This report covers global warming concerns, including not only automotive carbon emissions but the number of emissions resulting from clearcutting forests. Global warming could turn boreal forests into grasslands, destroy dwindling numbers of rare wildlife, and threaten many species' survival, including our own. Read on and learn about ways you can help to cool global warming.

Who Will Take Global Warming Seriously?

Wilderness Committee Educational Report Vol.17 - No.03 Summer 1998

IMPACTS OF RAPID GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE CATASTROPHIC, AND ASTRONOMICALLY COSTLY

Will our elected leaders wait to enact legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions until it is too late and a climate catastrophe is impossible to avert? Let's hope not!

Click on map to enlarge. The Climate of Canada, Environment Canada, 1990 and Forest regions of Canada, Canadian Forest Service

Let's face it. We've seen announcements of $25 billion worth of development in the oilsands. That alone will increase our emissions. They could put on a carbon tax. . They could put on a cap. They could issue tradeable (emission) permits. But in any of those scenarios, there would have to be a huge bureaucracy to administer the program. We are going to resist binding, regulatory measures. Ty Lund, Alberta Minister of the Environment, Edmonton Journal Oct. 22 1997.

"The financial impact on Alberta [of the Kyoto Agreement to reduce greenhouse gases] would be tremendous--certainly in the billions of dollars, perhaps trillions." Ralph Klein, Edmonton Journal Sept. 26 1997.

A frog is oblivious to gradually rising water temperature which eventually become lethal and kill it. Ostriches bury their heads in the sand to avoid facing an unpleasant situation.

Are we as foolish?

Are those who warn us of the dire consequences of global warming and demand that governments do something to defuse the "climate bomb" just full of "hot air"? It doesn't seem so.

In fact there are beautiful countries that most of us will never see, like Fiji and Tahiti that are ecosystem jewels that will literally disappear within the next century if we don't do something and these are people that are literally fighting for their very lives. Sheila Copps on The Nature of Things, December 1996

This year we've experienced El Nino on steroids...the escalation of climate change. There has been virtually no spring run-off and the forest in Alberta is already extremely dry and summer hasn't even started. Will forest fires release a huge carbon bomb this summer? What will be the impact of climate change over the next decade on existing industries such as forestry and northern farming? Who will pick up the tab; who will take responsibility if catastrophe happens?

-Gray Jones, Executive Director,
Wilderness Committee's Boreal Forest Campaign.

Click on map to enlarge.
The gradual variation in incoming solar radiation due to natural cosmic cycles plotted alongside the Earth's mean average temperature reveals the following general relationship: More sunlight energy = a warmer Earth; Less sunlight energy = a cooler Earth. The recent increase in Earth's temperature in spite of the gradual decrease in incoming solar energy is one piece of scientific evidence that suggests human-caused increases in greenhouse gasses due to fossil fuel burning and forest clearing is responsible for today's rapid climate change.