Climate Change Consensus?

[Moon The Loon]

Y'know, there might be something to all this. Since salt is bad for you (I read that in a newspaper) and the oceans are full of it, is it only a matter of time before we attempt to de-salinate the oceans for the good of our species?

[Guest rattler]

Another comment on the remarks made by Ontario & Quebec.

Don Martin: Frosty provincal relations new climate crisis

Posted: December 21, 2009, 9:28 PM by Daniel Kaszor

Don Martin, alberta, climate change, oil sands

There is a new climate-change crisis that Canada needs to address in the wake of the Copenhagen conference: the suddenly frosty relations between energy producing and consuming provinces.

Ontario and Quebec had promised federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice in advance they would refrain from bad-mouthing others, but they were barely off their jets before they started spouting “embarrassment” at the oil patch in general and Alberta’s oil sands in particular.

The way Mr. Prentice sees it — and this is from a minister not prone to shooting off his mouth — the antagonistic anti-oil position taken by Canada’s two largest provinces “was not responsible.”

“We felt it was important to stick to the high road during the negotiations,” he said in an interview. “It was unhelpful and not good for our country to have those comments made on the international stage. No one has ever said the oil sands should get a free pass.”

He is not alone in being disgusted by the podium-seizing antics of Quebec Premier Jean Charest and Ontario Environment Minister John Gerretsen, backed by retiring Toronto Mayor David Miller, whose people insist he is not taking a job with an environment group as I suggested recently (but my sources insist will be proven true).

This trio evidently didn’t understand Copenhagen was an international summit on climate change, heavily preoccupied by negotiations on how many tens of billions should be paid to developing countries to assist with green technologies. Interprovincial issues will be sorted out next year or, more likely, beyond.

Marjory LeBreton, the most influential Conservative in the Red Chamber, says Ontario should clean up its own backyard before insulting others.

“Look at Ontario’s electrical grid and its coal-fired power generating plants that were supposed to be phased out,” she told me. “The oil industry in Alberta has been a major driver of our economy, so it’s very short-sighted and very unfair to point the finger at them. It was very irresponsible, especially over there, where we were being subjected to all this scorn by environmentalists for generating 2% of the world’s greenhouse gases.”

But Ms. LeBreton sees it more as political grandstanding rather that a national unity threat. “People all over the country don’t want to sign onto something we have no hope of implementing,” she said. “As many people in Ontario and Quebec are annoyed at Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest as there are out West.”

Edmonton MP James Rajotte notes that not only do the populous car-centric provinces get a free ride from carbon emissions spewing out of the tailpipe, but Quebec’s cement industry secured an emissions exemption because it cannot capture its greenhouse gases.

“The oil sands are just 4% of Canada’s emissions. Transportation kicks out the largest GHG percentage right across the country, so you really should deal with the entire emissions sector,” the Edmonton MP argues.

“I’m puzzled. My understanding was that there was an agreement to keep this internal, which seems not to be respected by Ontario and Quebec,” he said. “You don’t want to play regional politics with this issue and disproportionately place blame on certain provinces.”

While the separation sabre-rattling response by unpopular Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach late last week was more a cry for headline attention than a concept embraced by voters, there is no doubt Albertans have cause to believe they are being picked on.

The massive buildup of oil sands infrastructure has delivered a cascading series of benefits to all regions of Canada that spends about 60 cents of every expansion dollar outside of Alberta.

The employment magnet created by Fort McMurray alone — never mind the mad influx to Calgary and Edmonton this decade — has kept paycheques flowing to thousands of families in depressed regions of the country.

Mr. Prentice returned home on the weekend as a unusually happy environment minister, armed with an agreement that doesn’t squeeze Canada into a binding emission reduction straightjacket and leaving it free to wait for the U.S. to act before he follows suit. 

But he’ll need those considerable skills as a former professional mediator to keep wildly divergent provinces from embracing selfish attitudes that lose sight of the national best interest. 

When the federal push finally comes to shove at the provincial level, Mr. Prentice may look back at Copenhagen 2009, the Year of the Canadian Fossil, with nostalgic fondness for being the easy section of his assignment. 

The political climate may well change for the worse inside Canada before things heat up on a global scale.

National Post

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/f...x#ixzz0aQYLKlEt

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[deicer]

Hundreds protest global warming....

[mo32a]

Here's some more fodder for the fire.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/f...ate-doctor.aspx

EXCERPT:

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

[Guest woxof]

I'm not normally a conspiracy theorist, but the idea of a socialist plot being enmeshed in this whole man-made global warming theory seems to get stronges as time passes.

Looks like I am right. Here is the full info about the above post.

How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles

By Lawrence Solomon

The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.

But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”

Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating — they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma.

The Climategate Emails showed, for example, that some members of the band were uncomfortable with aspects of their work, some even questioning the need to erase the existence of the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years earlier.

Said Briffa, one of their chief practitioners: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”

In the end, Briffa and other members of the band overcame their doubts and settled on their dogma. With the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the highest climate change authority of all, they published what became the icon of their movement — the hockey stick graph. This icon showed temperatures in the last 1,000 years to have been stable — no Medieval Warm Period, not even the Little Ice Age of a few centuries ago.

But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming.

Instead, the band members turned to their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website called RealClimate.org. “The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are doing the rounds” in aid of “combating dis-information,” one email explained, referring to criticisms of the hockey stick and anything else suggesting that temperatures today were not the hottest in recorded time. One person in the nine-member Realclimate.org team — U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley — would take on particularly crucial duties.

Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.

[dagger]

Another comment on the remarks made by Ontario & Quebec.

-Lets see

1. Alberta gets reduced emissions for oil sands operations that have to be made up in other parts of of the country. A sort of Reverse National Energy Program.

2. The oil revenues, great for Alberta, push up the Canadian dollar, making it harder for many other industries to survive.

3. Ontario continues to be a massive net contributor to equalization even though it suffers heavily because of #1 and #2 above.

My view is that any emissions forgiveness for the oil sands should either be offset INSIDE Alberta, or by Alberta either buying emissions credits from those industries forced to compensate for its special oil sands exemption or by providing low-interest loans to green energy projects elsewhere in Canada.

[Fido]

70% of emissions from a barrel of oil come from using the end product....gasoline.

Where are the most cars? Ontario and Quebec.

Therefore who pollutes the most and yet at the same time gets all holy about climate change?

The thing that really amazes me is that those people in Ontario and Quebec do not seem to understand that if oil in Alberta is taxed then the tax flows through to the gas pump in Ontario and Quebec.

Of course lets not look too closely at the $1.2 million dollars per job of Canadian money (mostly from oil exports) that was given to those Ontario auto workers to make what? More cars.

[Steam Driven]

Thoughts on our man in Copenhagen

National Post

I draw two clear conclusions from the inconclusive conference. First, most humans will not make sacrifices today for some calamity far in the future, whether well documented or not. Second, in view of the opposite positions taken by Ontario and Quebec on the one side and Alberta and Saskatchewan on the other, Canada is a federation of conflicting interests and it is a wonder that it has held together for so long.

Sudhir Jain, Calgary.

[dagger]

70% of emissions from a barrel of oil come from using the end product....gasoline.

Where are the most cars? Ontario and Quebec.

Therefore who pollutes the most and yet at the same time gets all holy about climate change?

