Canadian, Conservative and Sour. Satire, Cynicism, Snark and Sarcasm is Often the Best Medicine............... Stephen Harper's Favorite Blog
Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, says, "It's practically a slam dunk that we are in for about 30 years of global cooling," as the sun enters a particularly inactive phase. His examination of warming and cooling trends over the past four centuries shows an "almost exact correlation" between climate fluctuations and solar energy received on Earth, while showing almost "no correlation at all with CO2."Take the $100 million and BUY 20,000 SUV's (CBL January 2008)
Welcome to the weekly round-up of all things a growing climate skeptic needs. This week might be more linky than snarky, I reached a personal high of being Snark McSnarky of the Snark People last week, and I'm not quite over it yet.Hat Tip to Tom Nelson
Lots of good stuff for you this week, and if you've ever read a round-up before, you're going to love this week's return hottie. Don't forget to return up here to read the good stuff after you've gone and had your sneaky early look at her. You're so predictable.
Why is the Cuban model of disaster mitigation so successful? Can the United States learn something from Cuba? These are questions that the Center for International Policy (CIP), with the support of the Ford Foundation, is exploring. In 2007 CIP hosted a working conference for hurricane specialists from the United States and their Cuban counterparts to share expertise and exchange best practices for saving lives when natural phenomena strike, specifically hurricanes.
It's been a pretty unusual ten days but today has been truly extraordinary. At 3.20pm, the jury came back into court and announced a majority verdict of not guilty!So the testimony centered not on whether they actually vandalized the power plant - they never denied it - but on whether the criminals were correct to fear global warming from power plants. I don't know much about British law, but this seems to be a terrible precedent. Or maybe not - does this mean that I can go and legally vandalize every Congressman's house for wasting my money?
All six defendants - Kevin, Emily, Tim, Will, Ben and Huw - were acquitted of criminal damage.
To recap on how important this verdict is: thedefendantscampaigners were accused of causing £30,000 of criminal damage to Kingsnorth smokestack from painting. The defence was that they had 'lawful excuse' - because they were acting to protect property around the world "in immediate need of protection" from the impacts of climate change, caused in part by burning coal.
MSNBC has announced that it is removing both Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews from election-related anchor responsibilities.Now when is CNN gonna get rid of their roster of Democratic butt kissers? The heat and humidity of political partisanship on CNN makes CBC pale by comparison. Their conservative commentators are as outnumbered as pies on an anthill.
Good move. In fact, how were they ever put in that seat in the first place.
The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honour about ideas; he will not see that one must pay for an idea as for anything else. He will not see that any worthy idea, like any honest woman, can only be won on its own terms, and with its logical chain of loyalty. One idea attracts him; another idea really inspires him; a third idea flatters him; a fourth idea pays him. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other. The Sentimentalist is a philosophic profligate, who tries to capture every mental beauty without reference to its rival beauties; who will not even be off with the old love before he is on with the new. Thus if a man were to say, "I love this woman, but I may some day find my affinity in some other woman," he would be a Sentimentalist. He would be saying, "I will eat my wedding-cake and keep it." Or if a man should say, "I am a Republican, believing in the equality of citizens; but when the Government has given me my peerage I can do infinite good as a kind landlord and a wise legislator"; then that man would be a Sentimentalist. He would be trying to keep at the same time the classic austerity of equality and also the vulgar excitement of an aristocrat. Or if a man should say, "I am in favour of religious equality; but I must preserve the Protestant Succession," he would be a Sentimentalist of a grosser and more improbable kind.
This is the essence of the Sentimentalist: that he seeks to enjoy every idea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.
India has issued a report challenging global warming fears. This is dramatic. The Indian Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change said that India would rather save its people from poverty than global warming, and would not cut growth in order to cut gases.
Referring to claimed changes in climate attributed to human activity, the report declares: "No firm link between the documented charges described below and warming due to an anthropogenic climate change has yet been established."
The report goes on to state: "It is obvious that India needs to substantially increase its per capita energy consumption to provide a minimally acceptable level of wellbeing to its people . . . India is determined that its per capita greenhouse-gas emissions will at no point exceed those of developed countries."
The Australian Herald noted that this declaration "means India won't stop its per capita emissions (now at 1,02 t) from growing until they match those of countries such as the US (now at 20 t)."
