Jack Layton climate change denier | The Hill | Blogs | Toronto Sun

Jack Layton climate change denier | The Hill | Blogs | Toronto Sun

Brian Lilley has an interesting opinion of Jack Layton. The following can attest to that:

Jack Layton is a climate change denier.

Sure the NDP leader has spoken out in favour of Kyoto and demanded action on climate change at Copenhagen. Layton may have had his party produce private members bills trying to force the government to take action on greenhouse gases but in his heart of hearts Jack Layton wants your carbon footprint to go up and up.

You may now tilt your head slightly to the right and say, "huh?"

Lilley points to Layton's recent call to kill the heating tax arguing that such a move will cause carbon emissions to go up. He's right, that will likely happen if the tax is killed.

1) Jack Layton is not a climate change denier, nor am I -obviously-2) Killing the tax is a good idea. People should not have to struggle to stay warm for the sake of the planet.

The argument being put forth by Lilley is a fallacy. Accepting climate change does not mean agreeing to the method for dealing with the issue.

I have no idea what side Lilley stands on. It seems to be one of delusion.

Environmentalist Going Too Far

Punish climate change deniers - thestar.com

Rene Ebacher thinks that Harper's neglect of the environment is worthy of criminal charges:

By avoiding its responsibility to fight climate change, the government of Canada is guilty of letting millions of people suffer around the world. Stephen Harper and his “climate change denying” friends and acolytes in the business industry, should be tried under the International Criminal Court and condemned as environmental criminals.

The hyperbole being used by Ebacher is exactly the type of thing that isn't going to win the environmental movement many friends. Little explanation is given in to how the ICC would go about punishing Harper and those in the business industry. They'd have to prove that Harper and his business friends polluted the environment and thus lead to the suffering of millions. A rather curious idea as we are responsible in one way or another.

The ridiculously low amount of money promised by the Canadian government to help Pakistan makes me think of those people who buy “carbon offsets” so that they can leave their guilt at the door when they board a plane and fly all over the world.

Those dramatic events in Pakistan, in China and the fires in Russia, show us that we have to act promptly on reducing our carbon emissions. Governments around the world have to declare a “planetary state of emergency” to deal with the effects of climate change.

The events in Pakistan and Russia are of concern but here we find the all too common fallacy used by environmentalists and climate change deniers alike. Using a short-term event to explain a long-term event. There's no evidence, as far as I know, perhaps I am wrong, that these events are tied to climate change.

Radical environmentalists need to be called out for what they are. Fucking insane. They do nothing to advance the cause.

A dark ideology is driving those who deny climate change | Robin McKie | Comment is free | The Observer

A dark ideology is driving those who deny climate change | Robin McKie | Comment is free | The Observer

A good insight into the politics and motives of climate change deniers:

Life can be hard in Moscow. The Russian capital is sweltering in temperatures that reached a record 37.7C last week. Vast stretches of peat bog surrounding the city have dried out and caught fire covering Moscow with choking smog. The changing of the horse guard in Cathedral Square was cancelled as sentries wilted in traditional woollen uniforms. Elsewhere, more than 2,000 Russians – many drunk – drowned trying to cool off in lakes and rivers and at least 10 million hectares of crops have been ruined. States of emergency have been declared in 23 regions.

Nor is Russia alone. New York has baked in a thick tropical heat and humidity that is gripping eastern America. Public cooling centres have been set up while black-outs are common. In the Arctic, sea ice coverage continues to dwindle while a report last week revealed that levels of phytoplankton – tiny marine plants that are the foundation of the oceans' food chain – are plummeting, victims of global warming.

Our world is starting to sizzle as rising levels of greenhouse gases trap more and more of the sun's heat in the lower atmosphere – a point that was confirmed on Wednesday when the Met Office reported that sensors from around the world were showing that 2010 would be the hottest, or just possibly the second hottest year on record.

Either way, the news surprised many people, despite those tales emanating from New York and Moscow. A freezing UK winter and the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks – along with the damaging leak of "climategate" emails from the University of East Anglia – had persuaded many that global warming was a dead issue. If only.

