Rex Murphy on Global Warming

An inconvenient truth Feb. 1, 2007
Video (Runs 4:07)
Global warming is the biggest issue I can remember for quite a while.
Probably not since Y2K has there been the prospect of a crisis that has seized the attention of the entire world.
In the great Y2K alarms, you will remember there were all sorts of hideous scenarios... a great crash of all the world's computer systems, planes falling out of the sky at midnight as the millennium turned, security nightmares. Nothing happened, of course, except billions upon billions of dollars spent to avert a non-catastrophe.
The clock ticked over into a new millennium. The day after Y2K was very much like the day before Y2K.
But it was pretty big while it was going on, and a whole lot of very educated, scientific people kept telling us we were in for global chaos and turmoil.
I don't think global warming is another Y2K. Although it does share some of its wild properties. What it shares is a veritable industry of catastrophic prophecies and apocalyptic alarms, great gloomy portraits of the world's weather a hundred years from now.
Its loudest advocates possess a strident and quite impossible certitude about an immensely complex future outcome. Probabilities are argued as certainties. Disagreements are labeled as propelled by sinister oil interests. Science is made a handmaiden of world scale advocacy.
Beneath the noise, some things are absolutely clear. The earth is warming. It has been since the last ice age. No arguments there. Mankind has to some degree accelerated what we'll call the natural warming since the ice age.
I'm actually with Al Gore on this, although it's only fair to note that Al Gore is no more an authority on the process or the science than, say, Stephen Harper. The debate over global warming is not about the warming, but the projections of what that warming might mean, how radically it might affect parts of the planet.
It's also about what some nations, including Canada, are willing to do to slow it down. Well, what can we do, Canada? We can offer symbolic action, and, let's be clear, nothing more. Canada could shut down tomorrow completely, and if the projections of Mr. Gore are correct, it would have no meaningful impact on global warming. We're too small a country. We're not emitting CO2 gases in sufficient volume that our contribution, if it stopped, would tip the scales in any significant manner. But symbolically, if Canada were to cut its emissions drastically by choice, it might act as a signal to other bigger nations — the U.S., China, India — to give consideration to doing 0the same.
So the question for us is really, is the moral weight of our example worth the immediate, real costs to our economy and lifestyles? Will you drive 30 per cent less, buy 30 per cent less, approve putting a brake on the oilsands, offshore oil, the auto-making industry? In hard terms, will we use less energy, pay more for fuel, live less excessively, fly less often right now, just to show the world that we Canadians are willing to back up what we say about global warming by what we do?
This is not just a question for our politicians. It's a question for us all. Do we believe our moral leadership is worth the personal and public cost of providing that leadership? The answer to that question may be an inconvenient truth. But that's what the global warming debate for us Canadians is all about. For "The National," I'm Rex Murphy.