APEC Is Not Kyoto

Todays Headlines.

Made In Canada APEC Climate Accord.

More Hot Air in Sydney Declaration.

And, Harper gets his wish.

So if Kyoto is a failure for Australia, Canada, and the United States they get to scuttle the whole deal with their Sydney Declaration on Climate Change

Which Harper can further use as evidence that Kyoto doesn't work. Abroad or at home. Canada will then set its own targets regardless of Kyoto. Which was his agenda all along. That and killing bill C-3o.

Note that the mutually agreed upon target date is the Tories target date of 2050.

Orwellian speak abounds in and around the APEC Anti-Kyoto statement. And that is all it is. An attempt to justify Canada's target date versus that of the rest of the G8 which has set more rapid targets.

"No one meeting, no one agreement is going to fix this issue," Howard said of human-caused climate change. "Kyoto didn't fix it. The Canadian prime minister made the comment about Kyoto that it was really an agreement that produced two groups of countries, those countries that didn't have any targets to meet, and those countries that have failed to meet the targets that were set."

But Harper said Howard was taking his comments out of context, and even messed up the punch line of his joke.

"The quip I think I said in a (previous international) leaders' meeting was that Kyoto divided the world into two groups: those that would have no targets and those that would reach no targets. It's, as I say, just a quip, but I think there's a fair amount of truth to it."

The Sidney Declaration is a self fulfilling prophecy for Harper and Howard.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says it premature to be demanding climate-change goals of other countries, but he hopes that the participants at this weekend's APEC conference can at least agree those goals must be set.

"We haven't reached the point where we can dictate targets to the rest of the world," the Prime Minister told a late afternoon press conference on Friday.

Mr. Harper pointed out that the reduction targets set out in the Kyoto Accord — targets that his government rejects as being too costly to the environment — were never approved by countries that produce two third's of the world's emissions. And he said he believes that a G8 meeting held last June in Berlin produced the most reasonable approach to cutting the production of the gases that have been linked to global warming.

"Canada, Japan and others have articulated a specific goal that we would like to see which is a reduction of emissions by half by the year 2050. Not everybody even in the G8 yet subscribes to that," said Mr. Harper.

The 1997 Kyoto treaty – aimed at halting the speed of global warming – treats developing countries differently. It puts the burden of mandatory emissions cuts squarely on the shoulders of wealthy countries.

Harper, Howard and U.S. President George W. Bush are critical of that deal, with Harper suggesting yesterday it offered developing countries an escape hatch.

"Let's remember . . . if we can get an international protocol, this is a big, big step. It will be the first time the world has done this. In the Kyoto protocol, nations representing two-thirds of emissions essentially opted out. So we have to do a better job next time."

But Graham Saul, of Climate Action Network Canada, said in a telephone interview from Ottawa that Harper's statement is "outrageous" and "a total misrepresentation" of Kyoto's premise of "common but differentiated responsibilities."

"Kyoto is based on the principle that the rich countries are disproportionately responsible for the problem and so bear disproportionately the responsibility for solving it, and poor countries like India, where 500 million people don't even have light bulbs in their homes, shouldn't be forced to accept binding targets."

Until a global deal is reached, Harper also told reporters Canada would do well to join a group like the Asia Pacific Partnership, or AP-6, a six-member group co-founded by the U.S. and Australia that opposes binding targets on governments. Rather, it endorses a voluntary approach to greenhouse gas cuts, leaving governments to establish their own best methods of reaching goals.

Environmentalists have dismissed the climate-change declaration signed Saturday by the leaders of 21 Pacific Rim countries, including Canada.

The deal, announced in Sydney by Australian Prime Minister John Howard, includes the intention to set aspirational — voluntary — emissions reductions targets, and other green initiatives.

"We agree to work to achieve a common understanding on a long-term aspirational global emissions reduction goal," said the Sydney Declaration, issued after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders meeting.

Canada was given credit Saturday for helping the leaders set the targets. "We appreciate the efforts of Japan and Canada in proposing a long-term global goal," the declaration said.

Howard said that it "does transcend a number of international divisions. In particular I note that it is the first such gathering that has included both the United States and China in coming together regarding the aspirational goal."

Even a member of Howard’s cabinet had harsh words about aspirational targets in April. In a lecture at Monash University, Australia’s Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said aspirational targets are “code for ‘a political stunt.’ An aspirational target is not a real target at all.”

