Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[RocketRichard]

 

[cavalryman]

Or the left on pretty much anything else...

 

[RocketRichard]

'The left'?  We are talking about Canadian politics not American.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

I don't know when understanding our fisheries, agriculture (the government just closed the Agriculture and Agri-food Lethbridge Research Centre's federal science library, and threw thousands of reports in the trash)

Well now.......http://www.torontosun.com/2015/08/26/anti-harper-war-on-science-story-borders-on-hoax

By Anthony Furey, Postmedia Network

It seems the latest accusation against the Stephen Harper government for orchestrating a "war on science" is at best stretching the details, and at worst, bordering on a hoax.
Last Friday, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada put out a press release headlined: "Harper Government Trashes Another Federal Science Library."

The union representing 15,000 federal scientists was drawing attention to the closure of a library at the Agriculture and Agri-Food Lethbridge Research Centre -- a move they suggest was inspired by "the Harper government's 'war on science.'"
"While some items appear to have been shipped to government facilities in Ottawa, on Monday most of the library's contents had been either discarded in a dumpster outside the building or sent to recycling," the release claims.

Union president Debi Daviau is quoted as saying: "The Harper government continues to target government science at every turn."

Accompanying the release are pictures of piles of documents lying in a dumpster, as if they're damning evidence. The pictures combined with the headline and Daviau's quote are clearly meant to evoke an image of Conservatives showing up with hired goons to trash the place.

But dig a little deeper and the story is not at all how it's being sold.

"For the Lethbridge library, the collection was evaluated by researchers, and all unique and relevant materials were relocated but will still be available for loan," James Watson, media relations officer for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, explained via e-mail.
"Items no longer considered relevant to AAFC and duplicates already in the AAFC collection were offered to employees and in some instances materials were offered to Library and Archives Canada."
"The remaining material declared surplus at the Lethbridge library has either been made available online, or had no continuing value according to researchers."

The disposal of files wasn't a political issue at all, as the union implied, but a job undertaken by department researchers -- who are members of the very union denouncing the process.

The files were either transferred or digitized. The ones completely discarded were those researchers deemed useless. Yet even then, the government says efforts were made to give these files to employees or move them to other libraries, and items were disposed of in compliance with multiple government acts and regulations.

How exactly is this boring tale of a library digitizing files and cleaning up its inventory -- something many libraries do -- a "war on science" story?
Peter Bleyer, special adviser to the union president, acknowledged in a phone interview that digitization does play a part in the story, but said "not all information that was deemed valuable has been preserved."

It seems like some research experts considered useful has been turfed without being digitized -- although neither the union nor government were able to provide any numbers.
What the union can't confirm though, and admits as much, is that there's any actual proof the library and its contents were in fact targeted by the Harper government -- which was the whole argument underlying the strongly worded press release.

"It's a question of perspective," Bleyer explained. "Our perspective is the perspective of the people we represent. They feel they're being treated as if they're not relevant."

But feelings and direct evidence are two different things, a distinction one would hope researchers and scientists can make better than most people.

 

[vonGarvin]

The "Left/Right" paradigm applies equally here in Canada as it does in the US. 

You see, "conservatives" (the so called "climate-deniers" or whatever) don't deny that the climate is changing.  In fact, they point out the very real history that climate is never stable; it's always warming, cooling, getting calmer or getting more tempermental.  What they deny is that CO2, a wee molecule that is essential to life here on earth, is to cause for anthropromorphic climate change.  In other words, in spite of the CO2, it just isn't the cause.  Then they point to utterings in the past where Al Gore Inc © stated emphatically that the ice caps would melt by now, etc etc.  Then they refer to the cases in point: they are still there and maybe a wee bit bigger.  They also point out that the temperatures haven't risen since about 1998 or so (some data say it has risen, others no, but in all cases, not as dramatically as claimed by Al Gore Inc ©)

They also point to the Big Business of Carbon Credits © as being a culprit, and that it diverts money from very real concerns: pollution, toxic waste, etc.

