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It's a method of getting oil out of the sands that is now going beyond experimental. Essentially, steam is injected horizontally into oilsands to loosen the bitumen, then high pressure air is injected vertically which initiates combustion. The steam is only needed at the initial stage to get enough oil to start the process. Once combustion begins it continues with the only input and control being air, and oil is recovered horizontally. The combustion front is easy to monitor and can be halted with the cessation of air. Aside from the initial steam injection, natural gas is not required, neither is water and the resultant byproduct is sand. No big pits, no SAGD, no tailing ponds.

Should this prove commercially viable, and it looks like it will, Gore will look like an even bigger idiot.

And if it was me, I'd tell Ontario they can't have any.

Back to JKF study...

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J.O.

Interesting. Do they have a dedicated wind farm that is directly connected to the system?

No, it is a calculation that they use to promote their wind power. The City of Calgary owns Enmax (the electricity provider) and the Calgary Transit (the LRT system). They calculate that the wind farm output meets the LRT use. Mostly, it works best when the mayor is facing south and talking or blowing some new BS out his posterior.

mad.gif

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It's a method of getting oil out of the sands that is now going beyond experimental. Essentially, steam is injected horizontally into oilsands to loosen the bitumen, then high pressure air is injected vertically which initiates combustion. The steam is only needed at the initial stage to get enough oil to start the process. Once combustion begins it continues with the only input and control being air, and oil is recovered horizontally. The combustion front is easy to monitor and can be halted with the cessation of air. Aside from the initial steam injection, natural gas is not required, neither is water and the resultant byproduct is sand. No big pits, no SAGD, no tailing ponds.

Should this prove commercially viable, and it looks like it will, Gore will look like an even bigger idiot.

And if it was me, I'd tell Ontario they can't have any.

Back to JKF study...

thanks, very interesting.

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Ramjet

Calgary's C-train doesn't use ENMAX generated power, it comes from TransAlta.

Calgary.ca

OK

Tell us what you know.

I thought TransAlta was the infrastructure of the power grid.

Interesting note for Dagger and all the greenies.

See the last line on the City of Calgary link I posted.

It is expected that the "Ride the Wind" program will increase power costs by less than one-half of one cent per passenger.

Why an increase in power cost? It's just wind right?

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Guest rattler

Those aren't our gas reserves. They are US reserves, and in any major transition to Natgas, say, to power every passenger car, they will be depleted rapidly.

You do have a point re opur supplies of natural gas.

Canada’s total natural gas consumption increases steadily, by 1.5 percent per year, in the reference case, from 3.3 trillion cubic feet in 2006 to 4.7 trillion cubic feet in 2030. The strongest growth is in the industrial sector, averaging 1.8 percent per year, and in the electric power sector, averaging 1.3 percent per year. The rapid growth  projected for Canada’s industrial natural gas consumption is based in large part on the expectation that purchased natural gas will be consumed in increasing quantities for mining of the country’s oil sands deposits. In 2006, an estimated 12 percent of Canada’s total natural gas consumption was used for oil sands production; in 2030, that share could reach 22 percent of the country’s total gas use.16 

Consequently, U.S. dependence on natural gas imports declines from 17 percent in 2006 to 3 percent in 2030, as Canada’s production and exports decline, and as domestic production from shale and other unconventional sources increases

Natural gas production from the OECD nations increases by 7.8 trillion cubic feet from 2006 to 2030 in the reference case. The largest regional increases are projected for the United States, at 5.3 trillion cubic feet, and Australia/New Zealand, at 2.8 trillion cubic feet. The projected production increases for the two regions are offset in part by production declines in Canada and OECD Europe, where existing conventional natural gas fields are in decline. 

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/nat_gas.html

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Australia has just blocked twice, a foolish emissions trading scheme(ETS). It is not over yet, but the tide is turning, hastened by the hacking of emails in Britain.

The opposition leader decided to support the scheme and got tossed by his own party. Highlights from the link below....

