Should We Talk About the Weather?

My Crappy Country

2008-11-06T16:04:00.000-08:00

The “smug” is officially off being Canadian. With the stunning victory of Barak Obama this week, the well-worn pastime of self-righteously comparing ourselves to US may be coming to an end. Perhaps this is a good time to reflect on exactly how progressive our own country is.

Most of Canada cheered when Obama prevailed but the fact is that even if John McCain had been elected president, the United States would now have far more ambitious carbon reduction goals than Canada.

Our country seems well on the road to becoming a politically compromised petro-state and now trails the developed world in dealing with the greatest issue to face humanity

A recent report from the Conference Board of Canada shows that Canada now has among the worst environmental records of 17 of our major trading partners, ranking only slightly above Australia and the US.

These are only the latest in a series of shameful embarrassments on the world stage that would make Pierre Trudeau spin in his crypt.

Consider Canada’s outrageous flogging of cancer causing asbestos to the poorest countries in the world. The Canadian Medical Association Journal recently compared Canada’s aggressive promotion of our asbestos industry to the “international arms trade”.

Last week Ottawa succeeded in preventing Canadian asbestos from being included in the Rotterdam Convention. This agreement would merely require informing impoverished nations of the well-known human health risks of using this deadly substance.

Rather than defending this heinous position to international community, the Canadian government instead cut a quiet deal behind closed doors with such moral luminaries as Zimbabwe and Russia.

Our country is also become closely aligned with the worst of George Bush’s foreign policy. We have spent close to $20 billion intervening in impoverished Afghanistan, but less than 10% of this was aid. The vast majority of there has instead been on aggressive counter-insurgency.

This, while our military allies are plainly stating that international troops are now "part of the problem, not part of the solution".

Meanwhile, a humanitarian crisis unfolds largely unnoticed in the Congo that may rival the Holocaust in loss of human life.

The UN is pleading for peacekeepers, a vocation that was invented by Canadians. Yet in 2006, the number of Canadian peacekeepers worldwide could fit on a school bus. The genocide in Rwanda only fifteen years ago is apparently ancient history.

Canada’s perennial inability or unwillingness to deal with aboriginal living conditions, homelessness, child poverty, world poverty or universal day care speak volumes about what kind of country we have become.

While many Canadians enjoy absolving themselves by instead slagging Stephen Harper, at least he is honest in his disdain for such apparently naïve causes as environmental protection and peacekeeping.

More Canadians voted for his party than any other, and he won the election fair and square on a clear campaign of lower taxes and cheaper fuel. Had he also thrown in free cable, a grateful nation might well have handed him a majority.

The political Left in Canada remains far more committed to partisan gains than egalitarian principles. The provincial NDP’s brazen opposition to the BC carbon tax is a sickening case in point. Jack Layton successfully fear-mongered the proposed Liberal carbon tax in apparent collusion with the Tories.

Both parties maintained that this was an untried experiment though both knew very well that such taxes had been successfully employed in Europe for almost twenty years.

Sweden brought in a carbon tax seventeen years ago and has reduced absolute carbon emissions by 9% below 1990 levels while their economy grew by 44%. Here in the bumpkin backwater of Canada, emissions have ballooned by over 20% with no end (or concern) in sight.

Meanwhile the Green Party succeeded in wasting almost one million progressive votes and have ambitious plans for even more counter-productive lunacy.

For their part, the Liberals immediately threw the hapless Stephane Dion under the bus, and new leadership contenders are rapidly distancing themselves from the political plutonium of meaningful environmental policy.

Even with such stark choices in the last federal election, less than 60% of eligible Canadian voters bothered to exercise their democratic rights that many Canadian veterans gave their lives for. This is the worst voter turn out since confederation.

Electoral reform is one potential route out of this morass but that issue seems dead as a doornail in our jerkwater country.

Every other developed nation in the world besides Canada, the US and the UK have rejected the ancient first past the post system that was a museum piece when we inherited it from the British 150 years ago.

Provincial referenda on electoral reform have failed so far in BC, PEI, and most recently in Ontario where more than 60% of the public rejected the idea with the strident support of such supposedly progressive newspapers as the Toronto Star.

I do not enjoy writing these words but they are true. These and other issues have pushed me in sad transition from proud Canadian to someone who is increasingly ashamed of my country. The fact is that our international reputation was forged over 40 years ago and very little has happened since.

We can of course do much better but for the time being, and foreseeable future, we have chosen not to. It is not surprising that no leader remotely approaching the stature of Obama or Trudeau has appeared on the Canadian landscape. They would wither in the stripmall worldview that has become our new Canadian character.

Is our country capable of picking up the inspirational gauntlet that has been cast down by our southern neighbours? I sincerely doubt it, but would be delighted to be proven wrong.

More Australian Weather Records Tumble

2009-05-19T17:55:00.000-07:00

The Big Dry Down Under just got a whole lot drier. The first three months of 2009 in the already parched Murray Darling basin had the least amount of rainfall since Australian weather records began 117 years ago.

This massive drainage supports $9 billion in agriculture but has been hammered by what some are calling the worst drought in 1000 years. Authorities in Australia make no bones about the cause of this freaky weather.

"We've had big droughts before and big floods before, but what we didn't have was climate change," said Rob Freeman, the chief executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.

The Murray Darling is home to 2 million people who may not even have enough water to survive in the future. "I'd be loath to say that critical human needs will always be secure", warned Freeman.

The recent rainfall record was not the only smashed. Water inputs for three-year period ending March 2009 were less than half of the previous record from the great drought of 1943-1946.

The drainage is so dry that Lake Alexandrina at the mouth of the Murray River is now two feet below sea level. The parched lakebed high in natural sulfides is now exposed to air and oxidizing into sulfuric acid – devastating local ecosystems.

While droughts are normal in Australia, there has never been one as hot as this.

The killer heat wave in January claimed more than 370 lives – more than double the number lost during the worst wildfires in Australian history this February.

Unprecedented temperatures peaked over 45 degrees in Melbourne and averaged 12 to 15 degrees above normal throughout the State of Victoria.

While so-called climate skeptics maintain that climate change is a hoax or a big mistake, Australian firefighters who faced the grim task of battling the worst bush blazes ever came away with a different conclusion.

In an open letter the Australian Prime Minister, the firefighters union called for urgent government action to curb carbon emissions and control climate change:

"Firefighters work in conditions that most of the public try to flee. We often put our lives on the line. We understand that our job is dangerous by its very nature. However, we are gravely concerned that current federal and state government policies seem destined to ensure a repeat of the recent tragic events… Given the Federal Government’s dismal greenhouse gas emissions cut of 5 per cent, the science suggests we are well on the way to guaranteeing that somewhere in the country there will be an almost annual repeat of the recent disaster and more frequent extreme weather events."

Hard to argue with experience like that.

As the Big Dry becomes even drier, there is yet another opportunity to see climate change in action by simply looking out the window. Australia is rapidly becoming a time machine to visit what our warmer world will look like.

STV is a Bad Fit for Canada

2009-05-12T08:38:00.000-07:00

As a long-time advocate of electoral reform, with a heavy heart that I must advise my fellow British Columbians to vote against BC-STV on the May 12th.

BC-STV or “single transferable vote” is a bad fit for Canada, and if adopted here could become a mistake repeated in other provinces with potentially disastrous consequences.

The reason is that STV has an extremely poor record of representing the diversity that Canada is so renowned for, and may in fact lead to even less women being elected than our disgraced “first past the post” system that routinely returns only one in five elected female representatives.

If you watch this video of the Ontario Citizens Assembly process, you will see something that the BC citizens assembly never did. Professor David Farrell of the University of Dublin and authour of the textbook for both the BC and Ontario citizens assembly processes was asked specifically about STV and women during the deliberations in Ontario.

Professor Farrell states clearly that: “there is still this forlorn hope among STV proponents that you are going to find [more women elected under STV someday but unfortunately Ireland and Malta as the only two countries that use single transferable vote are historically right at the bottom of the heap in terms of the representation of women, so it is just not working.”

So why would the BC citizens assembly recommend a system that is even worse in terms of representing gender equity (and ethnic diversity) than our current system? Perhaps because they were never directly presented with this important information. Incredibly, gender equity was never part of the mandate of the citizen’s assembly.

This country exemplifies and celebrates diversity more than any other nation on Earth. There may be places that STV would be a better fit, but that place is not Canada.

Malta under STV elects less than 10% women, far worse than even our notoriously gender biased first past the post system. If we are going to bring in the first major electoral reform in North America, why would we want to start with a system that in many ways important to the Canadian character could be even worse than what we want to replace?

Many of these failings of STV flow from the notoriously adversarial system it uses to elect local representatives. In a single riding, literally dozens of candidates must compete for your attention, often of course by slagging their opponents.

People from the even the same political party are in direct competition against each other on a ballot that can be the size of a table cloth. Personalities like Don Cherry prevail. Those like Lester Pearson do not. It is little wonder such a gong show model attracts or elects such a paltry number of female candidates.

Likewise according to Professor Farrell, STV has a poor record of representing minority groups – another core Canadian value – in comparison to list systems like “mixed member proportional representation” (MMP).

So how did we end up in this mess? It is worth reflecting on flawed decision process imposed on the BC Citizen's Assembly in the final days of their determination. After months of mind-numbing expert presentations to lay members, the final crucial decisions were crammed into only two weekend sessions.

The enormous investment of time and effort meant there was little doubt the assembly was going to rightly recommend change. There was also a strong feeling among assembly members that they wanted to present a unanimous recommendation for an alternative model – either STV or the much more established model of MMP that has a comparatively stellar record of representing women and diversity.

In these final days, exhausted members were apparently faced with a small number of representatives (strangely from northern BC that will be very poorly served by STV) who made it clear they would block consensus if the recommendation was the MMP.

The rest is unfortunately history. In spite of the fact that fully 80% of public submissions instead supported some form of MMP, four years and two referenda later we are still stuck with a single choice: STV or nothing.

The good news is that there substantial and growing appetite for electoral reform in BC. The STV referendum in 2005 received 57% support. This was in spite of the fact that 64% of British Columbians knew “nothing” or “very little” about STV according to a Ipsos-Reid poll at the time. A second poll by Nordic Research Group poll on the eve of that referendum showed that only 37% of respondents could even name STV.

This was not for lack of trying. The BC government had mailed a 20-page explanation of STV to all 1.5 million households in the province, followed by a second mailing from the BC Referendum office.

British Columbians were voting for change. They were not voting for STV.

