Thank you. Scale is everything...but don't think too hard, you'll scare everyone! That's why I love this blog. Well Said!!!

Excellent post, thank you for the context.

Excellent post, thank you. I've always enjoyed Vitruvius' posts here, and shall add "The Sagacious Iconoclast" to my bookmarks.

Just read the synopsis of the Gun Registry. This program is undoubtedly one the Liberals used to funnel our money to their friends. The figures just don't "add up" any other way.

If Harper is elected to a majority, all of us non-Liberals must demand a thorough investigation into the GR.

Relating back to Vitrivius' statements about the culture of fear propagated by media and politics, it would seem that they know "big numbers" shock and can be used as fear-motivation manupulators.

Are they really innumerate in the mSM or are they skilled at sensationalizing and shocking?

...this is a matter of perspectives.

What is a million dollars? Say for a person earning $100,000/year that would be 10 years worth. Hockey players make ~3million per year on average.

Someone making $50,000/year, that would be 60 years worth, or a lifetime.

Now it isn't something to hear about paving a road costs $1 million per mile or to do an interchange $240 million.

Million doesn't mean anything anymore.

But what we miss from the statistics is other variables caused by the discussion, pollution, smoking and such.

Like how much ground water is being tainted, or how much traffic, pollution, and garbage is caused by oil refineries and sometimes gross lack of control? Heck the stability of an economy based on oil? Everyone is in for the quick buck. No tomorrow.

Smoking. What about the enjoyment of others around who don't smoke? What about dry cleaning costs, or litter by smokers, heck forest fires by butt tossers? I remember working in a military office where literally at 6' there was a smoke bank and funnels coming up from almost every desk where cigarettes were burning in their ashtrays. Now you don't see that.

While Kyoto was a farce, it did start people thinking about the future again. Where people missed it was the problem lays with air pollution caused by vehicle and industry exhausts. Ever been to Mexico City or Beijing?

Heck, Calgary on a thermo-inversion day...yuk.

Sometimes, the only way to get people to do something productive and to think beyond today is to use fear mongering.

While I agree with Vit, the media is great at skewing stats, but that's how they sell papers - fear, and doom. Humans love being scared and watching the results of it.

Attest to rubberneckers going by an accident.

In answer to WL Mac: Both.

Longer answer, they have a personal and institutional agenda which is very robust in it's resistance to inconvenient facts. Plus, they are English (or French) majors.

I'm with you, tomax. Some things cause damage and some don't. Oil runoff and road salt cause damage. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen compounds cause damage.

CO2 and private gun ownership don't. But what is everybody raging on about? Guns and Kyoto.

That's why Greenies and socialists in general irritate me. They're so busy lying about things that are entirely benign that they rush right past the stuff that's actually dangerous. You wanna see pollution, check out a Russian paper mill.

Advice to Conservatives who want to be in the majority: fix stuff that's actually broke.

True Phantom but we also see they have a knack for making astronomical figures seem minute or reasonable...thery way they covered up the Liberal spending on the gun registry for example.

It appears that the underpinning core competency of the MSM is to manipulate public opinion and market this skill/influence to the highest bidder.

Martha Hall Findlay perpetuates the "chicks are bad at math" stereotype:

"Ten months later we arrived in Montreal on a growing wave of support. Our 40 delegates turned into 130 votes on the first ballot. No other team could claim a 300% increase in support on that ballot."

An increase from 40 to 130 is an increase of 225%, not 300%. This math error has been prominently displayed on the front page of Hall Findlay's website for months.

http://www.marthahallfindlay.ca/

Excellent Post. Saved it last night for reference.

Keep this post in mind when Dryden starts blathering about universal daycare . Those fools couldn't even catalogue firearms in Canada for all the money spent , and they want us to entrust our children to their stewardship ? Same thought for Kyoto . Boggles the mind to think what would be spent on either by the Libs .

Respectfully Thomax,
"Like how much ground water is being tainted, or how much traffic, pollution, and garbage is caused by oil refineries and sometimes gross lack of control? Heck the stability of an economy based on oil? Everyone is in for the quick buck. No tomorrow."
I am afraid you are missing the point. We all know that pollution is a problem and should be cleaned up.
The problem is the focus on CO2 is a distraction that takes the focus away from the real pollution that is taking place like the ground water by oil companies you refer to.

What is of great concern to me is that while we chase the false pollutants the real problem grows.
For example in Saskatchewan enormous swathes of the north is being contaminated by radioactive tailings from old uranium mines. Every year hundreds more acres are be contaminated as the wind drifts the tailings with hardly a mention because it’s not sexy to people like Gore or Albatross.
Chasing the non-pollutants like C02 will do far more damage to the environment (and the world's poor) in the long run because it diverts our attention from the real problems out there.

My favorite is that 50% of all doctors were in the botton half of their class.

I wouldn't get too bent out of shape by mine tailings. In one famous example from years past, a tailings pond broke through its banks and ran into a creek - dispersing radioactive water into the stream.

What they didn't mention was that the natural level of radioactivity was higher in the creek than in the tailings pond, and that the spill was in effect, a dilution...

The portion of green-house gasses that is CO2 is about 1% or 0.01. Thus, the portion of green-house gasses that is human produced CO2 is about 0.03% or 0.0003. The heat-trapping effectiveness of CO2 compared to the average of green-house gasses is about 10% or 0.10. Thus, the portion of the green-house gas global warming caused by human CO2 is about 0.003% or 0.00003 or 30 millionths.

Hey Vitruvius,

That's fascinating. Can you provide a link so I can see more?

I'm not disputing you, I'd just like to read further.

Also, to help put the costs of the gun registry into perspective, consider that for the equivalent of 1 billion Canadian dollars (850 million $US), NASA bankrolled not one, but TWO Mars Rover missions:

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_701703555/Mars_Rover.html

"Assembly, test, launch, and a year of operations of each rover cost about $425 million, or about the same amount of money as it cost to make the movies Titanic (1997) and Pearl Harbor (2001)."

I hope, Albertaman, that your post was meant to prove the point. Considering the "couple hundred acres" that you are talking about is approximately .00000155 of the total surface area of Saskatchewan, I would hardly consider that to be an ENORMOUS swath of the north. As others have said, the hyperbole takes away from the really important issues.

1 billion loonies... If you toss one every 30 seconds into the toilet and flush... I'll come back and see how you're doing in 5 years and their'll still be 95% of the pile there... that's with no rest breaks or stops, 24/7... you'd roughly flush away 1 million bucks a year... there's perspective.

Yes scale is a lot but be careful because scale isnt everything.

Adscam. The argument used against anything being an issue in Adscam was that relative to Federal Govrnment spending the amount pilfered was small and therefore not worth doing anything about.

SO along with scale the missing element is legality, morality and scale on a personal level. It wasnt much to the federal government but it was a lot to the individuals who tapped it.

Scale is important but it isnt everything.

In regards to problems like CO2 emissions scale is definitley predominant.

Just thought I would be pedant and keep this from sliding too far in one direction.

Vit

excellent post

and a point(scale)I'v been making for a few years, but being not quite as articulate as yourself, have not been able to express it quite so, thusly I'v stolte your post for future use, and will accredit as your work,

thanks muchly

Here's some perspective..

