, I refuse to participate because there are — because who are the sceptics? There were none of them, Canadian ones, who were atmospheric scientists. We have palaeontologists, you know, geographers.

Senator Tkachuk: Geologists. You are a mathematician.

Mr. Weaver: By its very definition, physics is a mathematical subject.

Senator Tkachuk: I know that.

Mr. Weaver: Geology is not a mathematical subject. I am not going to talk to you about the formation of rocks. Should I discuss the politics of free trade with you? No. I could have my opinions, but they will not be reported in national newspapers. However, in the particularly charged issue, those opinions do, because media is always seeking dissenting opinions to present two sides of any story. It is Media 101.

Senator Tkachuk: I know. We have that same argument in politics too.

Mr. van Kooten, you talked about a carbon tax. If Canada were to impose a carbon tax but the rest of the world did not, how would that work?

Mr. van Kooten: It would just be a made-in-Canada policy. The Dutch have imposed a carbon tax. Why would that be any different?

Senator Tkachuk: Let us say the countries that imposed the carbon tax — I am not arguing for it or against it. I actually agree with you that we should not use control methods to achieve the Kyoto goals. I am not a supporter of Kyoto.

Mr. van Kooten: I am not a supporter either, and I do read the National Post.

Senator Tkachuk: If we imposed a carbon tax, and if the countries that signed the accord imposed a carbon tax, would that not — and let's say we reduced the amount of fossil fuels we used — make it cheaper for all the people who did not sign Kyoto?

Mr. van Kooten: Absolutely.

Senator Tkachuk: Would it not give them an incentive to use more fossil fuels? It seems to me it would.

Mr. van Kooten: Sure. The case is the same if you use emissions trading. If you put a cap on emissions, what you are doing is reducing the demand in Canada, which increases the supply of fossil fuels elsewhere. C-CAIRN 101.

Senator Tkachuk: So now that we are into Kyoto, what is your argument?

Mr. van Kooten: I am arguing that, if Canada is going to meet its obligations, we have to impose a carbon tax. It is the cheapest way to go. We then have to recycle the revenue from the carbon tax, get the double dividend. We have to somehow figure out how we are going to put in carbon credits, being the offsets, the terrestrial carbon sinks. The way to do it is to use the tax revenue to subsidize, and somehow certify, people who are actually putting carbon into the sink. As soon as that carbon is released, tax the same people who got the subsidy.

Senator Tkachuk: Mr. Lonergan, you mentioned the five countries that you said were most responsible for CO2 emissions. What were they?

Mr. Lonergan: The United States, Great Britain.

Senator Donald H. Oliver (Chairman) in the Chair.

The Chairman: China.

Mr. Lonergan: No, no, these were developed countries. This was from 1950 to 2000. The United States, Great Britain, France, I believe, Germany.

Mr. van Kooten: Japan.

Mr. Lonergan: Maybe Japan, yes, those five.

Senator Tkachuk: Where everybody in the world wants to live, sort of.

Senator Day: Canada was not on that list.

Senator Tkachuk: No, but Canada is a very heavy producer per capita.

Mr. Lonergan: Yes, per capita.

Senator Tkachuk: And one of the highest in the world, is it not?

Mr. Lonergan: I was talking about total emissions. It was just a realization or an acceptance that most of the CO2 that has been put up in the last century or more has been put up by industrialized countries. That is just an acceptance of that.

Senator Tkachuk: Right.

Mr. Lonergan: Hence, that the cause of the problem is primarily based in developed countries.

Senator Tkachuk: Does that let the countries that are not countries off the hook?

Mr. Lonergan: No, not at all. In fact, China and India's economies are growing rapidly, their CO2 emissions are growing rapidly, and now China is, I believe, the second-largest emitter of CO2 on a per-country basis in the world. There is a lot of concern in the developed world about the growth of these economies and their potential to contribute to the global warming issue. There is a tremendous reluctance on their part to participate in an international agreement because given that they are now experiencing rapidly growing economies they do not want those economies to slow down.

In terms of social science policy, one of the biggest issues in the next couple of decades will be how to incorporate China, India, and other rapidly growing economies into the international framework convention.

Senator Tkachuk: The proponents of Kyoto often use the argument that it will have an economically positive impact, because of all the research, et cetera. Conversely, many of the opponents of Kyoto argue that it will slow down our economy, which is going along really well right now.

Mr. Lonergan: I do not like to reduce the argument to strict economics, and that is what was done in the debate in Canada over the last six months. It is much more than an economic argument.

First of all, it does offer tremendous development opportunities for Canadian firms, private-sector firm, in the area of clean technology and the transfer of clean technology. There are benefits associated with Kyoto that are not economic benefits, benefits that are ignored. These benefits relate to other ecosystems besides human systems. The argument that focused on the number of jobs that would be lost or gained in a particular part of a province really degraded the whole discussion of climate warming, and I think that was very unfortunate.

I would prefer not to reduce to the argument or debate to an economic one, because it is a much bigger argument than that.