However, the many good people now working hard to promote STV maintain that this may be our last chance for electoral reform in BC. This is simply not true.

Five years ago it was a difficult to find more than a handful of people actively engaged on reforming our electoral system. We have since come a very long way in raising public awareness. Electoral reform is now inevitable in Canada, whether our politicians want it or not.

There is also an bizarre sentiment that STV is somehow a road to MMP. This is nonsense. If you find yourself standing at the front of a church about to be married to someone other than your true love, the time to call of the wedding is now - not after you have bought a house and had three children.

Once we change our electoral system, we will be committed to several election cycles before it can again be changed again. Untangling the mistakes flowing from the final days of citizen’s assembly process 20 years from now will be exponentially more difficult.

We soon will have had two referenda on STV. If this second one again fails, proponents of STV must admit this model is truly a loser and throw their admirable determination behind the alternative MMP model, also developed by the citizen’s assembly.

Incredibly, in spite of two referenda and hundreds of public submissions in support of it, this model has never been presented as a choice to the people of British Columbia.

Change must come to our electoral system. But not change that may make gender and minority representation in Canadian politics even worse.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer based in Vancouver. His late mother Doris Anderson, the former President of Fair Vote Canada, a strongly opposed STV.

Wilkins Ice Sheet Lost to Climate Change

2009-04-13T17:15:00.000-07:00

The latest massive piece of evidence of climate change appeared this weekend - about the size of Jamaica.

The Wilkins ice shelf off the coast of Antarctica finally disintegrated after decades of melting due to global warming. Last year it shrank by 700 square miles of area or about 14% of its size. This huge shelf was held in place by a thread of remaining ice only 500 metres wide.

The Wilkins is by far the largest ice shelf to break away so far and scientists naturally worry that this is a sign of things to come. The southern continent has warmed by 3 degrees Celsius in the last 50 years and the pace is picking up steam

The collapse comes the same weekend as a new study from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) showing one third of all Antarctic sea ice will disappear by the end of the century.

The report found that ice coverage on the Antarctic Peninsula alone has decreased by 27,000 square kilometres in the past 50 years.

Early numbers put out by SCAR suggest the collapse of Antarctic sea-ice not only pushes up anticipated sea level rises but will threaten the numbers of native animal species including emperor penguins, humpback whales and several fish species.

Their research also shows sea temperatures in the Southern Ocean are rising faster than in other oceans, and that ice melts in the Antarctic Peninsula and Western Ice Shelf will be greater and more rapid than expected.

"Ice shelves the size of small countries are crumbling away and the latest evidence from the Antarctic is showing that the effects of global warming there are increasing in magnitude," said Rob Nicoll of the Antarctic and Southern Oceans Initiative of the WWF.

Scientists were clealry surprised by how fast Wilkins fell apart. “It’s amazing how the ice has ruptured,” said David Vaughan, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey. “Two days ago it was intact.”

The connection with climate change is obvious to researchers who have been studying the area for years. Dr. Vaughan said the breakup up of Wilkins was a "really strong indication that warming is having an effect".

Wilkins was already floating so the latest breakup will not directly affect global sea levels. However researchers believe that land-based glaciers that were held back by the Wilkins ice sheet will now advance more quickly into the ocean.

Researchers last month doubled their estimates for global sea level rise by the end f the century. Places in Northern hemisphere like New York City will be particularly hard hit due to uneven distribution of rising waters and changing ocean currents in the Atlantic.

The new Obama Administration is taking a refreshingly frank view of these changes rather than the years of delay and denial that defined the Bush Whitehouse.

US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar released a statement about the Wilkins collapse saying it "demonstrates once again the profound effects our planet is already experiencing, more rapidly than previously thought, as a consequence of climate change".

This urgent sentiment is echoed by his boss. President Omaba told cheering throngs gathered at Prague Castle this weekend:

"To protect our planet, now is the time to change the way that we use energy. Together we must confront climate change by ending the world's dependency on fossil fuels by tapping the power from the sources of energy like the wind and the sun and calling upon all nations to do their part. And I pledge to you that in this global effort the US is now ready to lead."

What a difference an election makes. Lets hope its not too late for Antarctica, or the world.

Spin Over Substance in the Oil Patch

2009-04-11T13:41:00.000-07:00

Posteriors are puckering throughout the Alberta oil patch as long-overdue climate and green economy legislation moves through the US Congress.

The provincial government has responded by hiring Washington lobbyists at $500,000 per year to try and ensure whatever bill gets passed is so watered down that does not impact the dirtiest oil on Earth.

Premier Ed Stelmach of course frames it differently: "There's so much at stake for Alberta, and we'll be applying a full-court press not only on elected officials but also on the U. S. administration. It's important that Alberta has a way of ensuring the right information gets to the policy-makers and the decision-makers."

What he is worried about is that meaningful cap and trade legislation would further undermine the already marginal economics of the massive tar sands operation.

The foreign market for synthetic crude includes only one country: the United States. Who knew that one day America would move price carbon emissions? Apparently not the operators that have invested billions into the bitumen boondoggle only to see oil prices collapse and cap and trade legislation that will hit the tar sands like a two by four.

Saying this colossal capitial project is exposed on carbon pricing is a mild understatement. Synthetic crude produces at least three times the emissions as conventional oil. These emissions will increase as shallow deposits are exhausted and production moves to non-mining methods. Tar sands emissions already exceed those of 145 nations on Earth.

Any way you slice it, the cap and trade carbon pricing system moving its way through Washington may turn the tar sands into an investment quagmire.

Signs of trouble are already brewing in oil-addled Alberta. An over reliance on the tar sands mean the once-booming economy is going to contract 2% this year. The government is going to run a whopping $1.4 billion deficit for the fiscal year that just ended.

A recent report from the University of Calgary warns that a fixation on oil is leading to massive deficits and draconian government cutbacks not seen in twenty years.

"We criticize (the government) for allowing its budget to become so heavily dependent on volatile, energy-related revenues--that is a high-risk strategy; it has been tried before and has failed, with dire consequences," the report states. "It is a mistake the Alberta government must recognize and take steps to avoid as quickly as possible."

Interestingly, the highly touted “carbon capture” (CCS) solution for the tar sands has also been widely rejected by the marketplace. Nine out of twenty oil companies picked by the Alberta government to access a massive $2 billion fund to develop this dubious technology have since pulled their bids.

Such tar sands heavy weights as Suncor, Syncrude, ConocoPhillips and StatoilHydro decided this “solution” wasn’t worth their investment dollars, even if the taxpayer was also shelling out billions. This outcome is consistent with a secret government memo last year that said that CCS had very limited application for tar sands operations.

That of course has not stopped the Alberta or Canadian government from continuing to talk up the idea, particularly with the US administration. You can the bet the recent influx of public lobbying dollars into Washington will only amp up the decibels.

What’s that spinning sound I hear?

Climate Change a Hoax After All

2009-04-10T11:25:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry. What more can I say?

It was just revealed that so-called climate change actually is a hoax, perpetrated by that fiend Al Gore.

Numerous luminaries in the scientific community owned up with their own mea culpas when the gigantic ruse was revealed on this day, April 1, 2009.

With the exception of a few visionaries, virtually every scientist on Earth was taken in by the former Vice President’s compelling power point presentation. The humiliation was palpable.

“I am deeply ashamed for having unwittingly perpetuated such a massive fraud on the governments of the world,” said Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the IPCC, calling the grand climate hoax a “cunning deception spanning decades”.

“I have to admit, Al got me good,” said NASA’s Dr. James Hansen as he packed up his personal belongings at his office at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. “Despite my decades of experience in climate modeling and satellite meteorology, I would just get mesmerized whenever Gore started showing me all those fancy charts and tables. The man is a real Svengali.”

In another stunning development, a clearly chagrinned Nobel Committee revoked the peace prize granted to Gore and the IPCC in 2007, and instead honored the signatories of the Oregon Petition whose remarkable insights eclipsed that of the entire scientific community.

Reached for comment, Al Gore was clearly unrepentant of his heinous acts: “As long as I can remember, my only goal in life has been to destroy free-market capitalism and replace it with global totalitarian socialism. But it seemed that traditional methods, such as guerrilla warfare, were proving unsuccessful. Then, one day in 1988, as I was strolling through the halls of my giant mansion, it hit me: carbon dioxide.”

For a full report of these stunning developments, see this article in the Christian Science Monitor.

I extend my heartfelt apologies to those visionary skeptics who, as it turns out, were right all along.

Our Friend CO2

2009-04-10T11:21:00.000-07:00

One of the stupider arguments making the rounds in the media is that “carbon-dioxide-is-not-pollution– it’s life”.

In fact, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) produced a hilarious commercial saying just that.

Friendly footage shows how CO2 comes from little girls blowing dandelion seeds, and prancing gazelles. Then cue the ominous music: “now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant – imagine if they succeed. What would our lives be like then?”

Perhaps a bit of back-story is in order. The CEI has received a whopping $2,005,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. Their point person on climate change is the notorious Myron Ebell who is so pathologically pro-oil he once claimed that good gas mileage is a mass killer.

So what are the CEI (and their funders in the fossil fuel industry) so worried about? After decades of the atmosphere being used as a free dumping ground for astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide, the federal government is finally considering putting some regulations on our friend CO2.

It is no surprise that this proposed policy is about as popular with Big Oil as a fart in a diving bell.

The fight around CO2 regulation has been brewing for a long while. Back in 2007, the US Supreme Court found the EPA was negligent in not listing CO2 as a legally defined “pollutant” under the Clean Air Act. This designation would trigger long overdue regulation of carbon emissions – something the Bush Whitehouse was predictably opposed to.

Years of delay ensued where essentially nothing happened, other than climate change became exponentially worse. Interestingly, Myron Ebell of the CEI was accused of colluding with the Bush Whitehouse to discredit elements within the EPA that wanted to move forward with CO2 regulation.

Pitted against this immovable object was a seemingly unstoppable force. Barack Obama was elected President, and change ostensibly came to Washington.

Just last month the EPA finally submitted their carbon dioxide determination to the Whitehouse, deciding that CO2 meets the legal definition of “pollution” based on the well-known impacts climate change will have on human welfare, and almost everything else on the planet.

This is a first step on a long road towards recognizing that using the atmosphere as an unregulated dumping ground for CO2 is not only dangerous, but unfair to the taxpayer who will have to pick up the tab as our climate chickens come home to roost.