This appears to be part of the increasingly popular attempt by resistant governments to SAY they are taking climate change seriously while doing nothing serious about it. Australia's "principles" on climate change were clear enough when it helped to create the anti-Kyoto Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate: it seemed largely a matter of making the world safe for unrestrained coal exports.

Now, we have the prospect of the more formal and influential APEC organization joining this campaign to set a "long-term aspirationial goal."

It's instructive in these circumstances to listen closely to what people are actually saying. A goal, traditionally, is something that you want to achieve. A "long-term aspirational goal," on the other hand, sounds very like something that you would like to put off, or perhaps merely enshrine in a declaration while continuing to undermine the single international agreement (Kyoto) that has real and measurable climate change "goals."

There has been real movement in the last year on this issue. U.S. President George Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Australia's Prime Minister Howard no longer try to deny the science of climate change.

But their new tactic - nodding enthusiastically to a worried electorate while continuing to block international action - is still just so much spin. Until the world's largest energy producers (including coal countries like the U.S. and Australia) stop talking "aspirations" and start committing to measurable targets, there is no reason to take their declarations as anything more than public relations in its most poverty stricken form.

And again we have Alberta/Canada writ into the Sidney declaration, with reference to intensity targets.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, host of the APEC summit, nevertheless says the leaders have agreed on three "important and very specific things."Firstly, the need for a long-term aspirational global emissions reduction goal. And that is enshrined in the Sydney Declaration," he said. "Secondly, the need for all nations, no matter what their stage of development, to contribute accordingly to their own capacities and their own circumstances to reducing greenhouse gases. Thirdly, we have agreed on specific APEC goals on energy intensity and forestry, and we've also agreed on the important role of clean coal technologies." "Energy intensity" is a measure of energy efficiency. The declaration said members should aim for a 25 percent reduction in energy intensity by the year 2030.

Ironically it is the Chinese who are demanding these three countries meet their Kyoto obligations as the basis for China coming into the second round of the Kyoto accord. Something that won't happen as long as Harper says we can't.

THE Prime Minister, John Howard, compromised on his Sydney climate change declaration to accommodate the tough stance of the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, supporting the United Nations and the Kyoto Protocol. The protocol includes binding targets for developed countries to cut emissions.

At the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum leaders' meeting on Saturday, shortly before the release of the declaration, Mr Hu bluntly told Mr Howard that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change "and its Kyoto Protocol" was the legal basis for any international co-operation on climate change.

He also told Mr Howard the framework and the Kyoto Protocol were "the most authoritative, universal and comprehensive international framework" for tackling climate change.

"Developed countries should face their historical responsibility and their high per-capita emissions," Mr Hu insisted, saying the countries should "strictly abide by their emission reduction targets set forth in the Kyoto Protocol". His remarks were circulated by Chinese officials after the APEC leaders' meeting and before the final Sydney declaration was released.

So it goes back to the old cyclical argument; China is not in, the United States and Australia haven't signed on yet, and Canada can't meet its targets, so Kyoto is a failure. But that is just an excuse, and one that won't last through the next election.

But the program adopted by the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit set precedents that the United States, Japan and Australia say are important as the world grapples with climate change. Chiefly, China, which if not already the biggest polluter will be soon, agreed to a goal that also applies to rich countries.

"This is the first occasion ever that China ... has agreed to any notion of targets at all for developing countries as well as developed countries," Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told local television on Sunday. "That is, by the way, an enormous diplomatic breakthrough."

Although Chinese President Hu Jintao agreed to the climate-change pact, he argued that developing nations like China have a lesser role to play. In remarks to fellow leaders Saturday, Hu said rich countries have polluted for longer and thus must take the lead in cutting emissions and providing money and technology to help developing countries clean up.

"In tackling climate change, helping others is helping oneself," Hu said.

China, Indonesia and other poorer APEC members like Kyoto because it holds richer countries to this higher standard and exempts developing countries from emissions targets. Even though Kyoto supporters Canada, New Zealand and Japan have failed to meet their targets, experts say the agreement has had a positive effect.

"It's not simply whether any one particular country actually achieved its target or not, it's the overall impact of the protocol which has had an effect of bringing down emissions from what they would have been," said Graeme Pearson, who was the climate director of Australia's main scientific research body from 1992-2002.

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Felix II

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Carlos Fuller, the deputy director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, described the southern hurricane activity as part of a "strange" weather pattern.

"About 10 years ago, we saw one develop in the south Atlantic where your professor would tell you that never occurs.

"Unfortunately, the two hurricanes have been Category Five hurricanes, they made landfall as Category Five hurricanes. It is the first time in history and we have data going back to 1885; this has never happened," the meteorologist said.