"Many now realise that the debate on climate change is changing fast. The Climategate fiasco of leaked emails reflects poorly on the scientific establishment and more and more people are beginning to understand the enormous personal and broader economic costs of an ETS. "

"There are plenty of people who understand that Australia will have to be part of a global agreement on climate change. Advocating caution is not denial. Refusing to rush through an ETS, one that will punish our economy when big emitters in the developed and developing world have yet to do anything, is not recklessness. It is the essence of political responsibility."

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opini...o-1225805945514

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Anyone interested in this debate should definitely read this article from our national newspaper. Then you will understand why so many scientists supported this theory.....Now even the posters that were insulting me have run away.

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=2292746

Standing with the skeptics

The correspondence I have received on Climategate -- the leak two weeks ago of emails and computer files from Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that show global warming to be grossly misrepresented, if not an out-and-out fraud -- can essentially be sorted into two categories: "Why isn't this a bigger story?" or "Why does this matter?"

This should be a bigger story, because it matters a great deal.

The American and British scientists who control much of the UN's climate reporting through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)have been caught manipulating the temperature records to make the 20th century appear warmer than it was (and preceding centuries cooler), leaving an exaggerated impression about how unique and dangerous our current climate is.

They were also shown doing their level best to control the peer-review process at major scientific journals so those who disagreed with them were silenced. Countless times in the past decade, scientists skeptical about the man-made global warming theory have been scoffed at because their work does not appear in publications that ask other scientists to vet the credibility of articles in advance. Now we know why.

Understanding that it is easier to criticize papers published in unreviewed journals, the CRU scientists and their colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) -- the other major source of UN IPCC data -- and elsewhere are seen through their correspondence colluding with one another to control peer-reviewed journals and keep skeptics from contributing to the IPCC's five-year reports.

The latter is critical. The IPCC is the so-called scientific consensus on global warming. When you see reports that claim 2,500 of the world's leading scientists agree that warming is man-made and destructive, that collection of scientists is the IPCC.

Now we know why they all agree; very few, if any, scientists who disagree have been allowed to participate in the drafting of the IPCC's reports.

The most damning evidence, though, may be in the Harry Read Me files, the significance of which is only just now being deciphered. Being computer files rather than emails, they have been a tougher nut to crack.

Harry Read Me (Google them to read the originals), shows CRU computer scientists balking at making the "artificial adjustments" to the raw data demanded by their colleagues in the field. They know the original data does not show sharp warming in the late 20th century and the only way it can be made to show warming is to put apples-and-oranges data together, to graft weather station observations from the past 40 years onto the historic temperature records gleaned from tree-ring and lake-bottom sediment analyses. This is the "trick" to "hide the decline" that has received so much coverage online.

At one point, a computer researcher writes on the files that he has given up trying to torture the raw data to produce the temperature "hockey stick" desired by his colleagues.

This should be a huge story. Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have already been spent on public policy solutions to global warming. And if next week's world climate summit in Copenhagen produces any agreement at all among world leaders, it will be to spend hundreds of billions -- even trillions -- more to "save the planet." This would be a travesty if the whole thing turned out to be the biggest scientific hoax in a generation or more.

But to those who believe there must, therefore, be a journalistic conspiracy to keep the story under wraps, I say: There is no conspiracy. There are too many thousands of journalists worldwide to keep this quiet. Besides, we are as a group too disorganized and talkative to all sit on a story on purpose.

There may be some examples of deliberate silence being maintained in order to keep the global warming eco-cause alive. The New York Times, for instance, claims it is refusing to cover Climategate because the private emails and files were obtained through electronic theft. Of course, the Times had no such qualms about publishing the stolen, top-secret Pentagon Papers that showed the United States had manipulated events to justify the Vietnam war.

This is a story of equal importance. What is keeping this story from being reported is a mindset rather than a conspiracy. It is socially and intellectually easier to take the word of the pleasant, safe crowd claiming to be interested in saving the Earth. Standing with the skeptics is harder work, not to mention riskier.