While CO2 does not stink or make your eyes burn – it is definitely dangerous in the amounts now emitted around the world:

Climate change from burning fossil fuels has been identified by experts as a greater threat to humanity than global terrorism.
Leading researchers testified before Congress just last month that large parts of the United States may be rendered an uninhabitable wasteland – perhaps within the next ninety years.
Dr. Nina Fedoroff, the chief scientist for the US State Department testified last week that carbon-driven climate change could leave one billion in famine in only forty years.

All this is being driven by ballooning levels of CO2 that have not been seen in the Earth’s atmosphere for at least the last 800,000 years.

If all that isn’t dangerous, I don’t know what is.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, why not use legislation already on the books?

The venerable Clean Air Act remains one of the most powerful tools to begin making polluters pay for the well-known impacts of climate change.

But then, what polluter wants to pay for anything? Big Coal and the oil industry are pushing back hard.

Last year, the coal industry threw $45 million at a public relations campaign, and more than $10 million on lobbying. This was largely to promote the fiction of “clean coal” to the pubic, the media and lawmakers.

Hence the ridiculous argument being puffed up in the popular press that CO2 is merely a harmless gas exhaled by little girls and gazelles.

For the record, no one is disputing that historic levels of CO2 are essential for life as we know it. It is routinely added in greenhouses (and grow-ops) to boost production.

But as they say, a little dab will do ya. Too much of a good thing, be it water, whiskey or botox will kill you. The trick is knowing how much is too much.

Of course the fossil fuel industry would like the bartender to keep pouring a long while yet. And as with any drunk, rational conversation is not always possible. Sometimes the best way to keep the party going is denying there is a problem.

You can therefore expect to hear much more nonsense from the fossil fuel lobby about our invisible, harmless friend CO2.

NASA Reneges on Transparency - Still No DSCOVR Documents

2009-04-08T11:49:00.000-07:00

It was welcome news last month when Congress committed $9 million to refurbish the long-overdue Deep Space Climate Observatory

(DSCOVR). Good start. So how about some information to go with it?

Desmog blog readers will recall the long and fruitless quest to wring documents out of NASA about the bizarre story of the DSCOVR spacecraft. This $100 million instrument was fully completed eight years ago yet has been sitting in a box in Maryland ever since.

DSCOVR was designed to directly measure climate change for the first time ever by observing our warming planet from the unique vantage of the Lagrange Point - one million miles towards the Sun.

The climate denial industry has been regularly harping on the unreliability of low Earth orbit satellite data for years. Strange then, how the very experiment that could resolve such issues was mothballed – over the strenuous objections of dozens of leading researchers.

I struggled for over a year to extract any kind of internal documents from NASA using the Freedom of Information Act and got nowhere. After 11 months of stonewalling, the space agency elected to withhold an unknown number of documents due to some very bizarre rationales. I appealed later in 2007 and was also turned down.

Then Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.... One of his first actions, only one day after inauguration was to issue a memorandum to the heads of every federal agency directing them to err on the side of disclosure and openness. The legally binding statement ordered among other things that:

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve.

What a breath of fresh air. I decided to take President Obama at his word and re-submit my FOIA request to NASA the next day.

To make it easy on the beleaguered space agency, I kept the wording almost identical. In effect, all they would have to do is look at the already collected documents from my original request, glance at the presidential directive from Mr. Obama and release most or all of the long-withheld documents.

So what happened next? Absolutely nothing.

More than two months have gone by and I haven’t heard a peep from NASA in spite of numerous emails asking for an update on the status of my request. Maybe they didn’t get the memo…

Alas there was another directive just last week from the new Attorney General Eric Holder, overturning a draconian directive from John Ashcroft in the wake of 9-11. This new policy again instructs the heads of all federal agencies to pull back the veil of secrecy that has plagued the US government for years. Specifically, this policy states:

“The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. § 552, reflects our nation's fundamental commitment to open government. This memorandum is meant to underscore that commitment and to ensure that it is realized in practice.”

Holder also makes it clear that hiding behind legal technicalities is unacceptable:

“An agency should not withhold records merely because it can demonstrate, as a technical matter, that the records fall within the scope of a FOIA exemption.”

That bureaucratic game playing is a thing of the past:

“FOIA professionals should be mindful of their obligation to work "in a spirit of cooperation" with FOIA requesters, as President Obama has directed. Unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles have no place in the "new era of open Government" that the President has proclaimed.”

The Attorney General also demands that requests be handled as quickly as possible:

“When information not previously disclosed is requested, agencies should make it a priority to respond in a timely manner. Timely disclosure of information is an essential component of transparency. Long delays should not be viewed as an inevitable and insurmountable consequence of high demand.”

In light of all that, my question to NASA is quite simply: where are my documents??

I have been more than patient for the last two months, filed a very modest request that does not require any additional document searches, and have made several failed attempts to get an update on the status of FOIA request FOIA-09-070.

The ball is your court NASA. What do you have to hide?

Slavery, George Will and Light Bulbs

2009-04-04T12:59:00.000-07:00

History is punctuated by tipping points. And at each of these transitions there are those resistant to change – raising their voices in support of they way things were or spreading fear about the emerging new era.

William J. Grayson was a respected lawyer, politician and poet in 19th Century South Carolina. Of impeccable American pedigree, his father was aide-de-camp to George Washington during the War of Independence. On the eve of the civil war, he bravely spoke out against the secessionist movement that was so popular in his home state.

Grayson was also a vocal defender of slavery, stating in 1855:

“What more can be required of Slavery, in reference to the negro, than has been done? It has made him, from a savage, an orderly and efficient labourer. It supports him in comfort and peace. It restrains his vices. It improves his mind, morals and manners. It instructs him in Christian knowledge.”

History is a cruel judge. The many prominent citizens of the day resistant to abolishing the ancient and accepted practice of buying and selling humans are now seen a greatly diminished light.

Into that storied company strides George Will of the Washington Post. Graduating from Princeton with a Ph.D in politics, he is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, author of numerous award-winning books, a former instructor at Harvard. As a commentator, scholar and journalist, he has achieved virtually everything that can be in his many chosen fields of endeavor.

And like William J. Grayson, Mr. Will finds himself squarely on the wrong side of a defining shift in history. As the world makes its first tentative steps to deal with our collective climate crisis, Will is instead lending his considerable credibility to resisting that change.

There is no doubt that fossil fuels - like slavery– have provided a cheap and convenient source of energy. And like slavery, it is long-established norm that is rapidly becoming morally indefensible.

Virtually the entire scientific community is speaking in unison when they warn of famine, drought, mass displacements, global instability, and an impoverished future unless we take concrete and immediate steps to wean our economy off a reliance on fossil fuels. Dealing with climate change is abolition equivalent of the 21st. century.

Such fundamental shifts in society are difficult enough without specious arguments from prominent opinion leaders like Mr. Will questioning even the scientific imperative for change.

Yet Will has done just that, holding forth on subjects well outside his areas of expertise such as sea ice and polar meteorology. He has embarrassed himself and the Washington Post by publishing clearly erroneous claims about our changing climate, then repeating those claims when challenged even by the very scientists that collected the data he was misrepresenting.

His latest straw man are light bulbs. In an article this week, Mr. Will descends into anecdotal arguments of how compact florescent light bulbs don’t last as long as they should, are difficult to dispose of, and somehow all this is the fault of our government’s reckless haste to move on climate change.

That anyone of Mr. Will’s stature could seriously accuse government of pell-mell panic on climate change is quite simply laughable.

For over almost two decades, the scientific community has been hectoring world leaders that carbon emissions pose a real and immediate danger to society, global security and the economy. They have stated clearly and repeatedly that the longer we wait, the more difficult and tragic will be the outcome.

And for years, carbon emissions have marched relentlessly upwards - recently accelerating beyond even the worst case scenarios considered by the IPCC.Leaders meet, words are spoken, nothing changes.

Beyond the obvious economic, political and technical challenges of shifting the world away from fossil fuels, is perhaps the greatest challenge of all: public opinion.

The voting and consuming public remains scandalously ill informed about our emerging understanding of climate science. This makes the hill far steeper for those few political leaders willing to blaze a way forward into a new era.

George Will and the Washington Post are shamefully culpable in this situation. They have contributed to inaction at the very moment of history when action is imperative.

There is no doubt that Mr. Will, like William J. Grayson, is a distinguished and accomplished citizen. And like his predecessor of the 1800’s, people a hundred years from now may instead remember him only for being on the wrong side of history.

David Bellamy Gets It Completely Wrong on Climate Change Science

2009-04-03T20:12:00.000-07:00

There’s another strong contender for the Christopher Booker Prize for Bullshit Reportage of Climate Science.

The latest challenger is David Bellamy, a former BBC broadcaster who has been holding forth on his rather hostile views on climate science.

In a video interview with a British newspaper, he calls peer-reviewed journals as “the last thing I would use now.”

Huh?

If Bellamy has indeed written off the entire scientific community, where is he getting his information to back up his remarkable claims that carbon emissions are not driving climate change?

Hard to say… George Monbiot does an admirable job of trying to unravel Bellamy’s convoluted arguments in an article last week. Let’s try and follow the faint trail of breadcrumbs dropped by the UK’s leading climate change denier.

Among other things, Bellamy maintains that a much warmer climate 2,000 years ago allowed Romans to produce “very very good red wine up in the Scottish borders.”

True? Ah…no. Here is a map of the extent of historical wine production in the UK including both the Roman and Medieval periods, published by Richard Selley, author of The Winelands of Britain.

The good news (if you can call it that) is that Scotland may be promising vineyard habitat by the end of the century due to ballooning emissions of fossil fuels.

The “fine wine” argument instead buttresses the already colossal amount of evidence that the kind of climate change we are now witnessing eclipses anything seen in the historical record.

Bellamy also contends that the famous graph produced by Dr. Michael Mann had been “taken apart and proven to be a fiddle” - a charming turn of phrase but of course entirely wrong.

The so-called “hockey stick” graph has been recalculated several times using updated data and always shows the same thing: that the climate we are experiencing now is warmer that anything in recorded history. According to the US National Academies of Science assessment of this “controversy”:

The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998,1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years.

Bellamy may instead be referring to a fraudulent graph produced by a German high school teacher that was cribbed from an early draft by the IPCC way back in 1900. This cut and paste fakery involved phony temperature scales, extended timelines and amusing claims that the fake graph was correct and the entire IPCC process was wrong. It was also promoted to many schools in Germany.

For a knee-slapping account of this flim-flammery see this account from Realclimate.org.

Bellamy also repeats a favorite refrain of climate deniers that the ice core data shows a lag between temperature increases and CO2 increases. According to him, this indicates the link between CO2 and temperature is all a bunch of hooey.