 

[a_majoor]

Good timing on the TV's post, becasue here is an article on how perverse incentives really do lead to bad results:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/25/carbon-offsets-may-have-dramatically-increased-emissions/

Carbon Offsets May Have Dramatically Increased Emissions

That’s the finding of a new report from the Stockholm Environment Institute, which investigated carbon credits used to offset greenhouse gas emissions under a UN scheme. As one of the co-authors of the report put it, issuing these credits “was like printing money.” The BBC reports:


As a result of political horse trading at UN negotiations on climate change, countries like Russia and the Ukraine were allowed to create carbon credits from activities like curbing coal waste fires, or restricting gas emissions from petroleum production. Under the UN scheme, called Joint Implementation, they then were able to sell those credits to the European Union’s carbon market. Companies bought the offsets rather than making their own more expensive, emissions cuts.

But this study, from the Stockholm Environment Institute, says the vast majority of Russian and Ukrainian credits were in fact, “hot air” – no actual emissions were reduced.

The SEI sampled 60 random projects and found a whopping 80 percent of them to be of questionable green merit. The majority of these bogus Russian and Ukrainian offsets were used by the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (the EU ETS), a program already bogged down with problems pricing carbon. “[T]he poor overall quality of [Joint Implementation] projects may have undermined the EU’s emission reduction target by some 400 million tons of CO2,” said Anja Kollmuss, one of the leaders of the study.

This has huge implications, then, for Europe’s green goals. For years EU members have chosen to outsource emissions cuts with these carbon credits, but the lack of proper oversight at the UN level of the projects abroad supposedly generating these cuts now leaves the supposedly eco-conscious bloc in a bind. “If the EU was taking its climate targets seriously, then at least 400 million ETS certificates would have to be deleted to counter that,” Kollmuss pointed out.

But perhaps worst of all are the perverse incentives the SEI report alleges these credit swaps have created for actually increasing emissions. According to a study released in the journal Nature Climate Change, plants in Russia “increased waste gas generation to unprecedented levels once they could generate credits from producing more waste gas,” resulting in an increase in emissions as large as 600 million tons of carbon dioxide—roughly half the amount the EU’s ETS intends to reduce from 2013 to 2030.

The UN seemingly left it up to national governments to oversee these projects, and now it has a full-blown crisis on its hands. With the Paris climate summit just over three months away now, trust in the international approach to solving climate change is falling to new lows.

Posted: Aug 25, 2015 - 1:00 pm

 

[vonGarvin]

The posts of the TECHNOVIKING don't line up to the timing; the timing lines up to his posts....

 

[cld617]

What they deny is that CO2, a wee molecule that is essential to life here on earth, is to cause for anthropromorphic climate change. 

I just wanted to focus on this little gem. Are you really ignorant enough to claim that because a molecule is small and occurs naturally, that it is in fact harmless in large quantities to the environment and ecosystem? The only thing I can deduce from the bolded statement is that you think just that, and you're trying to push this stupidity onto others.

 

[RocketRichard]

I didn't realize people deny climate change so vehemently.  C'est la vie. We shall see in the years to come. We can agree to disagree.

 

[vonGarvin]

I just wanted to focus on this little gem. Are you really ignorant enough to claim that because a molecule is small and occurs naturally, that it is in fact harmless in large quantities to the environment and ecosystem? The only thing I can deduce from the bolded statement is that you think just that, and you're trying to push this stupidity onto others.

Well, then, you'd be guilty of an error if that's what you call a deduction.

 

[vonGarvin]

I didn't realize people deny climate change so vehemently.  C'est la vie. We shall see in the years to come. We can agree to disagree.

Who's denying anything? Climate is never stagnant.  It's always changing.

 

[RocketRichard]

Sigh...

 

[MJP]

Sigh...

I know it is such a burden to shoulder having to care for those that don't...knowing how much smarter they would be if they would just think like myself. 

 

[Fishbone Jones]

The only thing I can deduce from the bolded statement is that you think just that, and you're trying to push this stupidity onto others.

Careful how you talk with others.

Every poster has a right to their opinion here. If you want to debate, counter what you don't agree with, with facts.

---Staff---

 

[larry Strong]

It would be worth knowing how many of those documents are available in digital means..

