AGW Denial, The Greatest Scam in History?
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If we are supposed to be cutting back on fossil fuels why have refineries in western canada all doubled (even tripled) in size over the past 5 years or are being expanded as we speak?
Why is the plan to use CO2 as a solvent to INCREASE oil production? Why are oil companies poised to make the lion's share of the sequestering dollars?
Oh and what the **** is "clean coal"?
Why is the plan to use CO2 as a solvent to INCREASE oil production? Why are oil companies poised to make the lion's share of the sequestering dollars?
Oh and what the **** is "clean coal"?
Well, yea, the existing government is under fire for just this very reason. Canada was at the forefront of the Kyoto protocol and then became the most reviled country at COP15 for not keeping to their promises. Increasing oil production was not a solution to this situation at all as conservative government will never make C02 reductions a priority over making easy money.
The Fiberals never had any intention of living up to Kyoto, they just signed it and proclaimed themselves to be planet savers.
Kyoto was flawed anyways.
True, the liberals eventually revised their plans to enact a $10 billion dollar plan to reduce emissions by 270 million tonnes by 2012 - which was half of what the Kyoto protocol originally dictated. Very poor effort on their part, but I guess the science in 2005 wasn't conclusive enough for them.
When the conservatives stepped in, they scrapped that milestone entirely and now instead of cutting, we're expected to have an increase of 139 million tonnes between now and 2020 - and one-third of that amount is due to petroleum production and refining.
I would agree with us living 'conservatively' if we could get away with it, but now is just not the time. The economy needs to be put aside for more important issues.
CBC News In Depth: Kyoto
Canada and the Kyoto Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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True, the liberals eventually revised their plans to enact a $10 billion dollar plan to reduce emissions by 270 million tonnes by 2012 - which was half of what the Kyoto protocol originally dictated. Very poor effort on their part, but I guess the science in 2005 wasn't conclusive enough for them.
When the conservatives stepped in, they scrapped that milestone entirely and now instead of cutting, we're expected to have an increase of 139 million tonnes between now and 2020 - and one-third of that amount is due to petroleum production and refining.
Anyway, stupid politicians are stupid..
CBC News In Depth: Kyoto
Canada and the Kyoto Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
True and because of this the issue about AGW became political instead of an issue of science.
Weather-related disasters are here to stay, say scientists
China is witnessing its worst floods in decades, particularly in the northwest province of Gansu. It was reported in 2007 that rains had increased in northwest China by up to 33 per cent since 1961. AP PHOTO
By Chris J Hanley, Associated Press
Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat.
From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Pakistan, a sweltering southern Ontario and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.
The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says — although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming. The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia's heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They'll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America, under United Nations, U.S. and British government sponsorship.
"There is no time to waste," because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott.
He said modelers of climate systems are "very keen" to develop supercomputer modeling that would enable more detailed linking of cause and effect as a warming world shifts jet streams and other atmospheric currents. Those changes can wreak weather havoc.
The U.N.'s network of climate scientists — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves, and more intense rainfalls. In its latest assessment, in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning panel went beyond that. It said these trends "have already been observed," in an increase in heat waves since 1950, for example.
Still, climatologists generally refrain from blaming warming for this drought or that flood, since so many other factors also affect the day's weather.
Stott and NASA's Gavin Schmidt at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, said it's better to think in terms of odds: Warming might double the chances for a heat wave, for example. "That is exactly what's happening," Schmidt said, "a lot more warm extremes and less cold extremes."
The WMO did point out, however, that this summer's events fit the international scientists' projections of "more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming."
In fact, in key cases they're a perfect fit:
Russia is having the hottest summer on record, sparking drought, wildfires and smog. REUTERS PHOTO
RUSSIA
It's been the hottest summer ever recorded in Russia with Moscow temperatures topping 38C (100F) for the first time. The drought there has sparked hundreds of wildfires in forests and dried peat bogs, blanketing western Russia with a toxic smog. Moscow's death rate has doubled to 700 people a day. The drought reduced the wheat harvest by more than one-third.
The 2007 IPCC report predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires during dry years. It also said Russia would suffer large crop losses.