First of all, ice core data from Greenland and Antarctica dating back many hundreds of thousands of years shows that global temperatures move in lock step with atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Obviously, there is a very strong link between the two.

Secondly, scientists are not maintaining that ancient increases in temperature were initiated by increasing CO2.

For one thing, mastodons or our ancient primate ancestors did not drive cars or excavate and burn massive amounts of coal – that is something we are doing for the first time in geologic history. Prehistoric temperature increases were instead started by changes in the Sun’s output or the Earth’s orbit, and then amplified up to five times by the release of carbon in positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or CO2 release from warming oceans.

Third, this extensive ice core record is not something we should take comfort from. We are already seeing evidence of dangerous positive feedbacks which may lead to runaway climate change, whether we in the future decide to drastically reduce CO2 emissions or not. Once we start the train moving, it may pick up speed up even as we try and put on the brakes.

Speaking of ice, Bellamy also claimed in a letter to the New Scientist in 2005 that many of the world’s glaciers “are not shrinking but in fact are growing ... 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980"

His nemesis George Monbiot took the time to contact World Glacier Monitoring Service and read them Bellamy’s letter. Their response? "This is complete bullshit…Despite his scientific reputation, he makes all the mistakes that are possible."

It gets worse. Turns out that Bellamy’s “source” likely originated from a website hosted by none other than S. Fred Singer. This professional denier who has worked on behalf of the CFC, tobacco, and oil industries was ostensibly citing a “paper published in Science in 1989", stating that 55% of glaciers were growing.

Monbiot tried to find such a paper but it does not exist. This phony claim about growing graciers has been making the rounds on the internet for years and was finally put to bed by Desmog Blog last July.

It also turns out that Bellamy apparently meant to type “55%” but missed the shift key and got 555 instead. Bellamy later admitted to a “glitch of the electronics” regarding his letter to the New Scientist, yet never requested a correction be published.

So much for the robust case against climate science.

The Heartland Institute's Skeptic Handbook - Get Out the Shovel...

2009-04-01T15:20:00.000-07:00

Most climate denial material is all over the map so it is a pleasant change to have a nice clear target.

I am talking about the "Skeptic’s Handbook" that the notorious Heartland Institute is helpfully printing 150,000 copies of for distribution across the US including 850 journalists, 26,000 schools, “19,000 leaders and politicians”.

The mass printing of this climate propaganda piece is being funded by an “anonymous donor”. It is odd that “someone” feels strongly enough to shell out that kind of money but also wants their identity concealed. We do know that the Heartland Institute has been bankrolled to the tune of $676,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. Nuff said.

It is also interesting that this latest product of the denial machine is washing over the nation less than a month after the US government released their Climate Change Literacy brochure – cosigned by 13 federal agencies and 24 educational and scientific partners.

Membership in the supposed climate change conspiracy now include s such well known eco-freaks as the Department of Defense, the Department of the Interior and the US Forest Service.

The handbook itself is hilariously illogical. It coaches “skeptics” to avoid talking about the evidence of changing climate - for obvious reasons presumably. According to them, something may be heating things up, its just not carbon dioxide. Independent thinkers are instead counseled to follow these four cookbook points:

The greenhouse signature is missing
Ice Cores do not support carbon as a driver of climate change
Temperatures are not rising
Carbon dioxide is doing almost all the warming it can do.

All of these points are either entirely wrong or grossly misleading. Lets get out the shovel and start unloading this pile of manure.

The greenhouse signature is missing

Flat out wrong.

There is a clear signature that greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere and has been for years. If you thought that the scientific community had picked over this issue pretty carefully for about 100 years, you would be right. Hundreds of studies have looked at this question using mathematical analysis, laboratory studies and atmospheric observation. Modeling based on this data agrees very well with what we are seeing.

There are several drivers of temperature change on Earth, including atmospheric sulfates, volcanic ash, fluctuations in the ozone layer, changes in the Sun and greenhouse gases. Here’s what the modeling and direct observations shows:

The “missing hotspot” argument is also a favourite red herring that pops up perennially from deniers like a game of whack-a-mole.

First of all, the hotspot is not missing. Secondly, is not a signature of the greenhouse effect, it is the signature of warming from any source.

As a matter of fact, the warming profile of the atmosphere is exactly what you would expect from the greenhouse effect due to carbon emissions – namely a hotter lower atmosphere and a colder stratosphere.

Sorry deniers – that one is tossed in the tank yet again.

Ice Cores do not support carbon as a driver

Grossly misleading. Ice core data shows a very strong link between atmospheric carbon and global temperatures. What the deniers are harping on is that it appears that carbon does not start the warming, it only amplifies it.

Believe me, this is nothing to take comfort from. Ice core data dating back hundreds of thousands of years clearly shows that once warming is started due to regular fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit or solar output, it leads to massive increases in atmospheric CO2 from melting permafrost and release from the oceans. This in turn leads to positive feedbacks that amplify warming by up to five times.

The difference now is that we are jump-starting warming by dumping huge amounts of ancient carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. This is already leading to positive feedbacks like melting permafrost, and increased forest fires.

The other scary difference is that scientists believe that this time we may push past tipping points like melting the Greenland ice sheet that the planet has not seen in a long, long time. Sound like a good idea? Maybe we shouldn’t give it a try.

It is also amussing that deniers say that atmospheric carbon dioxide has nothing to do with warming, while also maintaining that it does, but it dosn't matter. You try and figure out what they are saying - I can't.

Temperatures are not rising

Politely put, this is complete crap. The clear trend is upwards and has been since about 1900 with a large increase since 1980. Here is the latest world land temperature graph from NASA – decide for yourself whether things are getting chillier.

What climate deniers love to do is cherry pick the data by starting counting in 1998 – the warmest year in the history of meteorology and one of the strongest El Nino years on record.

Another hoary old myth is the urban heat island effect – that weather stations that used to be far off in the country are now in the city surrounded by pavement and air conditioners. Believe it or not, scientists actually thought of that.

Still don’t believe the entire scientific community? Have a look at the latest graph of global temperatures for both land and oceans. Not many air conditioners floating around sea.

Carbon dioxide is doing almost all the warming it can do

Absolutely false. Saying increased atmospheric carbon is not going to make a difference is like suggesting that throwing more wood on a fire will not make it bigger.

It is true that high school physics shows that CO2 warming in the atmosphere follows a logarithmic relationship – meaning that heating from increasing CO2 does not follow a straight line. That is precisely why scientists instead talk about an atmospheric doubling of CO2 (yes, they’ve thought of that too).

Climate models predict that every additional doubling will lead to global warming of about 3°C – but some estimates put it as high as 6°C. I guess we’ll find out…

In the last 150 years, we have increased atmospheric carbon from 280 ppm to 385 ppm, and the pace is picking up speed. We are on track to hit 530 ppm by 2050.

To see what all these numbers mean, have a look at this animation from the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Norway.

Of course a real scientist making such baseless arguments among their peers would be laughed out of the room. That is why you will never ever see climate deniers make their claims in the scientific literature – only in the mainstream media. Meanwhile the voting public remains dangerously confused by this garbage. As they say, tick tock goes the clock.

The Denier’s Handbook was written not by a practicing researcher of course, but by a woman named Jo Nova whose past vocations included hosting of children’s program in Australia and touring Australia with a science circus sponsored by Shell Oil. Interesting, her former funder (the oil company) is no longer denying the link between carbon emissions and climate change in their communications with kids. Maybe she didn't get the memo.

She has at least one science-related publication to her credit: Serious Science Party Tricks ($14.95 AUD plus $2.50 postage). It does not directly relate to atmospheric chemistry however. It instead documents how to:

“Do the funniest, silliest, and most surprising tricks with things like paper, balloons, straws and flour. Simple, quick, easy and stunning. An activity book to keep you engrossed for hours!”

Hardly peer-reviewed stuff. I do not mean to disparage children’s literature, but these patently false claims are going to be distributed to 16,000 decision-makers and politicians and frankly she is asking for it.

It is also interesting that almost all of these augments seem to originate from our “rocket scientist” friend David Evans. Real climate scientists in Australia were tearing their hair out when he kept popping up in the media Down-Under claiming to have an expertise in climate science. FYI – he has not published one single peer-reviewed paper in the field.

For some excellent critiques of these old and erroneous talking points see the blog of Dr. Barry Brook, a climate scientist from the University of Adelaide, and Dr. David Karoly at the University of Melbourne. There are good eviscerations of Nova's "arguments" here.

The old field of climate science misinformation blooms anew – well fertilized by ““anonymous donors” and of course the fossil fuel industry.

Death to the CBC!

2009-03-26T11:37:00.000-07:00

Lorne Gunter recently vented his spleen about the CBC, and the National Post blowhard is clearly feeling a little threatened by the beleaguered national broadcaster.

"The CBC will never be able to exorcize its left-wing missionary zeal -- for global warming, for Islam, for big government, Barack Obama, multiculturalism, public health care, human rights commissions and so on. And it could never survive on private donations or ad revenues. So the only thing to do with Mother Corp is to pull down its office buildings and stations and pour salt in their foundations."

Besides the other perceived sins of zeal for Islam, Obama and public health care, Gunter has the gall to call for the abolition of our seventy-three year old national network due to their comparatively impeccable coverage of climate science.

I am flummoxed by my inability to describe just how dishonest and absurd Gunter’s argument is. Bear with me as I struggle to scale this seemingly insurmountable peak.

Desmog Blog readers know well how we feel about the monotonously inaccurate coverage by the National Post about the scientific understanding of climate change. I struggled to itemize all the factual errors in one single article by Gunter and could not do the subject justice in under 800 words.

On the suggestion of a Desmog Blog reader, I happily nominated Mr. Gunter for the Christopher Booker Prize for Bullshit Reportage of Climate Science, sponsored by George Monbiot and the Guardian. Godspeed Mr. Gunter – I am rooting for you.

His employer, the National Post felt it important to send reporters to the climate deniers conference in New York, sponsored by the hilariously unethical Heartland Institute. In contrast, they neglected to send correspondents to either the UN Climate conference in Poznan Poland, or the recent gathering of 2.500 of world’s leading climate scientists in Denmark.

I could go on but you get the point. I make no claim of being a brilliant researcher, but I must say unearthing the abundant errors in the work of Mr. Gunter and other staffers at the Post has been like shooting fish in a barrel with a RPG.

Now why would that be? Professional journalists are typically superb at research, fact checking and correctly citing sources – assuming they want to. In deference to their obvious skills as media veterans, one can only ask the pregnant question: are they instead willfully misleading their readers?