This Indian report was music to my ears. I have constantly said that developing countries cannot afford to let their school children do homework at night by candle light rather than by electric light, in an effort to save on electricity production, on the basis of the flimsy evidence presented in favour of man-induced climate change.
So we must ask ourselves: what is the main source of these claims that the Indian report referred to? The answer is that the claims mainly originate from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, commonly referred to as the IPCC.
Note the term 'governmental' – this is important. In July 1986, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) established the IPCC as an organ of the UN.
The IPCC's key personnel, and lead authors, were appointed by governments. In addition, the IPCC regulations state that its most important documents, its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) documents, have to be approved by UN member governments.
So when the SPMs are released to the public and the media, they are ‘government approved'.
From the start, the IPCC was more of a political entity rather than a scientific one. Frequently, the public is told of the thousands of scientists whose work forms part of the IPCC output. This is true. By far the majority of the scientists are good, competent folks. I know a few of them personally. But it is not their work that the public sees – the pubic is given the filtered version, which is published in the SPMs, and these SPMs are voted on, line by line, by representatives of the UN member governments.
The IPCC's second assessment report, of 1996, stated: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." In fact, the scientists never said this; they said that it was too early to tell. The third assessment report of the IPCC, in 2001, used the now infamous Hockey Stick graph, which purported to show that there had been a steep rise in global temperature during the twentieth century.
This graph was later shown to be wrong, and the IPCC's fourth report, of 2007, no longer uses it.
This should make people think a bit about government representatives voting on what version of the science they want the public to see. Many scientists, like me, have been irritated by all this, particularly when a result can be the retardation of the economic growth of the world's poor people. A number of the scientists involved in the IPCC work have quit very publicly, over the years, stating that what they actually determined scientifically and what was subsequently fed to the media differed greatly.
In parallel to all this, there has been a substantial, but rather silent, undercurrent of scientists who have been upset by this distortion of the truth.
A recent result of the existence of this agitated scientific bloc has been the establishment of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. This group was activated in early 2007, and was formalised at a climate workshop in Vienna in April 2007.
It is interesting to note that the president of the Czech Republic, Dr Vaclav Klaus, stated at the UN climate conference on September 24, 2007, that it would help the debate on climate change if the current monopoly and one-sidedness of the scientific debate over climate change by the IPCC were eliminated.
The NIPCC is a collection of eminent independent scientists directed by Dr S Fred Singer, the first director of the US Weather Satellite Service. He subsequently retired as chief scientist of the US Department of Transport. The founding core of scientists of the NIPCC came from a dozen countries, and all are totally independent. They state that their primary concern is the dissemination of scientific truth.
In accurately formulated scientific documents, the NIPCC rejects many of the claims of the IPCC, particularly the notion that man-induced climate change is upon us, and is causing great harm.
Keep your eyes open for good sense from the NIPCC.
The report forecasts more frequent heat waves will increase the number of heat-related illnesses and deaths and lead to more respiratory and cardiovascular disorders.I'll resist the temptation to comment on how they are presenting a case that is far more severe than any forecast by anyone other than the Gores, Sukookis and other wingnuts (far worse than the IPCCharlatans).
Habitual bouts of extreme weather – such as droughts, violent storms, heat waves and cold snaps – are expected to carry a higher risk of injuries, illnesses and stress-related disorders.
Air pollution, including higher levels of ground-level ozone and increased production of pollens and spores, will exacerbate asthma symptoms and allergies. The report says poor air quality will also lead to more heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases.
Outbreaks of E. coli, typhoid and other water-borne pathogens are also expected as drinking and recreational water is contaminated by run-off from heavy rainfall.
And the report predicts new infectious diseases – and a comeback of others previously eradicated in Canada – will crop up across the country.
In particular, we do not observe the large surface warming trends predicted by models; indeed, we detect significant surface cooling trends over the western Arctic Ocean during winter and autumn. This discrepancy suggests that present climate models do not adequately incorporate the physical processes that affect the polar regions.What he says now:
Some skeptics of global warming have also suggested that the melt is part of a cyclical process. Flat out wrong, says Serreze. He explains, "It's not cyclical at this point. I think we understand the physics behind this pretty well. We've known for at least 30 years, from our earliest climate models, that it's the Arctic where we'd see the first signs of global warming."Serreze says, "It's a situation where we hate to say we told you so, but we told you so.