In fact, that record rise in global temperatures, far from appearing unexpectedly had been predicted. Last January, the Met Office announced that it believed this year would, indeed, be a record scorcher. Given that Britain was then coated in thick snow, the prediction was brave.

It was accurate nevertheless. Western Europe and eastern America may then have been going through a grim, cold winter but other areas – including Asia and western America – were experiencing unexpectedly hot weather. The overall trend was a warming one. Few took notice, however, and the Little Englander's myopic view of the world – that only local events matter – continued to dominate newspaper columns and blogs. Global warming was nonsense, they insisted.

Thus the deniers got it wrong while climate scientists got it spectacularly right. Indeed, we should note just how prescient the latter have been. In 1999, the Met Office's head of climate modelling Peter Stott – working with Oxford University's Myles Allen and other meteorologists – published a paper in Nature on the likely impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Using temperature data from 1946 to 1996, the paper estimated future global temperatures and included a graph of a range of predicted outcomes for 2000 to 2040 with a dotted line indicating the most likely path. Crucially, for the year 2010, that dotted line showed there would be a rise of 0.8C since the Second World War– which is exactly what we are experiencing today.

So scientists not only predicted how hot this year was likely to be six months ago, they forecast a decade ago just how much the world would heat up 10 years later. Bear this in mind when deniers tell you climate science is a conspiracy or the work of charlatans. They are talking rubbish.

Such precision is encouraging for it indicates climate scientists know what they are talking about, though at a deeper level, the news is disturbing – for it is clear that few people are actually listening to this message. Why? What lies behind scientists' failure to get their warning over? Most answers have concentrated on the difficulty of explaining science – riddled as it is with uncertainties and qualifications. And to some extent, these explanations are correct. Atmospheric physics and meteorology are complex. However, there is a second, more sinister explanation, one that forms the focus of Merchants of Doubt, by US academics Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, which is to be published this month by Bloomsbury. This analysis of right-wing politics and its impact on science shows how a handful of individuals have managed to obscure the truth on issues that range from the dangers of smoking to global warming. These right-wing libertarians include such scientists as Fred Seitz and Fred Singer – who both worked on the Cold War projects such as the US hydrogen bomb project and who helped set up institutions like the US's Heritage Foundation and Marshall Institute.

Funded by corporations and conservative foundations, these outfits exist to fight any form of state intervention or regulation of US citizens. Thus they fought, and delayed, smoking curbs in the '70s even though medical science had made it clear the habit was a major cancer risk. And they have been battling ever since, blocking or holding back laws aimed at curbing acid rain, ozone-layer depletion, and – mostly recently – global warming.

In each case the tactics are identical: discredit the science, disseminate false information, spread confusion, and promote doubt. As the authors state: "Small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organised, determined and have access to power."

In Britain, links between deniers and big business are less obvious. Yet it is clear lessons have been learned and tactics copied. Consider these examples: the leaking of the "climategate" emails and the wild over-reaction to the mistaken insertion of a paragraph in the IPCC's last climate assessment, that suggested wrongly that Himalayan glaciers are melting rapidly. Both created a furore with the former revealing "a massive fraud" that represented "the final nail in the coffin" for the theory of global warming, deniers argued.

This claim was later shown to be nonsense, though it took three inquiries to establish the point. The overall effect, however, was the spread of confusion among the public and an increase in doubt about climate change. And given that the email leak involved a specific act of computer hacking, one must conclude this was the specific goal of that electronic "break-in".

In this way, scientists' warnings – that without action the world will get at least two degrees hotter this century – have been obscured by a small group of ideologues who believe individual liberties are more important than any other cause. Our planet may burn, millions may die, and cities such as Moscow and New York may smoulder, but at least we will be free of petty regulation and bureaucracy. It seems a stiff price to pay.

I do have one problem with this article, it's a point that comes up often. The confusion of weather and climate. Environmentalists need to avoid using heat waves as a way to prove their point about climate change. They should be well aware that the denialists use cold weather to prove their point. Even David Suzuki is guilty of doing this, it needs to stop.

Stephen H. Schneider, climate change expert, dies at 65

Stephen H. Schneider, climate change expert, dies at 65

By T. Rees Shapiro
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Stephen H. Schneider, 65, an influential Stanford University climatologist who parlayed his expertise on the dangerous effects of greenhouse-gas emissions into a second career as a leader in the public dialogue -- and debate -- on climate change, died July 19 in London.