1 million seconds is (11)eleven days..
1 billion seconds is (33)years..

do the math!

oops....that should have been 99.5%...no ones perfect :P

9 hours, well they need to be exposed.

tarred and feathered too.

Thanks Vit,

will save for another day for sure.

They also use the ruse "it ONLY works out to a cup of coffee a day per Canadian" or with the new Kyoto/Carbon tax "it ONLY equals a pizza per family per week."

My favourite is 12 billion dollars. This number is hardly mentioned in the eastern media lexicon. This is Alberta's overpayment to Ottawa. It works out to about $3600 per Alberta, ONLY. Or for my family that's $18,000. Where's my personalized golf balls?

Tomax: What is a million dollars? .... Someone making $50,000/year, that would be 60 years worth, or a lifetime..
Wouldn't that be 20 years? :)

Vitruvius: Damn, damn, damn, I thot I had you there with the 0.00003 or 30 millionths. Not so fast Vit, I thot, why that's 3 100,0000ths not 30 millionths. :)

I've been fascinated by numbers and percentages for a long time. Remember the financial reporting, "Dow has biggest point loss in stock market history" with no reference to the index level and related percentage decline; this has now improved. Or think of the money management business: say a $500,000 portfolio at 2% per year. Are you gonna charge $10,000 a year by client cheque or 2% or even better 0.02 inside the fund? Why the latter of course: way smaller and invisible.

me no dhimmi's law of the imprecision of round numbers: a few years back got a call from a unilingual Chinese girl from CRA telling me my payroll was gonna be audited. Correctly sensing that intimidation would work, I told her to go away and go after non-compliant taxpayers. Then I sat at the desk for a while wondering how that just came outta the blue for the first time in 20+ years. Then it hit me like a 2x4: heh, I sent in a cheque for exactly $5,000. Round number. Looks quick and lazy, like a guestimate. Since then I make sure that all cheques are uneven, preferably not repeating any numbers: e.g., $4,987.23. Looks like you really worked hard at that determination.

Or ask the average person what percentage he would need to make to break even after losing 50%. Amazing how few people get that right away.

Or ask people how much they need to take out of a RRSP to clear $5,000 after 30% income tax withholding. Very few can figure it out.

Vitruvius: Excellent. A keeper for the quotations file -- good ammo for the next climate injustice debate. I remember your Steyn Letter of the Week most vividly. Kinda like the Nobel prize, eh?

The media use the same trick when reporting 'excessive' bank profits or revenues. The question to ask is: "What percentage is it of total investment?" or "How much is that in dividends on shares?"

I have the same request as Jason Bo Green. Can you please provide links? I'm interested in reading further and using this info in discussions on Global Warming. Thanks.

I'm with you 110%.

"What is of great concern to me is that while we chase the false pollutants the real problem grows. For example in Saskatchewan enormous swathes of the north is being contaminated by radioactive tailings from old uranium mines. Every year hundreds more acres are be contaminated as the wind drifts the tailings with hardly a mention because it’s not sexy to people like Gore or Albatross." (Albertaman 11:59 A.M.)

Well, yes, pollution is pollution. But the sole aim of the eco-fearmongers appears to be a redistribution of wealth, and the facts be damned! Can't set up a uranium tailings credit purchasing scheme (or sulphur dioxide, road salt, etc... credit purchasing schemes)... not quite enough uranium tailings emitters to make a difference vis-a-vis moving money from producers of wealth to consumers of wealth. CO2 credits are a socialist utopia.

Here's some math for ya. I'm going from memory but here goes...
A 20 year old sets aside $3000 per year in after tax income for 40 years, investing each dollar with a good, grey, solid mutual fund which charges an annual Management Expense Ratio (MER) of 2.25%.
At age 61, our investor figures his investments have earned him exactly 10.00% compounded annually (no redemptions were ever made, nor has tax paid on the as yet unrealized gain) on the $120,000 he's invested; he has accumulated some $1,460,000 over the 40 year span.
At a 2.25% annual fee to manage this investor's money, the fund company has collected roughly $390,000 from him... close to $33,000 in the last year alone. The kicker... if he invested the money himself in the same boring companies old companies his managers invested the money in, his annual return would have been 12.53%; compounded annually, his same $120,000 investment would have grown to around $3,000,000! Think I've got the math right... stand to be corrected.

I'm not suggesting everyone go out and fire their money managers; these people collect 2+ percent annually for a reason; not every person, maybe even not most people, can invest with success. My purpose was to show that a little bit of math knowledge coupled with some perspective can go a long way to opening peoples' eyes.

Interesting post. Your point about innumeracy is well taken; everything needs to be placed in context. 0.1% of the Red Deer River sure sounds a lot less than 300000000 L (that’s about the annual water usage of 3000 people). I think the reason so many people are concerned is, unlike municipal wastewater which is treated and discharged, the water used by the oil industry is so polluted that it is taken out of the hydrological cycle and stored in tailings lagoons. Currently, technology such as reverse osmosis and distillation is not economically viable. So that’s 0.1% of the rivers annual discharge gone. I certainly don’t need to tell you that’s 1% in ten years – and I haven’t heard anyone suggest Alberta’s oil industry is shrinking.

drew:" ... I certainly don’t need to tell you that’s 1% in ten years"

To funny ... try the math again.

drew (3:08 P.M.)
More context. The Red Deer River comprises what percentage of all of Alberta's fresh water?

ON a completely different note.....has anyone had the chance to see if Cherniak has made a comment about the six Canadian Soldiers killed today?
Given the post he removed, I'm sure he's breathing a sigh of relief his visitors no longer see the comments he made in the past. Truth be told, to date, the only people I've heard of who actually WANT Canadian soldiers to die in Afghanistan, are the Taliban, the NDP, and some Liberal strategists who think it will play well to their anti-American and pacifist supporters. If you're reading this Jason, be honest with yourself. What were your first thoughts upon hearing of these deaths?
1. This should help the Liberals
2. Glad I removed that post
or
3. I mourn for the families of these men.

Given your extreme partisanship, I can't but help think you picked door number 1.

And if I'm right....then perhaps you should spend less time worrying about Dion's fortunes, and more thought on the good fortune you have to live in a Country made possible by men like those killed today.

some more figuring and numbers for scale.

all the oil production in the world is not as much as the flow of the Bow river in July.

If you burnt all the oil reserves in world , not just the daily production, all of it , every drop discovered to date in a magic burner under the ocean instantaneously the energy released would not raise the temperature of the ocean by 0.1 degree. Direct 100% recovery energy.

If you recovered all the C02 from the magic burner from burning all the oil in the world and converted it to limestone via saltwater saturation you would not get enough limestone to make 10 of the exposed part of Mt. Rundle.

Spills are always in litres yes.
and really no one is more upset than the oil company over a oil spill other than maybe the company that lost the ship. not only is the cargo lost, the cost of the spill , the constant harping from the press. and to think 60 years ago in the second world war. these kinds of sinkings were done on purpose.

and flow levels. Red Deer river is less than 5% because Alberta has some biggen rivers, clearwater, peace , athabasker, north saskratch ur bum

Very interesting post but you lost me with the smoking analogy. Smoking doesn't kill? But you say that it tends to reduce life expectancy by a few years. Interesting. I suppose you could say that if you don't die from lung cancer you will die from something else. Eventually.