The heaviest monsoon rains on record have fallen, affecting 14 million in Pakistan. GETTY IMAGES
PAKISTAN
The heaviest monsoon rains on record — 300 millimeters in one 36-hour period — have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of countryside. It's left 14 million Pakistanis homeless or otherwise affected, and killed 1,500. The government calls it the worst natural disaster in the nation's history.
A warmer atmosphere can hold — and discharge — more water. The 2007 IPCC report said rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia's monsoon region.
At least 1,117 people are dead after floods in the Chinese province of Cansu. AFP/GETTY IMAGES
CHINA
China is witnessing its worst floods in decades, the WMO says, particularly in the northwest province of Gansu. There, floods and landslides last weekend killed at least 1,117 people and left more than 600 missing, feared swept away or buried beneath mud and debris.
The IPCC reported in 2007 that rains had increased in northwest China by up to 33 per cent since 1961, and floods nationwide had increased sevenfold since the 1950s. It predicted still more frequent flooding this century.
The biggest ice island to break away from the Arctic in half-a-century has been spotted. (REUTERS)
ARCTIC
Researchers last week spotted a 260-square-kilometre chunk of ice calved off from the great Petermann Glacier in Greenland's far northwest. It was the most massive ice island to break away in the Arctic in a half-century of observation. The huge iceberg appeared just five months after an international scientific team published a report saying ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is expanding up its northwest coast from the south.
Changes in the ice sheet "are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated," said one of the scientists, NASA's Isabella Velicogna. In the Arctic Ocean itself, the summer melt of the vast ice cap has reached unprecedented proportions. Satellite data show the ocean area covered by ice last month was the second-lowest ever recorded for July.
The melting of land ice into the oceans is causing about 60 per cent of the accelerating rise in sea levels worldwide, with thermal expansion from warming waters causing the rest. The WMO'S World Climate Research Program says seas are rising by 3.4 millimeters per decade, about twice the 20th century's average.
Worldwide temperature readings, meanwhile, show that this January-June was the hottest first half of a year in 150 years of global climate record keeping. Meteorologists say 17 nations have recorded all-time-high temperatures in 2010, more than in any other year.
Scientists blame the warming on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pouring into the atmosphere from power plants, cars and trucks, furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning industrial and residential sources.
Experts are growing ever more vocal in urging sharp cutbacks in emissions, to protect the climate that has nurtured modern civilization.
"Reducing emissions is something everyone is capable of," Nanjing-based climatologist Tao Li told an academic journal in China, now the world's No. 1 emitter, ahead of the U.S. But not everyone is willing to act.
The U.S. remains the only major industrialized nation not to have legislated caps on carbon emissions, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week withdrew climate legislation in the face of resistance from Republicans and some Democrats.
The U.S. inaction, dating back to the 1990s, is a key reason global talks have bogged down for a pact to succeed the expiring Kyoto Protocol. That is the relatively weak accord on emissions cuts adhered to by all other industrialized states.
Governments around the world, especially in poorer nations that will be hard-hit, are scrambling to find ways and money to adapt to shifts in climate and rising seas.
The meetings of climatologists in the coming weeks in Paris, Britain and Colorado will be one step toward adaptation, seeking ways to identify trends in extreme events and better means of forecasting them.
A U.N. specialist in natural disasters says much more needs to be done. Salvano Briceno of the U.N.'s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction pointed to aggravating factors in the latest climate catastrophes: China's failure to stem deforestation, contributing to its deadly mudslides; Russia's poor forest management, feeding fires; and the settling of poor Pakistanis on flood plains and dry riverbeds in the densely populated country, squatters' turf that suddenly turned into torrents.
"The IPCC has already identified the influence of climate change in these disasters. That's clear," Briceno said. "But the main trend we need to look at is increasing vulnerability, the fact we have more people living in the wrong places, doing the wrong things."
By Chris J Hanley, Associated Press
Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat.
From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Pakistan, a sweltering southern Ontario and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.
The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says — although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming. The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia's heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They'll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America, under United Nations, U.S. and British government sponsorship.
"There is no time to waste," because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott.
He said modelers of climate systems are "very keen" to develop supercomputer modeling that would enable more detailed linking of cause and effect as a warming world shifts jet streams and other atmospheric currents. Those changes can wreak weather havoc.