His wife, Stanford biologist Terry Root, wrote in an e-mail to colleagues that her husband had died after an apparent heart attack on an airplane en route to London from Stockholm.

Dr. Schneider wrote books and more than 400 articles on human-driven global warming and its wide-ranging effects, such as a recorded rise in ocean temperature and the increasing potency and frequency of hurricanes. He conducted research on the near-irreversible damage of greenhouse gases on the ozone layer and theorized how a nuclear war might affect the climate.

The founder and editor of the magazine Climatic Change, Dr. Schneider was part of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore for international research on global warming. He advised every president from Nixon to Obama.

"No one, and I mean no one, had a broader and deeper understanding of the climate issue than Stephen," said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. "More than anyone else, he helped shape the way the public and experts thought about this problem -- from the basic physics of the problem, to the impact of human beings on nature's ecosystems, to developing policy."

One of Dr. Schneider's strongest talents as a scientist was finding vivid ways of describing the harm of global warming. He often appeared on television as a climate expert, including the HBO program "Real Time With Bill Maher."

He once told Maher's viewers that humans were to blame for global warming because of our use of the atmosphere as a "sewer to dump our smokestack and our tailpipe waste."

Carl Pope, chairman of the Sierra Club Foundation, said Dr. Schneider "had the ability to connect the dots in a way that laypeople could understand."

In the late 1970s, Dr. Schneider emerged as one of the early supporters of the theory that man-made industrial gasses were damaging the ozone layer and leading to a slow but steady rise in the temperature of Earth's atmosphere.

His passionate views on the climate debate occasionally attracted vitriol from extremist groups. An FBI investigation recently found he was named on a neo-Nazi "death list," and Dr. Schneider said he received hundreds of hate e-mails a day.

"What do I do? Learn to shoot a magnum? Wear a bulletproof jacket?" Dr. Schneider said. "I have now had extra alarms fitted at my home, and my address is unlisted. I get scared that we're now in a new Weimar Republic where people are prepared to listen to what amounts to Hitlerian lies about climate scientists."

Nonetheless, Dr. Schneider said he believed it was important for scientists to communicate with the public and spread their understanding of climate data and findings.

"If we do not do the due diligence of letting people understand the relative credibility of claimants of truth, then all we do is have a confused public who hears claim and counterclaim," Dr. Schneider said in a recent interview with Climate Science Watch. "When somebody says 'I don't believe in global warming,' I ask, 'Do you believe in evidence? Do you believe in a preponderance of evidence?' "

Stephen Henry Schneider was born Feb. 11, 1945, in New York. He was a graduate of Columbia University, where he also received a doctorate in mechanical engineering and plasma physics in 1971.

He worked as a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., for more than 20 years before joining the Stanford faculty in the mid-1990s.

Besides his wife, a complete list of survivors could not be determined.

Despite the fact that a recent study found that 97 to 98 percent of climatologists believed in global warming, Dr. Schneider acknowledged that the debate in the forum of public opinion was more divisive.

"I've been on the ground, in the trenches, for my entire career," Dr. Schneider wrote in his 2007 book, "Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate." "I'm still at it, and the battle, while looking more winnable these days, is still not a done deal."

Climate scientists often struggle in communicating to the public, Schneider was the exception. We lost a good man. Rest in peace.

Report: Oceans' demise near irreversible | The Kennebec Journal, Augusta, ME

Report: Oceans' demise near irreversible | The Kennebec Journal, Augusta, ME

Scientists Involved in Climategate exonerated

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/science/earth/08climate.html?src=mv

From Justin Gillis:

A British panel on Wednesday exonerated the scientists caught up in the controversy known as Climategate of charges that they had manipulated their research to support preconceived ideas about global warming.

But the panel also rebuked the scientists for several aspects of their behavior, especially their reluctance to release computer files supporting their scientific work. And it declared that a chart they produced in 1999 about past climate was “misleading.”

The new report is the last in a series of investigations of leading British and American climate researchers, prompted by the release of a cache of e-mail messages that cast doubt on their conduct and raised fresh public controversy over the science of global warming.