The thing that really amazes me is that those people in Ontario and Quebec do not seem to understand that if oil in Alberta is taxed then the tax flows through to the gas pump in Ontario and Quebec.

Of course lets not look too closely at the $1.2 million dollars per job of Canadian money (mostly from oil exports) that was given to those Ontario auto workers to make what? More cars.

On a per capita basis, I doubt most emissions come from Ontario and Quebec. And we're closing our coal fired generating stations here - unlike poor woe-begotten climate-slacking Alberta.

And that's intellectually lame to suggest oil revenues propped up auto jobs. Call it a refund of some of the tens of billions Ontario poured into equalization. Even now, it still will contribute a net $4.5 billion to equalization next year.

[DEFCON]

This issue isn't at all about the economy, or money for that matter.

It's really about saving the planet from us.

CO2 isn’t the only way we contribute to the destruction of the earth. Economic CO2 ponzy schemes masquerading as fixes for everything wrong is a problem, not an answer.

Money and greed have created most of our problems, the environment being but one of many.

Real green can only become reality following the reduction and stabilization of our numbers at a level about half that of the present. Continuing to forge a future basing everything on a model that’s success necessarily depends on the continuous growth of the human population and its insatiable rate of consumption, is just a damn poor plan.

[Seeker]

Maybe climate change is happening and maybe it isn't, maybe humans are the reason and maybe we aren't. The prudent course of action is to act as though it is happening and as though we have the means to effect a positive change. I'm having trouble with the logic behind transferring trillions of dollars to the less-developed countries though, can anyone explain why this is necessary? If the plan was to set achievable goals that gradually decrease CO2 emissions while taxing inefficient energy use, I'd be all for it - as long as the tax money stayed in my country and was used to fund development of alternative energy sources and industries. If the plan involves sending a big cheque to some African dictator though I can't help but feel that it's not about climate change at all.

[Guest rattler]

On a per capita basis, I doubt most emissions come from Ontario and Quebec. And we're closing our coal fired generating stations here - unlike poor woe-begotten climate-slacking Alberta.

And that's intellectually lame to suggest oil revenues propped up auto jobs. Call it a refund of some of the tens of billions Ontario poured into equalization. Even now, it still will contribute a net $4.5 billion to equalization next year.

As always, the total output is much more important meaningful than any per capita measurement. As far as closing your coal powered power plants. The original date was in 2007, then it slipped to 2009 and now we understand that some may close in 2010 but the rest will wait until 2014. So I guess we will have to wait and see.

Regarding equalization, since Alberta has not received Equalization payments since the early 1960s I question your tens of billions number unless of course you expect Alberta to repay for all of Canada. And to use your per capita basis, Alberta pays more per capita in equalization payments than any other Canadian Province.

http://www.eqtff-pfft.ca/english/EQTreasury/equal101-4.asp

You may also wish to read the following article which in part says:

Under the current system of wealth redistribution in Canada, Albertans paid an estimated $21.1 billion-- or $5,742 per person--more to the feds than they got back in federal services in 2009, according to Alberta Finance stats.

While Albertans forked out $40.5 billion in federal taxes and other payments, Ottawa returned just $19.3 billion in services. Per capita, the feds collect more, and spend less in Alberta than anywhere else. It's not even close.

On an individual basis, the outflow of dollars from Albertans' pockets to federal coffers was more than three times the rate for Ontario in 2007, the last year for which comparative data are available.

Since Ontario has become a "have not" province, that gap has only grown since.

Quebec, by far the biggest recipient of federal equalization cash, and the quickest to point fingers at the oil-sands as the root of all environmental evil, has indirectly sucked billions of dollars out of Alberta's oil industry. Put simply, Quebec postures as a green leader, while Albertans get to pay for it.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Al...6030/story.html

You can (perhaps) now understand why some Albertans are annoyed with the recent posturing by Ont and Quebec. I continue to want Canada to thrive and prosper as a whole and will fight any attempt to split it up but your attitude and that of others in Central Canada only adds fuel to the resolve of some in the West to continue beating the drum of separatism.

[Guest woxof]

1. Whether man-caused or a natural planetary cycle, do you think climate change is occuring or is it a made-up story by scientists who cooked the data?

2. If the answer is "no", what if you're wrong? What about those who's data is not "cooked"?

Those, like myself, who are questioning those who don't think climate change is occurring have a right to know what your plans are in case you're wrong.

1. Climate change is occurring as it has for millions of years. We had the 'Little Ice Age" and the 'Medeivel warm period" and many others. We saw evidence of this in a video posted earlier. The video seems to be a little more credible than one of the most important man-made global warming scientists deleting Wikipedia information on climate history.

2. You are the second one on this thread who has said the "what if we do nothing but we were wrong"? How many other situations could we do the same? Transferring millions of jobs to the third world along with trillions of dollars is going to have to be based on factual evidence, not hysterical claims, large coverups and disappearing evidence.

We have already seen in one of the many articles that I have posted about a factory closed in Britain and the same opened in India, but they can get away with putting out the same amount of carbon because they fall under different rules. Are we going to have Indian owned airlines with Indian pilots(if they had enough of them) flying our routes in Canada as payment for what the article you posted claiming to be a payoff for our "climate debt". Doesn't seem like an unrealistic suggestion after having seen what has been proposed over the last few years.

As far as I'm concerned, we don't have any climate debt to the third world. Aside from a model of freedom for them to aspire to, our technology has brought innumerable benefits to them. Then there is all the aid given, of which much is squandered. If anybody owes anybody overall, I would suggest they look in a different direction. And I'm sure as hell not going to cut into our economy with something that is just replaced in another part of the world.

I have been slowly, through others article been exposing this as what I have called the Scam of the century. I will continue to do so and have no intention falling for a blatent wealth transfer scheme.

And as for the National Post....We should all be grateful to them for going where the other media fefuse to go because of lack of ability, interest or being part of the man-made global warming crusade. For example...apparently the New York Times published illegal leaks from federal prosecutors in the Michael Milken and Martha Stewart cases, but won't publish Climategate emails because the were hacked.

See below for a detailed description of what the Climategate emails actually reveal. It is a large posting but absolutely necessary.

[Guest woxof]

I know this is very long but it is about thousands of dollars of proposed taxes every year on your family and your aviation career. Please read.

Terence Corcoran: Climategate Part 1 - A 2,000-page epic of science and skepticism

Climate change, University of East Anglia

The scientists seem to have become captive of the IPCC’s objectives

Now that the Copenhagen political games are out of the way, marked as a failure by any realistic standard, it may be time to move on to the science games. To get the post-Copenhagen science review underway, the world has a fine document at hand: The Climategate Papers.

On Nov. 17, three weeks before the Copenhagen talks began, a massive cache of climate science emails landed on a Russian server, reportedly after having been laundered through Saudi Arabia. Where they came from, nobody yet knows. Described as having been hacked or leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, the emails have been the focus of thousands of media and blog reports. Since their release, all the attention has been dedicated to a few choice bits of what seem like incriminating evidence of trickery and scientific repression. Some call it fraud.

Email fragments instantly began flying through the blogosphere. Perhaps the most sensational came from a Nov. 16, 1999, email from Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), in which he referred to having “completed Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” in temperature.

These words, now famous around the world as the core of Climategate, are in fact the grossest possible oversimplification of what the emails contain. The Phil Jones email and other choice email fragments are really just microscopic particles taken from a massive collection of material that will, in time, come to be seen as the greatest and most dramatic science policy epic in history.