Woxof...helping change history

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Now even the posters that were insulting me have run away.

Oh, fer krikey sakes, grow up.

You are not the light at the end of the tunnel. And you're not the freight train either.

Lots of folks have come to independent conclusions based upon their own research.

And it's not over.

So give the ego trip a rest.

Please.

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Thanks for carrying the torch, woxof. 

As previously mentioned, King Murphy has a few pithy words on the subject.

Thanks IPC. It was a lonely road at times, but I can see that I have slowly been picking up the pace and supporters along the way.

Here are various statements by credible sources on the fallout of Climategate....

1. Climategate fallout

Clive Crook, senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly and former deputy editor of The Economist:

In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back.

The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And this scandal is not at the margins of the politicized Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process. It goes to the core of that process.

One theme, in addition to those already mentioned about the suppression of dissent, the suppression of data and methods, and the suppression of the unvarnished truth, comes through especially strongly: plain statistical incompetence. Climate scientists lean very heavily on statistical methods, but they are not necessarily statisticians. Some of the correspondents in these emails appear to be out of their depth. This would explain their anxiety about having statisticians, rather than their climate-science buddies, crawl over their work.

I’m also surprised by the IPCC’s response. Amid the self-justification, I had hoped for a word of apology, or even of censure. The declaration from IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri that the emails confirm all is as it should be is stunning. Good lord. This is pure George Orwell.

The IPCC process needs to be fixed, as a matter of the greatest urgency.

2) Judith Curry, Chair, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology:

An open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research:

Based upon feedback that I’ve received from graduate students at Georgia Tech, I suspect that you are confused, troubled, or worried by what you have been reading about ClimateGate After spending considerable time reading the hacked emails and other posts in the blogosphere, I published an essay that calls for greater transparency in climate data and other methods used in climate research.

What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values: the rigours of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking. Under no circumstances should we ever sacrifice any of these values; the Climatic Research Unit emails, however, appear to violate them.

My motivation for communicating on this issue in the blogosphere comes from emails that I received from Georgia Tech graduate students and alums. I post the content of one of the emails here:

I am a young climate researcher and have been very troubled by the emails that were released from CRU. Your statement represents exactly how I have felt as I slowly enter this community. The content of some of the emails literally made me stop and wonder if I should continue with my PhD applications for fall 2010, in this science. I was so troubled by how our fellow scientists within the climate community have been dealing with opposing voices (on both sides). I hope we can all learn from this and truly feel that we are going to need voices like yours to fix these problems in the coming months and years.

3) Mike Hulme, climate scientist, University of East Anglia:

The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the IPCC has run its course. Yes, there will be another IPCC report but for what purpose? The IPCC itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production — just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

Woxof...Leading the charge, gathering an army.

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What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values: the rigours of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking. Under no circumstances should we ever sacrifice any of these values; the Climatic Research Unit emails, however, appear to violate them.

Once again, I recommend the book, "A short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_Histo...arly_Everything

What isn't really discussed in that Wiki review is the information he presents on the scientists of their time, and the development of the scientific method. Climategate isn't the first time science has been tarnished with bad scientists... and won't be the last either.

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Thanks woxof for the links. As usual, one link leads to another and another. This one link really made me sad. We were so busy turning off our lights and buying fuel efficient cars that we forgot about the main problem facing the earth. Pollution!

Warning: Do not watch if your Kip or Scuba 2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLrVCI4N67M...layer_embedded#

I remember as a young girl spitting my hubba bubba gum out of a boat....the reprimand I got from the "fishman" was scathing! Since then, I never put anything in the water that was not soluble. Not even Sptiz shells.

We quit throwing trash into diches through threats of fines, how do you police an ocean? How do you make boat owners accountable?

You leave with x amout of disposables on board and have to return with x?