All five investigations have come down largely on the side of the climate researchers, rejecting a number of criticisms raised by global-warming skeptics. Still, mainstream climate science has not emerged from the turmoil unscathed.

Some polls suggest that the recent controversy has eroded public support for action on climate change, complicating the politics of that issue in Washington and other world capitals. And leading climate researchers have come in for criticism of their deportment, of their episodic reluctance to share data with climate skeptics, and for not always responding well to critical analysis of their work.

“The e-mails don’t at all change the fundamental tenets of the science,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado. “But they changed the notion that people could blindly trust one authoritative group, when it turns out they’re just like everybody else.”

The researcher at the center of the controversy was Phil Jones, a leading climatologist who had headed the Climatic Research Unit of a British university, the University of East Anglia. He had stepped down temporarily pending results of the inquiry, but was reinstated on Wednesday to a job resembling his old one.

The university solicited and paid for the new report, which climate skeptics assailed. “This is another example of the establishment circling the wagons and defending their position,” said Myron Ebell, director of energy and climate change policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington.

The Climatic Research Unit, often referred to as C.R.U., has played a leading role in efforts to understand the earth’s past climate. Embarrassing e-mail messages sent by Dr. Jones and other scientists were purloined from a computer at the university in November and posted to the Internet, prompting a round of accusations.

Some of the scientists were forced to admit to poor behavior, such as chortling about the death of one climate skeptic. But were the researchers guilty of any scientific misconduct?

“On the specific allegations made against the behavior of C.R.U. scientists, we find that their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt,” said the new report, led by Muir Russell, a retired British civil servant and educator.

The University of East Anglia welcomed the findings on Wednesday, declaring that an unjust attack on its scientists had been found spurious. Dr. Jones — who had said he considered suicide after the e-mail messages emerged — issued a more muted statement, saying he needed time to reflect. “We have maintained all along that our science is honest and sound, and this has been vindicated now by three different independent external bodies,” Dr. Jones said.

Last week, the second of two reviews at Pennsylvania State University exonerated Michael Mann, a scientist there who was also a focus of the controversy.

The latest report was by no means a complete vindication. Echoing the findings of an earlier report by a parliamentary committee in London, the reviewers criticized the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit for consistently “failing to display the proper degree of openness” in responding to demands for backup data and other information under Britain’s public-record laws.

On one of the most serious issues raised by the e-mail messages, the Russell panel did find some cause for complaint, but it did not issue the robust condemnation sought by climate skeptics.

The issue involved a graphic for a 1999 United Nations report, comparing recent temperatures with those of the past. Dr. Jones wrote an e-mail message saying he had used a “trick” to “hide” a problem in the data. After the e-mail messages came out, Dr. Jones said he had meant “trick” only in the sense of a clever maneuver.

The Russell panel concluded that the data procedure he used was acceptable in principle, but should have been described more fully, and his failure to do so had produced a “misleading” graphic.

The issue involved an effort to reconstruct the climate history of the past several thousand years using indirect indicators like the size of tree rings and the growth rate of corals. The C.R.U. researchers, leaders in that type of work, were trying in 1999 to produce a long-term temperature chart that could be used in a United Nations publication.

But they were dogged by a problem: Since around 1960, for mysterious reasons, trees have stopped responding to temperature increases in the same way they apparently did in previous centuries. If plotted on a chart, tree rings from 1960 forward appear to show declining temperatures, something that scientists know from thermometer readings is not accurate.

Most scientific papers have dealt with this problem by ending their charts in 1960 or by grafting modern thermometer measurements onto the historical reconstructions.

In the 1999 chart, the C.R.U. researchers chose the latter course for one especially significant line on their graph. This technique was what Dr. Jones characterized as a “trick.”

The recent season of controversy included close scrutiny of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that produces a major review of climate science every few years.

The Russell panel found little reason to question the advice that the British scientists had given to the climate panel, or the conclusions of that body. The panel declared in 2007 that the earth was warming and that human activity was the major reason.

However, small errors in the 2007 report keep coming to light. A review issued earlier this week by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency found several, including a case in which the panel overstated the potential impact of global warming on fish catches.