Whether the emails, containing more than 2,000 pages and links to thousands more, are smoking guns and direct evidence of scientific skulduggery is in many ways a secondary issue. The Climategate emails are an unprecedented and unparalleled record of attempts by scientists to crack the mysteries of the world’s climate. They are at the heart of a massive effort to understand the world’s climate history and create models and systems to predict climate hundreds of years into the future.

The emails are not a random grab of email records from one scientist’s computer or extracted in a coarse raid on the central computer facilities of one climate institute. Only by reading the emails in chronological order, from the first email sent March 7, 1996, by Russian scientist Stephan Shiyatov, from the Laboratory of Dendrochronology, Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, in Ekaterinburg, Russia —complaining to British scientist Keith Briffa about funding problems for his tree-ring research — does it become clear that the emails are part of a conscious and systematic assemblage of 13 years worth of vital communications among some of the world’s leading climate scientists.

The last emails were sent between Nov. 10 and 12 this year, five days before the whole cache was stolen. One of those last emails outlines an attempt to orchestrate a media blitz by scientists at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting. The strategy was aimed at shaping public opinion going into the Copenhagen talks that ended yesterday.

In between these two emails from 1996 and 2009 is a vast documentary record of more than a decade of drama, intrigue and history.

Throughout the Climategate emails, in addition to a few possible smoking guns, we get smoking tempers, scientific and political disagreements and arguments, larger-than-life personality clashes, intercontinental rivalries, global politics and personal drama, not to mention individual notes that seem to have been taken from an old John le Carré novel. The Russian role in the emails, and that of Mr. Shiyatov, becomes crucial later in the story. But in that first email, Mr. Shiyatov writes: “Of course, we are in need of additional money” to carry out their vital collection of remote Siberian tree-ring samples. “It is important for us if you can transfer the ADVANCE money on the personal accounts... Not more than 10,000 USD [in any one day]. Only in this case can we avoid big taxes and use the money for our work.”

The context for all this, much of it conducted over the Internet between sometimes warring camps in Britain and the United States, is the greatest scientific research story ever told, an attempt to accomplish two main objectives under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN agency set up in 1988 to orchestrate global reaction to the perceived threat of man-made global warming.

The 13-year email exchange, while often chaotic and disjointed, follows two main tracks that, in the end, must somehow converge. The first is to develop a convincing history of global temperature going back over thousands of years. The second is to develop models and scenarios that allow the scientists and the IPCC to forecast climate change to 2100 and beyond.

I have not read all the emails. But I have read hundreds of them, including every word of the first five years. Only by plodding through them in chronological order, I believe, is it possible to get a sense of them as a vast and genuine documentary record. One immediate observation is that the early years — from 1996 to maybe 2000 — seem have been organized and whittled down to eliminate the long trails of redundancy that pile up in email communication. The emails in the later years remain cluttered and at times impossible to follow — as if whoever was collecting them ran out of time or had not finished the assembly work before they hit the Internet, whether by chance or by choice. It also seems possible that the emails were culled from more than one source, not just the CRU at the University of East Anglia.

By my reading, the emails contain many disquieting revelations about the state of climate science and the process. Other readers, investigators, scientists and activists on all sides of the climate issue will of course make up their own minds on this. But as the email story unfolds over the years, it is clear that the history of climate and temperature change over the past 10,000 years remains mostly speculative and largely unknown. The emails also imply that, in part because the past is so unknown, any attempt at long-range forecasts is, at best, uncertain.

Also clear is that the official science on climate change as we know it today, looking backward and forward, has been developed and controlled by the relatively small collection of scientists who wrote most of the emails. Working directly or indirectly for the IPCC, the scientists seem to have become captive of that organization’s objectives, which was to find “the hand of man” in climate records to justify plans to change the climate in future. The scientists, in other words, became engaged in the all-too-familiar business of decision-based evidence making.

Whatever the source of the emails, they are a dynamic record of how scientists sought to plot the past and predict the future of climate. In 1996, the first year of the emails, there is clear internal skepticism among these official IPCC-linked scientists over what would turn out to be one of the greatest sources of conflict, the role of paleoclimatology — the science of reconstructing world climate history over tens of thousands of years. More specifically, doubts existed especially over dendrochronology, the use of tree rings as a way to measure and document climate history. “I support the continued collection of such data, but I am disturbed by how some people in the paleo community try to oversell their products,” Tom Wigley, previous director of CRU and now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in Boulder, Colo., wrote in August of 1996.

In Mr. Wigley’s view at the time, ice cores were unreliable and “correlate very poorly with temperature.” He said the link between ice core and temperature variation was “close to zero” and tree rings were less than 50% reliable. “The main external candidate is solar, and more work is required to improve the ‘paleo’ solar forcing record.” Another U.S. scientist, Gary Funkhauser of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, was also cool to the idea of tree rings as indicators of past temperatures. He wrote in September, 1996, that he tried “every trick out of my sleeve” to get meaningful climate records out of certain tree ring records collected by Russian scientist Stephan Shiyatov.

Over in Britain, however, scientists had other ideas. Tree rings could be the answer to the paleoclimate problem. Keith Briffa at CRU, among others, believed that tree-ring science could be the magic bullet that would prove what the IPCC wanted — evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” of a “discernible human influence on global climate.”

In October, 1996, Mr. Briffa told a journalist that there were signs that recent warming in Siberian Russia was setting records. “The trend seems to be accelerating. We are getting reports back from Stephan (Shiyatov), our man in the Urals, that it is warmer this spring on the Yamal peninsula there than ever before... It is a major warming, like nothing seen there for a thousand years.”

Soon, however, problems emerged over Russian data. What with sampling issues, missing data and other problems, by November of 1997 Mr. Briffa is struggling with results. While the Russian tree rings produce seemingly good results for past climate, results for the 20th century are a problem. On Nov. 3, he writes to Tom Wigley: “Equally important though is the leveling off of carbon uptake in the later 20th century.” The density of the tree rings also declines, a finding inconsistent with carbon-induced warming. “I have been agonizing for months that these results are not some statistical artifact of the analysis method, but I cannot see how.”

Another U.S. scientist, Gordon Jacoby, a tree-ring specialist at Columbia University, writes about another tree-ring scientist, Fritz Schweingruber, and his work in Russia. “He should not represent his data as definitive... His opinions are influential, but there is an accumulating body of ring-width data that clearly shows him to be missing important information with his style of sampling.” This kind of skepticism runs through the emails.

Meantime, as the email saga unfolds, scientists are occasionally distracted by political matters. Leading up to the 1997 Kyoto climate conference, a German scientist, Joseph Alcamo, presses Mike Hulme, then with CRU and now a professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, to drum up names for a list of scientists for an official statement on the dangers of climate change. “I think the only thing that counts is numbers. The media is going to say ‘1,000 scientists signed’ or ‘1,500 signed.’ No one is going to check if it is 600 with PhDs versus 2,000 without. They will mention the prominent ones, but that is a different story.”

Mike Hulme, one of the more moderate scientists in the climate change field, appears to have declined to participate. Tom Wigley was even more adamant in arguing against a scientists’ statement. “Your approach to trying to gain scientific credibility for your personal views by asking people to endorse your letter is reprehensible,” Mr. Wigley wrote on Nov. 25, 1997.