I'm not a great fan of regulation, however our highways have been relatively clean since litter laws were put into effect.

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Warning: Do not watch if your Kip or Scuba 2.

Yes, it is true. The oceans of today are dumping grounds, however there are groups fighting the pollution and attempting to educate the masses. The areas that are popular with scuba divers are fairly clean as most of the reefs and surrounding areas are designated as Protected Habitation and fines for dumping are extremely high and in some cases ......prison .

Having said the above I will say that even in the protected areas there are those that still "dump" and unfortunately the "dumpers" are mostly the local people. The attached picture is of a clean-up Scuba 02 and I were involved in the water surrounding one of our favourite diving areas. There were about 8 divers in our boat and about 5 boats participated, (all at our own expense), and the bags you see are what we dragged around as we collected debris on the ocean bottom.

All the junk from our first dive is in the bags and the there is lots that does not show in the photo, tires, barrels, tanks, etc. We did two dives that day and happily there was not an excessive amount of trash but still it saddened all of us to see the debris in the water. In this case the government is on an "educational" program for the locals on the island and a clean-up is normally only required once every two year...with, hopefully, less trash each year.

We did get a free lunch, free soft drinks, and a thank-you certificate from the government for our help.

Until you spend a lot of time underwater do you appreciate how important it is to keep the waters, salt and fresh, free from pollution of all kinds......and I have even been known to yell at someone when I see them flick a cigarette butt in the water. mad.gif

Dive Safe...

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Woxof says that, as usual....they are a bunch of hypocrites

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_an...icle6931572.ece

Taking the private jet to Copenhagen

Any celebrity flying the green flag needs glittering eco-credentials. But how do they justify the fleet of customised planes, the luxury homes and the posse of servants?

Hypocrisy is the vice we find hardest to forgive, but it’s also the one we most enjoy discovering in others. And nothing piques our interest more than eco-hypocrisy as practised by the “green” celebrities who have been spouting green virtue but spewing out hundreds of tons of carbon from their private jets or multiple holiday homes around the globe.

There was Sheryl Crow, who had called upon the public to refrain from using more than one square of toilet paper per visit (“except on those pesky occasions when two or three are required”) and who was leading a Stop Global Warming concert tour across America. It was revealed that while Crow travelled in a biodiesel tour bus, her 30-person entourage followed in a fleet of 13 gas-guzzling vehicles.

John Travolta notoriously encouraged the British public to do its bit to fight global warming — after flying into London on one of his five, yes, five private jets (one of which is a Boeing 707). In 2006 his piloting hobby produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions, more than a hundred times the output of the average Briton, according to the Carbon Trust.

It is less well known that Tom Cruise — who has campaigned for the LA-based environmental group Earth Communications Office — also has an air fleet and a licence to pilot his five planes, including a top-of-the-line customised Gulfstream jet he bought for his wife, Katie Holmes.

Harrison Ford, who is vice-chairman on the board of Conservation International, voices public-service messages for an environmental federation called EarthShare, and once shaved his chest hair to illustrate the effects of deforestation, is another hobby pilot. He once owned a Gulfstream but now makes do with a smaller Cessna Citation Sovereign eight-seater jet, four propeller planes and a helicopter.

Oprah Winfrey, who preaches eco-virtue from her TV pulpit, travelled in a 13-seat Gulfstream IV private jet for years — the preferred model for celebrities and the super-rich. (She has replaced it with a faster Bombardier Global Express.) The public first became aware of her private-jet habit when her plane had to make a forced landing in California in 2005; it was reminded of it this year after one of her stewardesses was fired for allegedly having sex with the pilot while Oprah and other passengers were asleep.

Jennifer Aniston told reporters that to save the Earth’s precious water resources she brushes her teeth while in the shower. But she also flew a hairdresser to Europe to accompany her on a recent publicity tour for the film Marley & Me.