Cheers
Larry

Well now.......http://www.torontosun.com/2015/08/26/anti-harper-war-on-science-story-borders-on-hoax

By Anthony Furey, Postmedia Network

It seems the latest accusation against the Stephen Harper government for orchestrating a "war on science" is at best stretching the details, and at worst, bordering on a hoax.
Last Friday, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada put out a press release headlined: "Harper Government Trashes Another Federal Science Library."

The union representing 15,000 federal scientists was drawing attention to the closure of a library at the Agriculture and Agri-Food Lethbridge Research Centre -- a move they suggest was inspired by "the Harper government's 'war on science.'"
"While some items appear to have been shipped to government facilities in Ottawa, on Monday most of the library's contents had been either discarded in a dumpster outside the building or sent to recycling," the release claims.

Union president Debi Daviau is quoted as saying: "The Harper government continues to target government science at every turn."

Accompanying the release are pictures of piles of documents lying in a dumpster, as if they're damning evidence. The pictures combined with the headline and Daviau's quote are clearly meant to evoke an image of Conservatives showing up with hired goons to trash the place.

But dig a little deeper and the story is not at all how it's being sold.

"For the Lethbridge library, the collection was evaluated by researchers, and all unique and relevant materials were relocated but will still be available for loan," James Watson, media relations officer for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, explained via e-mail.
"Items no longer considered relevant to AAFC and duplicates already in the AAFC collection were offered to employees and in some instances materials were offered to Library and Archives Canada."
"The remaining material declared surplus at the Lethbridge library has either been made available online, or had no continuing value according to researchers."

The disposal of files wasn't a political issue at all, as the union implied, but a job undertaken by department researchers -- who are members of the very union denouncing the process.

The files were either transferred or digitized. The ones completely discarded were those researchers deemed useless. Yet even then, the government says efforts were made to give these files to employees or move them to other libraries, and items were disposed of in compliance with multiple government acts and regulations.

How exactly is this boring tale of a library digitizing files and cleaning up its inventory -- something many libraries do -- a "war on science" story?
Peter Bleyer, special adviser to the union president, acknowledged in a phone interview that digitization does play a part in the story, but said "not all information that was deemed valuable has been preserved."

It seems like some research experts considered useful has been turfed without being digitized -- although neither the union nor government were able to provide any numbers.
What the union can't confirm though, and admits as much, is that there's any actual proof the library and its contents were in fact targeted by the Harper government -- which was the whole argument underlying the strongly worded press release.

"It's a question of perspective," Bleyer explained. "Our perspective is the perspective of the people we represent. They feel they're being treated as if they're not relevant."

But feelings and direct evidence are two different things, a distinction one would hope researchers and scientists can make better than most people.

Thanks Bruce

Turned out to be the "Tempest in the tea pot' I figured it to be...............


Cheers
Larry

 

[George Wallace]

LOL

Many of us already know a lot of this, but it is always funny to see how the "Environmentalists" all conveniently overlook these facts (making the rounds on FB, an article from 2013):

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.

LINK

The two Suzukis: There’s Saint Suzuki, the one you see on CBC, and Secret Suzuki, the capitalist millionaire
Ezra Levant
Saturday, October 12, 2013, 6:00 PM

There are two David Suzukis.

Most of us know one of the Suzukis. Let’s call him Saint Suzuki. That’s the Suzuki whose TV show on the CBC constantly lectures us about our lifestyle. He says we need to consume less, buy less and use less fossil fuels.
But then there’s another Suzuki. Let’s call him Secret Suzuki, because he’s far less well-known.

Secret Suzuki is the one who lives on Vancouver’s elite Point Grey Road, on a double lot, overlooking English Bay, right above the exclusive Kitsilano Yacht Club. The City of Vancouver assesses the land value alone at over $8 million. And that’s just one of Secret Suzuki’s properties.

He has another million-dollar home in Vancouver. And then there’s another home on Quadra Island. That’s three homes right there, if you count the double lot on Point Grey Road as just one property.