Which brings us to the end game of Mr. Gunter’s latest offering to his readers. There is more at play than the obvious irony of Gunter calling for the biblical destruction of the CBC due to their accurate reportage of climate science.

His employer Canwest Global Communications has raked up a crushing debt of $3.7 billion. Their share price languishes around $0.30 – after plummeting more than 97% in value in the last two years.

After two humiliating meetings with impatient creditors, their latest deadline to pony up interest payments of $30 million is April 7. What to do?

Rather than cutting costs, selling assets, or running a responsible and profitable business, CanWest has instead hired a close confident of Prime Minster Stephen Harper to negotiate some manner of structural bailout for the beleaguered media empire.

A deal straight out of the PMO would likely take the form of sweeping tax breaks or gutting regulations that would be music to the ears of Lorne Gunter and his ilk.

Meanwhile, the CBC, that has irritated and enraged the Harper government by responsibly representing climate science to the Canadian Public, has been allowed to hit the ground with a splat. Just today they announced the elimination of 800 staff positions and the sale of $125 million in assets just to keep the doors open.

No wonder.

Last year they revealed the Harper government was not being truthful when they shoveled $2.5 billion of taxpayers dollars towards the baseless band-aid of carbon capture to alleviate massive emissions from the Alberta tar sands.

Harper himself is a receptive audience for the type of climate tripe trotted out almost daily by the National Post. He referred to Kyoto a “socialist scheme designed to suck money out of wealthy nations”. This remarkable story was also broken by the CBC.

The CBC also did fine work revealing the inner workings of the Denial Machine – perhaps the most sinister public relations campaign in history, and very reason this blog was started.

And where does the rubber hit the road in such a PR campaign? Nothing as clumsy or obvious as a full page ad paid for by oil companies.

Instead it manifests in columns such as those obediently penned by the likes of Lorne Gunter, referencing the work of “a cadre of scientists who share the industry's views of climate science… trained in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases.”

Back to Lorne Gunter’s rant against the CBC. He is not merely angling on behalf of his employer in the high-stakes backroom lobbying now going on in Ottawa.

He is also campaigning in his column that one the finest foils to the dangerous drivel produced by himself and others around climate science should be dispensed with by our oil-friendly Prime Minister.

I doubt Mr. Gunter cares that much about the CBC’s coverage of Obama, healthcare or Islam. Like a teenage boy hoping to nonchalantly buy condoms at the neighborhood drug store, he has arrived at the cashier with some pop, magazines and toothpaste.

What he and the rest of the denial machine are threatened by is responsible accurate reporting on climate science – something the CBC has proven dangerously accomplished at.

Keep an eye on April 7. With such an oily regime in Ottawa, Mr. Gunter may soon get his wish.

Saying Sorry is Hard to Do (Maybe I Can Help)

2009-03-24T17:51:00.000-07:00

Lorne Gunter was wrong.

How can it be? For someone that has spread such a load of manure about climate science, it was interesting he owned up to two token errors in an otherwise typical anti-climate rant last week.

It was such a minor mea culpa however, we thought we should help him with bigger stuff. After all, the National Post has become such a sad excuse for a newspaper they don’t belong to any press council in Canada. This means that the reading public doesn’t even have a professional body to complain to.

So here we go Lorne – a quick jaunt through some of the whoppers in a single column earlier this month. If you or your editors want to take a crack at fact checking or properly citing your sources, there is something called “internet” that might help. Maybe you can try this on your own next time, assuming that’s something you want to bother with.

On March 9, Gunter proclaimed that William Happer was not a climate denier but an expert on “the interactions of visible and infrared radiation with gases”. Sounds like he has some valuable expertise on climate change.

Wrong. Happer is not a climate scientist at all. He even said so himself. His main research focus is using MRIs to image lungs.

Is he a climate denier? You be the judge. In spite of having no apparent peer-reviewed publications on climate science, he felt qualified to give testimony to the US senate on the subject.

Real climate scientists were not amused. Dr. Bill Chameides, the Dean of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Duke University wrote an excellent rebuttal to the load of dung dished out by Happer in his testimony to US lawmakers.

Another significant citiation point conveniently omitted by Gunter is that Happer is also Chair of the George C. Marshall Institute, which has received more than $700,000 from ExxonMobil. Of course, a ten second Google search by Gunter might be too much to ask of a professional journalist like himself.

Which brings us to another whopper by Gunter “The significance of Prof. Happer's statement is not that it proves global warming is false, but rather that it shows there is no consensus among respected scientists.”

So Gunter’s thesis hinges on the erroneous testimony of a single non-climate scientist, who works for an organization that has received $715,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998?

Let’s move along. There is a lot of ground to cover in this forest of errors and misinformation.

Gunter says: The feedback from atmospheric water vapor is “close to zero and may even be negative”.

Not true. Have a look at this peer-reviewed paper published last year on that very subject.

Gunter says: "additional increments of CO2 will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much CO2 ... that it has blocked most of the infrared radiation that it can."

This old red herring is regularly trotted out by deniers and has no scientific basis.

Gunter says: “Over the past decade, while carbon dioxide concentrations have continued to grow, there has been "a slight cooling," according to Happer. Any warming in recent decades, then, "seems to be due mostly to natural causes, not to increasing levels of carbon dioxide."

That is garbage. This peer-reviewed paper from last year is the latest to debunk the old chestnut of "global cooling".

Also, have a look at this global temperature graph just released by NASA and decide for yourself if the world is getting warmer or not.

Gunter says: “Kanya Kusano, program director at the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, called the IPCC's warming theories "an unprovable hypothesis."

He seems to be arguing that Japan’s leading scientists question climate science.

That’s strange. The National Academies of Science of eleven countries co-signed this declaration on climate change, including Japan.

Gunter references a “University of Wisconsin study that shows global temperatures have at least flat-lined during the past decade and that that trend could continue for another 30 years.” So climate change is nothing to worry about?

Not quite. Here is text of the actual paper Gunter is talking about.

Far from casting doubt on climate change, the authors conclude by stating:

“If the role of internal variability in the climate system is as large as this analysis would seem to suggest, warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models, given the propensity of those models to underestimate climate internal variability. “

Wow. My fingers are getting tired and that is just one of his articles. If he had to print corrections every week, there would be no room for new (or very old) deceptions, omissions or outright lies about climate science.

Harper Handout for Friends at National Post?

2009-03-20T20:02:00.000-07:00

Frequent readers know very well what I think of the outrageously inaccurate editorial position of the National Post on climate science.

I have often wondered, “Why would a paper on the verge of bankruptcy consistently print articles so clearly wrong about such a high profile issue? What’s in it for them?”

Well the murky waters are becoming slightly more clear. CanWest Global Communications, the parent company of the National Post has been bleeding red ink for years. Their crushing debt now tops a whopping $3.7 billion and the latest deadline to make a massive loan repayment is early next month.

What to do? Now comes word that CanWest has hired Ken Boessenkool to lobby the government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper for concessions to keep the doors open.

Boessenkool is not just any old lobbyist. He a close confident of Harper and the reclusive Harper doesn’t have many of those. Boessenkool worked with Harper since 2000 and was his chief policy advisor in the 2004 election. He recently was with enormous PR firm Hill and Knowlton in Calgary.

Boessenkool is also registered lobbyist on behalf a number of fossil fuel and tar sands giants including Suncor, Enbridge and TransAlta. TransAlta also has an interest in Harper’s favourite climate panacea – carbon capture and storage.

Hill and Knowlton have a long and dubious record of involvement with so called science skeptics. Way back in 1954, they designed the original campaign for the tobacco industry to deny the link between cigarettes and cancer, including drafting the infamous Frank Statement.

In 1975, they worked on behalf of the CFC industry to obscure the link between chlorofluorocarbons and the ozone hole with the help of notable skeptics such as S. Fred Singer.

Back to the National Post. Their very survival depends now depends on some kind of tax break, regulatory change or hand out from the Harper government. Being represented by close friend of the Prime Minister certainly will help. Consistently printing erroneous articles about climate change might aid their cause as well.

Harper himself has battled the entire scientific community around climate change. He has been a active opponent of international efforts to curb carbon emissions, and one of his biggest worries now is whether the Obama Administration will limit imports of tar sands oil due to concerns about climate change.

This is the largest capital project in the world, in Harper’s home province, with only one customer – the United States. To say that Harper’s friends in the tar sands business would be screwed if their one and only market dried up is an understatement.

The fate of the tar sands, as well as our changing climate, is no longer about science or public policy – it is about public opinion. The National Post been so one-sided and extreme on this front, they are almost not a newspaper at all.

In fact, I considered filing a complaint with some of the provincial press councils about the naked propaganda they regulalry publish on climate science. But guess what? The National Post is not a member of any press council in the country.

Such tiny publications as the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder, or the North Bay Nugget find the time to be involved in these professional associations, but not the National Post – only one of two national papers in the country.

That means the Post has the luxury of printing whatever dangerously wrong tripe they want and the reading public does not even have a professional body to complain to. Must be nice to never have to say you’re sorry.

All this may work in their advantage in the meetings with Harper. After all, why bother running a successful and responsible newspaper when you can instead cozy up to the oil friendly Prime Minister for a hand-out that will be refused to your competition?

While CanWest may bounce happily in a government-funded safety net, the Heritage Minister has made it clear that our national public broadcaster will be allowed to hit the ground with a splat.

The CBC is looking at a budget shortfall of $100 million and may even have to auction hard assets to keep the doors open. There will be no helping hand for them. Heritage Minister Moore instead suggested they should slash up to 1,200 positions.

It is no coincidence that the CBC has dug much deeper on climate issues, last year embarrassing the Harper government by debunking claims that carbon capture will solve emissions at the tar sands. They also have done fine journalism countering the mountain of misinformation from the fossil fuel lobby seeking to confuse the public around climate science.

Perhaps they will take comfort in these good works while they are cleaning out their desks…

In the meantime, the National Post may ironically be rewarded for their journalist malpractice. It seems that far from being a liability, their shockingly irresponsible position on climate science may prove to be one of their greatest assets.

Only in Canada.

Climate Clowns Grumpy Over New Learning Resource

2009-03-19T16:46:00.000-07:00

Climate change “skeptics” are feeling a little down today.

The US government under the umbrella of 13 federal agencies and 24 educational and science bodies just published a brochure called “Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science”.

Guess what? They all agree that climate change is not a hoax.

This 17-page document will be distributed across the nation and covers the basics of climate science, how the energy budget of our planet works and the well-known dangers of climate change.