Fuller said a high-pressure system, known as the Bermuda High, kept both 'Dean' and 'Felix' on a westerly track.

As the remnants of powerful Hurricane Felix dissipate today over Central American mountains, some meteorologists are voicing concerns about the computer models that were meant to forecast the storm's intensification. "In general, computer models did very poorly in forecasting the development of this system," said Keith Blackwell, a hurricane researcher at the University of South Alabama's Coastal Weather Research Center in Mobile.

Felix set a record by strengthening from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane—the category for the most destructive storms on the Saffir-Simpson scale—in only 51 hours.

"It strengthened more rapidly than any other storm on record, anywhere in the world," Blackwell said.

If the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season ended tomorrow, we would still call it extraordinary. The year's first two hurricanes, Dean and Felix, both reached Category 5 classification. That's a record, one among many that these two storms helped establish.

To begin with, in the archives (which go back to 1851, with varying degrees of completeness) only three other seasons - 1960, 1961 and 2005 - had more than one of these monster storms. And no season can rival this additional feat: Both Dean and Felix struck land at full Category 5 strength.

There hadn't been a Category 5 landfall in what hurricane experts call the Atlantic basin (the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic north of the equator) since 1992's Hurricane Andrew ravaged southern Florida. Now we've seen two in two weeks.

The scariest factoid, however, is this : We've now witnessed eight Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic basin in the past five years (Isabel, Ivan, Emily, Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Dean and Felix).

You have to go back to the 1960s, with six recorded Category 5s, to find another decade that even approaches the present one in this regard. (And if you look beyond the Atlantic? In June, Cyclone Gonu was a Category 5 and the strongest storm ever observed in the Arabian Sea.)

It's hard to keep up with the crazed weather. As I write, a heat wave has killed over 50 people in the Midwest and South, with temperatures reaching 112 degrees in Evening Shade, Arkansas. Torrential storms have flooded Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, and South Dakota. California has its second largest wildfire ever. Texas and Kansas are battening down for new storms, while still recovering from last month's floods, along with Oklahoma, which is now getting flooded again. A few weeks before, a massive rainstorm closed down the New York City subways. That doesn't count over 2,000 dead and millions displaced in India and Bangladesh floods, runaway forest fires in Greece, the hottest-ever temperature in Japan, or unprecedented melting of Arctic icecaps. Tomorrow the weather will ricochet off the charts someplace else.

This surge of weird weather offers a powerful warning. Placed in context, its lessons could also help us overcome the denial that's prevented the United States from taking action on global climate change. They could give courage to elected representatives who've wanted to act but have been hobbled by timidity. They could create a political opening to defeat prominent elected climate-change deniers whose seats used to seem unassailable and are running for reelection in hard-hit states. They could help the Senate leadership stand strong and call the bluff of those threatening a filibuster or a Bush veto. As Samuel Johnson wrote, knowing you’ll be hanged in two weeks concentrates one’s mind wonderfully. What's happening to our weather just might foreshadow that hanging.

A few years ago, global warming felt remote to most Americans. Although they heard it debated, it didn’t seem real. The media gave “equal time” to deniers and the most respected scientists. Now 84% of Americans view human activity as at least contributing to global climate change, and 70% demand greater government action. Responses have shifted in the wake of Katrina and the succession of local disasters; Gore's Inconvenient Truth; the international IPCC report and similar impeccably credentialed scientific studies; and the start of serious media coverage, from Parade and the AARP magazine to Vogue. Add the impact of so many ordinary citizens speaking out, and Americans are starting to link the disasters they're seeing around them with what's happening to the planet.

When people's communities are hit with exceptional floods, droughts, tornadoes, heat waves, or runaway wildfires, or they see these events on TV, even conservatives who would have once treated them as random "acts of God" start recognizing their deeper roots in the patterns of human action. In a May 2006 poll of South Carolina hunters and fishermen, for instance, 68% agreed that global warming was an urgent problem requiring immediate action, and a similar number said they'd seen the immediate impact of climate change on local fish and wildlife. Even before this summer's parade of calamities, 75% of all Americans said recent weather had been stranger than usual

So our national frame on the weather is beginning to shift. Each new "natural disaster" now reinforces the sense that just maybe not all these disasters are so natural after all. And if we fail to seriously address their roots, similar ones or worse will dominate our future.

