NHL & Global Warming: A Development Of Some Note

The NHL says that climate change is real, and announces measures the league will take to fight it. They're worried that the gradual disappearance of outdoor rinks might be detrimental to the game.  And it probably will be.  Less access to free ice-time means, down the road, a smaller pool of skilled skaters to draw from  The economic argument is simple and compelling: the more you charge for something the less of it you get.

Life In Scarborough: Scarborough Youths Reject The Lure Of Tar-Sands $

Overheard a young couple yesterday in one of Scarborough's relatively upscale pubs.   He had taken her out for dinner. They were both Millennials, sporting elaborate tattoos.  He said that he had considered leaving for Fort Mac to shovel bitumen outta the tar-sands, but decided that doing so would mean selling out his values, betraying the good Mother Earth, and etc.  He didn't care about money.  Life was so much more.  Good lad. I'm pretty sure he was trying to get laid, but whatever. Back in my day, if you wanted to advertise your sensitivity creds you just threw on a VHS of any movie starring the young Matthew Modine, Birdy comes to mind, and then made sure your gal saw you tearing up  the appropriate moment.  The bar has got a little higher since the 1980s, which is a good thing.

Gruending On God And AGW

...many people seem drawn to talking endlessly about the unknowable. Yet no church that I have ever attended has placed an emphasis upon the urgent need for environmental stewardship. We appear largely uninterested in discovering how our various religious traditions might speak to practical, but profoundly moral questions that could save millions of people from an existence that may well become ever more nasty, brutish and short.

Actually, I have written several times about the "Green Evangelical movement", and in particular the Evangelical Climate Initiative, or ECI, which has called for sweeping reform to combat global warming in what it terms a "Bible-based" response to the issue. Unfortunately, I haven't heard much about these guys in the past two years, and don't know whether they are still active.

Israel Behind Global Warming Hoax?

TWO variaties of nutter, banding together to give you an even nuttier variety of nuttiness.

h/t one of my Ottawa readers

An Important Moment Tonight

...in the history of our beloved planet. Long, tough road ahead. 219-212 in the house means an uphill battle in the Senate. This is how hard it is when the adults are in charge. Greenpeace and the other groups that opposed Wasman-Markey ought to really consider shaving their freak-flags and taking a stab at intellectual maturity. Siding with the Deniers because a bill is imperfect is a disastrous strategy.

Some Distance Emerges

...between Harper and Iggy on Carbon Trading:

Ignatieff called for a common cap-and-trade system to be negotiated with the United States that would set a hard cap on emissions and define specific reduction targets.

Since the idea of a national carbon tax is dead, the only game in town is C&T. And the only halfway effective version of C&T calls for the setting of hard (rather than soft or intensity-based) caps. This statement a) places Iggy a bit left of Harper, who is still hemming and hawing over hard and soft caps and, b) moves him towards a popular, progressive American President.

Not an earth shattering bit of political positioning. Significant nevertheless.

Same Old Same Old, The Japanese Edition

The "Japanese scientists" who have "made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change" are the same brand of local deniers and retired old farts from mostly-irrelevant fields that usually publish this kind of report, except they talk like this: 資源学会はエネルギーと特に関係の深い電気・機械・化学のみならず.

Iggy On The Tar Sands

Yes this kind of thing gives me a stomach ache, but the political point of it is clear and difficult to argue with. With grownups arriving in Washington, the environmental issues surrounding the Alberta tar sands have gone global. In a sense, this is a thing to be profoundly wished for: Alberta can't threaten to secede from the United States, and with the proposed pipe-lines out of the area stalled, maybe dead, they only have but the one customer. As Gwyn Dyer argued here, the notion of Calgary employing the "oil weapon" is pathetic, so the Obama administration has both the ability and the motivation to demand serious movement on this file (motivation because, after all, the tar sands are located in a foreign land and attacking them has very little in the way of a domestic downside).