Perhaps more egregious, because she is a much more in-your-face global-warming campaigner, is Dame Trudie Styler, film financier and wife of Sting. Not only do she and her husband run seven homes and travel between them in private jets and a fleet of cars, but in 2007 an employment tribunal revealed Styler was furious when her pregnant chef refused to travel 100 miles to prepare some soup and salad. (The chef had regularly made the trip in the past, travelling by train and taxi.) And Sting recently had to contend with accusations that the Police were “the dirtiest band in the world” because of the scale of their last tour and the carbon footprint of the fans who went to see them.

This spring Styler was accused of hiring a private jet to take her and an eight-person entourage from New York to Washington, DC, for the White House correspondents’ dinner, even though there are dozens of scheduled shuttle flights she could have taken, not to mention fast trains. Strangely, Sting flew commercial to the same dinner. When challenged, Styler reportedly defended herself by saying: “Yes, I do take planes. My life is to travel and to speak out about the horrors of an environment that is being abused at the hands of oil companies.”

U2’s latest world tour features three stages and a giant claw that ensures as many spectators as possible get a decent view. Alas, transporting the whole shebang around the world is estimated by carbonfootprint.com to produce the carbon equivalent of the annual emissions of 6,500 British homes — or a rocket trip to Mars and back.

Coldplay’s Chris Martin has been fingered as one of music’s biggest eco-hypocrites. George Monbiot, a writer and environmental campaigner, noted on his blog that Martin flew thousands of miles on his private jet, including brief trips between LA and nearby Palm Springs. Monbiot calculated that Martin’s trips back and forth to see his family produced 250 times the carbon emissions of an average Briton.

Monbiot also cited an interview Martin gave in which he discussed his angry global-warming song, then boasted about his family’s profligate private jet use, saying of his daughter: “As she gets older, hopefully she’ll come and see us when she wants. I always thought it’d be cool to be in school and say, ‘I’m not coming in today — I’m off to Costa Rica to see my dad play.’ I do think that wins you a few points.” Martin replied to criticism by pointing out that he paid for the planting of mango trees to offset the carbon emissions of his tours and flights home.

There are endless other examples of hypocrisy by green politicos. David Cameron was once photographed virtuously riding his bike to the House of Commons, with his official car behind him, carrying his suit and briefcase. Ken Livingstone, who swore he would make London the world’s greenest city when he was mayor, made scores of arguably unnecessary flights to foreign destinations. The supposedly green Barack Obama had a St Louis chef flown 850 miles just to make pizza at the White House.

At the end of the film An Inconvenient Truth, the unbearably earnest former presidential candidate Al Gore asked his audience: “Are you ready to change the way you live?” His own huge Nashville mansion consumed over 20 times the electricity of an average American home. Indeed, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, it burnt twice as much power in the month of August 2006 than most American homes do in an entire year. Another inconvenient truth revealed that the former senator spent $500 a month just to heat the indoor swimming pool in his lavish domestic establishment. The 100ft houseboat he bought in 2008, on the other hand, was said to be powered by biodiesel.

Gore gave the usual response of the green celebrity caught not practising what they preach. He said he made up for his consumption of electricity and production of carbon dioxide by buying carbon offsets — some from his own offset company.

SUVs and four-wheel-drive cars are another eco-sin green celebs find hard to resist. Those who have harangued the public against driving these wicked vehicles — but who turn out to have recently owned at least one themselves — include Barbra Streisand, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz.

Of course, the SUV is often parked next to a virtuous Toyota Prius hybrid electric car, but the former doesn’t exactly cancel out the latter. However, as one Hollywood agent told me, the real reason so many people in Tinseltown drive a Prius is because “it’s the only car you can drive which costs under $35,000 which doesn’t make everyone think that your career has gone down the toilet”.

It was just as green activists began worrying about eco-fatigue — the green equivalent of compassion fatigue — two years ago that the first wave of celebrity eco-hypocrisy stories hit. The first thing these stories did was make us feel better about our own relatively minor eco-failings. They also allowed us to vent the irritation we feel about being lectured by actors, rock stars and lesser species of celebrity.