Fact is, and it is much more proven than the so-called global warming science, smoking kills and it kills absolutely. Terms like "shortens life expectancy" try to mask the fact that smoking kills. Do some vehicle accidents kill or do they just tend to shorten life expectancy. A fatal gunshot wound may have severely shortened a person's life expectancy but it certainly did kill him or her. Same goes for the guy who died of lung cancer because he smoked. It killed him.

I love this post! totally true! and "a different Bob" you missed the point. yes we will die from smoking but the point is it is irrelevant based on our lifetime. Those 90 year old codgers in retirement homes don't give a shit about the effects of smoking. Yet the government sees fit to ban it there. Am I the only one shaking my head at this nonsence?

Good points, as usual, Vitruvius. Something that always chokes me is how GHGs are quoted "per capita". As Kate says, it is the dose that makes the poison and it is the amount of a pollutant per unit volume (or surface area) of the earth that counts.

On average, in Saskatchewan, we have a mere 1.72 people per square kilometre generating waste, while Alberta's average is 5.1 and Canada's is 3.2, and (for comparison) the UK's is 246 (all figures from Wikipedia). Now with 48 times as many people per square kilometer as Alberta, Great Britain hasn't been devastated and sterilized by pollution; from what I hear first hand (and have seen from the plane) it is one of the lushest islands on the planet.

Ignoring density/concentration places tremendous costs on us with little to no benefit. As a small, but maddening, example, the rural municipality I grew up in has now been ordered by Sask. Environment to close their small garbage dump (most farm 'dugouts' are larger) as a punishment for unauthorized burning of garbage. This at a time when there are less people living in that community than in at least the last hundred years and garbage had historically always been burnt with no ill effect.

Kind of like when AL GORE had 4 million gallons of water released from a dam in conneticutt so he could do a ad paddling his cannoe what a hypotcrit gore is

Speaking of the dangers of smoking, the shoemaker in my home town,in Manitoba, was an old gentleman from Russia who left to escape the Communists after WW1.

He was a tiny little man, looked like the model for Geppetto, and was a superb craftsman. He always had a hand rolled cigarette in his mouth, while he worked.

Once I had a pair of shoes re-soled, about 1961, and I only had a dollar, so when I went to pick them up, I was a bit worried that I wouldn't have enough money.

I asked how much it was, he replied, "twenty five cents". Relief! The new soles lasted until the boots wore out.

Nice old guy, absolutely Hated the Communists, and died at one hundred and five years of age.

Make that "Too funny"

Drew ... in case you didn't get your error. If you drink one cup of coffee per day for one year, it doesn't mean you drink 10 cups a day for 10 years.

Kate you should e-mail the post to Dr. Heidi Cullen at the weather channel and Al Gore just for shitz and giggles, if you recieve a response post it!

E-Mail? Drive it over in the Dodge.

More numbers games: Income inequality.
The focus on the spread between the "rich" (anyone with a car less than 5 years old) and the "poor" (people without high speed internet) without focusing on income growth at the bottom.

Which would the "social justice" set prefer: bottom decile making $20K per year and the top decile making 10x or $200K per year OR, bottom decile making $15K per year and the top decile making 8x or $120K per year?

Tax breaks for the rich. With a 5 percentage point cut in income taxes, the guy making $200K saves $10K while the guy making $20K a year saves "only" $1K. NO FAIR!!! (sexist example mine).

Strangely enough, when you're an 85 year old smoker and die of a heart attack the medical community states that smoking was the cause of death.

...while smoking does kill, it is not immediate and while we can point out 100 year olds who smoke, I guess I could point out 55 year olds dying of lung cancer.

Just as well saying "Speeding kills" is true, yet most accidents are under 50-60KM speeds and a few die at that speed, so would it have the same effect if we say driving the speed limit kills?.

Point is, we can use numbers and statistics any way we want, and I was saying sadly it usually takes shock therapy to get anything done with this generation.

Oh at $50K/year to reach NHL average $3mil is 60 years.

Me No Dihmi,
The top 10% in income pays 80% of taxes in this country. Those with family incomes over 100K in this country are already taxed higher than almost every country in the G8. What socialist will never get is the paradox of taxes.
The more you try to take eventually the less you will get. The wealthy and highly mobile leave for a better tax environment those that remain lose the incentive to excell. Saskatchewan is learning the hard way as thousands of the best and brightest have fled to Alberta.
Meanwhile people like you feed the belief that anyone that has done well is not something that should be celebrated but cause to draw scorn.
To you it is better to create a society that is weak and dependant under the guise of compassion than it is to become stong and independant.
If a socialist findS someone in a hole yelling for help they think its somehow noble to jump down the hole and have both yell for help.
A conservative recognizes that jumping down the hole is foolish and will find a rope to help the person climd out. Unfortunatley due to the decades of socialist conditioning of many in this country they would rather hurl scorn at the person handing them the rope than climb out of the hole themselves.

For example, some time ago some people were complaining that the oil patch uses 330,000,000 liters of water a year from the Red Deer River. 330,000,000 liters! Ohh, be vewy afwaid!
People forget there are oceans of water underground.
People also forget that water is a waste by-product of crude oil production.
Dehydration facilities are the first to receive produced oil once out of the ground, and those millions of millions of gallons are too salty to be released on the surface.
Long story short BigOil is not starved for water, quite to the contrary of leftist "complainers", they have water excess problems.

p.s 33,000 m3 is a massive amount of water for any one operation.

I'm not going to dissect Vitrivius's entire post right now as I have other things ongoing today. I will point out some obvious errors in the above statement.
The mean flow of the Red Deer river is much higher than the 50 quoted above and is actually 62 m3/s or 1,986,768,000 m3/year. Vitrivius claims the oil sands use 330,000 m3/year, using those numbers 330,000 m3/year really would be miniscule.
Considering that it takes on average 3.5 m3 of water to produce one cubic metre of oil, using Vitrivius' numbers, one would be led to believe only 94,286,571 litres or 94286 m3 of oil were extracted from the oil sands annually. The National Energy Board tells us by 2015 we can expect there will 472,000 m3 of oil extracted from the oil sands per day. That means we can expect water to be consumed by the oil sands at a rate of 1,652,000 m3 per day or 1.652 billion litres per day, every day, irregardless of whether the rivers are running at maximum or minimum flow rates. If we use minimum flow rates above of 10 m3/second we find we would require two Red Deer Rivers to supply the total water needs of the oil sands because we would have a water deficit of 788,000 m3 per day. Thankfully much of the water for the oil sands doesn't come from the Red Deer River but the Athabasca River and much of the water can be reused. Even so, at low water flows, the oil sands demand for surface water may exceeds the available water for all of the demands of oil production.
We also have to remember that other people downstream need to use this water. I have stated in the past in other posts that the western pariries are facing major droughts, what then?

Obvious errors-
CO2 is a gas, not a vapour.

"Humans produce about 50 giga-tonnes of atmospheric CO2 vapour per year."

We do not emit 50 GtC per year, we emit ~7.1 GtC per year including cement production and carbon produced from deforestation. Your numbers are simply out to lunch.

