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Here's the irony about Canada's two-decade, shambolic, inept,half-hearted and contradictory response to the incontrovertiblefact that the planet's surface climate has, over the past 150years, warmed: It mirrors uncertainty about the predictive abilityof climate science. In a way, the chaos of our response epitomizesthe gaps in what we know. Our failure is, in fact, a directconsequence of those gaps. More than that, the uncertain response reflects genuine confusion,among ordinary people but also among policymakers, about whatCanadians can or should do about climate change. That extends intothe federal Conservative caucus: Environment Minister Peter Kenthas fielded questions from his colleagues, including the primeminister, about the reliability of climate science. Derided byenvironmentalists as an apologist for inaction, Kent within hisparty has played the role of activist. But he faces an uphillfight, one increasingly reflected in public opinion. Abacus Data late last month released a poll showing that 55 percent of Canadians are quite worried about pollution of drinkingwater, rivers, lakes, reservoirs and contamination of soil by toxicwaste. But only a third of those surveyed said they worry a lotabout climate change. This reflects a similar trend in the UnitedStates, measured by Gallup this past April. It seems we're reallynot all that concerned about climate change, after all. For a politician to utter such heresy in Canada now, as formerAlberta premier Ed Stelmach noted following the Alberta provincialelection, is fraught with peril. Wildrose leader Danielle Smithlost to Conservative Alison Redford, Stelmach said, because shedared say the scientific debate around climate change is stillactive. In other words, it's not entirely settled. In other words,reasonable people can disagree. Unthinkable. This is now the most fraught economic debate we have. It underliesOntario's controversial Green Energy Act. It underlies NDP leaderTom Mulcair's strategic decision to hurl thunderbolts at theoilpatch. But what if much of what we generally assume about thediscussion were off the mark or incomplete? There are credible scientists who belong in neither ideologicalcamp. They agree that global warming, certainly over the pastcentury, is incontrovertible. But they disagree on the level ofcertainty we can have about its causes. And they raise troublingquestions about the wisdom of policy remedies based primarily onfaith. For example: Dr. Ross McKitrick, a University of Guelph professorwho has delved into the economics of climate change for more than adecade, says the planet's surface temperature is indeed graduallyheating up though the rate of warming has slowed in the past 10years. And he allows the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changemay eventually be proven right, in its finding that carbon dioxideemitted due to fossil fuel consumption is the cause. He also saysother human activities including changes to the earth's surfacecaused by development, and long-term solar cycles may be afactor. McKitrick disagrees profoundly with the notion that the science issettled. More to the point, even if the Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change is right, he is convinced that all major policyremedies proposed so far would have been ineffective, even ifimplemented precisely as designed. "There's no way of fixing it by tinkering around theedges," he says. "Windmills are irrelevant. We're talkingabout shutting down industry and taking cars off the road." The human toll of rolling back development which is unavoidable,if global CO2 emissions are to be sharply curbed has yet to becarefully considered, McItrick says. "Think of the alleviation of suffering that comes when peopleget electricity, access to motor vehicles, ordinary development. Tostop all that from happening, it just seems to me that would be amuch heavier human toll than just learning to adapt to climatechange as it comes along." Dr. Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and AtmosphericSciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, agrees. She positshuman causes, but also other possible causes. One of her concernsis regional climate variability. "In some parts of the world,warming would be good," she says. "Think Canada, Russia,northern China for starters. They might have more hospitableweather, longer growing seasons, a longer tourist season." Like McKitrick, Curry contends that the cost-benefit analysis aclear-headed comparison of the benefits of development and betterinfrastructure, against the benefits of lowering sea levels byperhaps two or three feet, over a century has yet to be done.And she argues that, rather than developing big global carbontreaties that go nowhere, Western governments ought to put moreresources into advancing the science of weather forecasting, tobetter mitigate the damage caused by hurricanes, floods, droughtsand other weather-related disasters, especially in the Third World. There's more, but you get the point: Why is it, given that so muchof the policy debate in our country now concerns what to do aboutclimate change, that speaking about gaps in the science, whichclearly do exist, is taboo? Twitter.com/mdentandt. We are high quality suppliers, our products such as China Prepainted Steel Coil , China Pre-painted Aluminum for oversee buyer. 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