Of course global climate change doesn’t cause every extreme weather event. And not all our fellow citizens are quite ready to act on the full enormity of the climate crisis, still resisting much of what needs to be done, such as increasing gas taxes. But most Americans want someone to do something, even if they're ambivalent about paying the costs. The more our warnings resonate with what people see around them, the more they can draw broader links, and the more the Exxon-funded denials ring hollow.

This situation expands political possibilities. While memory of this summer of disasters is still fresh, why not begin now to make a major issue of the rabid global climate change denial of Senators like Oklahoma's James Inhofe, Texas’s John Cornyn, and Oregon's Gordon Smith. Inhofe, who's called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," has been considered to have a safe seat. But his approval rating, just after last November's election, was a lowly 46%, and Cornyn's 45%, both lower than just-defeated Virginia Senator George Allen. So they may already be more vulnerable than conventional wisdom suggests. Gordon Smith's race has long been forecast as tight. Instead of writing off the prime deniers as unbeatable, or dismissing global climate change as too complex to make an electoral difference, why not brand them with their stands, juxtaposing their dismissal of the crisis with images of flooded homes and farms?

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No Rush

The Harper Green Plan was to come into effect by 2050. No rush. By then we will also have Ice Breakers, but they will be redundant.

Most polar bears could die out by 2050

Two-thirds of the world's polar bears will be killed off by 2050 — and the entire population gone from Alaska — because of thinning sea ice from global warming in the Arctic, government scientists forecast Friday.

Only in the northern Canadian Arctic islands and the west coast of Greenland are any of the world's 16,000 polar bears expected to survive through the end of the century, said the U.S. Geological Survey, which is the scientific arm of the Interior Department.

Florida airboats glide on thin Arctic ice

As climate change thins sea ice around the Arctic, making travel by snowmobile during the spring precarious even for practiced hunters, one solution may be to borrow technology from the swampy Everglades of Florida.

Arctic Kingdom Marine Expeditions is reporting success in using airboats to guide tours to the floe edge outside Pond Inlet this summer.

A study by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has found that the Arctic ice is melting faster than expected and will decline by 40 percent by 2050.

The estimate is based on a study of national and international computer models keeping the period 1979-1999 as a base. An earlier report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had found that sea loss was greater in the summer in Arctic Sea located north of Alaska, Canada and Asia.

The IPCC report had placed the blame on greenhouse gases and had said that unless these emissions were controlled, the Arctic Sea would almost disappear by the turn of the century.

In a year when the Arctic ice cap has shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded, a new analysis from Seattle scientists says global warming will accelerate future melting much more than previously expected.

About 40 percent of the floating ice that normally blankets the top of the world during the summer will be gone by 2050, says James Overland, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. Earlier studies had predicted it would be nearly a century before that much ice vanished.

"This is a major change," Overland said. "This is actually moving the threshold up.

"If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said it wouldn't happen until 2070 or 2100," said Serreze, who was not involved in Overland's project.

Even a 40 percent loss of ice would be devastating to ice-dependent animals such as walruses and ringed seals, said Overland, who shared his data with federal officials considering an endangered-species listing for polar bears.

Gray whales will suffer if the ice-loving crustaceans they feed on disappear. But some commercially important fish species, like pollock and salmon, could thrive in warmer water — a possible boon for the Seattle-based fishing fleet that plies Alaska's Bering Sea. There are also hints, though, that the disappearance of ice would favor predators that undermine fisheries, Overland said.

Shipping will benefit if the Northwest Passage across the Canadian Arctic melts out each summer — as it did for the first time this year.

Of course that is why we are having the international race to declare sovereignty over the arctic because heck there is a silver lining to global warming after all.

Exploring for Oil in the Arctic's 'Great Frontier'

"We think it's a great frontier ...." Fox says. "The belief is that about 25 percent of the world's remaining reserves are in the Arctic. And I think it's a major play for us."

Even the climate seemed to be cooperating with that major play. Polar ice retreated this summer from the spot where Shell plans to explore for oil.

Shell would hardly need its reinforced hulls, or rented Russian icebreakers.

Global Warming May Cancel Next Ice Age

The effects of burning fossil fuels today will extend long beyond the next couple of hundred years, possibly delaying the onset of Earth's next ice age, more properly called a glacial period, says researcher Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

SEE:

Polar Bears Threaten Tories Arctic Sovereignty

Tories Ignore Arctic Climate Change

Petrocan's Arctic Sovereignty

US Declares War For The Arctic

Mackenzie Valley Pipeline

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Michael Crichton Climate Change Denier

In an essay on his home page Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, compares the current debate around Climate Change with the Scientific movement for eugenics and Lysenkoism. He calls it the politicization of science. Well duh science has always been the handmaiden of the ruling class.