Question for Vitrivius
Seeing I'm running out of time and have to move on to other things. How much of the planets ability to absorb Co2 has been compromised through things like deforestation, pine beetle infestation and acidification of the ocean due to increased CO2? Do your claims of 0.03% still hold true or is the net affect much higher than what you have estimated? I don't have time right now to check your math, but I don't think you've taken into account how the CO2 balance has been altered through man's increased emissions and earths reduced abilities to absorb CO2. Have you calculated the amount of CO2 required to increased the earth's average atmospheric temperature one degree and how your numbers affect future climate?

I'm amazed a post can get so much attention and can be taken seriously when it contains lunacy such as this-

"Smoking, since it has been mentioned, is another such case. We are told that smoking kills. Nonsense; having a smoke won't kill you. Smoking a lot for a long time has a tendancy to reduce one's life expectancy by a few years. The fear-mongers tell us to be vewy afwaid. The numerate ask themselves: am I willing to spend a few end-years of my life on the overall cause of enjoying all the other decades of my life?"

Only someone trying to push a fool’s agenda can justify the consumption of a known carcinogen.

I too would like a link (or links) for this stuff. Our town is having a free showing of "An Inconvenient Truth" in a few weeks and my wife wants us to go. There will be discussion afterward. I'd like to reference something more than "I read it on a blog" when bringing up these numbers. Thanks.

Alan

"Kate you should e-mail the post to Dr. Heidi Cullen at the weather channel and Al Gore just for shitz and giggles, if you recieve a response post it!

Posted by: Boss429 at April 8, 2007 5:49 PM"

Why, do you think Heidi Cullen and Al Gore need a good laugh?

The problem with the "Smoking Kills" argument is that death is part of a zero sum equation. Everybody dies eventually, so we end up moving numbers around for cause, but the end result is always 100%. If you ban smoking entirely, you will not save a single life.

My favorite scare story is the World Children Fund claiming 183 million Africans would die of global warming in the next 100 years. With all due respect, at least 6.5 billion of us alive today will certainly die over the next 100 years. Good luck with saving those Africans.

One very minor quibble about the long gun excerpt...$100,000 per year is the salary of the software engineer, but not necessarily his/her "charge out rate". The rate a company charges an employee out at in a consulting business is often at least 3 times salary.

I apologize if Vitruvious covered this in greater depth in his other post.

Albertaman at April 8, 2007 7:43 PM

I agree with everything you say here. You've misread me or I've not been very clear. I was attempting to use the thread -- which is about innumeracy -- to illustrate other examples of misleading reporting/advocacy; specifically I was attempting to show the fallacy of focusing on the inequality of income rather than on income growth at the bottom of the heap and in my example I was trying to show that sometimes "poor" people are better off when the "rich" make a even higher multiple of their income. I was also trying to point out the fallacy of describing a tax cut as favourable to the rich just because they save more $$$ when the percentage cut is identical -- an error that even very well-educated people seem to make.

Whoops! I apologize Me no Dihmi,Jumped the gun.
Read you post again and got your point.

Kate,
I keep asking why the details of the costs of the development of the Gun Registry remain hidden. It is my understanding that very little went directly into the development of a system. Most of the money was spend on "requirements definition". In plain words, this means that numerous consultants, police, bureaucrats from various departments, provinces and territories were paid to travel around the country and internationally to study what the system should do. The title "Gun Registry" became a misnomer. Every imagined possibility for the system became included in the list of wants. What was wanted was a system which almost every bureaucrat or police officer with an "official need" could access the system to determine if a citizen might be a concern. For example, the police officer who pulled someone over for speeding would be able to access the system simply by using the license plate number of the car and, if the car owner also owned a gun, call in for reinforcements before approaching the vehicle. Imagine the result. You are pulled over speeding and before you know it you are surrounded by police with guns drawn to fetch your ownership and registration. Sure, it easy to understand the type of justifications that might be given for such a system, but is that the type of country Canadians want?

Smoking doesn't kill. Smoking a certain amount over an extended period of time along with certain genetic pre-dispostions perhaps, will shorten your life.

Vitruvius makes a classic libertarian argument here too: people actually make rational decisions in the matter: which do I value most, the present enjoyment of smoking or the statistically projected reduction of life expectancy later in life?

At 57, I gave up alcohol because one morning in January 2006 I finally calculated that the "cost" of my daily morning hangovers exceeded the pleasure of my "happy evenings" and not because alcohol kills 'cos it doesn't anymore than smoking does.

AND, man, I've calculated that the savings will buy me a new motorcycle every three years. No really!

Albatross doesn't answer questions he just throws falsehoOds like this post. "Saskatchewan and Alberta will be dust bowls." He ignores facts like much of Saskatchewan is so wet and cold right now many farmers are faced with the fact for a second year in a row it will be a challenge to get a crop in.
In much of central Sask the water table is as high as they have been in decades.
However, he will point out that somewhere on the planet right now there is a spot where it is warm and dry and we should be very afraid or that the wet conditions are short lived.
In a time not to far in the future self-righteous doom and gloomers like Albygore will again be proven wrong just like the global coolers were.
In the mean time I feel sorry for the poor of this country and the developing world because people like Albygore are doing everything they can to shut down economies and that will keep the poor exactly where they are.

I warned right from the start all who cared to hear it that the gun registry was actually alan rock's attempt at the PMO to show he could 'do good things' and at the very least a beautiful cover story to direct quasi-legitimate sums to supporters in the form of payments for the development and maintenance of the registry.

regarding the miniscule CO2 figures, any word on how much closer man-made contribution moves us to the threshold when a cascade effect takes over? you know, the snowball effect whereby increases in CO2 content in the atmosphere causes it to accelerate.

anyone can dick around with numbers.

Alan:

Check out: www.scienceandpolicy.org for some excellent articles refuting Al Gore, including a paper by Lord Monckton.

Also, a New York Times article from March 13th does a reasonable job as well:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13gore.html?

albatros39a,

Better check your facts before you try to discredit others based on "obvious errors." CO2 most certainly exists in our atmosphere in a vapour form. One of the simplist definitions of a vapour being: a vapor condenses very readily to the liquid state under small changes of temperature or pressure or both. CO2 certainly fits the bill.

Where as I like the exposure of the "numbers" games that are often played, I think Vitruvious' smoking example is nothing more than smoker's rationale. Yeah, everyone of us has seen or known the 105 year old granny who has a cigar and brandy to end the day but the reality is that for the vast majority of people, smoking will hasten your end. Chances are too that the end will not be comfortable or dignified. While working for the last dozen or so years in the cancer field, I have seen first hand people dying painfully from that little butt. It ain't pretty. Oh yeah, there are numbers to prove that too. Just my thoughts.

PB,
Actually the genius Albatross obviously does not know that water vapor is the gas phase of water.
These geniuses are the types leading the charge against dangerous greenhouse gases like water vapor.
God help us all.

albatros39a (8:02 P.M.)...
Using your numbers...

Red Der River flow rate = 62 cu. meters/second.
Flow therefore equals 1,955,232,000 cu. meters annually.

The oil sands will produce 472,000 cu. meters of oil daily by 2015. This will equate to 172,280,000 cu. meters of oil produced per year.

