It's Global Warming Stupid

Damned if they do damned if they don't so the Tories do the next best thing.....nothing.....

Tories mum as environment report calls for push on global warming
The Conservative government was on the defensive yesterday and key ministers were out of town as the much-anticipated report from the Auditor-General's environment commissioner called for a "massive scale-up of efforts" to combat global warming.

The demand is out of sync with recent comments by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who questioned the accuracy of global-warming projections this week and has presented clean air as a more pressing environmental issue.

Although the report's release date has been known for weeks, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn and Northern Development Minister Jim Prentice were all in Alberta yesterday. Ms. Ambrose was unavailable for telephone interviews.

"To head out of town on the first horse back to Calgary while the commissioner’s report came down with a clear indictment of past wrongs is not encouraging," said NDP environment critic Nathan Cullen.


In denial...The Harper government is in denial about Climate Change, and in league with American global warming deniers.

In the past, Mr. Harper has questioned the science of climate change, calling it a “controversial hypothesis,” while his former environment critic Bob Mills went a few steps further calling the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to address climate change, “a great socialist plot.”

Sowing doubt about climate change in Stephen Harper's backyard

"The Kyoto Protocol is a political solution to a non-existent problem without scientific justification," says Ball, on the Friends of Science website.

As it does in the U.S., the lobby group is trying to create the appearance of a scientific controversy where none exists. It's a political debate they attempt to pass off as science. And it is having some resonance with the Harper government.

Friends of Science puts out radio ads calling for an end to the Kyoto accord because, they say, the science of climate change isn't proven.

That's not all. In April, says the website, "Researchers at the University of Calgary, in co-operation with the Friends of Science Society, released a video entitled: Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What you're not being told about the science of climate change.

Tim Ball gave his anti-global warming pitch in May to the Alberta government's standing policy committee on energy and sustainable resources. Ball approached the committee, committee chairman Doug Griffith's spokesman.

Stephen Harper and Environment Minister Rona Ambrose are making the issues even muddier by exploiting the public confusion sown by the anti-climate change forces. Many people mistakenly think global warming is connected to air pollution and smog, two separate issues and never intended to be linked.

So why do Harper and Ambrose talk about "pollution and greenhouse gases" in the same breath? It's politics. The Conservatives don't support Kyoto and so are trying to change the subject to air quality. To quote Ambrose: "We're looking at co-benefits -- actually taking action on things like clean air and pollutants (where) there's a co-benefit of reducing things like greenhouse gases."

Well, you can hear that exact same strategy in the Friends of Science radio ads.

"Sixty leading scientists want us to reconsider Kyoto. ... There has to be a better way to reduce pollution and clean up our air, water and soil," says the ad.

Kyoto, of course, never was about cleaner air, it's about rising temperatures. This is fudging of the first order. But it must be heartwarming to Harper's political supporters in the oilpatch. And maybe in Ontario, Harpers figures there are more votes for cleaning up smog.

ExxonMobil funds climate-change propaganda: British scientists

Britain's leading scientific academy has accused oil company ExxonMobil Corp. of misleading the public about global warming and of funding groups that undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

The Royal Society said Wednesday it has written to the U.S. energy giant asking it to halt support for groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change."

Yesterday while the Climate Change auditor issued her report climate scientists meeting at MIT issued their own warning, one that most business people can understand, its called Risk Assessment. And the risk is extinction if we don't do something more than less than nothing.

A Dangerous Energy Climate

"If we don't throw everything we have at energy efficiency right now, and start to do things we know how to do right now [in fossil-fuel alternatives], we don't have a chance" of halting drastic planetary changes, said Nathan Lewis, a chemist at Caltech whose research interests include new solar-power materials. Lewis spoke yesterday as part of a panel on energy at the Emerging Technologies Conference.

Caltech's Lewis said the question has become one of risk management. "If we don't cure cancer, the world will stay the same. If we don't cure AIDS, the world will stay the same. But if we don't solve this problem in the next 20 years, from a scientific viewpoint, the world is not ever going to be the same," he said. "How much are we willing to spend to avoid the risk of doing something that we don't like for the next 3,000 years or more?"The biggest policy need is for some regulation of carbon dioxide, Lewis said. Currently, there is little economic reason for companies to pursue non-carbon-emitting alternatives or to sequester the gas.


It's global warming stupid, not smog. Smog is a symptom, global warming is the problem.

Hot "Prehistoric" Conditions May Return by 2100, Study Says

Palm trees in Canada? No ice anywhere? The future could look like Earth's hottest ancient epoch, says a new study of carbon dioxide levels.

The study shows that the high carbon dioxide (CO2) levels found during the Eocene epoch match the CO2 levels predicted for the end of this century by many global warming models.

The Eocene occurred between 56 million and 49 million years ago. It featured the highest prolonged global temperatures of the past 65 million years.

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