At the time, as a top official at CRU, Mike Hulme was also a key player in moving the second track of the Climategate emails, the strange business of constructing economic, scientific and climate forecasting models for the next 100 years and beyond. The scientists appear to have been dragged into the economic prediction game by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, in turn assigned by the IPCC to construct economic outlooks for growth and carbon emissions. The exercise ultimately let to the production of one of the IPCC’s long-term climate gimmicks, a range of scenarios or story lines that produced different levels of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2100.

The scientists, who wrangle with this project for a couple of years, were lured into participating in what from the start was a loaded ideological exercise. In March 1998, Mike Hulme at CRU received a draft version of these 100-year forecast scenarios. Four scenarios were developed: A1, B1, A2, and B2. The exercise turns out to be a set-up for a campaign to undermine free markets, globalization and free trade.

In the 1998 draft, the A1 scenario is called the Golden Economic Age. It describes a period of “rapid and successful economic development,” brought on by the economic structures that have been successful in the past: free markets, global free trade, innovation. “Free trade enables each region to access knowledge, technology, and capital to best deploy its respective comparative economic and human advantages.” By 2100, it said, the developed world under free global trade, would have annual per capita income approaching $100,000 and the developing world $70,000.

The trouble with this Golden Economic Age, a name that was dropped in the final IPCC report on scenarios in 2001, is that it produced a lot of carbon emissions — thus making free trade, open markets and globalization a non-starter. The alternatives were variations on slower growth. Scenario B1, called Sustainable Development, involved “high levels of environmental and social consciousness” along with reductions in income and social inequality. Average per capita income would rise only to $40,000 by 2100. But the good news, from the IPCC perspective, is that carbon emissions were a lot lower.

The upshot of these scenarios, based on IPCC objectives of reducing carbon emission, is a deck stacked against free markets and globalization. In the emails, the scenarios make their way through a barrage of comment from scientists who, for the most part, balk at the process. In one small sample, Tom Wigley wrote to Mike Hulme telling him that “energy-economics models need to be revised” because they fail to take into account actual emissions between 1990 and 1999. In July, 1998, David Schimel, a climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote to Wigley: “I raised this issue at the scoping meeting ... where it was greeted with general agreement but it appeared to come as a complete surprise to many that scenarios should have a relationship to reality.”

Emails cataloguing the weaknesses in the scenarios project are numerous. Still, the project moved forward as part of the email exchanges off and on for a couple of years. While the scientists balked at simple numbers and sought qualification, the IPCC wanted precision.Geoff Jenkins, a former head of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, where CRU is housed, wrote to Mike Hulme: “Getting away from single number answers is very laudable scientifically, but it presents policymakers (for whom the whole IPCC exercise is undertaken) with a problem.”

In the end, Mike Hulme appeared as one of the contributing authors for the IPCC’s 2001 Synthesis Report, including various 100-year scenarios. It concluded that carbon concentration in the atmosphere could rise to 1,250% above the pre-industrial year of 1750 under the free market A1 scenario, with temperatures rising as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius. Capitalism clearly ruins everything.

The 2001 Synthesis Report looked authoritative in its carbon and temperature outlooks. But one of the “lead authors” was Kevin Ternberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Eight years later, Mr. Ternberth shows up in the emails. On Oct. 14, 2009, he wrote to Tom Wigley: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.” In other words, one of the lead authors of the 100-year climate forecasting exercise says there’s something wrong with the models — or the data.

If the emails show anything on the climate scenarios, it is that the 100-year science projections never really got settled. They were a product of climate and economic models that remained problematic all through the 13 -year email record. Equally uncertain were the attempts to reconstruct paleoclimate records going back 1,000 years.

Despite various technical problems gathering tree-ring data and fitting them to actual climate history, much hope surrounded the paleo effort. Keith Briffa, the British tree-ring expert overseeing the Russian Siberian work and other projects, wrote in early 1998 that Rashit Hantemirov, another Russian tree-ring researcher, “has done outstanding work putting together ... what will no doubt become a world famous sub fossil chronology in the Yamal area of northern Siberia.”

Yamal would indeed become famous, but for other reasons. What really rocked the paleoclimate work at CRU, and ultimately shook the IPCC, was a seemingly out-of-the-blue email on June 17, 1998, from Michael Mann to Phil Jones, then head of East Anglia’s CRU centre. Before then, no mention had been made in the email cache of Michael Mann, then adjunct assistant professor, department of geosciences, Morrill Science Center, University of Massachusetts. It is, in many ways, the email that rocked climate science.

Dear Phil,

Of course I’ll be happy to be on board. I think the opportunity for some direct collaboration between us (me, and you/tim/keith) is ripe, and the plan to compare and contrast different approaches and data and synthesize the different results is a good one. Though sidetracked by other projects recently, I remain committed to doing this with you guys, and to explore applications to synthetic datasets with manufactured biases/etc remains high priority. It sounds like it would all fit into the proposal you mention. There may be some overlap w/proposals we will eventually submit to NSF (renewal of our present funding), etc. by I don’t see a problem with that in the least.

Once the collaboration is officially in place, I think that sharing of codes, data, etc. should not be a problem. I would be happy to make mine available, though can’t promise its the most user friendly thing in the world.

In short, I like the idea. Include me in, and let me know what you eed from me (cv, etc.).

cheers,

mike

Exactly what those words mean is hard to know. It must be science talk. What is certain from the Climategate emails is that world climate science, and the Climategate emails, would never be the same thereafter. Mr. Mann quickly rose to be the dominant figure in the paleoclimate effort. He and associates, Ray Bradley at the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm Hughes, a meso-climatologist and Professor of Dendrochronology in the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, had just finished a paper titled “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcings over the past six centuries.” The core of that paper was a graphic that would come to be known as the graphic “hockey stick” presentation of the temperature over the past centuries.

With Mr. Mann on board, everybody else seemed to go overboard. In the emails, he soon elbowed out Keith Briffa as the prime tree-ring guru. The Mann hockey stick, and the science work behind it, would end up consuming thousands of email hours over the next decade and, as we shall see in Part II on Monday, now threatens to consume one of the scientific pillars of climate science.

[Guest woxof]

Terence Corcoran: Climategate Part 2 — A 2,000-page epic of science and skepticism

There's trouble over tree rings as the Climategate emails reveal a rift between scientists. By Terence Corcoran

In the thousands of emails released last month in what is now known as Climategate, the greatest battles took place over scientists’ attempts to reconstruct a credible temperature record for the last couple of thousand years. Have they failed? What the Climategate emails provide is at least one incontrovertible answer: They certainly have not succeeded.

In a post-Copenhagen world, climate history is not merely a matter of getting the record straight, or a trivial part of the global warming science. In a Climategate email in April of this year, Steve Colman, professor of Geological Science at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told scores of climate scientists “most people seem to accept that past history is the only way to assess what the climate can actually do (e.g., how fast it can change). However, I think that the fact that reconstructed history provides the only calibration or test of models (beyond verification of modern simulations) is under-appreciated.”

If temperature history is the “only” way to test climate models, the tests we have on hand — mainly the shaky temperature history of the last 1,000 or 2,000 years — suggest current climate models are not getting a proper scientific workout.