Mr. van Kooten: It depends on how economic benefits are measured. As economists, we measure economic benefits as either a surplus that accrues to consumers or a surplus that accrues to producers. So when I put those numbers up, those were actual costs to consumers or producers, and that takes into account the fact that we do have technological change occurring. So we are taking that into account. At one point, I heard the minister say that the ice storm was a blessing because it created jobs, et cetera, and led to higher growth in Quebec. That is nonsense from an economics point of view. There had to be a cost to that ice storm. Just because economic activity is suddenly being generated does not mean that there is a benefit from an ice storm.

The same thing is true with respect to global warming. If Kyoto is implemented, there is a cost to doing that, period. There has to be.

Mr. Lonergan: This is something that all of you are much more familiar with than we are in academia, but you cannot overstate the importance of forging an international agreement —

Mr. Weaver: That's all it is.

Mr. Lonergan: — on an environmental matter like this. Over and above strict economic considerations, to me it has been an absolutely amazing achievement. Those of you who wrestle with these issues all the time, and have in your past, certainly understand that. Those of us who get fleeting glimpses of international policy discussions and policy development and who get frustrated after 10 minutes and walk out of the room are also truly amazed at this development. I think Kyoto is a major step forward, notwithstanding the fact that its impact on the climate, as Andrew noted, is really going to be very minimal.

Senator Tkachuk: My concern is that that is going to be an excuse not to do the amount of work that has to be done.

Mr. Weaver: Exactly.

Senator Tkachuk: I was upset at the fact that the emerging countries were using the argument that we polluted — that we had the right to pollute and we got rich and, therefore, the only way to get rich is to continue to pollute. That is a ridiculous argument, and they are getting away with it.

I think Kyoto may turn out to be a bad thing, but time will tell that.

Mr. van Kooten: That is also the view I take. I take the view that we should never have ratified it and that the international community made a disaster with Kyoto.

Senator LaPierre: Mr. Chairman, essentially, I have only a few comments. I am outraged by what has been said this afternoon in this room. I will not make my comments now, I will do it in camera

Senator Hubley: Mr. Weaver, do you deal with oceans as well?

Mr. Weaver: Yes. My background is in mathematics, meteorology, atmospheric dynamics. Most people would say that my expertise is the ocean's role in climate. So the answer is yes.

Senator Hubley: Oceans did not feature largely in your brief today; however, I am wondering if there is anything you would like to say about oceans and their role in our discussions.

Mr. Weaver: It comes back to your question on Kyoto. Kyoto is a missed opportunity for Canada. Discussions about terrestrial sinks, et cetera, is analogous to a drop of water in the ocean. The terrestrial biosphere and its sink are insignificant compared to the carbon potential, both the uptake and release of carbon by the ocean. It is many, many, many orders of magnitude bigger. To discuss policy in terms of trying to mitigate change through modifying the terrestrial carbon sink is irrelevant, as far as I am concerned. The real discussion should have been how can we tap into the potential sink that may exist in the ocean in terms of a mitigation strategy for carbon uptake. This is where the uptake can happen. It cannot happen on land. It is basically silly policy as far as I am concerned.

Senator Hubley: Mr. Lonergan, you talked a lot of vulnerability. Am I looking at vulnerability as an inability to adapt?

Mr. Lonergan: Adaptation is one component of vulnerability. One you identify a vulnerable population, you look at various coping strategies or adaptation strategies that have been used.

I am sorry to use the example of Africa again, but that is where some of my experience is. We are looking at communities that have experienced significant droughts in the past 20 or 30 years and studying how they have coped. By looking at those coping strategies or adaptation strategies, we can develop policies that will assist other communities that might experience similar environmental stress.

Senator Hubley: Are there models in Africa that can be applied to the Canadian situation?

Mr. Lonergan: I would not say there is a model. However, one of the studies we did as part of the Mackenzie Basin project — I think Stuart Cohen talked to you about this a few weeks ago — was to take a community in northern Northwest Territories on the Mackenzie and look at how climate change may have affected them. We started with the notion that Andrew just criticized, that you cannot really look at a specific community and talk about how climate change affects them. We realized that they had never heard of climate change, nor did they care about climate change. This was about six or seven years ago. So we had to come at it from a different perspective.

We talked in the community about environmental issues that really affected them. Of course, the issue of land use change affected them. then we got into discussions about the year there was a lot of precipitation, or the year the temperatures were very high a few years ago. We got into oral histories and looked at how these communities coped and the types of land use changes that occurred under those circumstances. Finally, we realized that this kind of straightforward notion of looking at the causes of climate change and its effects on communities was ridiculous.

We actually took a Canadian model, an idea we developed, and applied it to Africa. Hence, it was the other way around. We have used that approach in two or three Aboriginal communities — finding out what resource issues and what land issues are important to them, and then getting around to issues of how extreme weather and climate events may have affected them in the past, through oral histories, recording these oral histories, and then getting a sense how these communities have adapted to the kinds of weather and climate changes that we may see in the future.

It is certainly an interesting and effective way to go, and it is one that resonates well with a lot of the indigenous communities because we are recording oral histories.

Senator Hubley: I am going to present you with a small model that we have had an opportunity to see. It is an on- the-ground project. It involves a farming colony. They have a large operation in pigs, hens and sheep. They have a system where they pipe the manure into a covered holding tank. The methane gas is retrieved and directed into an engine, which, in turn, provides the energy for their whole operation. The rest gets sold into the grid. With the money they make, they will pay for their system in about five or six years. They made a $2.4 million dollar investment, and they are thinking of expanding.