In the end, we get an Alberta that doesn't resemble the ass-side of the moon, and all is well, though as Canadians we get our noses rubbed in the fact that it is probably more useful to lobby the U.S. rather than Canadian gov. over environmental issues.

But this does not mean, as one of Steve's commenters has suggested, that Iggy (or any Canadian politician) should try and get "on the good side" of the issue. By definition, the fact that the development of the tar-sands is largely out of the hands of Canadians means it doesn't matter what side of the issue he's on. So let him pander. Its harmless and might help win a seat or two out West (though not in Alberta). I thought it was 100% puke-worthy when Dalton McGuinty renamed the 401 the "Highway of Heros", but it went down well with the public and he won relection and now in fact he probably qualifies as the "greenest" premier in the land.

Moreover, if the Libs have any smarts, Kinsella's in the back room somewhere teaching Iggy how to eat pork rinds without a fork.

h/t TPB.

Steyn's Back

...and he's boring.

A hint, Mark: "ecopalypse" has nothing going for it. Try "Warmocaust", or "Warmageddon", and refer to environmentalists as "Green Shirts". That brings the yucks every time.

On the upside, there's nothing there that would trigger a questionable content complaint. Steyn and Maclean's get to keep their millions in free government stamps (their PAP subsidy) for another week.

Don't Like The Sounds Of This

The Canadian Nuclear Association is hosting a wing-ding on the dawn of the "nuclear Renaissance" and place is going to be chock-a-block with Conservative politicians, including Lisa Raitt, Brad Wall, and Hugh Seagal.

Even T-Rex is showing up to use a lotta 12 syllable words to insult environmentalists with.

Australian Climate Sceptics Launch World's 1st Denialist Political Party

The world's first up-front political party representing climate sceptics has been launched in Australia. Their president, Leon Ashby, is an Australian Dairy Farmer and Convenor of Landholders for the Environment, which looks to be me to a property owners/rural property rights organization masquerading as an environmental group.

I would love to know whether this is a one man show or if Mr. Ashby can attract a few bodies to his cause. I know nothing of Australian politics, but if something like this showed up in Canada I would probably categorize it as another right wing fringe party that might steal a few votes from the CPoC. Good news for Kevin Rudd?

John Theon Deleted

In late January, John S. Theon began his swift ascent into the pantheon of Climate Change Deniers with the claim that he had once been James Hansen's "supervisor" and thought the guy was a crazy loose cannon even way back then.

I am proud to say that I helped put paid to such claims in this and in several other posts.

Well, you know your 15 minutes are over when they take away your Wiki entry, and Mr. Theon has lost his. The discussion can be found here, but in brief Mr. Theon was found to be "Non-notable".

Ah well, better to have had a wiki entry and have lost it, then to never have had a wiki entry at all. Some of us yearn for a wiki entry, but are never granted the honor. I, for example, yearn for a wiki entry, but have no wiki entry to show for my yearning.

h/t Stoat (the grumpy climate scientist)

Welcome Obama, About Those Tar Sands

This full-page ad appeared in USA Today on Tuesday, placed by the Mikisew Cree First Nation, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, and the environmental group Forest Ethics.

And it looks like the folks from Greenpeace have scaled Alexandra Bridge and hung a number of banners reading “Welcome President Obama” and “Climate Leaders Don’t Buy Tar Sands”. As of a couple of hours ago, they were still up. (PS. if anyone has a shot of them e-mail and I shall post)

Pity when the most effective target of your lobbying campaign are the citizens and leaders of a foreign country, but there you have it.

The Stuff Leaks...

...and so the notion of Carbon Sequestration takes another hit:

"The fact that methane gas can escape from a thick shale seafloor may demonstrate that there needs to be more research done on the integrity of geologic seals in petroleum reservoirs earmarked for CO2 injection,” says [Federico] Krause who is a professor in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary. “It shows that under different geologic circumstances gases that are present in underground formations can indeed seep out, and all the effort expended in trying to remove CO2 from our atmosphere would be lost.”

