Climate Change: In Defence of the Indefensible

BitWhys

As the public relations war over climate change drags on, it becomes ever more apparent that one side has very cleverly manipulated the other into a position where they must defend the indefensible.

You might imagine that in talking about the "indefensible," I am referring to the "sceptic's" defence of inaction - the corporate and governmental plea to ignore certain science and honour the self-destructive status quo. But that's not the case. The villains, liars and ostriches who argue against taking action on climate change have, in fact, taken the upper hand, forcing everyone else to defend two things that are almost completely without merit.

The first indefensible target is the Kyoto Accord, an international agreement that is so lame, so complex - so entirely inadequate - that serious students of climate change dismissed it out of hand when it was negotiated in 1997. Kyoto doesn't include enough countries. It doesn't set targets that are sufficient to turn the climate changing supertanker away from the rocks. And its carbon credit system is so byzantine that any implementation plan would be doomed to collapse under the weight of its own bureaucracy. It is an embarrassingly timid first step.

The second target - equally if not more wretched - is the climate change policy record of the Canadian Liberal government of Jean Chretien. In the years after originally initialing the Kyoto agreement, then-Prime Minister Chretien set up an "implementation process" that took political cynicism to new heights. This was a strategic effort designed to compromise strategy. It was a consultation plan that invited everyone to give input, but enshrined corporate backsliding while ignoring or sidetracking scientific evidence. Prime Minister Chretien was so indebted to business, and so frightened of the provinces, that he established a huge, cumbersome and expensive process that could not possibly produce a workable result. Then, figurative moments before being pushed from power, he committed Canada to Kyoto even though his "implementation process" had served only to compromise Canada's position. Not only were we left without a plan, but our greenhouse gas production had increased unforgivably.

Yet, despite the foregoing, we stand here today and plead for the new Canadian government to respect Kyoto and to honour the Liberal record, at least to the extent of not ripping apart the few climate change programs that arose in the past decade. It's indefensible.

But here's the thing. If the Kyoto critics stood up and said, "Kyoto is bad; we want something better," they would be credible, as well as clever. But they don't. They say, Kyoto is bad, so let's have the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Energy. Let's go from an accord that is inadequate and clumsy, to one that is a joke - an insincere effort to cripple the single (if risible) international agreement that is addressing the climate change crisis.

The only reason anyone could defend Kyoto is that it is better than nothing. The Asia Pacific Partnership - which advocates "voluntary" action by industry and which prohibits the participation of environmental NGOs - is nothing.

As for the Liberal record, the current Conservative administration has every right - even a responsibility - to be dismissive. Chretien, success as prime minister, Paul Martin embarrassed Canadians on the world stage and insulted our American friends (and trading partners) by scolding U.S. President George Bush during the Montreal meetings on the Kyoto agreement last winter. Bush may be deep in the pocket of the energy industry - he may be the single most destructive force in the international climate change conversation - but his country still has a better record than Canada when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

So, again, if the Tories were to say, "The Liberal record is bad; we would like to do better," we could only cheer the sentiment. But so far, the Tories have said, The Liberal record is bad, so we have withdrawn funding from every climate change program we could identify and now we intend to use the money to give tax credits for the expansion of fossil fuel production in Alberta.

That's appalling. It's an affront to every Canadian, as well as to the global environment.

Let's be clear, then: when the deSmogBlog criticizes those who would abandon Kyoto, it is not a defence of the indefensible, it is a plea for sanity, for honesty and for any action against climate change, no matter how timid. When we criticize the current government for it's attack on the Liberals' climate change programs, it is not an endorsement of that other, properly humiliated political party, it is a plea for sincerity - which seems in short supply in the executive offices of the Tory Environment Minister Rona Ambrose.

This is not a political game to be won by smirking strategists and spin-doctors. And if the clever dissemblers succeed in preventing any reasonable response to the climate change challenge, our children will not get the joke.

tamarin

BitWhys

tamarin

BitWhys

zoofer

Gore Sea Levels?
By Dennis Avery

Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth says human-emitted CO2 will boost the earth’s temperatures enough to melt the Arctic ice cap—and suddenly raise sea levels by 20 feet.

Phooey.