Two scientists, one British and the other American, straddle the initial Climategate battle over recent global temperature history. Later, the same two scientists appear to abandon their internal disagreements and join forces to present a united front to fight off critics and put down skeptics.

In the United Kingdom, Keith Briffa, at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit — from where the emails appear to have been hacked or leaked — headed one of the main scientific projects. His specialty is dendroclimatology, the study of tree rings to reconstruct past climate records. In 1998, Mr. Briffa played a lead role as East Anglia’s CRU tried to fulfill its mandate from the IPCC, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: develop official global temperature data records.

In June 1998, a new player dramatically crashed the official CRU paleo world. As described on Saturday in the first part of this two-part series on Climategate, U.S. scientist Michael Mann was invited to become part of the official effort to create a history of global temperatures. Then adjunct assistant professor of geosciences at the Morrill Science Center, University of Massachusetts, Mr. Mann would soon come to dominate the IPCC paleoclimate effort.

Like all paleoclimatologists, Mr. Briffa and Mr. Mann both used various proxies. Actual temperature records exist only from the late 1800s, forcing scientists to use uncertain indirect methods — ice core samples, tree-ring measurements, rock formations — to determine what temperatures might have been 500, 1,000 and 5,000 years ago. Mr. Briffa focused much of his attention on Russia, where scientists scoured Siberia for tree ring data.

When Mr. Mann joined the UN global paleo project, he had already finished “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcings over the past six centuries,” a paper written with Ray Bradley at the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm Hughes, a meso-climatologist and Professor of Dendrochronology in the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. The core of that paper was a graphic that would come to be known as the “hockey stick” presentation of northern hemisphere temperatures over the past centuries. It was called the hockey stick because it appeared to show a flat temperature run and a sharp uptick in the last 50 years.

The main Mann-Briffa confrontation took place in the spring of 1999 after Mr. Briffa submitted a paper to Science magazine, critiquing elements of the hockey stick and presenting his own 2,000-year tree-ring-based paleo record. Mr. Briffa sent Mr. Mann a copy of his Science article on April 12, advising Mr. Mann that he had “decided to mention uncertainties in tree-ring data while pushing the need for more work.” Earlier emails also show Mr. Briffa struggling with Russian tree-ring results and the reports of Russian scientists on their difficulties. Their findings often contradicted the idea that the world is warmer today than hundreds or even thousands of years ago. “Relatively high number of trees has been noted during 750-1450 AD. There is no evidence of moving polar timberline in the north during the last century,” wrote Rashit Hanntemirov from Russia in October 1998 — implying that warming has been common in the past and nothing unusual was happening today.

The reference to 750-1450 would appear to support the long-held scientific view on the existence of a Medieval Warm Period that might have been hotter than the 20th century. A couple of weeks later, another Russian, Eugene Vaganov, wrote in a paper saying that “the warming in the middle of the 20th century is not extraordinary. The warming at the border of the 1st and 2nd millennia was more long in time and similar in amplitude.”

Mr. Briffa, in his Science paper, proposed his own 2,000-year record as an alternative to Mr. Mann’s hockey stick, using other data, including collections from Sweden and Yamal, in Siberia. The paper raises issues that cast doubt on Mr. Mann’s version of climate history. Mr. Mann notoriously posits that the widely accepted existence of a Medieval Warm Period, and a subsequent Little Ice Age, are scientifically dubious phases that never happened. When Mr. Mann saw the pre-publication version of Mr. Briffa’s critical paper, he blew up. In an April 13 email, he wrote to Mr. Briffa complaining that his work is “very misleading” and that it is “a bit unfair” in the way Mr. Briffa presents Mr. Mann’s perspective.

Mr. Mann said another section in Mr. Briffa’s paper was “incorrect” and that it misrepresented the level of uncertainty in Mr. Mann’s work. “Our uncertainties are based both on 20th century calibration and independent confirmation from 19th century data. PLEASE MAKE SURE this is clear.” Mr. Mann asks Mr. Briffa to remove parts of his 2,000 year graph. Mr. Mann criticized Mr. Briffa for using tree-ring density data as opposed to the tree-ring width data that Mr. Mann had been using because he found density measures inadequate.

Finally, in an important concluding remark, Mr. Mann tells Mr. Briffa to “correct” his definitions regarding “global temperature and non-temperature proxies.” Mr. Mann prefers using the words “global climate proxies,” thus giving the impression that proxies from tree rings and other sources and actual temperatures are one and the same for IPCC purposes. What Mr. Mann appears to be talking about here is the use of what CRU head Phil Jones would later refer to as Mr. Mann’s “trick” and how he was able to “hide the decline” that Mr. Briffa’s tree-ring research showed 20th century temperatures to be cooler rather than warmer.

A series of email exchanges, some heated and involving a range of scientists, follows. It appears, moreover, that Mr. Mann had interfered with the peer-review process of Mr. Briffa’s article at Science magazine. One of Mr. Mann’s associates, Raymond Bradley at the University of Massachusetts, on April 19, wrote to Science editor Julia Uppenbrink, saying, “I would like to disassociate myself from Mike Mann’s view” regarding the climate warming article. Mr. Bradley sends a blind copy of this email to Mr. Briffa.

The conflict eventually makes it up to Phil Jones, the head of CRU, who writes a stinging letter to Mr. Mann on May 6. “You seem quite **bleep** off with us all in CRU,” said Mr. Jones. “I am somewhat at a loss to understand why.” Mr. Jones, in strong words, then rips into Mr. Mann. He accused Mr. Mann of “slanging us all off to Science.” We all have disagreements, wrote Mr. Jones, but “We have never resorted to slanging one another off to a journal ... or in reviewing papers or proposals.”

After a month of back and forth, Mr. Mann seems to offer an apology. In a mildly grovelling but self-serving and ultimately not-too-apologetic letter, he commends Mr. Briffa and others for doing such terrific work. “I appreciate having had the opportunity to respond to the original draft .... We have some honest disagreements among us .... Thanks for all the hard work and a job well done,” wrote Mr. Mann on May 14. Mr. Bradley, Mr. Mann’s associate in Massachusetts and co-creator of the hockey stick graph, sends a private response to Mr. Briffa: “Excuse me while I puke ... Ray.”

More clashes occur later that year over the tree-ring record. Mr. Briffa, in September 1999, is still battling Mr. Mann. “I know Mike thinks his series is ‘the best’, and he might be right — but he may also be too dismissive of other data and overconfident of his own.” He adds: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data,’ but in reality the situation is not quite so clear ... I believe the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”

At this point in the Climategate emails, the stage has been set for a decade of high drama. Over the next 10 years, the emails become a zone of internal conflict and external battles to suppress criticism, ridicule critics and resist all outside interference with the official science story they had assembled: The late 20th century was the warmest in history, and the next 100 years could be a climate nightmare.

The Mann technique of aggressive intervention in the peer-review process over Mr. Briffa’s work sets the tone for what would become a major strategy as all the scientists within the IPCC loop waged war on any science and papers that contravened or questioned the official view.

The anti-skeptic campaign switched into overdrive with the arrival on the climate science scene of two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. In mid-2003, after many efforts, Mr. McIntyre and Mr. McKitrick finally published a paper titled “Corrections to the Mann et al Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series.”