I raise that because I want Mr. van Kooten to comment on the economies that are at play here. The path to decarbonization did identify methane gas, not hydrogen; it was the one just below that, in terms of acceptability.

Mr. van Kooten: Where was that farm located?

Senator Hubley: In Alberta.

Mr. van Kooten: In Alberta?

Mr. Weaver: It is the only province that would allow you to sell into the grid.

The Chairman: No, you can in Nova Scotia, as well.

Mr. van Kooten: In British Columbia, there was a time when they would burn the residue from saw-milling operations. They were not allowed to generate electricity and sell it into the grid. As soon as you allow that, there are incentives for these people to do that. If a carbon tax is imposed, which makes the energy even more valuable, it becomes even more profitable for people to generate their own electricity.

That is a very good example, and it is the kind of thing we want to encourage as economists.

Senator Hubley: Yes, I thought it was a great little project.

The Chairman: One of the good things about it is the fact that waste is being utilized. Disposing of waste is a problem; they were not only disposing it, they were utilizing it to generate power.

Mr. van Kooten: Alberta does not have a waste-disposal problem compared to Holland, for example. Holland is the size of Vancouver Island, and they have 30 million pigs, 16 million people, and who knows how many chickens.

Senator Hubley: It demonstrated that there are models, success stories, out there.

Mr. van Kooten: In Holland, they use a humongous model, a mineral accounting model, where they keep track of every mineral that enters their agricultural system. They have to do that in order to prevent pollution. They are now trading; they are now buying and selling ability to put nitrogen into the soil.

Senator Hubley: Mr. van Kooten, you mentioned avoiding regulation. Can you expand on that?

Mr. van Kooten: I think the context I used it in was that we should avoid getting into a command-and-control economy, where we apply regulations, where we tell company A that it must reduce by 10 per cent and company B that it must reduce by 10 per cent. There could be economies having B reduce by 20 per cent and A not reducing at all, but A paying B to reduce. It is more efficient and cheaper to do that. We need to set up a government structure that permits that.

Senator Hubley: Yes, that has that flexibility.

Senator Gustafson: I have a question about nuclear power. Why are we so slow coming to the realization that maybe this is the way we should be going?

Mr. Weaver: Many us have been saying this for a long time. Two technology paths exist with respect to nuclear power. One is a cold war technology path where the by-product is bomb-grade plutonium — for example, Korea right now. The other is the CANDU path, which does not give that kind of by-product.

In disasters like Chernobyl, people are afraid of what they cannot see. Hysteria sets in. Scientists by and large are not leading the charge. On the topic of climate change, it is the scientists who are speaking. On the topic of nuclear power, it is not. It is groups representing elements of society who are concerned about this. The problem with nuclear power is that as a result of public pressure there has not been the technological development that should have occurred in that energy source.

Nuclear waste is nothing more than wasted energy. There should have been technology in place to develop means of extracting that low-grade waste energy and harvesting it.

Senator Day: I agree wholeheartedly.

The Chairman: Chernobyl did, in fact, take place though.

Mr. Weaver: It did, but it took place in a reactor totally unlike the CANDU reactor. It could not happen in a reactor like the CANDU. It took place in a cold war-era reactor system.

Mr. van Kooten: The husband of one of my graduate students was into Chernobyl as a firefighter the day after it happened.

Senator Gustafson: For what it is worth, did any of you know Ian Thorson?

Mr. Weaver: No.

Senator Gustafson: We grew up together. He worked in Chalk River for years. He is probably the brightest person I have ever met, and he indicated 20 years ago that we should be using this.

I recall telephoning the Saskatchewan government Saskatchewan has large deposits of uranium.

Senator Tkachuk: You can mine it, but not use it. Sell it to North Korea.

Senator Gustafson: The answer I got from the minister is that when it becomes politically saleable, it will happen. It appears to me that it is becoming politically viable.

Mr. Lonergan: Just to add to that briefly, the simple answer is that it is a socially unacceptable form of energy production at present.

Senator Gustafson: Right or wrong.

Mr. Lonergan: That is right. Mr. van Kooten made a good case for carbon taxes, but we are not going to see carbon taxes as part of Canada's plan because it is simply unacceptable socially. It is entirely a social issue.

The Chairman: I would ask each of you to briefly say what you would like to see the committee include in its report by way of public policy recommendations for the future on our topic, not Kyoto, on our topic.

Mr. van Kooten: That is a very tough thing to answer. I often wonder why summer fallowing became so popular after the studies that were done in Indianhead. There is a missing link between research and what really gets out there. The Americans beat us in that way in agriculture, at least, because they have extension agents. We do not have extension people attached to the universities.

My view is we should calm down the media process and invest a little more time and energy in just doing the research and letting the researchers do the work.

Mr. Lonergan: We have some of the best climate researchers in the world in Canada, yet their impact is being defused because there has not been a concerted enough effort to get them together through fund partnerships and integrated research in this area. However, there is no question that we have the leading scientists in the world here in Canada.

Mr. Weaver: Three quick comments. First: This is a national problem. It needs a national institute, with a national focus, with people from across various disciplines.