It takes 3.5 cu. meters of water to produce 1 cu. meter of oil. Therefore, it will take some 602,980,000 cu. meters of water to produce 172,280,000 cu. meters of Tar Sands oil... in 2015, you know, 8 years hence.

You state "If we use minimum flow rates above of 10 m3/second we find we would require two Red Deer Rivers to supply the total water needs of the oil sands because we would have a water deficit of 788,000 m3 per day."
If, however, we use your stated mean flow rate of 62 cu. meters/second, there will be s surplus of 3,704,800 cu. meters of water per day... in 2015. Ain't numbers a hoot?!

To quote Vitruvius, "The portion of greenhouse gas effectproduced by CO2 in relation to other greenhouse gases, such as water vapour..." (taken from GWN, Feb 11, 2007). So quit with the contention that he doesn't understand the difference between what constitutes gas or water vapour. It sounds like nit-picking.

No time to evaluate the rest of your numbers. Perhaps Al Gore and Heidi Cullen could, ahem... "vet" them for us? Talk about human kind's grrrreat luck to have 2 such scholarly climatologists with us at the same time!
"Why, do you think Heidi Cullen and Al Gore need a good laugh?", er, somethin' like that.

albatros

read this

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17997788/site/newsweek/

that may help you straighten out your dooffuss thinking

Alan, the above link is intresting, read it and it will give you some amo

Albertaman let me ask you-
- Just because there is no drought where you live right now, does that mean there is no drought anywhere in Saskatchewan or Alberta?

- Just because there is no drought where you live right now, does that mean there has never been a drought where you live?

- Just because there is no drought where you live right now, how many summers of drought would it take to run your wells dry?

- Just because there is no drought where you live right now, does that mean there will never be another drought?

-Just because there is no drought where you live right now, do believe there is no global warming?

-How much do you think your weather situation can change from one year to the next?

Those in Calgary today saw a glimpse of what can happen with a shift north of the polar jet in Calgary can do to temperatures. The temperature went from a high of 2 on Saturday to a high of presently 12 deg C after the polar jet moved through Calgary about 10:00am this morning. This was a rather mild event, but the temperature difference in such an occurrence can be as high as 60 C. on either side of a jet.
The location polar jet is generally (with variables) a result of pressure of the Subtropical High Pressure Zone (SHPZ). In simple terms, the higher the pressure at the SHPZ, the further north one will find the polar jet, and when one is on the south of the polar jet you’re warmer than when you’re on the north. The pressure of the SHPZ is a result of temperature, and with an increase in temperature comes an increase in pressure that pushes warm air and the polar jet north. We see this every summer when the SHPZ warms from increased solar insolation. As I told you the other day the SHPZ is responsible for the mid-latitude deserts of the Mojave Gobi Arabian and Sahara deserts. Unless there is a body of water such as the Gulf of Mexico the air from the SHPZ remains dry as it moves across land. Alberta and western Saskatchewan sit directly in line with the continental tropical air mass that forms over Mexico every summer, and it’s only because there is presently insufficient pressure to move this warm dry air into Canada turning the western prairies into desert. It won’t take much heating at the SHPZ to drive this warm dry air mass north turning Alberta and Saskatchewan into an extension of the Mojave.
http://islandnet.com/~see/weather/graphics/photos/naairmass2.jpg

You wanted to know how long it would take? Right now it’s only a best guess because the warming is accelerating and we are in unknown waters. A guess would have said somewhere around 2040 to 2050 serious droughts would have begun. The way things are going, that part of Canada will be lucky if they can even still consider seeding a crop. Likely by then agriculture will have been written off as no longer worth it. I’m guessing obvious signs of impending crop failures due to global warming will begin within ten years or earlier. I'm quite sure if we looked close enough we will find signs now.

Thank you, SueC. Those references are just what I was looking for. Lots of good reading.

I would suggest that albatros39a spends some time at those links.

Alan

PB

From the Oxford Dictionary of Chemistry

vapour
1. Moisture or other substance diffused or suspended in air.
2. The air-like substance into which certain liquid or solid substances can be converted by heating.
PB

From the Oxford Dictionary of Chemistry
vapour
1. Moisture or other substance diffused or suspended in air.
2. The air-like substance into which certain liquid or solid substances can be converted by heating.

Carbon Dioxide is not an "air-like substance" but a component of air (or the atmosphere) and therefore not a vapour. Though as a liquid particle CO2 can exist as a vapour, in standard atmospheric conditions it is not a vapour, it is a gas.

"You state "If we use minimum flow rates above of 10 m3/second we find we would require two Red Deer Rivers to supply the total water needs of the oil sands because we would have a water deficit of 788,000 m3 per day."
If, however, we use your stated mean flow rate of 62 cu. meters/second, there will be s surplus of 3,704,800 cu. meters of water per day... in 2015. Ain't numbers a hoot?!"

The point is that at times the river will be insufficient to meet demands of the oil sands.

albatros39a, you have mentioned repeatedly that you had "other things ongoing/to move on to" today, and have indicated that you are pressed for time.

It is clear that you are both a busy person and an important one. Don't, by any means, let us keep you from those ongoing other things.

exetaz, good point, I'm supposed to be writing a term paper. What do you know about the Birdman Culture of Easter Island?
I’m outa here.

"Only someone trying to push a fool’s agenda can justify the consumption of a known carcinogen."

All book smart, not a brain in his head. Lines of speculation out of context. When I was your age, I was so sure of everything, too. By 2050, most of the people presently on this planet will be dead. In my case, lonnnggg before that, so I really don't care.

"The warming is accelerating". The rhetoric is accelerating, I don't know about the warming...

Accelerating, or oscillating? Would you recognize the periodicity if you saw it? Will you live long enough to?

"I'm quite sure if we looked close enough we will find signs now."

And if you find some, can you say they're due to "global warming"? (hint - no, you can't, but you will.) Or put another way, like GW Bush, you can blame just about everything on "climate change", everybody now does.

"The way things are going, that part of Canada will be lucky if they can even still consider seeding a crop."

The way things are going, planting a crop will be the least of anybody's concerns. What hasn't been built on, will be fought over. Alby, if you haven't figured it out yet, the ONLY solution to anthropogenic climate change, if it exists beyond microclimates, is flat-lining population growth. No amount of carbon trading, bicycle pedalling, reading by nuclear glow, will stop anthropogenic climate change, if it exists beyond microclimate, UNLESS there is a concomitant reduction in birth rates and population. That isn't going to happen by 2050, although pop reduction might certainly occur by one or a combination of the four horseman.
In the end, Mother Nature always compensates...

Industrial use of the athabaska river is less than 2.5% of the annual flow and is never more than 20% of the lowest flow rate.
It wouldnt matter if the tarsands used the flow of the red deer river 20 times , it has nothing to do with it.the red deer river goes to the Hudsons Bay through Sask. and Man.