There is something annoying about the way “ordinary” people are being told they must give up their “addiction” to cheap travel, when no leading Hollywood star — not even Leonardo DiCaprio, who often flies commercial — can bring themselves to relinquish the private jet.

Yet there is something absurd about criticising celebrity eco-hypocrites. People who become film stars and rock gods usually do so because they want to join the jet set, and the jet-set life is inherently wasteful. It’s the profligacy that makes it fun and gives it its status. They are unable to give up their private jets because celebrity status is connected to travelling in the most exclusive way possible. Hence, just about all the things celebrities do to get away from “civilians” are unsustainable in green terms.

There are notable exceptions to the rule of green-celebrity hypocrisy. Ed Begley Jr from St Elsewhere and Best in Show became a vegan in 1970, bought one of the first electric cars, and has lived for years in a self-sufficient house that uses not just solar and wind energy but a toaster powered by a stationary bicycle. And unlike so many green celebrities, Begley Jr has a sense of humour about his crusade: on an episode of The Simpsons in which he plays himself, he is shown driving a vehicle powered entirely “by my own sense of self-satisfaction”.

The famous neo-hippie Woody Harrelson lives in a sustainable community in Hawaii, grows most of his food, uses only solar power, wears hemp clothes, eschews animal products, and fuels his car with biodiesel. Brad Pitt has done more than tell other people how to change the planet. His charity Make It Right New Orleans has built 13 ultra-energy-efficient greenhouses in an area devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

The Copenhagen summit next week will generate vast quantities of hot air. It will see 16,500 people coming in from 192 countries. That amounts to 41,000 tons of carbon dioxide, roughly the same as the carbon emissions of Morocco in 2006. Also, the organisers will lay 900 kilometres of computer cable and 50,000 square metres of carpet. More than 200,000 meals will be served and visitors will drink 200,000 cups of coffee — at least that will be organic.

When asked if the carbon footprint might have been reduced by turning Copenhagen into a video conference, a spokesman for the event said: “For such a major agreement, people need to meet together and negotiate face to face. We have delegates from all over the world. Video-conferencing systems are extremely useful, but they don’t match the personal touch. This is one of the main factors in having a good conference.”

Some of the charges laid against celebrities who are allegedly hypocritical about their green commitments are either unfair or don’t really stand up when examined closely. In 2008, Sting took a lot of flak when a US watchdog organisation, Charity Navigator, rated his Rainforest Foundation as one of New York’s worst charities. This was because only 41% of almost $2.2m raised at a Rainforest Foundation concert made its way to projects on the ground.

But while many leading charities spend at least 75% of their income on projects rather than fundraising and salaries, it is normal for charity concerts and balls to cost almost as much as they raise. Many of the better-known mega-charities spend a shockingly large amount of what they get from the public on fundraising, image advertising and swanky offices, but are not subject to the same scrutiny as organisations set up by a superstar.

It is also worth looking at the agenda of the green critics who slam celebrities for their eco-hypocrisy. They believe anything short of the immediate adoption of a pre-industrial way of life akin to that of peasant villages in the Middle Ages is a sellout. For them, Sting’s Rainforest Foundation is unforgivably capitalist.

Perhaps it is better that public figures say the right thing, even if they are not doing it themselves. Does it really matter that much that those who ask us to behave better are imperfect in their own behaviour? You could argue that if Trudie Styler believes that GM food, which she fiercely campaigns about, is a bigger threat than global warming, she is entitled to do so, and to fly her organic non-GM products from her Tuscan estate to the counters of Selfridges.

After all, it seems fairly clear that celebrity advocacy of green lifestyles does actually work, at least in the sense that it has made green concerns extremely fashionable.

