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Clinton News Record, 2014-07-30, Page 44 News Record • Wednesday, July 30, 2014 Viji_L[11 1 www.clintonnewsrecord.com NewsCl Record PUBLISHED WEEKLY — EST. 1860 53 Albert St. P.O. Box 39 Clinton ON NOM 1L0 (519) 482-3443 www.clintonnewsrecord.com SUN MEDIA A Quebecor Media Company _1 )- NEIL CLIFFORD Publisher neil.clifford@sunmedia.ca MAX BICKFORD Advertising Manager max.bickford@sunmedia.ca TARA OSTNER Reporter dinton.reporter@sunmedia.ca DAWN JOHNSTON Sales Representative clinton.ads@sunmedia.ca CHRISTY MAIR Front Office dinton.classifieds@sunmedia.ca SUBSCRIPTION RATES 1 YEAR $50.00 (47.62+2.38 GSI) 2YEAR $95.00 (90.48+4.52GST) SENIORS 60 WEEKS $50.00 (47.62+2.38 GST) 120 WEEKS $95.00 (90.48+4.52 GST) Advertising is accepted on the condition that in the event of a typographical error, the advertising space occupied by the erroneous item together with a reasonable allowance for signature, will not be charged but that balance of advertisement will be paid for at the applicable rate. 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Canada �Member of the Canadian Community ca Newspaper Association and the Ontario Community Newspapers Association editorial Pivotal generation earns anniversary tie QMI Agency Two big anniversaries for Canada — one sombre and upon us now, the other celebratory and upcom- ing — create the perfect conditions both to acquaint ourselves with the often -overlooked generation that helped a young country grow up fast and to honour its legacy. The first big milestone begins next month, the 100th anniversary of the start of fighting in the First World War. By the time it ended four years later, Canada— then a country of barely eight million — had, astonishingly, enlisted 620,000. By today's measure, that would be like sending 2.7 million Canadians to war. The second anniversary is Canada's 150th birth- day, its sesquicentennial year, in 2017. It will arrive a year before Canadians mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War, the armistice that gave birth to what later become known as Remembrance Day. Unlike a centennial, a nation's sesquicentennial has little special significance. Tough to even pro- nounce, it's just a marker on the road to a bicenten- nial bash 50 years later. But this one, book -ended by 100th -anniversary events of the Great War, should be considered differently. Foremost, it should be an occasion to keep alive the memory projects we will see launched this year for the men who fought in Europe, more than 60,000 of whom were killed. Farmers, miners, clerks and more, they came from big cities and small towns. The war also forced Canada — an outpost of the British Empire, not quite 50 years old and unpre- pared for what lay ahead — to step out of imperial shadows into full nationhood. Along the way came people and breakthroughs worthy of celebrating in our 150th year. People like Robert Borden, the wartime prime minister known to many only as the guy on the front of our $100 bill. It was he who pushed for Canadian military independence from Britain and won the country representation at the peace talks that ended the war. Breakthroughs like federal voting rights for women, harnessing government power to borrow abroad when needed, the creation of agencies like the National Research Council — all were out- growths of the war. For a nation with no obvious 150th -anniversary theme, a wartime legacy awaits its salute. column Changing thoughts on changing climate Tara Ostner The Clinton News Record Last week when I heard council mem- bers at a public meeting discuss climate change, I began to think about the cli- mate change versus global warming dis- tinction. What is climate change? Do cli- mate change and global warming refer to one and the same thing? Our climate is changing. By now, this is known to be true. Temperatures, winds and precipitation amounts are changing around the world and, more importantly, these changes are continuing to occur consistently and over significant periods of time. We have not come to the conclu- sion that our climate is changing simply due to variable weather that has occurred, say, in the span of a few months. Instead, our weather and climate appear to be changing in general and as a whole. Exactly what is causing our climate to change, however, can be less clear. According to many people, our climate is changing specifically because of global warming. Global warming, they say, which describes the average global sur- face temperature increase from human emissions of greenhouse gases, is what is accountable for our changing climate. For these people, climate change is global warming. For many years, I believed that, regard- less of what defenders of global warming said, there was not actually a consensus among the scientific community that global warming was indeed the cause of our changing climate. On the contrary, I argued that climate change is caused by many more things than just a temperature increase caused by humans and even refuted the idea that climate change was caused by us at all. As a result, it bothered me when non-scientists used the phrase global warming to describe the cause of climate change. If the scientific commu- nity couldn't know whether this was the cause then individuals like you and I cer- tainly couldn't know. Furthermore, if people are assumed to be the cause of our changing climate, restrictions on our lib- erties and income will likely ensue some- thing which most of which presumably don't want, especially if the restrictions are placed on us unnecessarily or unjustifiably. More than anything, however, I could not accept the idea that our 65 million year old planet was in some way intrinsi- cally tied to our actions (or inaction). It was here, after all, long before we were. Recently, however, I have began to step away from these beliefs because, today, there does seem to be a consensus among the scientific community that global warming is indeed the cause of climate change. I also notice that certain organi- zations that never used to explicitly defend global warming are now starting to. For instance, unlike the case less than ten years ago when NASA hesitated to define climate change as global warming, it now uses the two terms interchangea- bly and proclaims that 97% of climate sci- entists agree that climate change is very likely due to human activity. The Ameri- can Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society, American Meteorological Society, Ameri- can Physical Society and Geological Soci- ety of America all endorse the same posi- tion. Also, the recently released Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovern- mental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from around the world, states that it's very likely that human activity is what has warmed our planet. They define "very likely" as there being over a 90% probabil- ity of occurrence. I don't want to believe that we're nega- tively contributing (by how much I still don't know) to climate change. I don't want to believe this for obvious reasons, namely, I don't want to believe that we're damaging the planet and making its vari- ous life forms suffer as a result. However, I also don't want to believe it because I don't want to accept that we meager human beings could possibly affect some- thing vastly greater than ourselves, namely, the universe. How can something so finite and inferior affect something so magnificent and complex? This just doesn't seem feasible or even logical to me. However, because I am a staunch defender of science and all things scien- tific, I have accepted the thesis that cli- mate change is very likely caused by global warming and thus by us. If 97% of the scientific experts say that this is true I will trust it to be so. And if we are in fact harming our planet then restrictions on our liberties and income are perhaps nec- essary and at least possibly justifiable. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR The News Record welcomes letters to the editor. All letters must be signed and include a daytime phone number for verification purposes. Letters can be sent care of the Internet at clinton.news@sunmedia.ca, sent via fax at 519-482-7341 or through Canada Post care of The Editor, P.O. Box 39, Clinton, ON NOL 1LO. CLINTON NEWS RECORD — HOURS OF OPERATION MONDAY: 9:00 - 5:00 • TUESDAY: - CLOSED • WEDNESDAY: - 9:00 - 5:00 • THURSDAY: - 9:00 - 5:00 • FRIDAY: - 9:00 - 5:00 • SATURDAY & SUNDAY: - CLOSED ADVERTISING DEADLINE: FRIDAY AT 2:00 • PHONE 519-482-3443 • FAX: 519-482-7341 www.clintonnewsrecord.com