First of all, let’s understand just how cold the Antarctic is. Winter temperatures on its high, cold interior plateau range from 40 to 95 degrees F below zero! In the summer (December) it “warms,” with temperatures dipping only to 49 degrees F below zero—and sometimes rising within 25 degrees F of the melting point (32 degrees F). But even then, the ice reflects virtually all of the sun’s rays back out into space.

However, the world’s warming in the past 150 years has produced a change in Antarctica. The huge East Antarctic ice sheet, which contains nearly 90 percent of the world’s ice, has been thickening. European satellites measured the ice sheet’s thickness 347 million times between 1992 and 2003, and found it is gaining about 45 billion tons of water per year because the planet has warmed enough for snow to fall at the coldest place on earth.

The study, “Snowfall-driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-level Rise” was led by Curt Davis of the University of Missouri, and reported in Science on June 24, 2005.

Thickening ice in the Antarctic, in fact, is just about offsetting the meltwater being released from the edges of the Greenland ice sheet—which has also been thickening in its center. This leaves us with a global warming sea level gain of about 1.8 millimeters per year—or 4 inches per century. The rise has remained constant during the 20th century despite the moderate 0.6 degree C warming of the planet.

In the movie, a whole Antarctic ice sheet shatters on Gore’s computer screen. In the real world, that isn’t happening. It is only the Antarctic Peninsula—2 percent of the continent’s land area that sticks up toward the far-off equator—that is warming. It recently earned headlines by calving an ice floe as big as Rhode Island, not an unusual event.

But the East Antarctic ice sheet is more than 2,000 times bigger than Rhode Island, and the ice is two miles thick! John Stone of the University of Washington, reporting in Science on January 3, 2003 says the West Antarctic ice sheet has been retreating so slowly for the past 10,000 years that it still has not fully accommodated the end of the last Ice Age, and apparently still has about 7,000 years of ice to melt—and the East Antarctic ice sheet is melting even more slowly than that.

So. Al Gore says Antarctic melting will suddenly raise the sea levels by 20 feet, and the experts say 4 inches per century. Seth Borenstein, an AP science writer, did a column on June 27 headlined, “Scientists OK Gore’s Movie for Accuracy.” The dean of environmental studies at Duke is quoted as saying “He got all the important material and got it right.”

Were they talking about the same movie I saw? Gore overstated the impact of global warming on the Antarctic glaciers by about 50-fold. Or did he mean that 7000 years was “sudden”? How can so-called scientists applaud his accuracy either way?

Dennis T. Avery was a senior policy analyst for the U.S. State Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement. He is the co-author, with atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, due in October from Rowman & Littlefield.

http://acuf.org/issues/issue65/060807med.asp

BitWhys

July 21, 2006

Al Gore once told me that to get politicians to listen, you have to engage the people first. The former vice president is attempting to do just that this summer with his critically acclaimed global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." But he's up against some pretty powerful opponents.

His movie, by most standards, is pretty good. Rotten Tomatoes, a website that compiles movie reviews from newspapers, television and the internet, shows that 92 per cent of critics liked it. A story by the Associated Press on experts who critiqued the science behind the movie found that they too gave it a thumbs up for accuracy. Personally, I thought it was brilliant.

But shortly after the Associated Press article came out, other articles started popping up that said Mr. Gore's science was shoddy. People claiming to be experts wrote opinion pieces in newspapers decrying the film, Mr. Gore, and the "theory" of global warming in general. Contrarians, it seemed, were coming out of the woodwork. What happened?

What happened was a well-funded campaign to discredit the film and carpet bomb North Americans with confusing and contradictory information about the science of global warming. It appears to be having an effect too. Recent polls I've seen indicate that while the public is very concerned about climate change, they are still confused about the science.

Those who read science journals probably find this public confusion, well, confusing. While there is plenty of discussion in scientific circles about what precisely a changing climate will mean to people in various parts of the world, there is no debate about the cause of global warming (human activities, mostly burning oil, coal and gas), or about the fact that it is already having an effect and that those effects will become more and more pronounced in coming years.

Yet, there they are in the editorial and opinion pages, supposed experts writing about the grand global warming conspiracy perpetuated by Europeans. Or socialists. Or European socialists. Those in the know can laugh off such nonsense. But the problem is, most people aren't in the know. Average citizens are busy people and they are not experts in climate science, so naturally they tend to defer to people who appear to know what they're talking about.