Some of the nastiest accusations of hypocrisy have been thrown at the Prince of Wales. The “Green Prince” has been mocked for, among other alleged crimes, chartering a plane to South America to raise eco-awareness. Prince Charles’s spokespeople responded saying it would have been impossible to make 48 appointments across three countries in 10 days by regularly scheduled flights.

Unlike the common run of “green celebrities”, at least the Prince of Wales publishes annually an exhaustive green audit of all his homes and activities. Its content includes the paper usage of his household, the fact that his thirsty Aston Martin runs on bio-ethanol from wine wastage, and that his emissions for non-official travel are less than half of what they were two years ago.

If film stars and rock stars followed his lead by publishing their own eco-audits, the public might be more likely to listen to their exhortations.

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One of the things I find most disturbing from the supporters of the status quo is that ClimateGate-er's are "denying global warming exists".

This is completely inaccurate. ClimateGater's (izzat a new word for Oxford??) are aware, as are most humans, that the world's climate has been warming for nearly 10,000 years. ClimateGater's (it's a word now!) dispute the potential influence of humans to change the course of climate as the damage to the earth's atmosphere over the past 300 years has already been done. Short of going to ZERO emissions, anything less will have no influence on the earth's atmosphere.

Enter (again) the BS about the Arctic icecap. Immediately after Rex's summation of the pseudo-science supporting global warming was an episode of The Nature of Things hosted by you-know-who. The ice cap is melting as a result of climate change. You-Know-Who actually said that during the episode. He, along with millions of others has a complete lack of grasp of the fact that the Arctic climate is a result of the melting ice, not a contributor. Atmospherics 101: The atmosphere is warmed/cooled by its contact with the surface. The multi-year and other icecap ice is being melted from BELOW by currents flowing into the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic basin.

Once again, global warming has been occuring naturally for thousands of years. Where are the efforts to protect and displace those Earth inhabitants who live within 50 feet of mean sea level, as once again, the naysayers to the popular science do not deny global warming? They (WE) deny the extent of human involvement in its existence.

Now where did I put my Penfold's...

PS. My diatribes against one of the contributors to this thread have nothing to do with what (presumably) he has stated but how he (again, presumably) takes credit for being the Light At The End Of The Tunnel.

Choo, chew... wink.gif

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Audacity of ‘Hopenhagen’

Even without the mounting scandal of Climategate, the huge Copenhagen climate meeting that begins next week would represent a festival of political hypocrisy, historical amnesia, economic lunacy and cosmic irony.

Let's start with the irony. Barack Obama will be popping in on the way to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize. Two years ago, that prize was won by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the research and policy pinnacle for man-made global warming, and by Al Gore, climate alarmism's most successful huckster. They won the accolade for promoting an hysterical perspective that has set the nations of the world at each other's throats.

The infighting is far from restricted to the international level. Take Canada. Stephen Harper has, perhaps wisely, decided to attend an affair that he, in his more frank pre-political days, described as "A socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth producing nations." Although socialists take umbrage at being called socialists, nobody could now deny the accuracy of Mr. Harper's observation. The draft treaty of Copenhagen calls for up to $140-billion annually to be shipped to developing nations for "clean development."

But Mr. Harper will also be in Copenhagen to counter the presence of posturing provincial politicians. Representatives of Ontario and Quebec are heading to Copenhagen to embarrass the Prime Minister by suggesting that he should be "doing more." That is, doing more harm to the Canadian economy.

The two provinces are also going to bolster the radical environmental attack on the Alberta oil sands, on the basis that "relief" from draconian emissions restrictions for Alberta will mean more "pain" for themselves. And as if a sicker Alberta could somehow translate into a healthier central Canada.

Copenhagen's much vaunted emission targets are hypocrisy on stilts. They have been set, like those of the Kyoto agreement which Copenhagen is meant to replace, by a process of fingers-crossed competitive fantasy.

A Canadian Liberal government ratified Canada's Kyoto commitment to reduce emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2008-2012, mainly because the U.S. had committed to a 5% reduction. More significantly, Canada did so without any plan to achieve this target, which the country is above by perhaps 30%.