Second: Stop pretending you can address the climate problem by playing with the terrestrial biosphere. It does not do anything. It is not going to solve the problem. It is delaying the problem, and it is a smoke-and-mirrors game. I think that is bad policy and it is just playing with farmers. As far as I am concerned, they have got enough to deal with.

Third: The only way we are going to get change in the climate issue is to move along Mr. Djilali's path to the hydrogen era. That can only be done through federal leadership, through investment in the R&D necessary to actually make that step. President Bush just announced $1.5 billion in hydrogen fuel cell research. Canada is the leader right now, but it is going to move south of the border or it is going to move to Japan or Europe, and we are going to be buying it from someone else rather than developing it here. The market is global. Everybody consumes energy. We are the leaders in the alternate fields.

The Chairman: We have Ballard Power.

Mr. Weaver: We only have half of that. We do not own much of Ballard Power anymore. Ford and other U.S.- based companies own a lot of it. If Ballard Power goes off, I would be willing to stake a lot of money that it will move down to Illinois or somewhere like that. Ballard Power will relocate somewhere else.

The Chairman: Thank you all for an excellent presentation.

Our next witnesses are Mr. Smith and Ms. Neilsen. Please proceed.

Ms. Denise Neilsen, Research Scientist, Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for giving us the opportunity to participate in this very exciting process. It has been interesting listening to the presenters and hearing your reactions.

In contrast to the presentation by the previous group, we will look at techniques to assess how climate might have an impact at a local scale. In this case, we are looking at potential impacts of climate change on water resource management in the Okanagan Basin, for agricultural purposes. To this end, we will be making a PowerPoint presentation.

If we look at the agricultural land in the Okanagan Basin, you will see that most of it is located along the base of the valley. This is the agricultural land reserve within the Okanagan Watershed.

Water supply in the basin is of several types. Much of the water supply comes from these upland storage reservoirs in the headwaters of the streams that feed the main stem of the Okanagan Valley. Here we have Okanagan Lake. We also have in-stream pumps in some of these tributary streams, and we have water that is taken by pumps out of the main stem of the lake and the river system. This is important in what I will discuss towards the end of the presentation.

On the subject of water use within the Okanagan Valley, we will see that the diverted water use for irrigation and domestic purposes is about half of the precipitation that falls on the valley.

The vulnerability of the agricultural sector in the Okanagan Basin is not just due to climate issues. We have climate variability, which is an issue. Because this is a semi-arid region, for agriculture to exist, we are dependant on irrigation. Storm events, particularly hail events, are problematic because of the high-quality fruit and production in the area. These products are readily damaged by hail. As well, there are issues to temperature. For example, there is the problem of cold damage to trees and vines. We are at the northern extension of many of these tender fruit production areas. There is the problem of frost damage to blossoms and fruit in the spring. Occasionally, our temperatures become too warm for ice wine production. I will show you some data that supports that in a little while. The incidence of high summer temperatures results in heat damage to fruit.

One of the major things that we have to deal with is competition for resources. Because the Okanagan is a beautiful place to live, many people want to be there. Land is expensive; as such, for agriculture to exist, we need to produce high-value crops, not low-value crops. There is also competition for water because agriculture, as has been mentioned several times, uses a large proportion of water and irrigated production systems. The Okanagan is no exception. About 70 per cent of the water that is diverted is used for agriculture.

Climate change is also an aspect of the vulnerability of the agricultural sector in the Okanagan Basin. There is the uncertainty that has been described in the modelling of climate change by the previous people who presented, and there is the possibility of more extreme events, which has the potential of damaging agriculture.

In terms of climate variability, I have here the bloom dates for one variety of apple — the McIntosh — at the Summerland Centre. This is a continuous record, spanning 1937 to 2000. The line I am pointing to here represents the average date of bloom. Where the graph falls below the line, the bloom date is earlier; where the graph moves above the line, the bloom date is later. There is great variation here, but it is apparent that towards the end of the century there was a series of years where the bloom dates were early. Hence, in terms of the climate variability, as the century progressed we were getting earlier bloom times.

Another type of variability relates to winter temperatures. We are now experiencing winters where the minimum temperatures are not the same as in winters previous. Ice wine requires a minimum temperature of minus 11 Celsius. As we can see here, the ice wine harvest date is quite variable, but on average it is getting later and later. If this continues, we may not be able to produce ice wines. This year, the harvest date was just this week. Hence, the trend is continuing.

Let me just re-emphasize the vulnerability in terms of the competition for land and water. This is the Osoyoos Lake. This is Osoyoos, one of the communities. This is the American border. There is urban development, and trans- boundary requirements for water have to be factored into the equation. We have a highly controlled system, one that is controlled for flood and fishing. Agricultural water supply, as mentioned earlier, takes about 70 to 80 per cent of the diverted water. We also have other in-stream requirements for recreation and requirements for domestic water supply.

We are interested in looking at what is going to happen between now and the next half of this century, up to about 2050. If we look at what has happened over the recent past, we see that there has been a lot of variability. This graph shows the trend in maximum temperature in the north Okanagan, at Vernon. There is an upward trend through the century. Hence, we have lots of variation, but we also have this upward trend.