Theon Strikes Back

From comments here, a missive from John S. Theon to Marc Morano, regarding his position re James Hansen in the NASA hierarchy (which I wrote about originally here). I will post it without comment, other than to note that:


1) Hansen does not deny having met Theon, he simply claims to not recall meeting Theon. What this says about Mr. Hansen's memory is unclear. It sounds as though the two men would only have come into direct contact a couple of times a year on average, and it is quite possible that Theon played so little a role in Mr. Hansen's professional life that he was simply not memorable.

2) The concept of being "in effect" a person's supervisor comes into play again. I will just note that two men worked out of different cities and, again, Theon played no part in determining whether Mr. Hansen remained a NASA employee. Those people who have argued that you can "supervise" another under such circumstances tend to invoke the concept of "dotted line bosses" and reference the comic strip Dilbert. Not terribly convincing, as far as I am concerned.

3) Finally, Roy Spencer has been bitching how, way back when, Mr. Theon seemed a proper warmist while he (Spencer) was the guy getting oppressed by NASA for his skeptical views. Perhaps Mr. Theon can explain the evolution of his thinking from the 90s until today. Furthermore--since presumably if he was Hansen's supervisor he was Spencer's supervisor as well--perhaps he can explain who it was in the NASA hierarchy that was behind the "muzzling" of Dr. Spencer.

Marc,

It is absurd that Hansen denies ever meeting me. We have met on numerous occasions. This just demonstrates that Hansen has a poor memory.

I worked with Hansen from about 1983 to 1994 during which time he was at GISS in NYC and I was at NASA HQ in Washington DC. I retired from NASA in 1995. I had completed 37 and 1/2 years of federal service (civilian Navy, USAF, and including 33 years with NASA.)

The money came through me. We were in the Earth Observations Program which later became the Mission to Planet Earth Program. I visited GISS at least once a year to review and evaluate the GISS work. When I visited NYC, to review the research that GISS was funded to do out of the program for which I was responsible, Hansen was most cordial. When I asked him to give a lecture in Japan, he complied.

It was what it was, and no amount of denial will change that.

I repeat what I wrote to you in January: “I was, in effect, Hansen's supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation.”

Regarding some of the other attacks that have been aimed at me: I am truly appalled at the backbiting, vitriol that is sent by people who have nothing better to do than try to smear other people's reputations because they do not agree with their own thinking. To them, I recommend that they get a life.

John

While Anthony Watts Blithers

...and attempts to out-wonk McIntyre, Arctic Ice remains near the record lows of 2006-2007.

Ooooh! Pretty!

Writing about Global Warming? Need a pretty graphic to illustrate? There's tons of them at Global Warming Art, and all nicely explained too.

For example, the one above illustrates nicely this story about receding glaciers.

h/t Michael Tobis.

John S. Theon: New Elderly Denier On The Block

The lead:

James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic

Washington DC: NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.

Read on, however, and you can quickly see which way this one is going to break:

1) I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen's supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation...

Read the last bit closely. Being "in effect" Hansen's supervisor is here contrasted with being "in reality" Hansen's supervisor--being the guy who gives Hansen his annual performance appraisal, in other words--which, frankly, does linguistic violence to the term.

So, in short, Theon was never Hansen's "supervisor" in any accepted sense of the word.

2) “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” Theon wrote.

The "muzzling" of James Hansen occurred during the (2nd) Bush Administration, not during the 1980s. Having retired from NASA in 1994, Theon has no personal knowledge of the time period in question. Furthermore...

3) He's a geezer, and therefore fits the standard profile of a climate change denier.

...and he's a geezer that seems to have had some kind of conversion to AGW skepticism well after his retirement. In 1991 he seemed to be entirely comfortable with the line of Hansen's thinking as well as the use of climate models in general:

Undoubtedly, humankind is affecting the environment. Inadvertent climate system changes
brought about by mass loadings of carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), methane, etc., have thrust global change into the limelight. Radiative budget effects (i.e., greenhouse gases and global warming) and ozone depletion in the stratosphere certainly have heightened public awareness; however, climate change goes far beyond these fashionable concerns. The scientific community has to confront the myriad pieces that make up the climate puzzle. Scientists must discern the difference between natural and human-induced change, and decision makers must place the pieces in a manner that balances scientific recommendation against the demands of a higher population and an improved standard of living, which are heavily taxing the Earth's resources. be quantified and incorporated into climate models.