"Once again, the measures being urged have little basis in fact or science. Once again, groups with other agendas are hiding behind a movement that appears high-minded. Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions. Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences. Once again, vague terms like sustainability and generational justice --- terms that have no agreed definition --- are employed in the service of a new crisis.

I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions of the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression. "

Michael Crichton© 1997-2007 Constant C Productions. All rights reserved.

However in describing those who oppose the science and politics of climate change as brave 'authentic', 'objective' scientists whose voices are being suppressed he overlooks their politics, and their political agenda. Which is not the defense of science, or even technology but of capitalism as it currently exists.

As much as Crichton is a popular author, and one who opposes attempts to patent genes, on the issue of Climate Change he ends up using the arguments of the political right who have made the eugenics argument their way of slagging feminism and the left and now those who defend the science of global warming.

What they fail to do, as does Crichton, is differentiate between the moralist reform movements of the fin de sicle 19th Century (the temperance movement) which sought to keep women in the home and those progressive movements that sought greater liberty for women. Both were precursors to modern feminism and the progressive movements for social reform. But they were politically different, and thus to confuse the two is at best poor scholarship at worst deliberate political obfustication.

In his essay Crichton ultimately sounds like that other defender of science and technology and opponent of the conspiracy theory of Climate Change; Lyndon LaRouche.

In the first half of the 20th century, eugenics in action largely meant governments sterilizing or murdering people they didn't like. (Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality. And, as Aleksandr Solzenhistyn has pointed out, the doctrine of "class origins" transformed "egalitarian" mass murder into ethnic genocide since there is no sharp line between family and race.)

Progressives, Eugenics, Women and the Minimum Wage
Stephen W. Carson

American intellectual life in the early 20th century has a dirty secret and its name is Eugenics. Alex Tabarrok points out an excellent article by Thomas C. Leonard on Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women's Work (PDF). Leonard makes the point that Progressive support for exclusionary labor legislation for women, including the minimum wage, was based among other things on ensuring "that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as 'mothers of the race'". Though most know that eugenics had some sort of open popularity prior to the Nazis giving it a bad name, few know how thoroughly it was supported by all the "best and brightest". Here's a partial list from Leonard's paper: Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and economist Irving Fisher.

Progressives, in part for eugenic reasons, wanted to make women and other groups unemployable. Their chosen tool: the minimum wage.

...these progressives argued that minimum-wage-induced disemployment was a social benefit. Legal minimum wages and other statutory means of inducing undesirable groups to leave the labor force were, in the progressive view, a eugenic benefit.

The Progressive Case for Regulating
Women’s Work

By THOMAS C. LEONARD*

ABSTRACT. American economics came of age during the Progressive Era, a time when biological approaches to economic reform were at their high-water mark. Reform-minded economists argued that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers—whom they labeled “unemployables,” “parasites,” and the “industrial residuum”—so as to uplift superior, deserving workers. Women were also frequently classified as unemployable. Leading progressives, including women at the forefront of labor reform, justified exclusionary labor legislation for women on grounds that it would (1) protect the biologically weaker sex from the hazards of market work; (2) protect working women from the temptation of prostitution; (3) protect male heads of household from the economic competition of women; and (4) ensure that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as “mothers of the race.” What united these heterogeneous rationales was the reformers’ aim of discouraging women’s labor-force participation.

Eugenic thought crossed national borders, and it also traversed an extraordinary range of political views. Ideologically, the eugenics movement attracted reactionaries, such as Madison Grant, author The Passing of the Great Race, and key movement figures, such as Francis Galton, founder of modern eugenics, and Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who can be described as social conservatives. But eugenics also won advocates of very different politics, such as Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate who began intellectual life as a radical anarchist (a protégé of Emma Goldman), Fabian socialists such as Karl Pearson, Sidney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw, and the sui generis feminist, economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Love and Eugenics in the late Nineteenth Century
Angelique Richardson