It is also a calculated counter-attack by the US government on the creepy campaign by the fossil fuel lobby to keep the public confused about climate change.

"There is so much misinformation about climate," said Tom Karl, director of the government's National Climatic Data Center. "We want to provide an easily readable document to help everyone make the most informed decisions. Having one product endorsed by the nation's top federal science agencies, as well as leading science centers and associations, makes this document an essential resource." Karl said.

Amen to that Brother.

A poll last week showed that Americans were more badly informed about climate science than any time in the last ten years. This is a legacy of eight years of obfuscatation by the Bush administration, millions of dollars of propaganda from the fossil fuel lobby, and criminal irresponsibility on the part of many in the media.

The brochure will be an important resource to undo that damage and is being distributed by teachers throughout the country. It's also available for free download here.

The most sinister PR campaign in history would of course like to continue spinning the myth of perpetual controversy about climate science, however this learning resource is crystal clear:

"We now know that…human activities—burning fossil fuels, for instance—have had a profound influence on Earth’s climate. To protect fragile ecosystems and to build sustainable communities that are resilient to climate change—including extreme weather and climate events—a climate-literate citizenry is essential."

The goal of course the industry campaign is exactly the opposite – keep the public confused and misinformed about the most important issue of the 21^st century.

The old tobacco strategy that was so spectacularly successful in delaying meaningful regulation of cigarettes was repackaged for Big Oil. The results are seen in every day in newspapers throughout North America.

In contrast, the brochure explains in plain English what we now know about climate science, including the following basic statements that directly contradict millions in messaging invested by the carbon mongers of the world:

The overwhelming consensus of scientific studies on climate indicates that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the latter part of the 20th century is very likely due to human activities, primarily from increases in greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.

The impacts of climate change may affect the security of nations. Reduced availability of water, food, and land can lead to competition and conflict among humans, potentially resulting in large groups of climate refugees.

A combination of strategies is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The most immediate strategy is conservation of oil, gas, and coal, which we rely on as fuels for most of our transportation, heating, cooling, agriculture, and electricity. Short-term strategies involve switching from carbon-intensive to renewable energy sources, which also requires building new infrastructure for alternative energy sources.

Such plainly articulated facts, co-authored by virtually every relevant branch of the US government, are a welcome change from the impenetrable prose of the IPCC.

The spin-doctors of the world have had a field day with how unbelievably bad many in the scientific community often are at communicating with normal humans.

The professional charlatans who shill on behalf of Big Oil also never break character no matter ludicrous the lines they are given the read. A job is a job – you got a take what you can get in this economy.

However their performance just became a little more implausible for the viewing audience to swallow.

After all, it is relatively easy, in disingenuous kind of way, to cast aspersions on the green motives of Al Gore, or even poorly paid environmentalists.

But the Department of Defense? It seems a bit of stretch that they are part of some grand eco-conspiracy.

But cheer up sad clown. Maybe there will be some work denying the link between exectutive bonuses and corporate bankruptcies.

Bobbing in the Big Apple?

2009-03-16T19:14:00.001-07:00

Climate change just got a little closer to home.

We have heard a lot about potential displacements of millions in Bangladesh, or the disappearance of Tuvalu under the waves. But Manhattan?

A new study published today shows that shifting ocean currents due to human-induced climate change will raise sea levels in New York by an additional 36 centimeters by the end of the century.

That's on top of the 15 cm due to thermal expansion of the oceans in our warming world.

Then there's the impacts of melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, which scientists last week stated could double the IPCC predictions of only two years ago – to about a meter.

Let's not forget another study published in February showing that the northern hemisphere will be preferentially impacted by melting in Antarctica – adding another 30% of sea level rise in places like New York.

Doing the latest math, that could total more than 180 centimeters (close to six feet) of sea level rise in the Big Apple by the end of the century. This sea level thing is starting to add up.

Guess what? Many parts of Lower Manhattan are only 150 centimeters above sea level. Some of the most expensive real estate in the world could be under water in only 90 years. That ironically includes the Marriott Marquis Hotel where the notorious Heartland Institute held their climate deniers gathering last week.

I am sure that even if the ocean were up to their knees, such professional hucksters would find some novel way to spin how it had nothing to do with climate change.

Back in the real world, The Mayor of New York is taking these new findings very seriously.

“Climate change is real and could have serious consequences for New York if we don’t take action,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “We cannot wait until after our infrastructure has been compromised to begin to plan for the effects of climate change now.”

Bloomberg ordered urgent infrastructure investments now to deal with rising sea levels predicted by the scientific community.

These new findings also illustrate just how little we understand about how this planet works, and how insanely stupid it is to start turning knobs and pushing buttons in the absence of an owner’s manual.

Dr. Jianjun Yin of Florida State University published the latest study today in the respected journal Nature Geoscience.

He found that the titanic forces unleashed by climate change would alter ancient ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Current.

These two currents contribute to a deep ocean upwelling called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which has kept local sea levels around New York lower than they would otherwise be.

The AMOC also transports warm surface waters to the high northern latitudes, keeping Europe unusually warm given its proximity to the arctic circle.

Already, some studies have shown that the AMOC slowed by about 30% between 1957 and 2004, and it is expected to disappear further because of global warming.

This slowdown not only threatens the relatively balmy climate enjoyed in Northern Europe but will also eliminate the dynamic forces that keep the sea level lower along the US east coast.

"Some parts of lower Manhattan are only 1.5 meters [5 feet] above sea level," said Dr. Yin, a climate modeler at Florida State University. “Twenty centimeters [8 inches] of extra rise would pose a threat to this region."

The changes in ocean circulation will also bring increased risk of damage from hurricanes and winter storm surges, researchers say.

Increased sea levels and more intense storms are a nasty combination and will make the challenges of our new climate even more challenging to adapt to in densely populated areas like New York.

Buckle up those of you in the Big Apple. This climate change thing is getting more freaky all the time.

Paris Hilton and the End of the World

2009-03-13T16:10:00.000-07:00

Britney Spears is a great artist. Paris Hilton is very talented.

It seems the yawning gulf between perception and reality has never been greater.

Truer still for how the public perceives climate science. A new poll shows that 41% of Americans now believe concerns around global warming are exaggerated -the highest level of skepticism in over a decade.

This is a shocking figure given the latest scientific findings being reveled, even as we speak, at a gathering of 2,500 of the world’s leading researchers on climate change.

This chasm of opinion between the scientific community and the public shows how criminally irresponsible many in the mainstream media have been about portraying climate science, and how effective the misinformation campaign by the fossil fuel lobby has been in deceiving the average American.

Does public opinion even matter? In a voting (and shopping) society like ours, it is about the hottest commodity going. Right or wrong, any politician goes against it at their peril.

Perhaps Mark Twain said it best: “Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.”

This ancient principle is not lost on the industries of the world. The Union of Concerned Scientists showed how ExxonMobil “funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science”.

One of those groups was the Heartland Institute that just wrapped up their climate deniers conference in New York. Likewise, the coal industry last year shoveled $45 million on a PR campaign to promote the baseless idea of “clean coal”.

But shouldn’t companies be able to spend their advertising dollars any way they want?

Think of it this way: ordinary citizens rightly resent how massive lobbying efforts in Washington undermine democracy. The only difference between PR campaigns and Capitol Hill lobbying is that the person being lobbied is you.

Do these tactics work? Of course. Exxon did not become the largest corporation on Earth by making decisions that were not in their best interest. And they are certainly not going to part with their hard-earned money unless there is something in it for them.

Consider the recent media coverage of the climate conference in Denmark where 2,500 of the leading researchers on global warming are basically describing how the world is going to end. One would think that would be worthy of a bit of media ink.

Instead papers like the National Post chose to send their reporters to the climate deniers costume ball in New York.

So who was the winner in this latest skirmish for public opinion? As always, the answer is revealed by Google.

A quick internet search shows the real climate conference in Denmark generated 989 news stories. The deniers conference garnered about 112 stories. So truth won, right? Not quite.

The goal of a PR campaign like the one being waged by Big Oil is never to win the debate, just to keep it going. The now infamous 1969 memo by the PR firm Brown and Williamson to their tobacco client perhaps said it best:

“Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' [linking smoking with disease] that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

The enormous time and effort that went into the climate conference in Denmark, as well as all the underlying research, is useless unless it creates political action. The likelihood of that is severely undermined when newspaper editors decide to give equal or comparable coverage to industry-funded hacks saying there is really nothing to worry about.

While the world’s scientists continue to try in their own pedantic way to communicate the latest findings with ever-greater urgency, the forces of dumb are carrying the day.

What is at stake in this war for your mind is nothing less than the fate of the planet. If we are to make the radical shift in our economy that scientists warn we must (and fast), it is imperative that public opinion be onside. Without it, we fail.

Vested interests that would loose big if the world became a greener place know that very well. They are apparently succeeding in confusing the public about climate science - even as that science becomes more compelling, urgent, and terrifying by the day.

The vehicle for this heinous campaign of misinformation is of course the media itself. Mark Twain had some thoughts on that subject as well:

“That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditch digging and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.”

By the way, CanWest stock is now trading at 31 cents.

Truth or Consequences

2009-03-10T14:57:00.001-07:00

As the masquerade ball of phony scientists talks to itself (and of course the assembled media) in New York this week, a very different conference is happening on the other side of the Atlantic.

Hundreds of the worlds leading climate researchers are gathering at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen to discuss the latest findings about our warming world. Early dispatches are not encouraging regarding how much time we have to get serious about this crisis.

"The sea-level rise may well exceed one metre (3.28 feet) by 2100 if we continue on our path of increasing emissions," said Stefan Rahmstorf, professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "Even for a low emission scenario, the best estimate is about one metre." (Hear that Bjorn Lomborg?)

That is almost double what the IPCC estimated only two years ago.

"This means that if the emissions of greenhouse gases is not reduced quickly and substantially even the best-case scenario will hit low-lying coastal areas housing one-tenth of humans on the planet hard," the organizers warned in a statement.

The vast increase in potential sea level rise is partly due to ballooning emissions and partly due to improved understanding of the emerging science – even in the last two years.

There is something else at play as well. This conference is outside of the confines of the IPCC. When so-called skeptics call this process overly politicized, they are right – only in the wrong way.

Researchers have long complained that diplomats and politicians who draft the final wording of their assessments force them to be painfully conservative in their estimates and communications about our warming world.

The conference in Copenhagen is strictly about science and in this context the world’s leading researchers are free to tell it like it is – particularly about the need for massive and rapid reductions of carbon.