The Netherlands agency also found that the climate change panel had tended to emphasize the negative effects of global warming while playing down positive ones, like greater tree growth in northern climates. It recommended better balance and a greater emphasis on fact-checking.

“The idea that these things could be perfect is a fallacy,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at Columbia University. Christopher B. Field, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a leader in the United Nations climate body, said he foresaw an opportunity “to really do a better job in characterizing what we know and what we don’t know” in the group’s next report, due in 2014.

Yet another evaluation of the panel’s work is under way, with results due in August.

Dr. Pielke, who is largely persuaded by the mainstream consensus on climate change, has criticized both climate skeptics and the scientific community for the tone of their debate.

“It has been dominated for a number of years by people at the poles — the most activist scientists emphasizing alarm, versus the most ardent skeptics saying we don’t have to do anything,” Dr. Pielke said. “This recent controversy has opened the eyes of a lot of people to a much richer tapestry of views on climate policy that are out there, which I think is a good thing.”

There is No Debate Now Sit Down and Shut the Fuck Up

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/evidence-for-a-consensus-on-climate-change/

From Justin Gillis:

Many debates about global warming seem to boil down to appeals to authority, with one side or the other citing some famous scientist, or group of them, to buttress a particular argument. The tone is often, “My expert is better than yours!”

Against this backdrop, some analysts have been trying for several years to get a firm handle on where climate researchers come down, as a group, on the central issues in the global-warming debate: Is the earth warming up, and if so, are humans largely responsible?

Now comes another entry in this developing literature. William R.L. Anderegg, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, and his fellow authors compiled a database of 1,372 climate researchers. They then focused on scientists who had published at least 20 papers on climate, as a way to concentrate on those most active in the field. That produced a list of 908 researchers whose work was subjected to close scrutiny.

The authors then classified those researchers as convinced or unconvinced by the evidence for human-induced climate change, based on such factors as whether they have signed public statements endorsing or dissenting from the big United Nations reports raising alarm about the issue. Then the authors analyzed how often each scientist had been published in the climate-science literature, as well as how often each had been cited in other papers. (The latter is a standard measure of scientific credibility and influence.)

The results are pretty conclusive. The new research supports the idea that the vast majority of the world’s active climate scientists accept the evidence for global warming as well as the case that human activities are the principal cause of it.

For example, of the top 50 climate researchers identified by the study (as ranked by the number of papers they had published), only 2 percent fell into the camp of climate dissenters. Of the top 200 researchers, only 2.5 percent fell into the dissenter camp. That is consistent with past work, including opinion polls, suggesting that 97 to 98 percent of working climate scientists accept the evidence for human-induced climate change.

The study demonstrates that most of the scientists who have been publicly identified as climate skeptics are not actively publishing in the field. And the handful who are tend to have a slim track record, with about half as many papers published as the scientists who accept the mainstream view. The skeptics are also less influential, as judged by how often their scientific papers are cited in the work of other climate scientists.

“We show that the expertise and prominence, two integral components of overall expert credibility, of climate researchers convinced by the evidence” of human-induced climate change “vastly overshadows that of the climate change skeptics and contrarians,” Mr. Anderegg and the other authors write in their paper.

Climate-change skeptics will most likely find fault with this research, as they have with similar efforts in the past. For starters, Mr. Anderegg’s dissertation advisers are Christopher Field and Stephen H. Schneider, two of the most prominent advocates of the mainstream view of climate change; Dr. Schneider is a co-author of the new paper.

The climate dissenters have long complained that global-warming science is an echo chamber in which, they contend, it is hard to get published if one does not accept the conventional wisdom that humans are heating up the planet. So they argue that it is circular reasoning to claim a broad scientific consensus based on publication track records. The mainstream researchers reject that charge, contending that global warming skeptics do not get published for the simple reason that their work is weak.

In this long-running battle over scientific credibility and how to measure it, the Anderegg paper analyzes a particularly large database of climate researchers, and therefore goes farther than any previous effort in attaching hard numbers to the discussion.

Not that I actually expect the denialists to go away. They are, as the article points out, likely to find "flaws". Regardless, hopefully those who still had doubts on the consensus will be convinced.