Developed by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton in the 1860s, and drawing on theories of evolution, eugenics looked to provide solutions both for the problems of the urban poor and for the challenge of maintaining national supremacy. Richardson shows how these theories had particular resonance for a number of intellectually and politically concerned women in the period, who firmly believed that "the women of Britain could best serve the race, the country, and their own interests through the rational selection of a reproductive partner" (p. 215). This was the view that time and again comes across in the fiction of some of the best known New Woman Authors, particularly Sarah Grand and George Egerton (although, as she shows, resistance to eugenics is an important aspect of Mona Caird's work). Richardson's achievement is to get us to recognize this fact and its implications, as well as the part played by their writings in the late-century debates between the hereditarians and the environmentalists. This is a bravely revisionist reading, which will give considerable pause for thought to all those who have enthusiastically embraced and celebrated the progressive, protofeminist aspects of the New Woman movement. One understands freshly that the resistance to romance which can be found in so many of the New Woman novelists and polemicists is less a defiant call for woman's autonomy and self-determination than a demand for rational reproduction. Richardson exposes not just the class biases, but in some cases the antihumanitarianism of these writers.

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault deemed eugenics one of the ‘two great innovations in the technology of sex of the second half of the nineteenth century’. Richardson’s book is a notable aid to our understanding of the scope and importance of Foucault’s remark and the continuing significance of eugenics as a language of modernity. Much scholarly work in recent years has emphasized the pervasive anxiety about degeneration and decline characteristic of the period, in which eugenic thinking played a central part, but Richardson also shows the tremendous eugenic optimism felt by many of its enthusiasts: able to reverse Malthus’s cruel laws, eugenics promised a new and clean way to social perfection … In charting this ground, Richardson leaves us in no doubt about the class violence endemic to eugenic discourse in the period. That advocacy of eugenics was most enthusiastic within collectivist politics is now well known, but illuminated further here, especially in the final chapter on Mona Caird. Biological determinism, Richardson argues, ‘was underpinned by the paralysis of the individual’; at the heart of the eugenic project of this period is a critique of liberal individual, exemplified here by one of the book’s good men, John Stuart Mill. In her suggestive interpretation of this troubled alignment between left politics and the eugenic fantasy of state-managed human reproduction as a means to squeeze suffering out of the social body, Richardson reminds us that individualism ‘was not anathema to Marx’. Mill’s own contribution to the opposition to eugenics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an individualism that shares with Marx a commitment to ‘autonomy, activity, true consciousness, and sociality.’

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Damn Commie Canadians

Quick someone tell the flat earth society and the climate change deniers at the Blogging Tories.

Canadians prove humans are causing climate change

Like Medicare this will prove once again to the Republican and conservative American rightwhing whiners that their northern neighbours are truly evil and a socialist menace.



See:

Strange Bedfellows

Saving Capitalism From Itself

Echo Chamber

Fraser Institutes Flat Earth Report

Fraser Institute Meets Bill O'Riley

Flat Earth Society Meets In London

Capitalism Creates Global Warming

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Ice Age Continues

Let's see how quick the flat earth society of climate change deniers are to grab onto this news item to once again claim that climate change is not the creation of capitalism.

The satellites found that the Earth's crust over Canada has not completed what scientists call the "post-glacial rebound." Now, it's clear that the ice age is still affecting the planet.

GRACE satellites have detected changes in the gravitational field over regions of Canada that can be attributed to the crust bouncing back after the melting of a glacier 20,000 years ago (Illustration: Science/ M Tamisiea)

CO2 burps from ocean to atmosphere at end of last ice age

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God Created Global Warming

Yep when you break down the arguments from the right that's what it comes down to.

Global Warming, like AIDS, is all part of Gods plan.

Global warming is a given. The cause of global warming is questioned. Some scientists blame man, just as many other scientists contend we are undergoing one of Earth's natural warming cycles.

Our planet has been cooling and warming since God created it.


See

Creationism

Environment

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Business As Usual

Despite the headline the bosses still don't get it.

Bosses heed climate warning

The oil and gas sector's peak lobby, the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association, described the IPCC report as a "sober, careful and comprehensive overview" of the status of climate change science. APPEA chief executive Belinda Robinson said national and international policy responses must be similarly considered, measured and multi-faceted. "Just as the IPCC avoids hysteria, so should our responses. The report leaves little doubt in my, and judging by a range of polls, most people's minds that climate change is very, very serious," she said.

"But in tackling it there is absolutely no room for knee-jerk, ill-informed approaches that have more to do with political optics than a genuine desire to understand the complexities in settling on a suite of policies that serve the best long-term interests of Australia and the world."

Ms Robinson warned that until commercial, environmental and technological drivers combined to dictate Australia's future energy profile, the emphasis must be on keeping all gas, clean coal, renewable, nuclear and a variety of other energy options open, as well as well others not yet dreamt of.