“We could pass a threshold during the 21st century that can commit the world to metres of sea-level rise," warned John Church, a researcher at the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research in Hobart. "Short-term emission goals are critical."

The importance of moving quickly is critical say scientists to avoid committing our world to centuries of devastating temperature increases.

"With stiff reductions in 2050 you can end the temperature curve (rise) quite quickly, but there's not much you can do to the sea-level rise anymore," Rahmstorf said. "We are setting in motion processes that will lead to sea levels rising for centuries to come."

The Copenhagen conference is being held in part to give politicians the minimum amount of wiggle room when they meet for the next IPCC gathering next month in Turkey. These meetings have been notoriously ineffectual and researchers are worried that the next one may follow the same well-worn path of inaction.

All of which makes the industry-funded costume party in New York all the more heinous. Politicians have a difficult enough time making courageous decisions without a bunch of Big Oil hacks playing dress-up and giving them political cover for ever more delay.

The stakes are high in this planetary game of chicken. Will it be truth or consequences? As the clock runs down, our chances to turn the global emergency around are diminishing by the day.

As one observer wryly noted, “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.”

National Post Disgraces Itself Again (Again)

2009-03-09T18:46:00.000-07:00

Lorne Gunter of the National Post disgraced himself yet again this weekend with another outrageously inaccurate column

about something he apparently knows nothing about: climate science.

Gunter held forward William Happer as his climate skeptic champion to put those hacks at the IPCC to shame. He crows that Happer "is hardly a climate change 'denier'", and is instead "one of the world's leading experts on the interactions of visible and infrared radiation with gases."

A quick internet search reveals that Happer is not climate researcher at all. His recent publications relate to MRI imaging in the lungs of rats.

Perhaps more revealing is that Happer is also the Chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute – a right wing thing tank that has received $715,000 from Exxon Mobil since 1998. The usual list of Exxon-funded hacks have also been involved with this “Institute”, including Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, and Patrick J. Michaels.

Last week Happer told a congressional committee, "I believe the increase of CO2 (in the atmosphere) is not a cause for alarm."

He went on to add: “We evolved as a species when CO2 concentrations were three or four times what are now”. A video of this testimony is available here.

Is this true? Of course not.

Here is a graph of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 for the last 450,000 years. Humans evolved as a species about 200,000 years ago.

The planet has been around for a long time and there is evidence that atmospheric CO2 hundreds of millions of years ago was higher that it is now. However, it is hardly a world that humans would want to live in.

Radically different atmospheric chemistry during the Carboniferous period allowed millipedes to grow up to ten feet long. How would you like to find this critter eating your cat food?

Happer also reassured Congress that the frightening scenario of positive feedbacks such as carbon and methane release from melting permafrost is nothing to worry about. "The feedback is close to zero and may even be negative." Prof. Happer testified.

True? Absolutely not.

A recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found many of the Earth’s ecosystems are already being pushed close to dangerous tipping points.

“Everywhere we looked, there was evidence that what was believed to be likely has happened. Nature has been cooperating with climate change theory unfortunately," warned author Dr. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University.

Other interesting insights about Happer are covered here in a telling post from one of his former colleagues at Princeton.

It is also illustrative to look at what media outlets parroted the Happer story last week - minus of course any of the quick fact checking that I just did above.

A Google news search shows that Happer's grossly inaccurate testimony was covered by such luminary publications at the American Thinker, Capitalism Magazine, and the Right Side News – in a piece penned by non other than Marc Morano.

Morano of course is former staffer of Senator Inhofe, who has made a lucrative career out of denying climate science and taking hefty donations from the fossil fuel industry.

Could it be that Lorne Gunter and the National Post are on Marc Morano’s speed dial in his new gig as a “clearinghouse and one-stop shopping' for climate and environmental news”?

The quality of Gunter’s research is so laughably bad that there has to some explanation.

National Post Disgraces Itself Again

2009-03-09T11:18:00.000-07:00

Poland is a long way from New York, and the distance illustrates the vast gulf between truth and rhetoric in how many in the mainstream media continue to cover climate science.

Last year, not a single English language Canadian news reporter was sent to cover the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Poznan in Poland.

Yet even as they teeter of the edge of bankruptcy, the National Post felt it important to have a reporter covering the climate denier’s conference held this week at the swank Marriott Marquis in New York and sponsored by the notoriously unethical Heartland Institute.

The UN Conference featured actual scientists and had the potential to generate real news on how the world might come to grips with climate change.

The Heartland Conference is instead a retread of last year’s denialpoloza, featuring the same washed up hacks on the oil industry payroll.

Unlike a real scientific conference, this event is a Potemkin village constructed to give the appearance of scientific debate, when none has existed for at least five to ten years. Yet many in the media still eat it up.

On his way to New York, Peter Foster of the National Post gushed that the Heartland conference will: “feature dozens of presentations by…top scientists and other researchers who question the conclusions of the United Nations' highly-politicized Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

One can gather how much critical thought Mr. Foster will bring to this event. He does not seem to realize or care that media like himself are the real audience of this stunt - not the public or the scientific community.

Consider the plan hatched by the American Petroleum Institute in 1998—calling for a “campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry’s views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify”.

Even eleven years later, Big Oil is still getting much mileage out of their ruse, as evidenced by the giddy Mr. Foster.

If the industry shills in attendance in New York had important new insights and data to back it up, they would surely present their findings to their peers at an actual gathering of scientists, or in peer reviewed scientific literature.

Instead, like washed-up boxers who only pick fights in bars, these skeptics restrict their pugilism to industry funded fetes rather than the bearpit of real scientific debate. And supposed journalists like Mr. Foster are of course given a front row seat.

Other National Post staffers have fallen for Big Oil’s ploy and regularly spill buckets of ink trying to convince the public that the entire scientific community is wrong about our looming climate emergency. The immorality of this, I cannot begin to fathom.

As a writer myself, I don’t begrudge journalists the ability to hold forth on whatever subject they want. The important caveat of course is that sources be properly referenced and fact-checked. Climate denial news stories inevitably are not.

The fault for this lies with those editors and television producers acting as compromised gatekeepers of what information makes it into the public discourse. Many, such as the editors of the National Post, have failed so miserably to accurately communicate our evolving understanding of climate science that it called only be called journalistic malpractice.

So enjoy your stay at the Marriott Marquis Mr. Foster. I am certain that Big Oil will make sure you are well looked after – as long as you continue to deliver their message for them.

Wanted: Coal Industry Spin Doctor - Ethics Not Required

2009-03-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

Looking for lucrative gig as a coal monger? The dirtiest industry in the world may have a job for you.

At top public relations firm working on behalf of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) is looking for a “Vice President, Paid and Digital Media” to increase the public’s “appreciation for the use of coal”.

And do they have money to burn… Big Coal is blowing more than $20 million for a massive on-line propaganda effort to spread their message that coal is “clean”. More than $3 million is dedicated to “digital media programs” and another $17 million is being shoveled towards “media placement” in mainstream outlets.

That is just a small part of the media onslaught pushing the notion that its possible to apply an unproven and expensive technological band-aid to an industry that is pushing the world towards dangerous atmospheric tipping points.

This latest PR blitz is on top of the $45 million that Big Coal spent last year, including a whopping $10.5 million just to lobby Congress.

It is not often that public gets to gaze this far into the maw of the mighty media machine of the coal lobby. Our good friends at Think Progress broke the story when a senior staff member at Center for American Progress was bizarrely approached by head hunting firm for the position, and was sent this confidential job description. It’s not confidential anymore…

Big Coal is looking for someone who will:

“Work with ACCCE’s senior staff to prepare recommended strategies and tactical plans for engagement in shaping public attitudes and in support of public policy advocacy goals.

They will judge their success on the “Effective expansion of the America’s Power campaign in digital media formats (including, but not limited to, on-line/display, social media, and other digital formats).”

Next time you get invited to a pro-coal facebook group or twittered by a “clean coal” blogger, you’ll know who to thank.

It is not surprising that Big Coal is trying to improve on previous on-line efforts promoting their filthy product. Past campaigns ideas like the coal carolers and “blogger brigade” have been laughably bad.

Beyond the $20 million budget, their on-line spin doctor will also have access to:

One (or more) national public relations/digital media PR firms
One national traditional media placement PR firm
One national digital media placement PR firm

So if "clean coal" is such a great idea, why do they need such a massive PR effort to sell it?

Besides the obvious goal of trying to insulate the coal industry from meaningful climate change policy, governments are also shoveling money out the door like never before in history. The infrastructure that will be built with this unprecedented infusion of public cash may drive public policy for decades into the future.

In other words, if government and public can be made to buy (and build) the doubtful idea that carbon capture and storage (CCS) will eliminate the massive carbon footprint of coal, it could be business as usual for the next twenty years - whether it works or not.

Strangely there is another technology that involves drilling deep holes in the ground that, unlike CSS, has been commercially proven for more than 100 years: geothermal electricity.

Imagine if we invested all the money that may be wasted on a CSS pipe-dream and instead invested in infrastructure that would generate clean, domestically produced, renewable electricity powered by the ancient heat of the planet?

A panel of experts at MIT did just that only last year, concluding that emerging geothermal technologies could supply the United States with 2,000 times the current generating needs for centuries into the future.

There's something else the coal industry doesn't want you to know: Recent figures from Credit Suisse show that geothermal electricity is now cheaper than from coal fired plants - even before future carbon pricing mechanisms like cap and trade are factored in. What’s not to like?

It’s too bad that no one is spending $65 million to promote that…

Media Digs their own Grave

2009-03-04T20:17:00.000-08:00

Wonder why Canwest Global stock is trading at about 32 cents?

Have a look at the rant today from Lorne Gunter - former editor of the now defunct Alberta Report. It seems the market for erroneous and irresponsible tripe is not as large as the editors of the National Post might think.

Last week, CanWest (owner of the National Post) had a cap-in-hand meeting with their creditors and managed to grovel out a two-week reprieve on ponying up $88 million of their mountain of debt. They are now looking for things to heave over the side to stay afloat.

Why not start with Mr. Gunter?

His latest tirade against those knucklehead climate scientists is an excellent example of why the National Post has been bleeding red ink for years.

Gunter explains how he has figured out that climate change is all a big mistake. The Earth isn’t warming – it’s cooling. Who knew?? If you are reading this Mr. Gunter, I urge you to phone the IPCC right away. I can’t believe the entire scientific community never thought of that.

For the record, here is the latest global temperature graph just released by NASA. You be the judge of whether the world is getting any chillier.