But then there’s his large property holdings on Nelson Island. What’s so fascinating about that one is that he co-owns the property with an oil company, Kootenay Oil Distributors Ltd. They don’t plan to drill for oil together. It’s a beautiful tourist spot — maybe perfect for a nice big condo development.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with co-owning any property along with an oil company. But isn’t Saint Suzuki against fossil fuel companies — especially oil companies?

Saint Suzuki tells us that the world is desperately overcrowded, that we’re overpopulated, and that we’re going to run out of things.

But in his own life, Secret Suzuki has five children.

There’s nothing wrong with having five children. It’s a blessing. But then why does he think other people should have fewer kids?

Saint Suzuki rails against corporations and profits. He even gave a well-received anti-capitalist speech at the Occupy Vancouver protest.

But Secret Suzuki himself has several corporations. One of them, the David Suzuki Foundation, took in a whopping $9 million last year and has $12 million in assets. More than 10 million of that is invested in stocks and bonds.

Saint Suzuki despises lobbyists, and says they have a disproportionate control of political power in Ottawa. But Secret Suzuki himself has nine paid lobbyists registered in Ottawa’s lobbyist registry. Not one. Nine.

Saint Suzuki despises politicians, and says they can’t be trusted. Secret Suzuki starred in a Liberal party TV ad along with former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty.

Saint Suzuki says corporations have to be less obsessed by profits, and do more for the public good. They need to especially think of the interests of the next generation, our children.

But Secret Suzuki has made a tidy profit off young people. His standard speaking fee at universities in Canada is $30,000 plus expenses. He billed Quebec’s John Abbott College a cool $41,000 to visit them.

Saint Suzuki speaks in the language of tolerance and equality and liberalism — utterly politically correct.

But Secret Suzuki engages in conduct that should cause feminists to raise an eyebrow. When he visited John Abbott College, his assistant called with special requests to go along with his speaking fee. Here is an internal e-mail from the college’s Mary Milburn: “We have learned, via Dr. Suzuki’s assistant, that although the Dr. does not like to have bodyguards per se, he does not mind having a couple of ladies (females) that would act as body guards.” The college’s Jim Anderson got involved in selecting the coeds, too: “Please be certain that the women are nicely dressed, we don’t want them in evening gowns, but definitely NOT Police Tech uniforms.” All of this bizarre selection of girls, dressed just so, was the result of Secret Suzuki’s special request. If he were a conservative, he’d be called a dirty old man. But he’s a saint. So the college went along with it.

David Suzuki is not a criminal. But he is not a saint. He’s a real man — a capitalist millionaire, a politician, a man with a staff of lobbyists, a prolific father, a wealthy landlord. If only he’d stop scolding the rest of us for aspiring to do the same.

This is why I find it so amusing to listen to David Suzuki, Neil Young, Margaret Atwood, Jane Fonda, and all those other celebrities talk about the environment, after which they walk away and enjoy all the rewards of what they want others to protest against.  Hypocrites. 

 

[a_majoor]

Remember when we were being told that "Climate Change" would kill the trees?

http://flowingdata.com/2015/09/10/way-more-trees-than-previously-thought-new-estimates-show/

Way more trees than previously thought, new estimates show

Posted to Maps  |  Tags: environment, nature, trees  |  Nathan Yau

There are a lot of trees on this planet. But how many trees there actually are is still kind of fuzzy, because the estimates are based on satellite imagery. It's hard to gauge density. Research by T. W. Crowther et al., recently published in Nature, used on-the-ground sampling to estimate more accurately.

The global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere. We provide the first spatially continuous map of forest tree density at a global scale. This map reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.39 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.61 trillion in temperate regions.

 

[cld617]

This just in, there are trees...so global warming is a hoax. I hear it was cold somewhere too.

 

[Kilo_302]

Remember when we were being told that "Climate Change" would kill the trees?

http://flowingdata.com/2015/09/10/way-more-trees-than-previously-thought-new-estimates-show/

Oh come on  :facepalm: this leap is pathetic, even by your standards.