The Athabaska goes to the Arctic through the Mackenzie. they are totally independant of each other.The Athabaska river is less than 10% of the Mackenzie. therefore the water usage of the tarsands is actually quite negligble.

http://www.syncrude.ca/users/news_view.asp?FolderID=6725&NewsID=92

Albatross,
The absurdity of the fear mongering argument and its flawed logic is this.
If a region has higher than normal temperatures it is used as proof that global warming is real.
If a region has lower than normal temperatures it is ignored.
Examples of this are continuous. You did this very thing in your last post. It is ridiculously wet and cold in central Saskatchewan and yet you use the occurrence of a Chinook in Calgary (a normal and common occurrence) as evidence that global warming is real.
On a grander scale using your logic. The Gorites used the occurrence of an active hurricane season two years ago as evidence that the global warming was real and predicted that 2006 would even be worse. In fact the opposite occurred.
Therefore, using the same logic it would have to follow that because hurricanes activity was well below normal it could only mean that global cooling had to be the cause.

The flawed logic of peopel like you use will eventually lead to the complete collapse of your cause.
Time is not on your side as more and more people will educate themselves as they will do what I have done here. Logic is hard thing to dismiss in the long run.

smoking kills. Nonsense ... Smoking a lot for a long time has a tendancy to reduce one's life expectancy by a few years. The fear-mongers tell us to be vewy afwaid ... My point is: measured values mean nothing until they are scaled to a relevant context. People who fear-monger by deliberately hiding relevant context scaling are fraud artists.

Average age is not the age people die at. If you had someone suffer and die young because of smoking you not use numbers to deliberately hiding relevant context.

I will not call you fraud. You just don't know. That is why you use numbers wrong like that

smoking kills. Nonsense ... Smoking a lot for a long time has a tendancy to reduce one's life expectancy by a few years. The fear-mongers tell us to be vewy afwaid ... My point is: measured values mean nothing until they are scaled to a relevant context. People who fear-monger by deliberately hiding relevant context scaling are fraud artists.

Average age is not the age people die at. If you had someone suffer and die young because of smoking you not use numbers to deliberately hiding relevant context.

I will not call you fraud. You just don't know. That is why you use numbers wrong like that

Globle Waring enthusiasts remind me of the old story about Chicken Little ... "The sky is falling, The Sky is falling!!!" or was that the boy who cried wolf... or maybe it's the Limeric "Their was an old lady from Nantucket..."

Ok now that I'm finished my paper I can answer-

Albertaman, you obviously haven't the first clue about the mechanisms of climate and weather.

"The absurdity of the fear mongering argument and its flawed logic is this.
If a region has higher than normal temperatures it is used as proof that global warming is real."

Absolutenly wrong, an area of warm temturatures do not indicate the presence of global warming, average global temperatures do. Localized high tempuratures can be a symptom of global arming, but there are other explanations too like el Nino.

"If a region has lower than normal temperatures it is ignored."

Wrong again, low temperatures can also be symptom of global warming in a particular region, the western antarctic is often pointed pointed to a region of cooling temperatures. This area is an example of a cooling region that could be due to to changing wind patterns induced by global warming.

"Examples of this are continuous. You did this very thing in your last post. It is ridiculously wet and cold in central Saskatchewan and yet you use the occurrence of a Chinook in Calgary (a normal and common occurrence) as evidence that global warming is real."

Wrong, this is not the result of a Chinook it's the passage of the polar front over Calgary. Take a look at the surface analysis over Calgary and you'll see this. Chinooks are caused buy the dry and moist adiabatic laps rates across the mountains to the west. If you look at the last 24 hours of weather in Calgary the wind were conducive to Chinook conditions and were predominantly from the south to SE.

"On a grander scale using your logic. The Gorites used the occurrence of an active hurricane season two years ago as evidence that the global warming was real and predicted that 2006 would even be worse. In fact the opposite occurred.
Therefore, using the same logic it would have to follow that because hurricanes activity was well below normal it could only mean that global cooling had to be the cause."

Once again, wrong. Sea surface temperate is what causes hurricanes. Two years ago the sea surface was very high and was the driving force behind that year's storms. Last year was mild due to the low temperature of the sea surface over the Gulf of Mexico. I'm not sure right now what the present surface temperatures are like but I'm guessing if this year is an average year for storms, next year will be another severe storm season. Global warming will cause more frequent severe storm years, just as it will cause more frequent el Ninos, but for now they won't necessarily happen every year. Taken on average there have been far more major weather events around the planet, not just around the hurricane prone regions of North America.

Skip-
You said- “Alby, if you haven't figured it out yet, the ONLY solution to anthropogenic climate change, if it exists beyond microclimates, is flat-lining population growth.”
Ok my paper is finished now I can answer.

Albertaman, you obviously haven't the first clue about the mechanisms of climate and weather.

"The absurdity of the fear mongering argument and its flawed logic is this.
If a region has higher than normal temperatures it is used as proof that global warming is real."

Absolutenly wrong, an area of warm temturatures do not indicate the presence of global warming, average global temperatures are. Localized high tempuratures can be a symptom of global, by there are other explanations too like el Nino.

"If a region has lower than normal temperatures it is ignored."

Wrong again, low temperature can also be symptom of global warming in a particular region, but here too other explanations can explain the phenomena.

"Examples of this are continuous. You did this very thing in your last post. It is ridiculously wet and cold in central Saskatchewan and yet you use the occurrence of a Chinook in Calgary (a normal and common occurrence) as evidence that global warming is real."

Wrong, this is not the result of a Chinook it's the passage of the polar front over Calgary. Take a look at the surface analysis over Calgary and you'll see this. Chinooks are caused buy the dry and moist adiabatic laps rates from winds crossing the mountains to the west. If you look at the last 24 hours of weather in Calgary the wind were not conducive to Chinook conditions and were predominantly from the south to SE.

"On a grander scale using your logic. The Gorites used the occurrence of an active hurricane season two years ago as evidence that the global warming was real and predicted that 2006 would even be worse. In fact the opposite occurred.
Therefore, using the same logic it would have to follow that because hurricanes activity was well below normal it could only mean that global cooling had to be the cause."

Once again, wrong. Sea surface temperate is what causes hurricanes. Two years ago the sea surface was very high and was the driving force behind that year's storms. Last year was mild due to the low temperature of the sea surface over the Gulf of Mexico. I'm not sure right now what the present surface temperatures are like but I'm guessing if this year is an average year for storms, next year will be another severe storm season. Global warming will cause more frequent severe storm years, just as it will cause more frequent el Ninos, but for now they won't necessarily happen every year. Taken on average there have been far more major weather events around the planet, not just around the hurricane prone regions of North America.

Skip-
You said- “Alby, if you haven't figured it out yet, the ONLY solution to anthropogenic climate change, if it exists beyond microclimates, is flat-lining population growth.”

First of all, it exists, it's man made and it is global, not just microclimates. I’ve been saying all along it’s population that’s to blame. The best solution to global warming is a reduction of the population. We don’t need to flat line the population, we need to convince the world we need to reduce it by at least half if we intend to use resources at the rate we are using them. We are facing with a Malthusian catastrophe on a global scale if something isn’t done about it.
If you have not done so by now read
“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond ISBN 0-14-303655-6

"The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia" by Garrett Hardin ISBN-10: 0195122747

Good Night.