The public battles between Mr. Mann and the two Canadians are already on the record. The emails reinforce the worst of suspicions that the official scientific community did all they could to smear Mr. McIntyre and Mr. McKitrick, prevent publication of the work of skeptics, manipulate the peer-review process and isolate all skeptics as cranks. On May 31, 2004, Phil Jones, head of the IPCC-designated Climatic Research Unit, wrote to Mr. Mann: “Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised...”

Mr. Mann meddled in other ways. In January 2005, he called the editor of Geophysical Research Letters, the official science publication of the American Geophysical Union, to try to head off a paper by Mr. McIntyre. The editor, Steve Mackwell, defends the decision to publish and tells Mr. Mann that the McIntyre paper has been thoroughly peer reviewed by four scientists. “You would not in general be asked to look it over,” Mr. Mackwell told Mr. Mann. Later in 2005, Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Jones on their troubles with the GRL journal after Mr. Mackwell’s term as editor was up: “The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership.”

Mr. McIntyre, a mining exploration expert based in Toronto, and Mr. McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph, continued to dog Mr. Mann’s view of climate history. First they wanted release of the data behind the hockey stick graph and the computer code that produced various trend lines. When Mr. Mann and CRU declined or resisted, Mr. McIntyre began filing Freedom of Information requests in the United States and Britain. The emails portray embattled scientists fighting desperately to interfere with official FOI processes.

One now widely-circulated email, by Mr. Jones, asked Mr. Mann: “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith [briffa] will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment — minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”

In this email, Mr. Jones is asking key scientists who worked on AR4 — the 4th Assessment Report on the science of climate change produced by the IPCC in 2007 — to erase all emails related to that report. Caspar Ammann is a scientist at the Climate and Global Dynamics Division of U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric research. His area is natural climate variability and change over the past centuries and millennia and their application to climate change.

The emails take another turn against the IPCC scientists after Mr. McIntyre got his hands on some of the tree-ring data collected by Russian scientists in Yamal in Siberia. It appeared to Mr. McIntyre that Mr. Briffa, in producing another hockey-stick like result in 2007, cherry-picked tree rings. Mr. Briffa, once at war with Mr. Mann over climate records, now found himself aligned with Mr. Mann in defending the hockey stick. After Mr. McIntyre revealed his Yamal tree ring findings on his ClimateAudit blog, and Ross McKitrick wrote of the Briffa Yamal tree-ring issue in the Financial Post this past October, the emails again lit up with fresh rounds of defensive fire.

Within weeks, however, the private email battle would overtake the skirmish over the latest public McIntyre findings. On Nov. 17, with release of the Climategate emails, the 13-year battle over climate history and climate forecasting would be all over the Internet and the media.

The epic stories in the emails, in any honest reading, do not produce any concrete results or conclusions regarding the state of the science.

What exists now in the public domain is scientific conflict and uncertainty that goes to the heart of climate change science — past, present and future.

As recently as Nov. 28, a posting on the Mann-related website, RealClimate.org, continues to claim the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age never happened. If that is a scientifically provable, then it might be true that the last 50 years have been the hottest in a thousand years, offering some support to the idea that man-made climate change is changing the climate in a significant and unprecedented way. But if the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age did occur, then the Earth may have been just as warm today as it was 1,000 years ago. If that’s the case, the hockey stick graph and the official paleoclimate record is at best uncertain or, at worst, a scientific trick.

It is, in my view, not possible for a layman, or even an expert, to make any assessment of the tree ring data conflicts — to pick one issue — based on the emails. Masses of computer code and data are imbedded in the Climategate documents, enough to keep a full science inquiry busy for months, if not years. Exactly who did what with which data requires a full investigation by competent scientists and official bodies.

[Guest woxof]

So, let us not get distracted by blanket pejoratives like "socialism" and the notion of transferring billions to despots and having Indians fly Canadian routes for heavens sake - let's get a grip and not ride off in all directions.

Let us also dispense with the notion that "Capitalism did this." Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't - there is no doubt that unrelenting, unchecked industrial growth puts more effluent into "our" environment. What is in doubt is whether such behaviours are related to climate change or whether Terence Corcoran, who's right-leaning views are well known, is correct and "Plan A1" is an "anti-capitalist" plan and not an approach to climate change. We don't know, do we?

As for jobs being transferred off-shore, we've been doing that for years - in all but scale, it's called outsourcing.

Anyone who has done negotiations during bad times where give-backs are in play will be familiar with the notion that you express and indeed it is a serious one - If "we" give, someone else under the same pressure will use our "give" as an excuse not to give as much, or even take instead of giving.

The key here is blindingly obvious is it not? Regardless of who gives, (and the US "gave" a $100b commitment if I recall) and why and whether the socialism boogey-man actually turns out to be real and we actually help mankind by giving good reasons even for despots to re-think their economic behaviours, who loses?

In fact, in this discussion, what is the meaning of "win", & "lose" to us; to our children?

You say that Mr. Corcoran has right-leaning views. Not an uncommon thing. Does this somehow make the articles I have posted by him any less credible. I think not, however, I welcome detailed criticism of the articles I have posted, if you have found some errors. I see none of that on this thread.

Having tranferred jobs offshore for years is hardly an excuse to continue to do so based on what we now know to be unfinished science. There must be a better reason than this.

Yes the U.S. has foolishly given 100 billion as some of the powers that be in Washington support this type of move. Imagine what that could have bought in terms of policing, medicare or troops in Afghanistan, or maybe blankets for the dozens frozen to death in Europe this past week.

By the way, I think I have figured something out about global oil and our oilsands and this whole money transfer idea.

Remember the article I posted earlier of how a factory closed in Britain and was replaced by a factory in India? Similar carbon output, but it is O.K. for India because they have less stringent rules. It turns out that Venezuela, home of the outspoken, raging socialist Hugo Chavez has undeveloped oilsands as big as ours. Of course, he was at CPH raging about horrible capitalism and what should be done and extorting money to the third world etc.

I have figured out what he and his many socialist supporters in the environmental movement have planned. Canada closes our oilsands, but is there any less carbon footprint. Of course not, because Canadian taxpayers will fund development of the Venezuela oilsands. And the NDP would support it all the way. The Liberals, perhaps part way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orinoco_Belt

Just a theory of course but no doubt part of Chavez's plans. You heard it here first.

Woxof....figuring it all out.

[dagger]

As far as closing your coal powered power plants. The original date was in 2007, then it slipped to 2009 and now we understand that some may close in 2010 but the rest will wait until 2014. So I guess we will have to wait and see.

http://www.eqtff-pfft.ca/english/EQTreasury/equal101-4.asp

You may also wish to read the following article which in part says:

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Al...6030/story.html

You can (perhaps) now understand why some Albertans are annoyed with the recent posturing by Ont and Quebec. I continue to want Canada to thrive and prosper as a whole and will fight any attempt to split it up but your attitude and that of others in Central Canada only adds fuel to the resolve of some in the West to continue beating the drum of separatism.

Ontario's slipping date is for closing the last coal-fired generating station. The closures have already begun.

So what has Alberta done to reduce coal-fired emissions?

http://news.ontario.ca/mei/en/2009/09/onta...e-out-plan.html

And stop whining about separatism - woe is you. Your story rings as false as those of the Quebec separatists I grew up with. It's the old saw - everyone is always out to get you.

