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It’s hard to know whether to celebrate or to weep.

CanWest News Services reporter Mike de Souza has learned that the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is calling for a lightning fast (eight-week), bargain basement ($40,000) report on the potential economic impacts of climate change in Canada.

We certainly laud the Prime Minister’s sudden interest, but if this is anything more than a public relations exercise designed to lobby the anti-science cohort in his own caucus, it is an affront - so terribly inadequate to the task as to only further humiliate Canada on the international stage.

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A recent essay says the most pressing current scientific and political challenge is to avoid what is known as “dangerous” global warming – the point where world temperatures become irreversible.

As there’s a 25-to-30-year lag between greenhouse emissions and the full impact of their warming, current climate chaos is a result of carbon spewed in the late 1970s. The hit from more recent discharges – including China’s coal plants — is but pain yet to come.

So we’re dangerously close already.

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British economists have urged India to battle climate change, saying vulnerability to the phenomenon goes hand in hand with poverty . Dimitri Zenghelis, lead author of the Stern Review, which examined the costs and benefits of climate change moderation, said there is 90 per cent recognition of climate change in the developed world compared with only 50 per cent by developing countries.

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The board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s leading general science organization, has issued a statement declaring global warming “a growing threat to society.” The first-ever stand by the AAAS, which publishes the journal Science, also attributes recent warming to human activity.