I’m not sure why that post did that so I’ll try this again.
Albertaman, you obviously haven't the first clue about the mechanisms of climate and weather.
"The absurdity of the fear mongering argument and its flawed logic is this.
If a region has higher than normal temperatures it is used as proof that global warming is real."
Absolutely wrong, an area of warm temperatures do not indicate the presence of global warming, average global temperatures do. Localized high temperatures can be a symptom of global arming, but there are other explanations too like el Nino.
"If a region has lower than normal temperatures it is ignored."
Wrong again, low temperatures can also be symptom of global warming in a particular region, the western Antarctic is often pointed to a region of cooling temperatures. This area is an example of a cooling region that could be due to changing wind patterns induced by global warming.
"Examples of this are continuous. You did this very thing in your last post. It is ridiculously wet and cold in central Saskatchewan and yet you use the occurrence of a Chinook in Calgary (a normal and common occurrence) as evidence that global warming is real."
Wrong, this is not the result of a Chinook it's the passage of the polar front over Calgary. Take a look at the surface analysis over Calgary and you'll see this. Chinooks are caused buy the dry and moist adiabatic laps rates across the mountains to the west. If you look at the last 24 hours of weather in Calgary the wind were conducive to Chinook conditions and were predominantly from the south to SE.
"On a grander scale using your logic. The Gorites used the occurrence of an active hurricane season two years ago as evidence that the global warming was real and predicted that 2006 would even be worse. In fact the opposite occurred.
Therefore, using the same logic it would have to follow that because hurricanes activity was well below normal it could only mean that global cooling had to be the cause."
Once again, wrong. Sea surface temperate is what causes hurricanes. Two years ago the sea surface was very high and was the driving force behind that year's storms. Last year was mild due to the low temperature of the sea surface over the Gulf of Mexico. I'm not sure right now what the present surface temperatures are like but I'm guessing if this year is an average year for storms, next year will be another severe storm season. Global warming will cause more frequent severe storm years, just as it will cause more frequent el Ninos, but for now they won't necessarily happen every year. Taken on average there have been far more major weather events around the planet, not just around the hurricane prone regions of North America.
Skip-
You said- “Alby, if you haven't figured it out yet, the ONLY solution to anthropogenic climate change, if it exists beyond microclimates, is flat-lining population growth.”
First of all, it exists, it's man made and it is global, not just microclimates. I’ve been saying all along it’s population that’s to blame. The best solution to global warming is a reduction of the population. We don’t need to flat line the population, we need to convince the world we need to reduce it by at least half if we intend to use resources at the rate we are using them. We are facing with a Malthusian catastrophe on a global scale if something isn’t done about it.
If you have not done so by now read
“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond ISBN 0-14-303655-6
"The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia" by Garrett Hardin ISBN-10: 0195122747
Good Night.

...all I know is that I used to shovel snow up to my knees back in the 80's and would have two week stints of -40c/f weather up at Cold Lake.

It was called Cold Lake for a reason. Now, they are lucky to have snow up there, let alone rain during the summer.

I remember as a kid watching the snow hit the north shore then hit use in Shawnessy, maybe a foot or two. Was guaranteed to snow every year and we knew school would be closed if it snowed 2" or more.

Now, until last year, snow was never to be seen in Vancouver.

Somethings happening, man made or not. I don't care about wind bags or deny types, something definitely is happening.

Given Alberta, Sask and Manitoba, along with the three territories north of us, we have the largest collection of fresh water.

Write of water in Northern Alberta being clean due to oil contamination though.

Impending desert conditions in the prairies won't help our and oil's thirst for water.

Watch the next war not be over oil, but fresh, clean drinking water - now that scares me.

Maybe it is time to move to the Yukon.

Hi everybody, it's Vitruvius here. Sorry for the delay in my getting back to y'all folks, I've just now returned from Easter Sunday celebrations. The first thing I should note is that I don't have linkable sources for the numbers I used in my comment that Kate promoted above. The numbers I have used are my best reasonable understanding of the values involved, based on my readings over the last 10 years.

Nevertheless, my point does not depend on the exact value of anything. The original comment was written in the context of a discussion on the fear mongering industry. My point was that measured values make no sense until they are scaled to a relevant context. As others have commented above, it's things like rates and concentrations that are important in combating these sorts of fear mongering via big numbers cases, in which simply quantity measurements are expressed in conveniently small or big units, without context.

Also, it's not so much the mantissa that matters in these back-of-the-envelope types of calculations, it's the exponent: the order of magnitude. Once we are confident we are within an order of magnitude of accuracy, that is, the exponent is correct, then we can worry about the details of the precision of the mantissa. It doesn't matter whether you compute that sea levels will go up by 51.3 meters or by 52.6 meters if they actually only go up by, oh, about a meter or so.

Now let me get a couple little details out of the way. I smoked a cigar after dinner today. I am not dead. Therefore, smoking did not kill me. I sped by a couple percent on the drive home. Speeding did not kill me. Say I'm sitting alive by a gun on a table. The gun didn't kill me. Getting shot by a gun is a little trickier. The problem with these sorts of X kills statements is that they are gross oversimplifications that hide important details of the matter under consideration. That's part of the reason why the fear mongers like them: it helps them hide their fraudulent agenda.

Now to be clear, I don't think anyone who doesn't want to should have to be exposed to my smoking. I don't think people should drive faster than the conditions and their skills allow for the control of the vehicle. I don't think that we should soil our nest. Real pollution is to be avoided. Acid rain was a real problem, it's causes were almost completely man-made. That we could fix. And, I'm not an anarchist, I think that good government does have a role to play in society, I just want that role to be as honest and small as possible. Yet none of these matter with respect to my original point that measured values make no sense until they are scaled to a relevant context.

So let's return to the matter of scale. Stephen mentioned the argument that some people make claiming that, say, Adscam is a small scale problem monetarily, when it is a big problem ethically. Yet Adscam was only monetarily small scale when compared to total state spending. When scaled according to how much the Liberals were supposed to steal, which was zero, Adscam is a huge amount indeed.

I like Herman's note to the effect that total profits are meaningless unless they are scaled according to things like total sales and risk exposure. Eeyore makes a valid point that my 100,000 per year might be a bit low for loaded cost gun-registry staff, but then there were many staff who earned much less than that too.

On the oil patch water usage matter, again I too do not want to see us mismanage our planet's water resources. Note that the 330 Ml was just for the Red Deer river, not the entire oil patch, so comments that focused only on that river are irrelevant. As Ural and others noted, taking a fixed annual percentage of a river flow does not decrease the total flow over time, as long as it keeps raining upstream. Sequestered water is a bigger problem, but remember that's coming out of the ocean stocks, not the river stock, so it's still not that big a problem.

But let's be clear that where I live, on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, also known as the Rocky Mountain rain shadow, and classified as semi-arid, water management is a non-trivial issue. So you can be sure that the fraud artists will abuse numbers to fear monger on that basis.

DF correctly noted that CO2 output per capita is not a useful measure of concentration for green-house gas effect purposes, CO2 per m³ of atmosphere is. If my lake has ten times the volume of your lake, I can put ten times as much X in it as you can while still maintaining the same concentration as you. Based on our small population and huge atmospheric resources, Canada is the last jurisdiction that should be penalized when it comes to global gas concentrations.