Hence, how can we start to look at water requirements under future climate change? We have used a tool that we developed for irrigation management, which is an assessment of crop water demand or irrigation water demand based on some climate or weather data. In this case, we are looking at evapotranspiration, which is just the water requirements of the tree, which is the transpiration from the tree, and evaporation from the soil in the area surrounding the tree. Together, this constitutes crop water demand. The demand for water is driven by temperature and by wind. We have developed a model that is dependant on temperature data. We can take temperature data and from that estimate what is the crop water demand.

We also have to take some climate estimates from a global circulation model, a general circulation model, such as the ones that were being discussed earlier. When we first developed this tool, because of the complexity of the terrain that we are dealing with, we developed it for a general circulation model — Canadian General Circulation Model-1. Because of the very large grid size, we had to downscale to a much smaller grid size, and we did this using a model called PRISM — parameter-elevation regressions on independent slopes model — which downscales to a four by four kilometre grid.

The third factor in our modeling process is to superimpose these data on data for special distribution of crops. Here we have a very detailed land use map of the Okanagan. We have this sort of coverage for the whole Okanagan, which is split into fairly small units of different crop types, which all have a different requirement and a different model for estimating crop water use. So the model that we have developed combines the temperature and climate, downscaling through these PRISM grid cells, the spatial distribution of crops and the crop water demand level. Through that, we are able to generate some demands for water, both spatially and over time.

These are the sorts of data that Mr. Weaver would not be happy to see because it looks as if we are making a prediction, but in this case we are not making a prediction. We are just verifying our model. We are going to do something with it in the future, which will give us a little bit more of the variability and variation that is required to make some use and sense of these sorts of information.

What I want to point out to you here, however, is that these data are based on the 1961 to 1990 normals. These are the average climate conditions that existed in this time period. This is an average start of the growing season, which was around about March 26, and the average end of the growing season, which is about October 30. If we plug in some of the data from the model we mentioned, we see that we are extending the growing season by three weeks earlier and one week later. Hence, now we have a four-week longer growing season. For perennial irrigated crops, this extra four weeks becomes an issue. It is unlike an annual crop that may have a short growing season or a specific span. This is something to keep in mind when we are dealing with perennial crops compared with annual crops, which you may have come across previously in your hearings.

Hence, with our model we can generate the kinds of maps I am showing here, where we are comparing the water demand of 1961 to 1990 — it was fairly low, according to our scale, the green colours — to what might happen by mid- century. For this particular exercise, we show a 28 per cent increase.

At the same time, we are looking — this is some work done by Stuart Cohen's group — at possible changes in the hydrology of the basin. In this particular graph, this is the hydrograph for an unregulated creek flowing into the Okanagan Basin. What we are seeing is that, if we apply data from general circulation models, we are going to have an earlier onset of freshet, which is the peak of the flow, and potentially lower, and we are going to also have less water potential available towards the end of the growing season. So these are all factors that combine to have a potential impact on the availability of water for agriculture. With the model we have, because we have a spatial distribution, we now have the opportunity to roll up our information on an irrigation district basis.

Hence, in this case, we are looking at potential changes in a crop water demand from 1961-1990, in this case, towards the end of this century, and we can see that we are going to have increases in demand. In some cases, if we look at the licensed allocation, this is not important. If we look at, for example, this irrigation district, we are not even coming anywhere close to meeting what has been allocated. However, some other irrigation districts are already quite close to their allocation, and, in fact, by the end of the century and even probably by mid-century will potentially be in serious trouble.

These are the sorts of data we can get from our model, trying to test it in terms of variability and variation in our prediction techniques and in terms of the general climate variability that we see in the historic record. We are involved in a project with Stuart Cohen's group from Environment Canada. In our case, we are looking at the potential risk for crop water demand in the Okanagan. This is being fitted into a larger framework where their group is looking at other issues of water demand and supply. The three risks or uncertainties that we have to start to factor in are the uncertainty that is associated with the predictions coming out of general circulation models, the variability that exists in the historic record, and the need to define some impact thresholds for either irrigation districts or for individual farmer operations.

There is a lot of data like this that we can look at, but this one looks at three different general circulation models, the Canadian, the German and the British models, and three scenarios to look at seasonal change in maximum temperature. As you can see, there is variability in the outcomes of those models.

There is also variability in the climate record, and we have seen this in our bloom data and our temperature data. There are different kinds of variability. There is interannual variability. As well, there are trends that are increasing over time. In addition, we have also got these decayed oscillations, which are related to climate events as well as climate variability.

So how does that potentially have an impact on crop water demand? If we look at the model that we have developed, this is the range or the frequency distribution of crop water demand between 1916 and 2002. If you look at the graph, we see that we are measuring the range of crop water demand in hundreds of years. This is a very low crop water demand. That would happen, perhaps, two years out of every hundred. If we go to the other extreme, this might happen one year out of every hundred, but this is the sort of variation that occurs in the current climate record, and this is the sort of impact that it would have on demand for irrigation water.

What happens in the future? If we increased temperatures, if we increased the length of the growing season, do we slide everything to the right so that now we are getting the possibility of having much larger crop water demands? It is not happening very often, but maybe happening enough to be of concern.