Unfortunately, masquerading as an expert in the media is pretty easy. All you need are a few letters after your name and a controversial story to tell. That makes news. And there's no shortage of public relations people willing to spin a good tale - usually for a tidy profit. Companies pay big bucks to have these spin doctors work their magic and make sure the industry line gets heard.

But even some of public relations' best-known spin doctors are disgusted by what's going on right now over global warming. Jim Hoggan is one. He's a personal friend who happens to be president of one of western Canada's largest public relations firms, James Hoggan and Associates. And he's so appalled at what he says is deliberate manipulation of public opinion about this issue that he's started a website called desmogblog.com to debunk the global warming skeptics.

Jim writes in his blog: "There is a line between public relations and propaganda - or there should be. And there is a difference between using your skills, in good faith, to help rescue a battered reputation and using them to twist the truth - to sow confusion and doubt on an issue that is critical to human survival. And it is infuriating - as a public relations professional - to watch my colleagues use their skills, their training and their considerable intellect to poison the international debate on climate change."

Well said, Jim. His blog makes fascinating reading. It names names and follows the money trail - often leading back to big U.S. conservative organizations and fossil fuel giants. Jim's making it his mission to expose the liars and the frauds and he's doing a pretty good job.

Al Gore was right, the people do have to be engaged before politicians will listen. But engaging the people sometimes requires clearing the air first.

tamarin

Toro

What we really need is a massive reduction in human population. With such a precipitous drop, funding for pie-in-the-sky hopefuls like the Oil Sands will vanish overnight. Growth is the only god humans really recognize and it's killing the planet. Climate change can be solved by focusing on its catalyst first. Are we brave enough to do it?

bluealberta

zoofer

what form of global warming caused the Dirty Thirties??

elevennevele

Being over 50 and sober most of the time, as one poster put it, I can also say that I have seen weather patterns come and go, and in listening to my dad and his dad, who were both farmers, they saw a lot of weather patterns over the years too. BTW, what form of global warming caused the Dirty Thirties??

http://hcs.osu.edu/hcs300/biome.htm

Fertility declines after clearance and the soils quickly become useless for agriculture. The loss of diversity, productivity and fertility make clearance a threefold tragedy. (Countries are driven to clearance by their burden of debt not by wickedness.)

http://www.englishdiscourse.org/edc.1.1ryals.html

The Dust Bowl:
From the Roaring Twenties to the Dirty Thirties
Mary Ryals

There are various theories explaining the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. In Donald Worster's article, "Grassland Follies: Agricultural Capitalism on the Plains" he considers the main reason to be a combination between nature and economics. Indeed, the grasslands were torn apart by entrepreneurs trying to get rich in the 1930s. It resulted in neglect of the land's needs. The combination of millions of acres being torn apart and the natural drought brought circumstances that led to the Dust Bowl.

Millions of entrepreneurs headed to the Great Plains to make a buck, yet lacked the knowledge to understand what the effects millions of acres of overworked land would cause. "Nor was it exclusively or primarily drought that disrupted the ecological system of the Plains; it was humans and the economic culture pushing them ahead" (Worster 213). With their lack of consideration of the consequences for the land, mass production of wheat conjured the historic Dust Bowl. "A long series of willful human misunderstandings and assaults led finally to a collapse whose origins were mainly cultural" (Cronon 134. As Worster suggests in his thesis: "Whether defined as climate, as vegetation, as the presence or absence of water, as soil and topography, or more compositely as ecosystem and biosphere, nature has been a force to be reckoned with in social evolution"(206). Worster is arguing his point, and relaying the points of other writers, specifically Walter Prescott Webb and James Malin, in order to harden his argument. Worster clearly believes nature should strongly be considered when dealing with social and economic changes in order to prevent problems that erupt due to the combination of natural circumstances and economy.

Worster illustrates his beliefs and reasons for writing his article at the beginning when he states, "My main purpose here is to move toward a cultural explanation for this disaster, one that will, when complete, be adequate to its significance and alert to its complexity" (207). Without considering circumstances of the natural effects, human made scenarios conflicted with already hazardous natural conditions. People were working the land to the core trying to become rich. As Worster states: "For a few at least they made the region say money instead of grass" (214). It seemed as though the old fashioned love for the land was replaced by a dream to become wealthy.

Karlin