But here's the issue. Does Alberta get a special exception for oil sands emissions that will have to be made up outside its borders? If so, the wealth you claim to generate for all is an illusion because other provinces will have to apply carbon taxes and deeper carbon caps to make up for your SLACKERY.

Now, if you can make up the difference within Alberta, by closing coal-fired generating plants, by building an electric high speed train between edmonton and calgary, by taxing gasoline heavily so Albertans drive smaller cars, by giving everyone in the province a solar array to heat their homes, by making cows fart less, be my guest. The objections from me would disappear.

But you are not proposing that. All you propose is carbon capture, which is completely unproven and quite likely commercially unfeasible in the oil sands.

The end result is that with Harper's connivance, you are proposing to make the rest of Canada bear YOUR burden, not to mention the burden of an overvalued dollar which you can offset with oil royalties, but which kill export industries from coast to coast.

It is a REVERSE National Energy Program.

Like I said, do the off-setting within your borders, and this concern can go away. But it's not happening and with the Alberta government's attitude, it's not likely to happen.

[13820]

I used to enjoy your posts but lately you have become rather boorish.

You think Alberta should pay more into a imaginary carbon trading scheme.

And Ontario is exempt because it is closing down coal generating plants.

I won't even get involved in your slagfest, but in my opinion you just don't get it.

Your attitude makes me think that the comments of Quebec and Ontario's representatives at Copenhagen are really how central Canada feels.

We touched on separation years ago when the coalition debacle was front page, you might be surprised at how deep this feeling is in Western Canada.

Still waters run deep my friend.

[dagger]

I used to enjoy your posts but lately you have become rather boorish.

You think Alberta should pay more into a imaginary carbon trading scheme.

And Ontario is exempt because it is closing down coal generating plants.

I won't even get involved in your slagfest, but in my opinion you just don't get it.

Your attitude makes me think that the comments of Quebec and Ontario's representatives at Copenhagen are really how central Canada feels.

We touched on separation years ago when the coalition debacle was front page, you might be surprised at how deep this feeling is in Western Canada.

Still waters run deep my friend.

It's strange, but I didn't say that.

Maybe you can't read.

I said don't transfer your obligations to others. Meet them within your borders, as we will ours. You still own the oil, you still charge whatever royalties you want, you still spend the royalties as you like, but don't make others pay a penalty so you can have quiet enjoyment of your assets. I don't care if you charge $200 a barrel for the damned stuff. In fact, the higher the price the better and I don't begrudge you the dough.

Maybe we don't see the fairness of trying to stay healthy economically when our dollar is worth $110 US cents and we have to achieve deeper emissions cuts to offset yours.

As for whether Canada is to have an imaginary trading scheme, well, ask Harper. He's the only proposing it - to dovetail with whatever the US does - and he's your boy! Settle it with him. If we're not going to have international obligations, all he has to do is come out and say it, and I'd respect that more than suggesting we will have obligations (but, psst, we don't intend to honour them).

My electricity bill will rise significantly because Ontario is taking steps to reduce emissions by developing vast amounts of green energy and to foster a culture of conservation. My smart meter has been installed and I'll soon be paying three-tiered pricing for electricity that discourages peak usage.

Ontario is spending vast amounts on public transit and supporting California-type vehicle emissions standards. So I am paying for Ontario's drive for lower emissions, even as Ontario continues to be a large net contributor to equalization ($4.5 billion next year). It would be nice to keep that money in Ontario to cover part of our deficit, but you don't see anyone forming a separatist part or mouthing separatist threads.

[13820]

You'll figure it out soon enough.

[Guest woxof]

If I may woxof, you need to think more and write from that thinking, and not let others do your writing for you.

Your statement of "you need to think more" sounds quite typical of what I have heard from many in this discussion. I think that I will continue to post credible articles on the reality of the man-made global warming realities and consequences such as the common theme of "green jobs, green jobs" as if this will somehow be our economy of the future.

Lets see some of the careful analysis of such a program and no, I did not think this article up, but I am not into writing long philosophical posts(no matter the impressive thought that no doubt goes into creating them).

I am a "just the facts ma'am" type of guy and intend to stay that way. I know it has opened a few eyes here on this thread.

Germany's renewable myth

Germany is seen as a leader in renewable energy, but its experience has been a costly waste

An aggressive policy of generously subsidizing and effectively mandating “renewable” electricity generation in Germany has led to a doubling of the renewable contribution to electricity generation in recent years.

This preference came primarily in the form of a subsidy policy based on feed-in tariffs, established in 1991 by the Electricity Feed-in Law, requiring utilities to accept and remunerate the feed-in of “green” electricity at 90 percent of the retail rate of electricity, considerably exceeding the cost of conventional electricity generation.

A subsequent law passed in 2000 guaranteed continued support for 20 years. This requires utilities to accept the delivery of power from independent producers of renewable electricity into their own grid, paying technology-specific feed-in tariffs far above their production cost of ¢2.9-10.2 per kilowatt hour (kWh).

With a feed-in tariff of ¢59 per kWh in 2009, solar electricity generated from photovoltaics (PV) is guaranteed by far the largest financial support among all renewable energy technologies.

Currently, the feed-in tariff for PV is more than eight times higher than the wholesale electricity price at the power exchange and more than four times the feed-in tariff paid for electricity produced by on-shore wind turbines.

Even on-shore wind, widely regarded as a mature technology, requires feed-in tariffs that exceed the per-kWh cost of conventional electricity by up to 300% to remain competitive.

By 2008 this had led to Germany having the second-largest installed wind capacity in the world, behind the United States, and largest installed PV capacity in the world, ahead of Spain. This explains the claims that Germany’s feed-in tariff is a great success.

Installed capacity is not the same as production or contribution, however, and by 2008 the estimated share of wind power in Germany’s electricity production was 6.3%, followed by biomass-based electricity generation (3.6%) and water power (3.1%). The amount of electricity produced through solar photovoltaics was a negligible 0.6% despite being the most subsidized renewable energy, with a net cost of about $12.4 billion for 2008.

The total net cost of subsidizing electricity production by PV modules is estimated to reach US $73.2 billion for those modules installed between 2000 and 2010. While the promotion rules for wind power are more subtle than those for PV, we estimate that the wind power subsidies may total US $28.1 billion for wind converters installed between 2000 and 2010.

Consumers ultimately bear the cost of renewable energy promotion. In 2008, the price mark-up due to the subsidization of green electricity was about ¢2.2, meaning the subsidy accounts for about 7.5% of average household electricity prices.

Given the net cost of ¢41.82/kWh for PV modules installed in 2008, and assuming that PV displaces conventional electricity generated from a mixture of gas and hard coal, abatement costs are as high as $1,050 per ton.

Using the same assumptions and a net cost for wind of ¢3.10/kWh, the abatement cost is approximately $80. While cheaper than PV, this cost is still nearly double the ceiling of the cost of a per-ton permit under Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme. Renewable energies are thus among the most expensive GHG reduction measures.

There are much cheaper ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than subsidizing renewable energies. CO2 abatement costs of PV are estimated to be as high as $1,050 per ton, while those of wind power are estimated at $80 per ton. By contrast, the current price of emissions certificates on the European emissions trading scheme is only 13.4 (Euro) per ton. Hence, the cost from emission reductions as determined by the market is about 53 times cheaper than employing PV and 4 times cheaper than using wind power.