How can we quantify this concern? Well, if we look, this is a threshold for the imposition of watering restrictions in one of our irrigation districts. This is one of the irrigation districts on a tributary stream, so it is dependant on a upland reservoir for water supply. We can see that, in 2001, they almost hit this threshold. In 2002, they did hit this threshold, even though they had started almost at their maximum capacity. So if we can measure the crop water demand or the irrigation water demand in the area of that irrigation district and we can have a hydrologic model, which the people from UBC are currently working on that shows the inflow into that reservoir both now and in the near future, maybe we can come up with some probabilities or likelihood of this reservoir threshold being exceeded.

Now, if we look at our role in Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, we are also looking at adaptation strategies. How can we help farmers to adapt? What sort of management tools can we give them to adapt? Sometimes, these things are self-evident: for example, increased acreages of those crops that are more adapted to the new climate, longer- season apple varieties, more grape acreage. Grapes require slightly less water than other tree fruits, for example, to be successful. Development of drought resistant varieties and new crops is another example.

Other possible strategies are going to be changes in the elevation of crop production areas and northward expansion. There are situations where in fact we may have some advantages here. We might be able to move north with some of our tender fruit varieties into larger acreages. That is something that we have not yet managed to look at.

The area that I currently do a lot of work on is looking at water conservation practices. How can we adapt our production systems to utilize water in a much more efficient way? Can we impose systems where we actually undersupply water but still maintain the production that is required?

The Chairman: Could you explain the white tube that we saw? Is it a form of direct watering?

I am glad you asked me about this. This is an electronic evapimometer. It is a device that measures evaporation. A porous ceramic plate is linked to a reservoir of water and is a direct measure of evaporation. The beauty of this system is that it is electronic, so we can actually use it to switch our irrigation systems on and off in response to the amount of evaporation on a particular day. It is a very precise system of managing or trying to match water supply to water demand.

This overhead sprinkler is an old type of irrigation system, one that we want to get away from. It is very inefficient. This is a micro-sprinkler, a new type of irrigation, where we are only applying water to a small area of soil. These are mulches, and they are being applied to prevent the loss of evaporative water from the soil.

The Chairman: Can you tell me what the mulch is?

Ms. Neilsen: It is a paper mulch; it is shredded paper. Coming from the government, we think this is a very good use of shredded paper.

Let me now turn to some other strategies for adaptation. We are currently looking at some infrastructure adaptation on the part of irrigation districts. We are hoping to provide them some information. We are also looking at some agricultural management adaptation strategies. In our current study with Stuart Cohen's group, in order to get enough useful information, we are asking stakeholders for their input.

We are also integrated with two irrigation districts with which we are doing some detailed studies. It is important for us to integrate some of these climate risk and coping studies with regional planning in response to the need for infrastructure changes. Obviously, there will be some impact on regional governance structures. In our particular region, we have quite a complexity of local governance structures that are dealing with this rather large issue of water supply and demand.

With respect to infrastructure changes, engineers must conform with requirements in order to make infrastructure changes that are being brought by about current demands. What sort of data do they try to base the designs on? Do they look at the 1961 to 1990 normal climate, which may not apply over the next 20 years? How can they build the climate change information into their decision making? Hence, even though, in terms of broader climate science we do not have specific answers, we have to look at the variability and the potential changes that can come with climate change in order to help these organizations make their decisions.

In summary, the agricultural sector in the Okanagan Basin is vulnerable, and this is no different from other agricultural areas. We are vulnerable to current climate variability and we are particularly vulnerable to the competition for resources. We are already seeing impacts of change in climate over the past 50 years. We think that climate change studies do indicate a potential increase in the demand for water for crops and potentially reduce supply. We think we can aid, with some of these climate change studies, in determining the increase of system failure in this particular case that we are looking at, insufficient reservoir capacity.

The Chairman: Thank you very much for that interesting historical and statistical report. One of the things that we, as a national committee, a committee of the Senate of Canada, have to look at is being able to come up with recommendations and proposals that can work for the entire country, not for a region.

You focused on one small sector of one small area in one province of Canada to tell us about some of the tests and the analysis that has been done there. You told us that there was a lot of variability in much of the data you have received and that it was very hard for you to define impact thresholds as a result of this variability. If there is variability within that small region of British Columbia, what do you think it would be like if we were to take a similar region, say, in Ontario, another one in Quebec and another one in Manitoba? What do you think that would do?

My question is this: What advice do you have for us as a committee in taking data, like you have given us today, and applying that to Canada?

Ms. Neilsen: Indeed, the information I have shown you today is very specific to the region. However, the approach we have used is one that can be used locally and regionally in other parts of the country. That is the importance of what I hope I have gotten across to you. The specific information is particularly applicable, as you say, to our region; however, the issue of addressing local climate variation and variability is something that can be addressed in other regions I think in a similar way. Each region has its own particular climate sensitivities. For example, I understand that you have been looking at drought on the Prairies, so they have a different set of sensitivities than we have, but I think the approach is applicable to other regions.

The Chairman: Let's look at grape growing. One of your strategies was to move the production farther north; correct?

Ms. Neilsen: It is possible, yes.

The Chairman: We have been told by scientists both in Saskatchewan and in Alberta that a proper study has not been done of the terrain, the earth and the soils there to know whether they would, in fact, be conducive to producing the type of product you are getting now from the soils you are using in the Okanagan.