As in Canada so it is in Australia. PM pushes nuclear power

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Fraser Institutes Flat Earth Report

Real Climate - Climate Science From Scientists says the Fraser Institutes Flat Earth response to the IPCC report, falls flat as a pancake;

An unofficial, "Independent Summary for Policymakers" (ISPM) of the IPCC Fourth Assessment report has been delivered by the Fraser Institute. It's a long, imposing-looking document, resembling, come to think of it, the formatting of the real Summary for Policymakers (SPM) document that was released on Friday after final negotiations of the IPCC in Paris last week. The Fraser Institute has assembled an awsome team of 10 authors, including such RC favorites as tilter-against-windmills-and-hockey-sticks Ross McKitrick, and other luminaries such as William Kininmonth, MSc, M.Admin -- whose most recent paper is "Don't be Gored into Going Along" in the Oct-Nov issue of Power Engineer. To be fair, he did publish a paper on weather forecasting, back in 1973. According to the press release, the London kickoff event will be graced by the presence of "noted environmentalist" David Bellamy. It's true he's "noted," but what he's noted for is his blatant fabrication of numbers purporting to show that the world's glaciers are advancing rather retreating, as reported here.

And Real Climate refutes the theory of Radiative Forcing which Blogging Tory Kitchner Conservative used in his blog to prove that the IPCC report was Fear Mongering and Alarmism.

One of the strangest sections of the Fraser Institute report is the one in which the authors attempt to throw dirt on the general concept of radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is nothing more than an application of the principle of conservation of energy, looking at the way a greenhouse gas alters the energy balance of a planet. The use of energy conservation arguments of this type has been standard practice in physics at least since the time of Fourier. We have heard certain vice presidents dismiss "Energy Conservation" as merely a matter of personal virtue, but we have never before heard people who purport to be scientists write off the whole utility of "Conservation of Energy." From what is written in the Fraser report, it is not even clear that the authors understand the first thing about how radiative transfer calculations are done.

Ouch.

And DeSmogblog issued a press release in anticipation of the Fraser Institutes Report today;

DeSmogBlog.com: IPCC Criticism Fits into Canadian Climate Change ...

A Canadian think tank's attack on the recently released report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is one of several recent initiatives by Canadian groups to block action on global warming, DeSmogBlog.com President, James Hoggan, said Monday. The latest attack, by the Exxon-funded Fraser Institute, is scheduled to be released today, Feb. 5 at a press conference in the United Kingdom.

"These people are an embarrassment to Canadians," Hoggan said. Two industry front groups (the Natural Resources Stewardship Project and the Friends of Science) have popped up in Canada the last couple of years, spreading doubt about climate change at every turn. And a scientist associated with those groups put together a petition of skeptical "experts" last spring, a petition that was quoted in U.S. Senate committee hearings.

Now the Fraser Institute, a right-wing think tank that has received annual grants from oil-giant ExxonMobil, is issuing what it calls an independent summary of the report of the IPCC. The Institute claimed that the IPCC's own summary is a political document "neither written by nor reviewed by the scientific community".

Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis and a lead IPCC author called the Fraser Institute's effort "highly ideological". The IPCC summary was written and reviewed by some of the most senior climate scientists in the world, without political or bureaucratic input, Weaver said.

The English newspaper the Mirror issued the following report;

ATTACKS ON GLOBAL WARMING

A RIGHT-WING think tank funded by oil firms will today try to rubbish claims of climate change.

The Canadian-based Fraser Institute argues there is no globally consistent pattern in rain or snow falls and not enough data to prove rising temperatures pose a danger.

Its review - branded "rubbish" by Friends of the Earth - attempts to challenge the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which compiled a report by 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries.

ExxonMobil has paid the institute more than £30,000. A quarter of its funding comes from organisations including pharmaceutical, oil, and gas companies.

Today's launch of the report follows the revelation that the right-wing American Enterprise Institute - also funded by ExxonMobil - offered scientists up to £5,000 to underminine the IPCC study.

Just to be Fair and Balanced as they say on Faux Newz.

The Scoop from New Zealand published a news release from a New Zealand Flat Earth Coalition, another arm of the Fraser Institute. You can tell because they call the Fraser Institute an 'independent think tank', not a right wing one nor do they mention Exxon funded the report, nor the fact they are one of the Fraser Institutes sources.

Press Release: New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

Independent Summary Shows New UN Climate Change Report Refutes Alarmism And Reveals Major Uncertainties In The Science

February 5, 2007

For Immediate Release

LONDON, UK—An independent review of the latest United Nations report on climate change shows that the scientific evidence about global warming remains uncertain and provides no basis for alarmism.

