4 — Sunday, September 23, 1990 ~ North Shore News Canada won’ turn into a Mi i IN CANADA, I know from talking privately to people, there is a secret smugness — almost a thrill — about the idea of the Greenhouse Ef- fect. It comes down to the outra- geous, but nevertheless secretly- held belicf, that Canada, so long viewed by the rest of the world as a kind of extended sub-arctic tun- dra, will turn out in the next cen- tury to be a gloriously fertile land, while everything to the south turns to desert. In Toronto, especially, one often hears people jokingly refer to the notion that the weather will improve, thanks to global warm- ing. Instead of bitter winters, Torontonians will be experiencing the pleasures of a Miami-style climate. Palm trees on Bay Street, outdoor swimming at Christmas — that sort of thing. Jokes, as we all know, reveal actual attitudes that can’t other- wise safely be expressed in public. Canadians as a whole, Ido believe, actually harbor the notion that the Greenhouse Effect will work to our advantage. The grow- ing season will be longer, the winters shorter and perhaps even non-existent, property values will soar in the northern parts of the provinces, and the Northwest Ter- ritories may even become the new breadbasket of the world. Such a fantasy, despite its ob- vious appeal to the long-frozen Canadian psyche — to say nothing of our inferiority complex — is a dangerous form of insanity that can only contribute to our inaction in reducing carbon diox- ide emissions. There will be no *‘winners” in a full-blown Greenhouse Effect scenario, not even Canucks. The True North will not become a Jush paradise while tands closer to the equator boil and bake. Recent studies show, for one thing, that almost all of the heating-up of the planet’s at- mosphere will occur in the nor- thernmost areas. The simple reason is that, around the equator, you mostly have water, which moderates changes in temperature. This is not to say that the drought situation in Africa won’t worsen catastrophically, because all that is required for that to oc- cur is tiny increases in temperature. It is already happen- ing. But the very greatest changes in climate will happen at the poles, with regions like Canada com- pletely affected, whereas, con- versely, countries like Mexico will hardly be changed at all, at least not in comparison with the changes Canadians face. The phenomenon can be com- pared to a kind of Ice-Age-in- reverse. This said, I have to add that the degree of climate change being of- fered as a ‘‘best-guess’’ by most scientists is based on what is un- doubtedly obsolete data which suggests that a doubling of C02 levels within 50 years would mean an increase in temperature of 8°C in the Arctic, 2 to 4°C in B.C. and the Maritimes, and 4 to 6°C in most of the rest of the country. Disastrous as that would be for our agriculture, forests and fish- cries, new data strongly indicates yw «(DOITUP RIGHT, BC Nort Bob Hunter 7 ECOLOGIC that the true degree of warming would be much, much worse than that. {refer again here to the just- published book, Global Warming, the Greenpeace Report, edited by Jeremy Leggett. The bleakest part of the book is chapter five, by Dr. George Woodwell, director of the Woods Hole Research Centre in Massachusetts, who examines the ‘biotic effects’’ of planetary overheating. While the primary causes of the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere are un- doubtedly the Industrial Revolu- tion and deforestation, there is a “third source’? which has just begun to emerge, and which could cause a greater increase in temperature than the other two causes put together. There are estimated to be some 2,000 billion tonnes of carbon trapped in plants and soil, due to the respiration process in the plants themselves and the decay of organic matter in the soil. The tota! amount of carbon released as carbon dioxide into the at- mosphere in 1990 is thought to be 5.7 billion tonnes. Obviously, if even a fraction of the stored carbon was released from plants and soil, the Greenhouse Effect would roll into high gear. In fact, over a recent 18-month period, observers at the Mauna Loa weather station noted an unexpected surge in the amount of C02 entering the atmosphere. It was in the order of a 60 per cent increase above the levels that could be attributed to either in- dustrial emissions or deforesta- tion. What is apparently happening is that as temperatures rise, the release of carbon in plants and soil is stimulated. The hotter it gets, the more C02 is released from natural sources, thereby speeding up and intensifying the warming process. Moreover, since a 25 per cent increase in CO2 emissions — thanks to the burning of fossil fuels and destruction of forests in the last century — has never oc- curred in the history of the planet before, there is no theoretical limit to the amount of warming that can occur. The end result could very easily be a runaway Greenhouse Effect, which would turn the Earth into a living hell like Venus. Stay tuned. More bad news to come. Come on, we're adults. Might as well face this stuff. CICBC Charges laid A VANCOUVER man. was ordered Sept. 18 to stand cial on charges of conspiracy to import cocaine into Canada and traffick- ing cocaine, The charges against Robert Harrison, 32, are in’ connection with alleged events occurring be- tween May 7, 1987 and June 12, 1987 in North Vancouver District and Ventura County in California as well as other areas in B.C. and the U.S. Harrison will next appear Nov. 28 in Supreme Court to set a trial date. 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