In the real world, turns out even Exxon knew about climate change, way back in the 70s. So how does this fall into the vast "green/solar/wind power conspiracy"?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/environment/investigation-finds-exxon-ignored-its-own-early-climate-change-warnings/

 

[a_majoor]

Wrapped up nicely and neatly. There are lots of links within the article (far too many to cut and paste here), but going to the link will get you the article and access to the links as well:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/global-warming-paradigm-scuttled/?singlepage=true

Three Simple Facts that Scuttle the Global Warming Paradigm
Cutting through the fog: a primer for the layman.
by David Solway
May 2, 2015 - 10:53 pm
 
The putative climate “debate” that has been raging for the last thirty years or so has now reached the point of duncical irrationality. (I put “debate” in scare quotes since what we are observing is not so much a debate as an ideological crusade that brooks no resistance; in effect, a political jihad against those who oppose the Warmist orthodoxy.) The upcoming Paris COP (climate treaty conference) slated for December of this year, which Obama is expected to ratify, renders the situation increasingly urgent.

The world’s leading politicians, abetted by the dubious claims of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are plainly eager to sign an accord which, if implemented, would lead to record levels of poverty and unemployment in both the developed and Third worlds. In the words of Director of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) Tom Harris, “in formulating public policy on climate change, our leaders gloss over the uncertainties and close the door to evidence that does not fit the alarmist agenda.” There is little any concerned citizen can do but register his skepticism, doubts and defiance — that is, his resolute and fact-based denial, despite the social and professional stigma associated with being a “denier” and the threat of various forms of punitive action, especially in the academy. (See, for example, the “Statement on Climate Change”  professing allegiance to the IPCC signed by the faculty of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A & M University. Skeptics, regardless of their credentials, would never be hired in such a restrictive milieu.) By marshalling the reasons justifying such denial and disseminating them to the public, one hopes against hope to mitigate the disaster — not the so-called meteorological “disaster” of global warming but the economic disaster of uncertain science and crippling legislation — before it becomes irreversible.

The claim that we have heard bandied about for years is that the “science is settled” — a malapropism if ever there was one since the central principle of scientific thinking is that science by its very nature is never settled. There is always more to learn, always something to revise, correct and expand, always the possibility of a paradigm shift, as Thomas Kuhn famously explained in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The issue at hand is one of making decisions predicated on the best evidence available — the essential proviso being that the evidence is solid, authentic and comprehensive. This has manifestly not been the case in what has now become the global warming boondoggle, as we shall note shortly.

Amidst the blizzard of details, theories and confident assertions animating the global warming gospel, one can simplify the counter-argument by listing three attested facts that should settle, if not the science, certainly the furor that clouds our judgment. The matter is really not that complicated. These three facts, which no responsible scientist can deny, are the following:

1. There has been no global warming for the last eighteen years and counting. Warmists like to call this quiescent period of zero net warming a “Pause,” but there is no evidence to suggest a double-digit hiatus in process. The word “Pause” is a palpable evasion intended to maintain an unproven contention. What we do know is that during the years in which apocalyptic claims of imminent catastrophe have been indefatigably circulated, the temperature has remained stable. There is no getting around the thermometer.

2. The grounds of testimony advancing the global warming dogma are brazenly suspect and, in many instances, spurious. To cite only a few, well-known examples, there is the discredited computer models pre-programmed to advance the cause of global warming or “climate change.” Warmist researchers tend to omit important variables from their computer models, such as atmospheric humidity, sea-level pressure and long-range cycle activity. As adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute Steven Milloy writes, deploring the temptation of these researchers to guestimate the future, “Because we do not fully understand the climate system and do not know how to represent such important functions as cloud formation…many of Earth’s climate processes are parameterized (i.e., faked) in models.” According to mathematician and former carbon consultant to the Australian government David Evans, the IPCC models are wrong and the mathematics show that the human signature in the atmosphere is missing. Jonathan Newman, an environmental biologist at the University of Guelph, has also confirmed such skeptical conclusions. Newman and his colleagues reveal that the 31 computer climate models used by the IPCC produce different results: “this shows that…predicting the biological impacts of climate change can vary depending on which climate model is being used.” The beat goes on.