The U.N.'s network of climate scientists — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves, and more intense rainfalls. In its latest assessment, in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning panel went beyond that. It said these trends "have already been observed," in an increase in heat waves since 1950, for example.
Still, climatologists generally refrain from blaming warming for this drought or that flood, since so many other factors also affect the day's weather.
Stott and NASA's Gavin Schmidt at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, said it's better to think in terms of odds: Warming might double the chances for a heat wave, for example. "That is exactly what's happening," Schmidt said, "a lot more warm extremes and less cold extremes."
The WMO did point out, however, that this summer's events fit the international scientists' projections of "more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming."
In fact, in key cases they're a perfect fit:
Russia is having the hottest summer on record, sparking drought, wildfires and smog. REUTERS PHOTO
RUSSIA
It's been the hottest summer ever recorded in Russia with Moscow temperatures topping 38C (100F) for the first time. The drought there has sparked hundreds of wildfires in forests and dried peat bogs, blanketing western Russia with a toxic smog. Moscow's death rate has doubled to 700 people a day. The drought reduced the wheat harvest by more than one-third.
The 2007 IPCC report predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires during dry years. It also said Russia would suffer large crop losses.
PAKISTAN
The heaviest monsoon rains on record — 300 millimeters in one 36-hour period — have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of countryside. It's left 14 million Pakistanis homeless or otherwise affected, and killed 1,500. The government calls it the worst natural disaster in the nation's history.
A warmer atmosphere can hold — and discharge — more water. The 2007 IPCC report said rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia's monsoon region.
At least 1,117 people are dead after floods in the Chinese province of Cansu. AFP/GETTY IMAGES
CHINA
China is witnessing its worst floods in decades, the WMO says, particularly in the northwest province of Gansu. There, floods and landslides last weekend killed at least 1,117 people and left more than 600 missing, feared swept away or buried beneath mud and debris.
The IPCC reported in 2007 that rains had increased in northwest China by up to 33 per cent since 1961, and floods nationwide had increased sevenfold since the 1950s. It predicted still more frequent flooding this century.
The biggest ice island to break away from the Arctic in half-a-century has been spotted. (REUTERS)
ARCTIC
Researchers last week spotted a 260-square-kilometre chunk of ice calved off from the great Petermann Glacier in Greenland's far northwest. It was the most massive ice island to break away in the Arctic in a half-century of observation. The huge iceberg appeared just five months after an international scientific team published a report saying ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is expanding up its northwest coast from the south.
Changes in the ice sheet "are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated," said one of the scientists, NASA's Isabella Velicogna. In the Arctic Ocean itself, the summer melt of the vast ice cap has reached unprecedented proportions. Satellite data show the ocean area covered by ice last month was the second-lowest ever recorded for July.
The melting of land ice into the oceans is causing about 60 per cent of the accelerating rise in sea levels worldwide, with thermal expansion from warming waters causing the rest. The WMO'S World Climate Research Program says seas are rising by 3.4 millimeters per decade, about twice the 20th century's average.
Worldwide temperature readings, meanwhile, show that this January-June was the hottest first half of a year in 150 years of global climate record keeping. Meteorologists say 17 nations have recorded all-time-high temperatures in 2010, more than in any other year.
Scientists blame the warming on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pouring into the atmosphere from power plants, cars and trucks, furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning industrial and residential sources.
Experts are growing ever more vocal in urging sharp cutbacks in emissions, to protect the climate that has nurtured modern civilization.
"Reducing emissions is something everyone is capable of," Nanjing-based climatologist Tao Li told an academic journal in China, now the world's No. 1 emitter, ahead of the U.S. But not everyone is willing to act.
The U.S. remains the only major industrialized nation not to have legislated caps on carbon emissions, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week withdrew climate legislation in the face of resistance from Republicans and some Democrats.
The U.S. inaction, dating back to the 1990s, is a key reason global talks have bogged down for a pact to succeed the expiring Kyoto Protocol. That is the relatively weak accord on emissions cuts adhered to by all other industrialized states.
Governments around the world, especially in poorer nations that will be hard-hit, are scrambling to find ways and money to adapt to shifts in climate and rising seas.