Moreover, the prevailing coexistence of the EEG and emissions trading under the European Trading Scheme (ETS) means that the increased use of renewable energy technologies generally attains no additional emission reductions beyond those achieved by ETS alone. In fact, since the establishment of the ETS in 2005, the EEG’s net climate effect has been equal to zero.

While employment projections in the renewable sector convey seemingly impressive prospects for gross job growth, they typically obscure the broader implications for economic welfare by omitting any accounting of off-setting impacts. These im-pacts include, but are not limited to, job losses from crowding out of cheaper forms of conventional energy generation, indirect impacts on upstream industries, additional job losses from the drain on economic activity precipitated by higher electricity prices, private consumers’ overall loss of purchasing power due to higher electricity prices, and diverting funds from other, possibly more beneficial investment.

Proponents of renewable energies often regard the requirement for more workers to produce a given amount of energy as a benefit, failing to recognize that this lowers the output potential of the economy and is hence counterproductive to net job creation. Significant research shows that initial employment benefits from renewable policies soon turn negative as additional costs are incurred. Trade-and other assumptions in those studies claiming positive employment turn out to be unsupportable.

In the end, Germany’s PV promotion has become a subsidization regime that, on a per-worker basis, has reached a level that far exceeds average wages, with per-worker subsidies as high as $240,000.

It is most likely that whatever jobs are created by renewable energy promotion would vanish as soon as government support is terminated, leaving only Germany’s export sector to benefit from the possible continuation of renewables support in other countries such as the US.

Due to their backup energy requirements, it turns out that any increased energy security possibly afforded by installing large PV and wind capacity is undermined by reliance on fuel sources — principally gas — that must be imported to meet domestic demand. That much of this gas is imported from unreliable suppliers calls energy security claims further into question.

Claims about technological innovation benefits of Germany’s first-actor status are unsupportable. In fact, the regime appears to be counterproductive in that respect, stifling innovation by encouraging producers to lock into existing technologies.

In conclusion, government policy has failed to harness the market incentives needed to ensure a viable and cost-effective introduction of renewable energies into Germany’s energy portfolio. To the contrary, Germany’s principal mechanism of supporting renewable technologies through feed-in tariffs imposes high costs without any of the alleged positive impacts on emissions reductions, employment, energy security, or technological innovation. Policymakers should thus scrutinize Germany’s experience, including in the US, where there are currently nearly 400 federal and state programs in place that provide financial incentives for renewable energy.

Although Germany’s promotion of renewable energies is commonly portrayed in the media as setting a “shining example in providing a harvest for the world” (The Guardian, 2007), we would instead regard the country’s experience as a cautionary tale of massively expensive environmental and energy policy that is devoid of economic and environmental benefits.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/f...wable-myth.aspx

[boestar]

IMHO this whole thing about Climate Change STOPPED being about saving the planet and STARTED being about MONEY the minute people started trading CREDITS for something that may or may not exist. This is kind of like trading on SPECULATION (we know how that went with oil).

There are people in high places that are getting filthy rich (or moreso) with the world panicking over climate change.

The scientists can't agree, the people can't agree, the AEF'ers can't agree.

Are we doomed? He!! I don't know. Am I willing to pay for it? Not without difinitive proof.

The world is a changing place, both man made and natural changes. it has been for thousands (millions) of years, It has been a hot place, a cold place and a temperate place. Life continued and will continue. The climate may change, hotter or colder it doesnt matter. Ther Human race is one of the most adaptive animals on the planet we will get through it.

Just look at the planet today. We have people living in 50+ degree heat in one part of the world and people living in -50 degree heat in the other. These people may have evolved to and adapted to those conditions over time but they adapted.

As for the planet itself. it will also heal itself. Just a some forests require fire to regenerate, sometime things have to be torn down to rebuild.

I am not saying we should do nothing. We should not pollute the planet and we should promote green spaces reforestation and in doing so a balance will be found. Mother nature has a lot of experience (more than us) and correcting things that have gone wrong. I have faith that she will, by whatever means, effect repair on the planet, however, what that repair will look like when it is done is another story.

[dagger]

Your statement of "you need to think more" sounds quite typical of what I have heard from many in this discussion. I think that I will continue to post credible articles on the reality of the man-made global warming realities and consequences such as the common theme of "green jobs, grenn jobs" as if this will somehow be our economy of the future.

Lets see some of the careful analysis of such a program and no, I did not think this article up, but I am not into writing long philosophical posts(no matter the impressive thought that no doubt goes into creating them).

I am a "just the facts ma'am" type of guy and intend to stay that way. I know it has opened a few eyes here on this thread.

Credible? Reality?

There's your problem.

Goebbels had you in mind when he developed the modern concepts of propaganda. There are always two sides, even many sides, to any issue. Unless an article considers the various points of view, it is not necessarily credible or portraying "reality" (since reality can be a variable concept).

The article mixes cost and security issues - security issues that don't exist in North America because we have massive indigenous sources of natural gas in particular. The new shale plays in Texas and Louisiana are humungous - BC's Horn River find is tiny by comparison. And there are potential shale plays in Central Canada, Atlantic Canada, New England, etc.

Germany bought expensive green power by getting in early. Since 2000, and especially since 2008, the cost per MW of solar power has fallen from $4 to about $1. I spoke last week with the CEO of a major automation company - an American, and certainly not wild-eyed greenie. He sees solar achieving grid parity by the middle of the next decade. Between cost efficiencies in manufacturing, improved energy capture technologies in solar panels, and the introduction of large scale Chinese solar panel manufacturing, you will be hardpressed to find many who have looked at solar power and don't believe that.

So maybe the Germans paid a big price - although they are selling billions upon billions of dollars of wind and solar equipment for solar and wind farms the world over. Maybe they did lock into old technology, although I dare see there are several huge projects under construction that will use the latest technologies and by the middle of the next decade, what passes as old technology will have completed its full amortization cycle. Solar panels aren't forever. They generally have about a 25-year efficiency, and then should be replaced. With the falling cost of solar, it's likely that this replacement cycle will happen at a fraction of the original cost.

If you want to know where solar is going, check out a US company called Solyndra. Check out the companies lining up to buy its rooftop systems. It's not altruism, chuckles. It's because these companies can smell smaller electricity bills by turning their stores into energy self-sufficient outlets.

[Thebean]

I'll jump on the Global Warming Bandwagon when someone, anyone, provides a credible explantation for the following picture, published in Feb 1998, page 55, in National Geographic.

The mummified seal was found "more than 100 miles from the coast....it may be centuries old".

Since when did seals hump across "more than 100 miles of ice" looking for fish?

Maybe the Ocean was a couple of miles from the dearly departed seal when it died, and the earth went thru a cooling phase over a couple of hundred years causing the ice pack to extend 100 miles or so from the carcasses location?

Nah...That wouldn't fit in with all those theories from those discredited British scientists....they'll come up with the theory that the anti-global warming folks killed a seal, mummified it, and dumped it 100 miles from the ocean.....

[E-HANDLE]

I am not saying we should do nothing.  We should not pollute the planet and we should promote green spaces reforestation and in doing so a balance will be found.

Here here!

I have some farmland in southern Alberta that I would be willing to plant trees on. I will, of course require some payment

This marks the third year in a row of poor crops in that area. I don't farm, but the man who rents the land from us says that the poor quality is due to the late springs, cooler than normal summers, and early frosts and cold weather.

Go figure.