A group of 100 leading Canadian and U.S. scientists has issued an urgent call for a moratorium on new oil sands development and listed 10 reasons why no more projects should be permitted.

"I believe we have a duty to speak up,'' said Mark Jaccard, an energy economist at B.C.'s Simon Fraser University who spent more than a year drafting a letter to make sure it was scientifically sound.

Jaccard was a co-author of a 2014 essay in a scientific journal that made a similar argument. But the current letter, released Wednesday, represents a much wider cross-section.

Economists, biologists, climatologists and political scientists have all signed the text, which has been sent to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and all members of Parliament. The signatories include 12 fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, 22 members of the US National Academy and a Nobel Prize winner.

They are careful to include in their warning all high-carbon energy sources, including coal and other types of unconventional oil, but it's focused on the oil sands. "No new oil sands or related infrastructure projects should proceed unless consistent with an implemented plan to rapidly reduce carbon pollution, safeguard biodiversity, protect human health and respect treaty rights,'' the letter says.

Greg Stringham of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said science will make the industry sustainable. "There are thousands of other scientists working across the world on behalf of industry and government to ensure that these oil sands are developed responsibly,'' he said.

Jaccard said he was struck by the number of natural scientists who asked to sign. More and more of them, he said, are seeing climate change affect their work. He remembers one scientist who studied British Columbia's pine trees, decimated by a pine beetle expansion made worse by warming temperatures. "This little scientist studying pine beetles and the foot of Godzilla called climate change comes down on top of it,'' he recalled.

"He said, 'I feel silly. Why am I just studying this thing and not trying to help humanity do something?'''

David Schindler, a University of Alberta ecologist, agreed. "Everyone in this group really sees what climate change is starting to do to our ecosystems and the potential for harming society in major ways.''

The harm will be more than environmental, suggested David Keith, who teaches both physics and public policy at Harvard. "The world is going to gradually decarbonize and the decisions will not be driven from Alberta,'' he said.

"The deeper we get into a commitment to these large projects, the better off we are in the very short term, but the worse off we are in the long term. We'll be worse off economically when there are real restrictions on carbon emissions.''

Climate change is a challenge for every aspect of society, said Thomas Homer-Dixon, who leads the Centre for International Governance Innovation at Ontario's University of Waterloo.

"There's an enormous number of social science disciplines that are involved in this problem. We're dealing with social phenomena rather than natural phenomena, and they're all wrapped up in this problem of climate change and the impact of climate change.''

Industry knows things are changing, said Stringham. "We fully recognize the energy mix is changing. It's just not one at the expense of the other – let them compete with their technologies and their environmental impact.''

The answer isn't a moratorium, but even more spending on research to mitigate the industry's impacts, he said. "It's applying technology in an accelerated fashion that's going to be the answer to the future of where oil sands goes.''

Wednesday's letter is an example of natural and social scientists feeling compelled to share knowledge that increasingly alarms them, said Homer-Dixon.

"If we just keep it within our academic journals and papers, we're not doing the broader society any favors. The situation is urgent and the information and knowledge that we have needs to be part of the conversation.''

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MEANWHILE, Alister Doyle reports for Reuters that a new worldwide study finds high global concern about fixing climate change:

Almost 80 percent of people worldwide are perturbed about global warming and most want tough action to fix the problem, according to a new study that the United Nations touted as a spur to an international climate deal later this year. The report, based on consultations with 10,000 people in 75 nations from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, also showed that 66 percent viewed measures to tackle warming, such as more wind or solar energy, as a chance to improve their quality of life.

Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said the findings were "important proof" of public support in both rich and poor nations for a U.N. deal to limit climate change due to be agreed in Paris in December.

"Action now is necessary," she told a news conference on Wednesday at talks among almost 200 nations in Bonn, Germany, that began on June 1 and will run until Thursday to lay groundwork for a Paris agreement to limit global warming. She said public opinion was often overlooked by government negotiators immersed in technical details. "It brings some light into what is otherwise a very dark box," Figueres said.

Organizers from the World Wide Views Alliance, partly funded by the French government, said the study amounted to the largest public consultation ever on climate change. It was conducted on June 6, starting in Fiji and ending in the United States. The results showed 79 percent of people were "very concerned" by climate change, 19 percent were "moderately concerned" and two percent were unconcerned or had no opinion.

More than 90 percent wanted the upcoming Paris meeting to set some form of legally binding goal of zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2100 to help avert natural disruptions such as more downpours, heat waves and rising sea levels.

On Monday, leaders of the world's major industrial democracies resolved to wean their energy-hungry economies off carbon fuels and set a goal of global decarbonization by 2100. Wednesday's report was based on meetings of 100 people, chosen as a cross-section of society in each nation with checks to ensure that that they did not include, for instance, unrepresentative numbers of climate activists or deniers.

Citizens answered questions after discussing global warming in the consultations run by the World Wide Views Alliance. "It is not a campaign, it is not about telling people what to think," said Bjorn Bedsted, the group's global coordinator. The U.N. panel of climate scientists says it is at least 95 percent probable that most global warming since 1950 is caused by human activities, led by burning fossil fuels.

Originally published by The Canadian Press