(h/t to Sharon) B.C. [British Columbia] is about to be hit with new taxes to achieve the government’s
greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goal of 33% below current levels by
2020. But the BC Liberals were elected to reduce taxes and burdensome
regulations, not increase them.
So just how did the premier come up with this goal and what is the outlook for B.C.?
While
in Hawaii for his Christmas 2006 vacation, the premier is said to have
read a couple of books on catastrophic climate change, including Al
Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Tellingly, the British High Court ruled
showing the movie version of that book, and misleading students into
believing it accurately represented climate science, was in violation
of the political indoctrination section of the country’s Education Act.
The experience in Europe goes beyond propaganda, however. The
experience in Europe is one of job losses with little, if any, GHG
reduction.
The Real Climate guys have offered odds
on future temperature changes, which is great because it gives us a
sense of their confidence in predictions of future global average
temperatures. Unfortunately, RCs foray into laying odds is not as
useful as it might be.
The motivation for this bet is the recent Keenlyside et al. paper that has caused a set of mixed reactions among the commenters in the blogosphere. Some commenters here
have stridently argued that the predictions in the Keelyside et al.
paper are perfectly consistent with predictions of climate models in
the IPCC. However, when one such commenter here was asked to show a
single IPCC climate model run showing no temperature increase for the 2
decades following the late 1990s he submitted an irrelevant link and
disappeared. Others have argued that the Keenlyside et al. projections
(and this includes Keenlyside) are inconsistent with the IPCC
predictions. Real Climate apparently falls into this latter camp.
Students at a California public school have written a series of letters to Chicago's Heartland Institute, which works to discover and develop free-market solutions to society's problems, attacking its members for "destroying our planet" by refusing to endorse the politics of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" film.
According to students in the sixth-grade class of teacher Michael Steria at David A. Brown Middle School, the institute consists of "fools" and "horrible people."
"I think your (sic) fools for denying G.W. you know it could kill us all & you're just adding to it. I want you to help stop G.W. not increase it," said one letter.
"We are going to tell you about global warming. I don't care if you don't want to read, but I'm making you read it you horrible people," said another.
A TOP Indian advocacy group that monitors climate change in south
Asia warned last night that the Nargis cyclone that devastated Burma
was "a sign of things to come", as climate change caused extreme
weather to increase in intensity.
"Nargis is a sign of things to come. Last year, Bangladesh was
devastated by the tropical cyclone Sidr," CSE director Sunita Narain
said in a statement.
"The victims of these cyclones are climate change victims and their
plight should remind the rich world that it is doing too little to
contain its greenhouse gas emissions."
(h/t to Jacob) Great Britain is a decade ahead of Canada in the global warming debate and what's happening there today is instructive for us.
Former British prime minister Tony Blair was a major booster of the Kyoto Accord.
A 2006 report his Labour government commissioned from British
economist Sir Nicholas Stern, predicting world-wide environmental and
financial disaster if immediate steps weren't taken to combat global
warming, is the Holy Grail of the international green movement.
Initially, Great Britain thought it would have a relatively
easy time implementing Kyoto because of its "dash for gas" starting in
the 1980s, during which coal-fired energy plants were replaced by
natural gas facilities.
(h/t to Stefanie) An anti-nuclear, Toronto-based, urban-loving, 1970s peace activist
who opposes subsidies to the oil industry might be the last person
expected to detail cracks in the science of global warming.
But
Lawrence Solomon has done just that in a short book with a long
subtitle: The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up
against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud (and
those who are too fearful to do so).
The spark for the book came
after an American TV reporter compared those who question the Kyoto
Protocol to Holocaust deniers. But Solomon wondered about that so he
sought out the experts in specific fields to garner their views.
Consider Dr. Edward Wegman, asked by the U.S. Congress to assess the
famous "hockey stick" graph from Michael Mann, published by the UN's
International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which purported to show
temperatures as mostly constant over the past 1,000 years -- except for
a spike in the last century.
An American organisation is defending its decision to publish names
of scientists in association with an article supporting the theory that
most of the recent global warming is natural and not manmade.
Joseph
Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, said today that a list of
500 scientists on its website had published work which contradicted
some of the tenets of "global warming alarmism".
Many of the scientists, including five in New Zealand, have reacted angrily to being included on the list as they say their research does not support that argument.
The idea that Greenland's ice melts sluggishly in response to global
warming has long been one hedge against rapid global sea level rise --
but the idea may be wrong, say researchers.
New geologic evidence from the seafloor off the southern tip of
Greenland shows that during the two past periods of global warming, the
melting of Greenland glaciers was right in synch with rising global temperatures -- rather than lagging behind as models have predicted.
In other words, the ice is very sensitive to global warming and recent losses of ice there could be the beginning of a much larger melt than expected.
"People had thought that there was this thermal lag," said Anders Carlson of the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
THE vultures are circling over Burma's dead. Hey, isn't that fat one Al Gore?
Sure
is. And - flap, flap, plop - there he lands, the first to go picking
over carcasses for scraps to feed his great global warming scare
campaign.
What the world should be learning from this terrible loss of at
least 60,000 people in the cyclone that hit Burma last week is that
tyrannies kill more surely than any freak of weather.
But Al Gore, who won a Nobel "Peace" Prize for terrifying people
with his error-riddled An Inconvenient Truth, wants you to blame
instead his pet bogeyman. Tremble, sinners, before the wrath of a hot
planet!
Antarctica hasn't warmed as much over the last century as climate models had originally predicted, a new study finds.
Climate
change's effects on Antarctica are of particular interest because of
the substantial amount of water locked up in its ice sheets.
Should that water begin to melt, sea levels around the globe could rise and inundate low-lying coastal areas.
The new study, detailed in
the April 5 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, marks
the first time that researchers have been able to give a progress
report on Antarctic climate model projections by comparing climate
records to model simulations. (These comparisons have already been done
for the other six continents.)
The term "junk" science has been around for several years now. A
working definition for the term is "faulty scientific data and analysis
used to advance special, or hidden, agendas."
A few examples of
claimed junk science include the degree of impact of carbon dioxide
emissions on global warming, negative health effects for women with
silicone breast implants, and the side effects of some prescription
medicines.
So, if there truly is legitimate debate between cause
and effect in these cases, why do jurors readily accept a "junk
science" causation relationship?
(h/t to Sharon) B.C. [British Columbia] is about to be hit with new taxes to achieve the government’s
greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goal of 33% below current levels by
2020. But the BC Liberals were elected to reduce taxes and burdensome
regulations, not increase them.
Students at a California public school have written a series of letters to Chicago's Heartland Institute, which works to discover and develop free-market solutions to society's problems, attacking its members for "destroying our planet" by refusing to endorse the politics of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" film.
