There has been a fair amount of coverage devoted to the federal government's new report on the possible Canadian effects of global warming, as I still like to call it (we all know that this "climate change" neologism is a cop-out, and that Al Gore will be urging some new trendy term on us five years from now). The first round of newspaper copy was designed to emphasize the scariest threats in the report; now it seems there is some speculation about what happened to the expensive public-relations blitz that was intended to accompany the report's release. We know the Conservative government is reluctant to make the large, immediate economic tradeoffs that professional environmentalists want. Could this be why the report was dropped quietly onto the internet like a Victorian flirt's handkerchief hitting a parqueted floor?

It's possible, but I don't think it's true. The report we're talking about is called From Impacts to Adaptation: Canada in a Changing Climate 2007. It's not a document about what we can do now to save Mother Earth: it's about what we can do to ready ourselves if some planetary warming, irrespective of the cause, is inevitable. In that sense it does not suit the environmentalist agenda to have the report widely publicized. Adaptation measures are competing for the same reserve of attention and funding as the Kyoto-type hair-shirt efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas output. The more we talk about living with a warmer Earth, the more we may come to see it as acceptable.