Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Sep 29 2006 (IPS) — Canada should move quickly to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the country’s environmental auditor warned Thursday.

Earlier this week, leading U.S. scientists said that the Earth is warmer than it has been in 10,000 years and less than one degree C from being the warmest in a million years.

“Our future is at stake,” said Johanne Gélinas, Canada’s commissioner of the environment and sustainable development.

“I am more troubled than ever by the federal government’s longstanding failure to confront one of the greatest challenges of our time,” Gélinas wrote in her annual audit report.

There has been no serious attempt to reduce emissions from Canada’s transportation and industrial sectors, which account for 78 percent of all emissions, Gélinas told IPS in an interview.

Gélinas works for the government-funded but independent Office of the Auditor General of Canada.

Despite being legally required to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent under the Kyoto Protocol, Canada’s emissions have soared nearly 35 percent, mainly due to a booming oil and gas sector that supplies the United States.

Under Kyoto, 34 industrialised nations, including Canada, are obligated to reduce their greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions by 5.2 percent below their 1990 levels by 2008-12.

Although Canada has until 2012 to reach its reduction target, Canada’s new Conservative government has said that target is “impossible”. And it has either scrapped existing reduction GHG programmes or put them on hold pending a new environmental plan expected sometime in October.

However, government officials have hinted that the plan will focus on smog reduction, not GHG or climate change.

Another decade of business-as-usual carbon emissions will probably make it too late to prevent the ecosystems of the north from succumbing to runaway climate change, concluded a new U.S. analysis released this week.

Global temperatures have been rising rapidly over the past 30 years, averaging 0.2 C every decade, reports Jim Hansen, director of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

However, the warming is happening much faster in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere, particularly in the sub-Arctic boreal forests of Siberia and North America, the researchers found. Here the melting of ice and snow is exposing darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight and increase warming, creating a positive feedback.

If additional global warming is not limited to less than one degree C, those feedbacks, such as the release of millions of tonnes of carbon stored in the permafrost, will likely trigger catastrophic climate change.

That will make the Earth a “different planet”, eventually including an ice-free Arctic, they conclude.

“The current (Canadian) government thinks the science on climate change is debatable when it clearly is not,” said Gordon McBean, a climatologist at the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction at the University of Western Ontario.

The latest science shows that the chance of significant and abrupt, irreversible changes increases as global temperatures rise, McBean, a former Canadian government scientist, told IPS.

“It is the government’s duty to protect its citizens,” he said.

Canadians are already suffering from the impacts of climate change, said Gélinas. But no one has yet calculated those costs or the future costs of climate change to Canada, including the costs of adaptation, she said.

An immediate and massive scale-up of efforts needs to be made by the current government to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change. Previous Canadian government’s efforts at reductions have “been too little and too slow”, said Gélinas.

“Climate change is the single biggest issue challenge facing Canada,” agreed Morag Carter, director of the Suzuki Foundation’s climate change programme.

Mandatory reduction targets and caps are needed, Carter said in an interview.

“The commissioner’s report clearly shows that the voluntary programmes of the past did not work,” he said.

But matters may be even worse under the current government. Despite the fact that science of climate change is not in doubt, Carter worries that the Harper administration is listening to the few remaining climate change deniers.

“There is a desperate urgency here. We can’t waste another five or 10 years before acting,” he said.

Gélinas agrees, and says her message to the present government is that strong federal government leadership is crucial to address climate change. The consequences will only be worse if policy-makers do not act quickly, effectively and decisively, she said..

“What we need now is a commitment to specific actions with timeframes for completing them,” she said. Otherwise, “Is that the future we want for Canada?”