More importantly, the report repeatedly commits what is an unthinkable sin for advocates of immediate greenhouse action: it mentions the possible benefits of a warming planet as well as the perils. One can't help wondering how different the whole thing might have looked if it had been prepared under the auspices of the Environment department, which often appears to be occupied by a stubborn core of alarmists. Instead, it comes to us from the Department of Natural Resources, which is inherently more inclined to foster unsentimental, economic-style thinking about our natural inheritance.

The core of From Impacts to Adaptation is really a series of reports, each one covering a different region of the country. I was naturally interested in the Prairie section, especially after I read a 16-word summary in a rival paper: "More frequent droughts could cost farmers billions; loss of cold winters could spread pests and disease." These things are, it is true, cited as potential consequences of the median IPCC warming scenarios that are taken as the premise of the report. The potential for more severe droughts is especially noteworthy, because the recorded environmental history of the Prairies is too short for us to be confident that the climate conditions familiar to us are themselves truly "natural" in the long term.

But the summary could just as easily have featured this paraphrase:
"The balance of evidence suggests that warming may be a net plus for the region's single largest industry." The report foresees longer growing seasons, potential for higher-value crops, and increased land values for Prairie farmers. Irrigation districts may have to take steps to increase their efficiency, but they have already made astonishing progress in recent decades and there are easy ways to attain further gains.

In forestry, the picture is similar in principle: higher temperatures and carbon-dioxide concentrations promise greater baseline productivity for the sector, but with more fires and pests. Warming threatens transport in areas dependent on seasonal ice roads, but as any prairie dweller can tell you, less severe winters would lead to immense savings in primary highway maintenance. The energy sector faces adaptive challenges, ranging from loss of hydroelectric capacity to permafrost degradation in the north, but household heating costs would be lower for the ordinary citizen.

We have become accustomed to living with cognitive dissonance when it comes to global warming. Let's say for the sake of argument that the degree of "consensus" on a warming Earth is not overstated (which it is), and that the basic science is not still subject to major revisions (even though the models still can't handle cloud cover, and there may be dangerous oversimplifications in the underlying math). Most of us do accept as an operational premise that the mean temperature of the planet is increasing.

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