Climate change "expert" offers dire warning

Screw over our grandchildren's children and live for today, or start drastically changing the way we travel, eat and power our world.

That's the basic choice facing the planet as it ponders global warming, Andrew Weaver says.

"There is no halfway solution," the University of Victoria professor said, speaking to a crowd at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo recently.
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"What does it mean to live in a world that is 6 C warmer?" he asked.

He describes a grim scenario -- 80 per cent of the world's species are wiped out, most of southern Europe is a desert, and the planet's low-lying regions are under water because of melting polar ice caps.

But don't look to politicians to make tough decisions needed to curb economic growth or challenge entrenched industries, he said. They rely on a political cycle that focuses on the next four years, and aren't concerned the impact their decisions will have generations from now, he said.

And as long as the media continue to give credibility to so-called climate change deniers, there will be a mistaken belief there's a big debate within the scientific community about how serious global warming is and how much of it is caused by humans, Weaver said.

"If the public believes there's uncertainty about climate change, they won't put pressure on elected officials to do something about it," he said.

Weaver might be Canada's most prominent authority on the issue. He is an adviser to Al Gore and lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists who interpret climate change data for the world's governments.

In the middle of the last federal election, Weaver released a book, Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World, and went political -- a rare step for a scientist -- by telling Canadians whom they should vote for.

Hint: not the Conservative party. Their cap-and-trade plan for curbing emissions lets the market determine the cost of carbon offsets, he said.