As I wrote in Global Warning, “Climate modeling is notoriously capricious, which may explain why many of its forecasts are conveniently projected a century into the future when they cannot be refuted by opponents of the theory….Climate modeling is really climate meddling.” The literature critically examining the defectiveness and unreliability of climate computer modeling is extensive and readily accessible.

Then there is the debunking of Michael Mann’s notorious “hockey stick” graph that served as the basis for analytical projections. Refusing to disclose his “hockey stick” metadata in judicial proceedings that he himself initiated against his critics, Tim Ball and Mark Steyn, Mann is now facing massive damage suits. When the plinth corrodes, the statue tumbles.

Which bring us to the Hadley “Climategate” scam, divulged in a cache of hacked emails, which revealed the extent of data-suppression and revisionist hijinks embraced by the movement’s proponents and leading “experts.” This outrage should have put paid to the entire controversy. A second bundle of “hide the decline” email dumps, known as Climategate 2.0, has confirmed that “climate science” has been cooked. The lead researcher at the East Anglia CRU (Climate Research Unit), Phil Jones, had gone so far as to recommend deleting all incriminating emails and/or changing the wording of others. A.W. Montford’s Hiding the Decline is a definitive exposé of the great deception known as global warming, as is Tim Ball’s The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science,which also discloses the vast wealth-transfer scheme the lurks behind the political and “scientific” camouflage.

Then there are the emission-belching lifestyles of some of the movement’s chief advocates — e.g. Obama and his family, Nancy Pelosi and others in the Democrat administration, jetting about indiscriminately on personal business. Al Gore enjoying a lifestyle which uses twenty times the national average of electric power, apart from other kinds of energy consumption. Richard Branson, described by Norman Rogers of the Heartland Institute, as “the owner of an airline that gulps jet fuel by the tanker load [and who] whines about global warming.” Coupled with such wildly conspicuous energy consumption,  the message of retrenchment and carbon chastity we are supposed to internalize is irremediably tarnished. (Ironically, the danger we are facing appears to be the onset of a period of global cooling as the Holocene Interglacial we are currently experiencing may soon come to an end. John and Katherine Imbrie’s Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery offers an authoritative account of glacial cycles.)

3. As undeniably respectable scientists like Nobel laureate Fred Singer, co-author with Dennis Avery of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, and Robert Zubrin have pointed out, CO2, a natural fertilizer, is a positive benefit to human and animal life on the planet. Zubrin has decisively shown in The Merchants of Despair that there exists robust scientific proof derived from ice core data and isotopic ratios in marine organism remains that CO2 emissions create surplus plant growth that in turn absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus restoring climate equilibrium over the long haul, and that under conditions of cyclical global warming agricultural productivity naturally increases and human life improves immensely. This is a fact that has been thoroughly misunderstood as people have been brainwashed by politicians and their cronies who have invested in “green energy,” by a cadre of compromised scientists dependent on government research grants and now constrained to defend their reputations, and by a compliant media consortium.

As one enters into the science and pseudo-science dealing with climate change, it becomes obvious that the discipline is enormously complex, as is the subject studied, and that the intricacy of analysis and argument transcends the compass of any short paper or article. Nonetheless, when it comes to assessing the truth claims of the Warmist constituency, the three facts cited here, all easily accessible, are sufficient to clarify the scope and nature of the climate hoax that has been foisted upon us. Indeed, it is not necessary for the layman to come to grips with the myriad conclusions stemming from empirical and theoretical practice, which he has not been trained to evaluate with mathematical rigor. For those who have neither the time nor the expertise to negotiate the convolutions of the “debate” or weigh the import of figures, graphs, interpretation of data and the like, the question devolves into one of trust. And one cannot trust shysters, incompetents, hypocrites and operators who are embedded in the Warmist ingroup. It is enough to remark their discrepancies, sophistries, extenuations and disreputable behaviors to see that their deposition lacks credibility. It is, on the contrary, the members of the climate outgroup who are acting responsibly, both in their research and comportment.

In light of the above, no sensible and reasonably informed person can continue to support or allow himself to be influenced by what augurs to be the greatest scandal of the modern era.