ROSEHILL: We all know, don't we, that global cooling and imminent ice ages are caused by global warming? We all do know that, right? And we surely all know that global warming is caused by global cooling. Right? And global cooling is caused by a buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere, caused by man made pollutants, such as happened 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, and.... Wait, I'm getting confused. Global warming is caused by pollutants caused by wooly mammoths, which caused the ice ages that killed them off, because they ate too much and produced too much flatulence. Wait, which came first, the global warming which caused the ice ages, or the mammoths which farted too much??? And what were people doing back 10 to 12,000 years ago to cause so much CO2, anyway? Probably driving too many chariots pulled by those mammoths. Wait, the wheel wasn't invented yet. So, did the invention of the wheel cause global warming, or global cooling??? Now I'm really confused. What's Gore's number? I need to call him to get the truth, don't I?? Al, help me, please!I feel like I got a new toy...
Lloyd Alter of the environmentalist Web magazine Treehugger wrote on Reading Toronto about knowing the man killed on Avenue Road.It is to laugh. The tree huggers really want to live in China, or at least an equivalent that speaks mostly English.
Mr. Alter blamed the tragedy on the city for “paying lip service to the concept of bikes as transportation,”
Sanjuan soon discovered that incompetence, corruption, anti-Semitism, and outright criminality were rife throughout the UN Secretariat. Among the shady activities that he personally observed or documented were rigged bidding for major service contracts; drug transactions conducted in the UN’s parking garage; sale of shotguns and beryllium directly out of the UN building; ties to global organized crime figures; use of UN Information Centers and other agencies to disseminate anti-US and pro-PLO propaganda; systematic theft and abuse of UN facilities and budgets in East Africa; graft and corruption in Vienna; widespread sexual harrassment; use of the UN employee’s lounge to plan anti-Israel and anti-US activities by Muslim delegates; open celebration of 9/11 by said delegates in the halls of the UN; and inexplicable tolerance of all of the above on the part of the secretary general and the US government.Meanwhile, here's a piece I did in the CCD the year before Pedro's book came out:
"We have a compassion gap in Canada, a land that by tradition celebrates mutual health and happiness and not the accumulation of wealth."So THAT's why we are so anxious to pay taxes and not worry about having financial security. It's in our genes, unlike those of almost all other humans.
"Most shameful is that 3.5 million Canadians, or 11.4 per cent of the population, live in poverty, almost 900,000 of them children. That's not much better than the 12.3 per cent of Americans in poverty."So let me get this straight, with all of our traditions of egalitarianism, and the greedy drive of Americans to spit on the poor, we're just a teeny, tiny bit better... (Maybe better call us incompetent compassionists).
"Two-thirds of Canadians earning at least $150,000 in 2005 have a university degree (for the most part publicly funded)."So, The Star is able to see that education is a good thing when it comes to earning filthy lucre. But is it just me or does this imply that (a) public university education should only be available to the rich, or that (b) those who receive publicly funded educations should spend a career in servitude to the government doing compassionate things?
Income growth is stuck in first gear for most Canadians as government and business have failed to address the impact of globalization; the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy; the need to protect labour rights in bargaining for decent pay and benefits.I'll let others observe that this assumption seems to indicate that government has some control over whether production economies are best served where output can be delivered to consumers at a lower cost, or whether Canadians are better off paying $5k for a laptop instead of $500,
Governments have permitted an erosion in the progressive income tax, the most powerful tool for redistributing wealth. Governments long ago deserted the field of affordable housing – for which 70,000 GTA families are on waiting lists – the absence of which is the chief impediment to educational achievement, fulfilling jobs and escape from spousal and child abuse.Ah, that's the answer. Just tax us more, give all the money to the government and all the ills of society will be cured. Like in, say, Cuba.
A caring society provides affordable education, so aspiring teachers, nurses and public-health workers no longer pass up those noble vocations because they don't pay well enough to cover the student loans.Ah!!! And higher taxes will mean that unionized workers will MAKE MORE FILTHY LUCRE...
MP Peggy Nash, whose Parkdale-High Park riding observes first-hand our compassion gap, celebrates the coexistence of rich and poor in her constituency, but adds: "You're always fighting against a deterioration in communal values. The last thing we can afford is a grossly polarized society."Note - "Communal Values" (i.e. socialist / communist values) NOT community values such as clean living, hard work and honesty. Much better than we aspire to the lowest common denominator, so that the government can make our lives much better.