The meetings of climatologists in the coming weeks in Paris, Britain and Colorado will be one step toward adaptation, seeking ways to identify trends in extreme events and better means of forecasting them.
A U.N. specialist in natural disasters says much more needs to be done. Salvano Briceno of the U.N.'s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction pointed to aggravating factors in the latest climate catastrophes: China's failure to stem deforestation, contributing to its deadly mudslides; Russia's poor forest management, feeding fires; and the settling of poor Pakistanis on flood plains and dry riverbeds in the densely populated country, squatters' turf that suddenly turned into torrents.
"The IPCC has already identified the influence of climate change in these disasters. That's clear," Briceno said. "But the main trend we need to look at is increasing vulnerability, the fact we have more people living in the wrong places, doing the wrong things."
A youtube experiment.. You're kidding aren't you.
What was that you were saying about rhetoric?.. It might help if you didn't rely on youtube as the basis of your "science"
No of course not....just comment on it or post the experiments you have done.
Well, if you want experiments, you might as well start with the classics.
Tyndall, J, 1861. On the absorption and radiation of heat by gases and vapours, and on the physical connexion of radiation, absorption, and conduction.—The bakerian lecture.
This paper is still being cited by current papers in our modern era.
The youtube video you so flippantly ignore, is basically a modern equivalent of a classic piece of science.
And as for scalable, the atmosphere of our planet is the upper bounded experiment. Plenty of others have already shown the proof of concept. Studying the past and using observations allows climatologists to place bounds on the sensitivity of our climate to perturbations. An excellent paper is Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity (subscription required). The authors narrow the uncertainty often quoted using multiple observational datasets, something I think you will particularly enjoy as it is an efficient piece of science, as in it is not a single factor at a time investigation.
Tyndall, J, 1861. On the absorption and radiation of heat by gases and vapours, and on the physical connexion of radiation, absorption, and conduction.—The bakerian lecture.
This paper is still being cited by current papers in our modern era.
The youtube video you so flippantly ignore, is basically a modern equivalent of a classic piece of science.
And as for scalable, the atmosphere of our planet is the upper bounded experiment. Plenty of others have already shown the proof of concept. Studying the past and using observations allows climatologists to place bounds on the sensitivity of our climate to perturbations. An excellent paper is Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity (subscription required). The authors narrow the uncertainty often quoted using multiple observational datasets, something I think you will particularly enjoy as it is an efficient piece of science, as in it is not a single factor at a time investigation.
Here it is without having to pay the money, http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/research/d5/jdannan/GRL_sensitivity.pdf
Interesting study although somewhat cursory.
A few points:
It appeared that the central premise had to do with CO2 acting as the "culprit" which invariably sets up the direction of the study. That said, a couple of potential factors were recognized (section 3.1) but essentially dismissed (possibly due to the doc being a summary?). Further, other than mention of radiative forcing, no mention of solar inputs and the potential additive element.
By the admission of the authors requiring elements of "necessarily subjective" reasoning (inputs), the paper is in no way implicit support for a smoking gun.
Good cartoon... If the proponents of AGW spent as much time on cartoons. they might have the semblance of a chance of making an argument.
Are you serious? Where exactly do you think the energy is coming from that a greenhouse gas molecule is absorbing and re-emitting?
See, that's your problem. In all of your questions, you want to see conclusiveness, and a smoking gun. You ask for experiments, I give you the pioneering experiment, and you complain that it's not a smoking gun for anthropogenic climate change. That's not possible to find in one study. Then you ignore everything else that has ever been posted or studied. So you can't put together pieces.
You might as well pray to the deity of your choice for all of the gains in understanding the universe. Because that's the only way you'll ever get what you are looking for. Best of luck.
Dead serious and I'm talking about the same energy source that is (likely) responsible for the observed warming on Mars.
I want conclusiveness because that is exactly what you are selling. Don't pretend otherwise.
That said, if you choose to submit "studies" that are not comprehensive, don't get all upset that I identify that component... This goes to the many comments that I've made in which I've stated that the system is far too complex to critically analyze, in a truly comprehensive manner such that solid conclusions can be drawn that point to definitive causation.
Better going with hundreds of thousands of years of historical events than prostrating myself in front of the IPCC alter and worshiping idols of Gore and Suzuki.