Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada

Front Cover
Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2004 M06 24 - 273 pages

Drought, floods, hurricanes, forest fires, ice storms, blackouts, dwindling fish stocks...what Canadian has not experienced one of these or more, or heard about the “greenhouse” effect, and not wondered what is happening to our climate? Yet most of us have a poor understanding of this extremely important issue, and need better, reliable scientific information. Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada delivers some hard facts to help us make some of those hard choices.

This new collection of essays by leading Canadian scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanists offers an overview and assessment of climate change and its impacts on Canada from physical, social, technological, economic, political, and ethical / religious perspectives. Interpreting and summarizing the large and complex literatures from each of these disciplines, the book offers a multidisciplinary approach to the challenges we face in Canada. Special attention is given to Canada’s response to the Kyoto Protocol, as well as an assessment of the overall adequacy of Kyoto as a response to the global challenge of climate change.

Hard Choices fills a gap in available books which provide readers with reliable information on climate change and its impacts that are specific to Canada. While written for the general reader, it is also well suited for use as an undergraduate text in environmental studies courses.

From inside the book

Contents

1 Introduction
1
Whats Going to Happening?
11
What Can We Do?
89
Hard Choices
199
About the Authors
257
Index
265
Copyright

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Page 244 - The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
Page 203 - Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.
Page 244 - And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity ; for the land is mine : for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.
Page 238 - A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.
Page 36 - the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate' [5], and was sufficiently confident by the time of the Third Assessment Report to conclude that 'there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities
Page 14 - Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future. Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years . This experiment, if adequately documented, may yield a far-reaching insight into the processes determining weather and climate.
Page 218 - I oppose the Kyoto Protocol because it exempts 80 percent of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the US economy.
Page 31 - Higher minimum temperatures, fewer cold days and frost days over nearly all land areas Reduced diurnal temperature range over most land areas Increase of heat index3 over land areas More intense precipitation events" Increased summer continental drying and associated risk of drought Increase in tropical cyclone peak wind intensities...
Page 31 - Higher maximum temperatures and more hot days over nearly all land areas Higher minimum temperatures, fewer cold days and frost days over nearly all land areas Reduced diurnal temperature range over most land areas Increase of heat index (a measure of human discomfort) over land areas More intense precipitation events...
Page 213 - Conference on the Assessment of the Role of Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases in Climate Variations and Associated Impacts (conference held in Villach, Austria, Oct.

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