Picture a world where climate change has become an advanced reality.

The Mississippi Delta, islands in the Pacific and a good deal of Bangladesh are disappearing beneath the waves. The Amazon is afire; the monsoon (a periodic wind in the Indian Ocean and southern Asia, characterized by torrential rains) has failed to materialize for a third successive year. India has lost almost all its agricultural production and Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey are turning into deserts.

Would people and governments in that circumstance be seeking friendly, collaborative ways to cope with an international disaster?

In a speech to students, in the University of New Brunswick’s lecture theatre this week, the international journalist and author Gwynne Dyer warned that the affects of climate change could one day push nations into war.

He argued that the effect of uncontrolled global warming will be: mass starvation; mass population movement and war. He said that if we let climate change go to the tipping point we will face dire changes in rainfall distribution that will change agricultural production that in turn will destabilize world politics.

Dyer says a study by the World Bank (which has not been made public) on the affect of climate change on Indian agricultural production concludes that a mean temperature rise of two degrees Celsius would diminish agricultural production in India by 25%. A five degree increase would virtually destroy India’s agricultural production.
Consider what happened in Greece this summer.

Wildfires scorched much of southern Greece during the last week of August. Six thousand homes and four million olive trees burned to the ground. Half the forests of Greece are gone and 64 people are dead... It’s hard to imagine that people will ever live in the carbonized landscapes of the Peloponnesus (the heart and soul of Greece) again.

What nobody saw coming was the political fall-out of those fires.

When the center-right government of Kostas Karamanlis called an early election in August, it had a comfortable lead in the polls and was cruising towards certain victory. The fires changed everything. In polls, published prior to the September 16th election, Karamanlis's New Democracy party had fallen below 40 percent in polls.

In the end, the Party managed to hold on to a tiny majority (152 of 300 seats) with 41.84% of the vote.


Contrast the realities above with Prime Minister Harper’s speech to an assembly of 80 countries at the United Nations this week, where he told delegates that Canada is vigorously campaigning for an international deal that would reject the central foundation of the Kyoto Protocol.
Instead of capping greenhouse-gas emissions at specific levels as called for under Kyoto, Mr. Harper wants to link results of climate change actions to "intensity targets". His position stands in stark contrast to European countries and falls in line with the U.S. approach to climate change.


After addressing the United Nations on Monday, Harper announced that Canada would join a rival climate change pact becoming the seventh member of the Asia-Pacific Partnership, a group nicknamed as the anti-Kyoto partnership by some environmentalists.


The Asia-Pacific Partnership, created by the United States, Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea and accounting for nearly half the world's greenhouse-gas emitters has been criticized for ignoring the mandatory reduction targets contained in Kyoto.


The United States withdrew from Kyoto following George W. Bush’s election in 2000. He did not attend the Monday session at the United Nations. Instead, the U.S. President held a parallel climate change conference in Washington on Thursday and Friday, attended by 16 of the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters, including Canada.


U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made clear the U.S. preference is for “voluntary measures” not reduction targets. John Ashton, a climate change specialist for the British Foreign Secretary, said “a voluntary approach to global warming would be about as effective as a voluntary speed limit on a super highway”.


Canada’s David Suzuki says the ultimate goal of climate change initiatives must be to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. “That's the cause of global warming. If you don't reduce emissions in absolute terms, then the problem keeps getting worse”.


The Harper/Bush plan calls for a reduction in "intensity targets”. Intensity-based targets will not reduce total gashouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas intensity refers to the amount of greenhouse gases produced per unit of economic activity (a barrel of oil for example).

If targets are tied to economic growth, then actual greenhouse gas emissions can or will continue to rise, so long as they are tied to economic expansion. The atmosphere does not respond to intensity. It responds to greenhouse emissions. Intensity targets will do little, if anything to fix the problem.


According to a Canadian (Harris-Decima) poll released on Monday, the environment tops a list of most important issues facing Canadians, surpassing health care, the economy and the war in Afghanistan.


The environment was almost twice as important as the war in Afghanistan. The poll says that 61% of Canadians feel strongly about the environment and are "very concerned" about the issue. A meager 11 per cent of those surveyed said the Harper government takes the issue of climate change "very seriously."


If Gwynne Dyer is half right, our future depends on action now. It took the Americans three years and thousands of lives to see through the George Bush deception and rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

Surely, it will not take Canadians three years to see through the Harper sidestep on climate change. It’s time for Stéphane Dion and the Liberal Party to step up to the plate with an alternative.

Climate change could be the make or break issue in the next election, particularly if there is one this fall.

W.E. (Bill) Belliveau is a Shediac resident and Moncton business consultant. He can be contacted at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com Atlantic Insight is a published Blog inventory of opinion articles published weekly in New Brunswick's print media as written by W.E. (Bill) Belliveau, who is a resident of Shediac, New Brunswick, and small business owner, operating his Moncton-based marketing consultancy, Bell Strategic. He can be reached by e-mail at mailto:bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com