Have you conducted a series of soil tests in areas where you may move north, as a result of the climate change, to determine whether those soils are suitable for grape growing, say?

Ms. Neilsen: No, we have not actually done that. I should like to defer to Scott Smith on this. Mr. Smith is the land use expert.

Mr. C.A. Scott Smith, Head, Land Resource Unit, Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada: My job is to assess land in terms of its agricultural capability. I know what these fellows are referring to with the instance on the Prairies, where, even though it may warm, there is a limitation as to how far north one can move because of the Canadian Shield. Once you encounter the Canadian Shield, there is bedrock close to the surface. Hence, even though it is warmer, there is not an adequate soil base to operate in.

To some extent, it is the same in the Okanagan Valley because once we move out of the valley floor, even though it may become warmer higher up, we are onto mountainside. Hence, even though there may be a climatic condition that is suitable for having agriculture at higher elevation, there is an absence of terrain or soil. Hence, there are limits to how agriculture can move out of the valleys in the Cordilleran Region. This would apply to any of the valleys. We can go up if we encounter plateau regions, relatively level land at higher elevation. Those areas would definitely have potential for agriculture under future climatic scenarios.

Ms. Neilsen: Tree fruit production, for example, started in the Kamloops region of British Columbia but is no longer practised there. There are fairly large areas that probably could be opened up for tender fruit production in the future, if necessary.

The Chairman: I was interested in some of your evidence about grapes and ice wine. You told us about the sustained temperatures that you require for the grapes to freeze and produce the sugar necessary for that variety of wine. You showed us a chart that indicated that each year it is later and later that the grapes have had the temperatures to produce the sugar that you need. In France, in Burgundy and in Bordeaux, if the grapes are late maturing and the growers become worried about frost, they put pots in between their rows to keep the frost possibilities away. I am wondering whether you have come up with any innovative adaptations to help increase the colder temperatures? Is there anyone working in science to develop and innovative way of helping sustain the temperatures?

Ms. Neilsen: Not to my knowledge.

Mr. Smith: As a point of clarification, the chart in question was showing the harvest for the production of ice wine.

The Chairman: Yes.

Mr. Smith: That is a time when it is colder than minus 10 degrees Celsius. The grapes have to be harvested frozen, pressed frozen. The temperature cannot be warmer than minus 10 Celsius.

What is happening is that the grapes are growing during the growing season and are left on the vine to freeze. It used to be that they could encounter minus 10 Celsius in early November; then it was December before we got minus 10, then January. This year, it was the last week of February before the temperatures dropped to minus 10 Celsius. We know enough about the climate in the valley that once March arrives there is very little chance of the temperature dropping to minus 10 Celsius. So, any warmer and we will not be producing ice wine in the Okanagan Valley. It will not be possible because we will not have winter temperatures cold enough to freeze the grapes.

The Chairman: You will have to adapt by finding something else to do with those grapes on the vine.

Mr. Smith: Yes. We will not leave them on the vine and wait for them to freeze. We will have to harvest them in the fall, as is the case in most wine-producing regions of the world. Canada is one of the few regions that consistently produces ice wine.

Senator LaPierre: You could send the grapes in a frozen state to Ontario. Ontario could produce the ice wine and you guys could do something else. Is that possible?

Ms. Neilsen: Ontario already produces most of the ice wine in Canada actually.

Senator LaPierre: Yes, and the competition is not very good, I suppose.

Senator Hubley: Thank you for your presentation. I am certainly encouraged to see that you have come up with some strategies to adapt. You have identified some of the important issues in water that your industry depends on.

In an earlier presentation today, we were told that there are no high-altitude weather forecasting services available. If they were available, how would they benefit your industry?

Ms. Neilsen: I am really glad that you raised this, because this is an issue that we hoped to touch on. In terms of our industry, because the industry is concentrated in the valley floors, high-altitude weather stations would not necessarily be an issue, per se. However, in the whole area of climate modelling and forecasting, it is important that we start to put into place high-altitude weather stations for climate monitoring and that we continue to maintain the weather stations that already exist. There is some concern about those disappearing, and similarly for hydrology studies, which are also important, that we continue to monitor the flow of rivers. Again, all those monitoring activities are currently at risk. There is a push to reduce the number of monitoring sites across the country. This is of great concern.

Senator Tkachuk: Who is pushing it?

Ms. Neilsen: There is a lack of funding for the continued maintenance of those stations. Currently, they are mainly maintained by Environment Canada.

Senator Hubley: Are you seeing more violent storms in your areas? Perhaps you are not prone to that as much as other parts of the country. Are there dramatic changes in the weather in the Okanagan Valley?

Ms. Neilsen: I would not say that there are dramatic changes. The changes are gentler. The increase in winter minimum temperatures we are experiencing is one of the main results of climate variability at the moment.

Senator Day: In your modelling, you did not include any of those adaptation strategies, other than showing the potential change due to temperature increase.

Ms. Neilsen: Right.

Senator Day: You did not incorporate into the graph issues like biotechnology, or direct feeding or the mulch that you talked about.

Ms. Neilsen: We are not at that stage. We are doing work on an experimental basis to look at the water savings that are potentially available with all those techniques. There would have been no difficulty in incorporating those into the model because the basis of our crop water demand model is exactly the same as we are using for irrigation management. We do have a direct link between potential water savings from those strategies that could be applied to the model, but we have not done that at the present.