Perhaps the reason the National Post is going broke is because, like Gunter, they don’t respect the basic tenet of journalism: accuracy matters more than ideology. The Post has always erred towards the latter, an indulgence pioneered by its founder Lord Black, now cooling his heels in a Florida Jail after being convicted of fraud.

Writers like Gunter are a good fit for this world-view and their editors seem to let them print anything they want no matter how inaccurate. George Will of the Washington Post demonstrated this principle in spades recently with his hilariously backward claim that sea ice data showed that climate change was some kind of hoax.

The Washington Post took a huge hit on their credibility due to this debacle.

Interestingly, they seem to be in same morass as Canwest. The Wasington Post lost almost $200 million in 2008 and had to eliminate 231 staff. Too bad one of them wasn’t Mr. Will.

While the scientific community has been trying in their own pedantic way to warn the world about the apocalyptic consequences of burning fossil fuels, well-positioned pundits like Gunter and Will spill buckets of media ink trying to convince the voting public exactly the opposite.

It is the moral equivalent of standing in front a burning orphanage and telling the arriving fire fighters to go home because they are only shooting a movie.

This well funded PR campaign has left the developed world, particularly North America, dangerously ill informed to deal with a crisis that may leave large parts of United States uninhabitable. Many areas of the world are already there.

The delivery vehicle of this cynical of PR campaign are media outlets themselves such as the National Post and the Washington Post (as well as collaborators like Lorne Gunter). They will have much to answer for as climate change proceeds apace.

Then again, they'll probably go broke first.

Have Another Dounut Canada

2009-03-03T11:41:00.000-08:00

"Oh shit..."

Those words nicely sum up the latest scientific assessment of climate change. "We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously in climate policy," announced Dr. Chris Field at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago this month.

Professor Field was a lead author of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that just two years ago projected temperature increases this century of up to 6.4 degrees Celsius. Those worst-case scenarios now seem mild in light of recent climate change research from around the world.

Massive emissions from new coal fired plants in China and India are largely to blame, blowing the ceiling off even the most pessimistic assumptions of carbon increases this decade.

Recent data shows that greenhouse gas emissions had ballooned 3.5 per cent a year from 2000 to 2007 -- more than three times the growth rate in the 1990s and "far more rapid than we expected" said Field.

In turn, these vast increases in atmospheric carbon are opening a Pandora's box of melting arctic tundra that could unleash an ancient store of frozen carbon that would dwarf industrial emissions.

The total amount of CO2 released since the start of the Industrial Revolution more than 200 years ago is about 350 billion tonnes. How much carbon could be released by melting permafrost? About 1,000 billion tonnes -- almost three times that much. Scientists believe our warming atmosphere has already begun that dangerous process.

Worse yet, these frozen soils also contain vast amounts of methane -- 23 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2. A recent report from the UN warned:

"The potential consequences of large amounts of methane entering the atmosphere, from thawing permafrost or destabilized ocean hydrates, would lead to abrupt changes in the climate that would likely be irreversible. We must not cross that threshold. Reversing current human induced warming will help us avoid such outcomes entirely."

Sorry folks, but that's not all the bad news. It turns out that our warming world is drying out tropical forests, making them susceptible to wildfires for the first time in history. Not only would that be a biological catastrophe, it would lead to massive additional releases of carbon into the atmosphere.

"Tropical forests are essentially inflammable. You couldn't get a fire to burn there if you tried. But if they dry out a little, the result can be very large and destructive wildfires," warned Dr. Field.

"It is increasingly clear that as you produce a warmer world, lots of forest areas that had been acting a carbon sinks could be converted to carbon sources."

Maybe this global warming thing wasn't such a hot idea after all. It is becoming clear that if we go any farther down this dangerous road, we are unleashing forces that will vastly accelerate global warming, whether we reduce emissions or not.

The fork in this road of course is current carbon emissions. "Without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought," said Dr. Field.

No shit.

So what has been the response of the Canadian public to this five alarm planetary emergency? Not much. While our American counterparts have been planning a massive demonstration of civil disobedience in Washington to mount pressure on the already climate-friendly Obama Administration, Canadians have remained polite and calm.

Prime Minister Harper is no dummy and you can bet that if he felt this job was on the line due to public outrage over his awful record on climate action, he might take this file more seriously. Instead carbon emissions in Canada continue to climb, even in spite of the economic downturn. Our country has one of the worst records in the world on reducing our oil addiction and remains number seven worldwide in absolute emissions.

Consider this: Obama is investing five times as much per capita in green energy stimulus as Ottawa. While Canadians have enjoyed a sense of smug superiority to our American neighbors, those days appear to be long gone.

The reason: Canada is saddled with the tar sands -- the carbon equivalent of a drinking problem. While there continues an oil boom in Alberta, no rational discussion of this bitumen boondoggle seems possible. Remember the National Energy Program? Virtually every Albertan does. Even newly minted leader Michael Ignatieff felt the need to come to the defence of the dirtiest oil on Earth this week in an effort to build his political support in the West.

Bizarrely, the one man who can put the brakes on the tar sands isn't even Canadian. If Obama chooses to limit purchases of filthy oil from the tar sands, this project is in big trouble. There is no infrastructure to deliver synthetic crude anywhere but the U.S. Declining oil prices and global credit crisis have already put the squeeze on once-booming Alberta. If their market also dries up due to a credible cap and trade system in the U.S., the party is over.

Canada, the once proud global leader on such principled issues as fighting apartheid, land mines, and pioneering peacekeeping, now finds itself hoping that it can develop the dirtiest oil on the planet. The United States may well decline to buy it for ethical reasons. Talk about being on the wrong side of history.

Politics does not happen in a vacuum -- it flows from public opinion and action. The science on climate change is not just clear, it is terrifying. How will our nation respond?

Have another donut Canada.

Ethical Limbo at the Washington Post

2009-03-02T18:39:00.000-08:00

How low can they go? The ethical limbo dance at the Washington Post sank to impressive new depths this weekend with a column from the newspaper’s ombudsman Andrew Alexander.

He finally weighed in on the George Will debacle and took a decidedly tepid approach to this raging scandal - essentially recounting what had happened and promising no fundamental change.

The Post’s star columnist was caught in a series of egregious errors about his understanding of climate science (or lack thereof).

Specifically, Mr. Will led his readers to believe historical sea ice data indicated that climate change was all a big mistake – that ice coverage was about the same as 1979. In fact the researchers at that National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado said exactly the opposite: that vanishing arctic ice was strong evidence not just of global warming, but that we are edging into dangerous feedbacks involving melting permafrost.

Not only did George Will get it wrong once, he printed a second column reiterating his erroneous claims about the most important issue on Earth. Talk about chutzpah.

Alexander ’s explanation of this mess states Will’s piece was fact-checked by no less than four different individuals – none of whom ever contacted the research center that produced the data Will based his baseless claims on.

It wasn’t till nine days later that the center finally got an email from anyone at the Post – long after the proverbial horse had strolled out the barn and trotted down the road. In the meantime, researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center issued their own blunt clarification:

“We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.”

More disturbing perhaps is how little the Post has apparently learned from their credibility meltdown. Take this bland response from Post editor Fred Hiatt:

“It may well be that Will is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject — so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him.”

Ombudsman Alexander chimed in a similar sentiment at the end of his piece: “the Post can present a mix of respected and informed viewpoints”.

What does that mean? That political pundits will continue to hold forth on scientific matters they know nothing about under the guise of “debate”?

To be clear, this is not just about one or two badly researched, or flat out wrong, articles. This is a fundamental issue of ethics and media that has been going on for decades.

The strategy of confusing the public on industry-related science is one of the oldest tricks in the public relations playbook. A now-infamous 1969 internal memo from the Brown & Williamson tobacco company put it bluntly: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

Sounds like what Mr. Will accomplished in the last two weeks.

Then there's the similar plan from the American Petroleum Institute in 1998—calling for a “campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry’s views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify”.

(Hello? Mr. Will?)

What was old is new again. Remarkably, this chilling plan by Big Oil to use the media to deceive the public was largely ignored by news outlets when it became public.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, ExxonMobil “funnelled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science”.

Is there is any difference between the PR efforts of the tobacco industry and the world's carbon mongers? Sure. Big Oil makes Big Tobacco look like a corner store.

Fossil fuels make up the largest industrial sector the world has ever known, currently worth between $8 trillion and $9 trillion annually. That's four to five times larger than the next-largest industrial sector - cars. By that yardstick, the amount of money invested in funding climate-change deniers is pocket change to Big Oil.

Has this campaign to befuddle the public on climate science been successful? You bet. It may well go down as the most audacious, successful, and cynical campaign in public-relations history.

Consider a 2004 academic study entitled Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press—on the very subject of how climate-change science is distorted by the media. The authors analyzed media stories from the five most prestigious newspapers in the U.S.—including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal—over a five-year period to see what relative weight was being given to mainstream scientists and so-called skeptics.

“From a total of 3,543 articles, we examined a random sample of 636 articles. Our results showed that the majority of these stories were, in fact, structured on the journalistic norm of balanced reporting, giving the impression that the scientific community was embroiled in a rip-roaring debate on whether or not humans were contributing to global warming.”

The researchers found that the “U.S. prestige-press coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse…that the prestige press’s adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic [human-caused] contributions to global warming and resultant action.”

Translated into plain English: the public is being misinformed on climate science by kneejerk journalism that continues to tell both sides of the story even when there is no other side. The resultant political inaction might well kill the planet.

It seems that Big Oil's sinister plan to influence opinion leaders is succeeding with columnists like Mr. Will in ways they may not even be aware of. The most elegant PR campaigns are often so invisible.

Nobel Laureate and climate expert Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria had this advice to the media:

“What newspaper editors have to realize is that there are people out there who are using them. Rather than thinking that they are serving the public discourse, ask the question, ‘Am I being used to further an agenda?’ And the answer with the issue of climate change is ‘Yes.’ ”

There is of course a rich irony in a career scientist like Weaver seeing so clearly what is wrong with how the media covers climate change when he has had to endure so many media commentators publicly lecturing him on science.

Maybe the ethical limbo dance at the Washington Post will go even lower. Or perhaps instead they will pledge to their readers that they will restrict their editorial debate to climate policy – not climate science. Plumbers shouldn’t try their hand at brain surgery, and vice versa.

There remains a vital role for mainstream media like the Washington Post: not to foment controversy about climate change – but to debate what are we going to do about it. But until that happens, their credibility is in serious trouble.