Mr. Harper and Environment Minister Jim Prentice have not announced how they plan to achieve a cut in emissions by 20% by 2020 (3% below 1990 levels). That's because they have no way of reaching such a target without huge, currently unimagined technological advances or economic depression. Every developed nation is committing, yet again, to targets that are unachievable. Meanwhile, China is promising a 40% reduction in carbon intensity, a target it is already expected to meet under existing conditions. The developed nations' policy masoschists are hoping that capitalist innovation will somehow bail them out. Or perhaps they are reflecting that they will likely have shuffled off this mortal coil before their irresponsibility and culpability becomes apparent.

From a strategic point of view, Canada's position is to coordinate its climate policies with those of the U.S. to avoid green protectionism. Which is where we get to the combination of policy lunacy and historical amnesia.

The global economy remains in a precarious position. Analogies have been drawn to the Great Depression, but if anything threatens a rerun of collapsing output and rising unemployment it is the prospect of "carbon tariffs" that could be every bit as damaging as the U.S. Smoot-Hawley legislation of the 1930s.

Apart from the adverse effects of restricting trade, economic history reveals other sure-fire policy failures, including "industrial strategy" and, relatedly, trying to fund top-down Third World development by redistributionist handouts. And yet these are the very policies at the centre of the new global accord that would give unprecedented power to the UN, one of the most corrupt and incompetent organizations on earth.

The UN's self-appointed "Eminent Persons," such as Maurice Strong and Gro Harlem Brundtland, who put "sustainable development" on the map, have for decades sought to link projections of environmental apocalypse to plans to "help the poor." But "robbing the rich" is not enough. They have to suffer too.

Slashing developed country emissions is to be achieved primarily by two unworkable policies, one old and one relatively new. The first is government promotion of "green" technologies, that is, "picking winners," a policy with a batting average of about zero. The second is a vast system to "price" carbon by capping industrial emissions and then "trading" permits to exceed those quotas. This will effectively criminalize economic growth.

Cap and trade has been described as a "market-based" mechanism, but is in fact a parody of a market, since it depends on credits created, divvied up and handed out by UN bureaucrats. Think of oil-for-food to the power of ten. Carbon trading in Europe has already proved an expensive and pointless boondoggle.

The final example of suicidal hypocrisy in Copenhagen will be the presence of so many corporate giants. One of the myths of the Climate Industry is that there has been a huge program of scientific disinformation masterminded by fossil fuel interests. Recently, a tiny Calgary-based group called the Friends of Science attracted the wrath of David Suzuki for daring to fund a radio campaign calling for scientific debate on man-made global warming. Mr. Suzuki claimed that Friends was a "front" for Big Oil. The claim is nonsense.

But while Green wrath is heaped on a group of Calgary Rotarians, last year some of the world's biggest advertising companies and corporate marketers – including Ogilvy & Mather and Coca Cola - responded to a call from UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to "grapple with the fate of the planet."

The result has been a huge campaign spanning 50 countries and based on the hokey catchword "Hopenhagen." Far from opposing the Copenhagen process and the loss of wealth and freedom it implies, corporations, including many big oil companies, have fallen meekly in line with the prevailing lunacy, or been bullied into silence.

Climategate suggests that this inverse pyramid of activism and appeasement has been based on a pinpoint of poisoned "science." The Danish capital will be filled next week with those attempting to ignore that inconvenient truth while committing earnestly to cripple the world's economy (later rather than sooner) and promising to ship further hundreds of billions of dollars to hold up the development of the world's poorest people.

http://www.nationalpost.com/scripts/feeds/...html?id=2304964

Woxof.....clearing the air.

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The thing with the cartoon is that it mixes the concept of whether or not we are causing climate warming by our CO2 emmissions, (the science of which is not clear), with global pollution which pretty much everyone agrees is something we should address. I find this crossing of messages is something that is always present in this debate.

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