Senator Day: Is all your modelling based on the same species and, therefore, the same typical demand for water, the same species of plant with no increase in vineyards and no increase in other products?

Ms. Neilsen: Our current model is not based on the same species across the board. It is based on all our crops. However, in terms of land use, we are keeping the same land use. We have not tweaked it to change areas of different crops or anything like that. However, the potential is to do that.

Senator Day: Would you then be in a position with this modelling to tell a farmer that he or she should use biotechnology, say, because there will not be the water over the next 10 years that there has been in the past, to tell him that if he rotates crops or is planting new species, new varieties of grapes, he should plant something else? Is your model that sophisticated?

Ms. Neilsen: I do not think that within a particular species we have varieties that at the moment are more drought tolerant. This is for tree fruits and grapes. I do not think that that information is there, nor do I think anyone has done any screening for that with those particular crops. For our systems, water conservation techniques, at least in the short run, are going to be more important than looking at drought resistant varieties.

Senator Day: Is that not just looking at one part of the picture?

Ms. Neilsen: It is looking at one part of the picture, and there is no reason why one should not look at drought resistant varieties. Water conservation measures of various kinds, whether it be irrigation, scheduling, changing to very conservative irrigation practices, mulching or a combination of all of those things, are things that can done on a fairly short term and naturally realize large benefits in water saving.

Senator Day: Where, if anywhere, is the study being done with respect to the longer-term issues that I have talked about?

Ms. Neilsen: No one I am aware of is looking at drought tolerance in these sorts of perennial crops, high-value tree fruit and vine production. Techniques such as supplying water deficits and undersupplying water but trying to maintain crop quality are being looked at by some.

Senator Day: If we introduced a programme whereby farmers who saved water, based on historical patterns, received some type of credit, would that encourage individual farmers to start looking at new biotechnology, new science that would help save water?

Ms. Neilsen: I think it probably would, yes.

Senator Day: Are there any financial incentives of that type currently in place?

Ms. Neilsen: Certainly not within our region that I am aware of.

Mr. Smith: I wish to add something with regard to the use of water. One of the most effective ways to encourage water conservation is to charge the user by volume, monitor use. In the Okanagan, that has not been the case. A farmer simply has an allocation of water; no one actually measures how much is used. Obviously, there is no incentive to be efficient.

If producers were charged by volume, there would be an obvious incentive to adopt new technologies, such as micro-sprinklers, mulches, et cetera.

Senator Day: That is the same economic incentive I was talking about.

Mr. Smith: That is coming in our region.

Senator Day: Is it?

Mr. Smith: We are starting to monitor water. I think that will ultimately be the main tool to lever efficiency out of producers.

Senator Day: Presumably, the first step in monitoring water volume is to charge above allocation. In other words, if a producer were to exceed allocation, a fine would be levied.

In California, they just cut it off at the allocation. No fine is levied; a producer just does not get any more water.

The Chairman: I know you listed to a lot of evidence today, before making your presentation. Since you are the last witnesses, I am curious as to whether you heard anything today from any of the other witnesses that surprised you. Second, is there anything you really disagreed with that you would like to put on the record?

Ms. Neilsen: No, I do not think I heard anything that really surprised me; neither is there anything I really want to contradict.

Mr. Smith: I should like to comment on Andrew Weaver's position that there is no use trying to make predictions about what will happen at a local level. In essence, we are working at the local level. Ultimately, this is the challenge for scientists like Denise and I who work in a region at a research facility. We have to somehow be able to take the output from the general circulation models and apply the output to local issues, because ultimately that is where it all happens.

There are some real challenges to doing this, but there are some techniques that almost become research in themselves — for example, how to scale down the output from the Canadian modelling group at the University of Victoria and apply it to a site-specific issue like irrigation water in the Okanagan. We use multiple models, and not just the Canadian model. You will see that we referenced the Hadley model, which Mr. Weaver made reference to as being the finest research facility.

The Chairman: Many people have given us the Hadley model.

Mr. Smith: Hence, we use multiple models and then multiple scenarios — for example, business-as-usual scenarios, among others. We do not necessarily use the absolute value that their model produces. We can apply a change in temperature to our local climate station and then run our models that way. We do not walk away from the challenge of trying to somehow downscale to local issues. In order to do climate change research, we depend completely on the group at the federal lab at the University of Victoria that generates the Canadian model output.

There was some discussion about their being a group who takes the raw data generated by the modellers and packages it for people like us to use in regional climate change research projects. Whether they should be in Regina or everyone should be in Victoria, I suppose in the perfect world critical mass is important, but our recommendation certainly is that to continue the support of the Canadian climate modelling group. They are world class in their own right. It means that we as Canadians have the opportunity to work with our own scientists to generate scenario data that we can apply to our own problems, that we do not have to go to Germany or Japan for climate change output. There are special challenges in British Columbia because of the mountainous terrain; as well, our climates vary over a few kilometres because of mountain rain shadows and what have you.

The Chairman: I wish to thank you both for your attendance here.

Senator Tkachuk: They have got a great facility in Summerland as well. It is quite pretty.

Ms. Neilsen: Please come and visit us.

The committee adjourned.