4) He's being working the climate skeptic "rubber chicken" circuit for about a year now, performing before such audiences as the Republican Women’s Club and the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance.

h/t to Steve from Brisbane, who did much of the legwork in the comments here.

And an update here!

Denialist Machine At Work

A short excerpt from Christopher Booker's Telegraph article on an important new paper re the the warming of Antarctica gives us a glimpse as to how such research gets treated by the Denialist movement:

One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kenneth Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed 'it is hard to make data where none exists'. A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for Nasa, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: 'with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.

1) Inflate the credentials of skeptics. Mr. Hayes appears to have visited the area exactly twice, within the past five years, though when he writes

...In the late 1980s helicopters were used to take our personnel to Williams Field from McMurdo Station due to the annual receding of the Ross Ice Shelf...

...it suggests a knowledge of the place extending back decades.

Furthermore, his brief email contains at least one demonstrably false claim:

One climate note to pass along is December 2006 was the coldest December ever for McMurdo Station.

Not so.

2) Inflate the differences among real scientists. While generally characterizing the new paper as "good work", what I think Kenneth Trenberth is objecting too is (from "Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year"):

...we use statistical climate-field-reconstruction techniques to obtain a 50-year-long, spatially complete estimate of monthly Antarctic temperature anomalies. In essence, we use the spatial covariance structure of the surface temperature field to guide interpolation of the sparse but reliable 50-year-long records of 2-m temperature from occupied weather stations. Although it has been suggested that such interpolation is unreliable owing to the distances involved1, large spatial scales are not inherently problematic if there is high spatial coherence, as is the case in continental Antarctica4.

Trenberth is one of those leery of this kind of statistical interpolation. The paper's authors think it works under the circumstances. A real, scientific exchange will perhaps ensue, and Booker will undoubtedly ignore it.

(Note: Trenberth expresses other objections, and the paper's authors answer as best they may, here.)

Economic Collapse Frees The East

Environmental activists are relieved by the indefinite shelving of an oil pipeline proposal that they say would make Ontario too dependent on "dirty oil" from Alberta and bring it to Quebec for the first time.

However, activists with Environmental Defence and ForestEthics are concerned the project put on hold by Calgary-based Enbridge could be resurrected in the future.

So they will go ahead Monday with the release of a joint report asserting the project would soon make Ontario totally dependent on Alberta's tarsands for energy security and would undermine the Ontario government's commitments to reduce carbon pollution.

The "Trailbreaker" project would have enslaved Ontario's energy future to Alberta:

Trailbreaker would reverse the flow of a pipeline that now carries crude oil imports from Montreal to refineries in Sarnia, Ont. Instead, Alberta tarsands oil would flow via Sarnia to Montreal and by pipeline to Portland, Maine, where it would be shipped to U.S. refiners by tankers.

"The impact on Ontario would be to force its refineries to rely exclusively on oil from Alberta, since other sources now imported from Montreal would be cut off," the report said. "Given that Alberta is running out of conventional oil, the proposal would mean that Ontario would receive its oil from the tarsands, which produces three times the greenhouse gas emissions as regular oil."

The project's collapse has been put down to current economic conditions. Note that the Gateway Pipeline, which would run West to Kitimat, has also run into trouble, and has been stuck in the "proposal" stage for awhile now. Some in the oilpatch have been hoping that this pipeline would allow the sale of oil to the Chinese, and therefore help Alberta avoid "greening" the tar-sands in response to any environmental initiatives from the Obama administration. With Trailbreaker also in hiatus, it looks like Alberta oil has no way to reach less finicky non-American buyers. Big Oil may have been trapped into acting in a environmentally responsible manner.