Dear Editor:
It is not unusual to see Brian Paleczny’s (“Letter writer ‘wrong,’” July 27) lack of logic to say Canada should do better than accepting our emissions at 1.6% despite the fact our emissions are insignificant.
Alarmists like to point out per-capita stats which are meaningless in the big picture. He goes on to mention 1989 fire stats of 7.6 million hectares burned yet he ignores 2020 with only 0.5 million hectares burned. Did climate change take a rest?
In the 1990s and 2000s, Canada has seen its largest outbreak of Douglas fir bark beetles, spruce bark beetles and balsam bark beetles, which as decimating trees in BC’s Pacific North West and Canada’s boreal forest. Tens of millions of hectares have been impacted. Might explain fire intensity.
I would suggest Mr. Paleczny go to the CNFDB site and look at the graph which shows number of fires and area burned from 1980 to 2021. The numbers are up and down but what it doesn’t show is that fires are trending up. One bad year is not a trend. In fact, 1981, 1989, 1994 and 1995 had close to 30 million hectares burned in total.
Ron Moore, in his letter to the editor (“Missed the point,” July 27) says we should worry about a livable future for our grandkids, and Liz Armstrong writes (“Back from the brink,” July 27) that we are looking at a future which is not livable, and yet Jim Skea, the new head of the UN’s IPCC, said it’s not helpful to imply that a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius is an existential threat to humanity.
Who should we listen to? I prefer not to listen to the media’s climate change sound bites.
Mr. Moore goes on to suggest that we lower our emissions to match the Chinese who emit 27% of the world’s emissions because their per capita emissions are lower than Canada’s. Logic is out the window with that idea. He is also big on sequestering carbon, which is very expensive and in my mind would be better spend on tangible improvements for Canadians.
Mr. Moore’s pronouncement that fossil fuels are a dying industry could not be more inaccurate. Norway has just approved $18.5 billion in new oil and gas projects to meet growing global demand.
My worry about the future is that we won’t spend money where it will benefit the people of the world, but rather on trying to control our climate, which is affected by La Nina and El Nino, to say nothing about the 40 billion gallons of water vapor which was shot up into the stratosphere by the Tonga volcano eruption of Jan. 15, 2022.
Experts say it could remain in the stratosphere for several years exacerbating our climate change effects for decades. As we know, water vapor traps heat. We will see how this plays out.
Peter Mandic,
Fergus