In 2006, independent research organization The Fraser Institute convened a panel of 10 internationally-recognized experts to read the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report and produce an Independent Summary for Policymakers. The result, released today and available at www.fraserinstitute.ca, is a detailed and thorough overview of the state of the science. This independent summary has been reviewed by more than 50 scientists around the world and their views on its balance and reliability are tabulated for readers.

US Republican Senator Inhofe is using the Fraser Institute Report to refute the IPCC Report, he too is aligned with the small circle of climate deniers, he quotes the report almost word for word,

Washington, DC – Sen. James Inhofe, (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, today commented on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Summary for Policymakers.

"This is a political document, not a scientific report, and it is a shining example of the corruption of science for political gain. The media has failed to report that the IPCC Summary for Policymakers was not approved by scientists but by UN political delegates and bureaucrats," Senator Inhofe said. The IPCC is only releasing the Summary for Policymakers today, not the actual scientific report which is not due out until May 2007.

Which is refuted by Real Climate;

Why go to all the trouble of producing an "independent" summary? The authors illuminate us with this wisdom regarding the official Summary for Policymakers: "A further problem is that the Summary for Policy Makers attached to the IPCC Report is produced, not by the scientific writers and reviewers, but by a process of negotiation among unnamed bureaucratic delegates from sponsoring governments." This statement (charitably) shows that the Fraser Institute authors are profoundly ignorant of the IPCC process. In fact, the actual authors of the official SPM are virtually all scientists, and are publically acknowleged. Moreover, the lead authors of the individual chapters are represented in the writing process leading to the SPM, and their job is to defend the basic science in their chapters. As lead author Gerald Meehl remarked to one of us on his way to Paris: "Scientists have to be ok, they have the last check. If they think the science is not represented, then they can send it back to the breakout groups. "

Inhofe, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition; a handful of scientists and rigth wing lobbyists, and a wine grower, like the folks the Fraser Institute has rounded up are all part of the coalition funded by Exxon of climate change deniers, like the Candian petro lobby; Friends of Science.

In fine neo-con tradition what they do is quote each other, without refering to the fact they all belong to the same club, as if that proves their authority and points.
And they make the misleading claim that they are "leading climate scientists" which of course they are not. They are corporate apologists for capitalism.

This is the same tactic used when the Fraser Institute issues an economic report on the joys of the free market, proving their evidence by quoting a "leading" economicst from the Cato Institute, which of course quotes a "leading" economist from the Fraser Institute as a source.

You get where all this is leading. It is a self completing circle, as Phil Ochs said; a small circle of friends. Though one could be forgiven for considering it an ideological circle jerk.

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Fraser Institute Meets Bill O'Riley

Love this announcement from the Fraser Institute for their Flat Earth Report; note the Bill O'Riley like No Spin Zone pronouncement.

Climate Change Without the Spin:
An Independent Summary for Policymakers of the New IPCC Report

When spinning is exactly what this is all about. Another example of neo-con newspeak.


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BT Climate Change Denial

Well this proves that in order to be a true card carrying conservative in Canada you must, despite all evidence to the contrary, continue to deny the scientific evidence of Global Warming. Not because you don't believe it but because it's the rigorous (as in rigor mortus) position you MUST hold or all is lost.

As evidenced by the following Blogging Tory posts:
PCC Report Doesn't Prove Causality
By the Numbers
"The best CTV push-poll yet..."
A Voice of Sanity at the Globe
From the people who brought you...
"The semantics of climate change"
The forecast calls for pain
National Post reinforces my point
"Global Cooling" ?
It?s very likely, said the groundhog
It is VERY LIKELY!

etc. etc. ad nauseum.

The irony is that like their Great Leaders denial of the science of climate change/Global Warming back in 2002 when he called Kyoto a 'money sucking socialist' scheme, these poor deluded folks don't get it.

Kyoto is meant to save capitalism from itself. It has to do with ameliorating the worst excesses of the market by creating a market to exchange carbon credits, thus producing a new form of stock market. That is capitalism in action. Nothing socialist about it. Well except for government regulations, which even capitalists agree are needed to keep the playing field level.

Of course these folks are correct in pointing out Kyoto doesn't work, nor can capitalism when it comes to changing the course of its own inherent crisis as the result of its creation of self sustaining technology.

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A Critique of Kyoto Capitalism Is NOT Sustainable

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