Oh, and, vapour and gas are synonyms in generic engineering usage. They are one of the two types of fluids, the other being liquid. Technically vapour is the transitive part of the non-liquid component in a three or more part thermodynamic flashing, and gas is the non-transitive part, but that is beyond the scope of our usage here.

On the matter of how much additional CO2 vapour will produce a one degree rise in temperature, the answer is that adding more CO2 vapour will not produce any rise in temperature. Once you pass concentration levels of 200ppm, which we passed billions of years ago, additional CO2 does not cause additional warming, because of the saturation effect. That's why we find CO2 concentrations following temperature, which itself follows solar output. CO2 concentrations can only lead temperature when they are less than 200ppm (assuming constant solar output).

Well, I should probably keep this short, so I'll close by noting that it doesn't matter if my sample calculations were off by even a factor of ten, because for the particular examples I chose they need to be off by a factor of 100 to 1000 before any such error is relevant to my argument. That's why I chose such egregious examples ;-)

As I've mentioned, my point is simply that measured values mean nothing until they are scaled to a relevant context. People who fear-monger by deliberately hiding relevant context scaling are fraud artists.

...for the grammar anl types, sorry, it's late and i'm awaiting on an ebay bid to finish.

Even the usually sensible Vancouver Sun has resorted to scare mongering, I guess to keep the David Suzuki fanclub reading the paper. For example, from the front page of Saturday's Weekend Edition, "Mass starvation, increased threat of disease, species extinctions, declining food production and drinking water shortages are among the impacts now VERIFIED (my emphasis) as results of global climate change, scientists representing the United Nations warned Friday. The world's poorest people live in the areas facing the greatest range of threats, but a spokesman for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that, even in developing nations, the poor, sick and elderly face IMMEDIATE risks."

This media campaign led by lefties including the UN is out of control. Time to tune our politicians, on all levels, and our advocacy journalists IN. The pockets of taxpayers are not bottomless.

One figure I recall from the Long Gun Registry is $38 million for a computer system upgrade. I have been involved in the computer industry for half my life and can't imagine what you could spent that kind of money on for an upgrade.
As far as smoking is concerned, It's difficult, if you are capable of reasoned thought, to imagine why tobacco should be banned but marijuana should be legalized. And if you are going to claim that maryjane is for pain, then tobacco is equally effective at preventing the onset of alzimers.

Albatross said:

"Those in Calgary today saw a glimpse of what can happen with a shift north of the polar jet in Calgary can do to temperatures. The temperature went from a high of 2 on Saturday to a high of presently 12 deg C after the polar jet moved through Calgary about 10:00am this morning. This was a rather mild event, but the temperature difference in such an occurrence can be as high as 60 C. on either side of a jet.
The location polar jet is generally (with variables) a result of pressure of the Subtropical High Pressure Zone (SHPZ). In simple terms, the higher the pressure at the SHPZ, the further north one will find the polar jet, and when one is on the south of the polar jet you’re warmer than when you’re on the north. The pressure of the SHPZ is a result of temperature, and with an increase in temperature comes an increase in pressure that pushes warm air and the polar jet north. We see this every summer when the SHPZ warms from increased solar insolation. As I told you the other day the SHPZ is responsible for the mid-latitude deserts of the Mojave Gobi Arabian and Sahara deserts. Unless there is a body of water such as the Gulf of Mexico the air from the SHPZ remains dry as it moves across land. Alberta and western Saskatchewan sit directly in line with the continental tropical air mass that forms over Mexico every summer, and it’s only because there is presently insufficient pressure to move this warm dry air into Canada turning the western prairies into desert. It won’t take much heating at the SHPZ to drive this warm dry air mass north turning Alberta and Saskatchewan into an extension of the Mojave."

Albatross, yours is a problem that was once stated, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

First, yes, the polar jet crossed Calgary today and caused the temperatures to warm because the associated baroclinic zone passed through. It's April. The upper-air pattern is transitory in April in the northern hemisphere. Right now there's a fairly meridional flow across North America, and so abnormal temperatures are being found. Not anything ridiculous as, like I said, this is April, after all. If you're going to spout about really warm temperatures in AB, you need to balance it off with talking about the record lows recorded in GA last night or the abnormally late snowstorm that spanked the maritimes last night.

Second, and most egregious, is this: "The pressure of the SHPZ is a result of temperature, and with an increase in temperature comes an increase in pressure that pushes warm air and the polar jet north."

This is 100% dead wrong. Warming creates low pressure--remember hot air rising? Well, when it rises it creates a vacuum, aka a low pressure system. Cyclogenesis 101, for those of us who actually know what the f*** we're talking about. In more general terms, saying that high pressure created by surface heating pushes the polar jet north is crap.

"Alberta and western Saskatchewan sit directly in line with the continental tropical air mass that forms over Mexico every summer, and it’s only because there is presently insufficient pressure to move this warm dry air into Canada turning the western prairies into desert."

Bullplop. AB and SK are drier primarily due to subsidence in the lee of the Rockies as the prevailing westerlies cross. Not because of some mythical flow from Mexico.

And BTW I've been doing the weather for a lot of years now, and I have **NEVER** seen a 60C difference across one front. Never.

(And "solar insolation" is redundant. That's how I can tell you're an amateur.)

After all is said and done about the monies spenton the "Great Gun Registry" I still maintain that it was no more than a massive rip off to feather the retirement nests of Liberals and their friends.

Follow the money and you hit a brick wall of silence and analyzing all the possible ways that that much money could have been spent just does not add up.

At one point above our own dear Albatross asserted that "Only someone trying to push a fool’s agenda can justify the consumption of a known carcinogen". Meanwhile, Albert Einstein said that his favourite things were smoking his tobacco pipe and sailing his little sailboat. I hardly think that Mr. Einstein was a fool.

And a meta-comment, if I may: my little Sagacious Iconoclast web library site - tinyurl.com/yt26dy (it's not a web log, really, it's an archival site that I use to publish things that I don't want to include in-line in my comments here at Small Dead Animals, or in messages to my mailing lists: more of a blib than a blog, really) had received before yesterday about 1,200 visits over the last year. Yesterday, it received about 500 visits. Funny how that works. Well, I sure hope you folks liked what you found there.

Good night, everyone, I wish you well.

Tomorrow, we can return to the debate over the definition of well.

I also reduce the size of the solar system by the opposite trick, using larger measures:

Geoatationary sattlites are only 36 Meg metres away; The moon is only 300 Mega metres away and the sun only 150 Giga metres. No wonder it affects the climate!

Lorne Gunter's done the math, too, in this morning's National Post.

Although gruesome, perhaps we could also do a numerical check on the number of Canadian troops killed in Afghanistan. The loss of 56 troops since 2002 is trumpeted by the media as some horrendous cost (granted, any death is a horrendous cost), but there is no comparison provided to put this in perspective for the uninformed masses.

Comparisons to WWI and WWII are not truly equivalent (I'm sure there were potentially 56 killed in one or two landing crafts alone in one mission)...but what about comparisons to Korea and Kosovo and other more-similarly sized missions? Is the loss of 56 out of more than 2,000 over 4-5 years of fighting TRULY such a huge number? How many Taliban have been killed? Without something to compare the losses to, the MSM just keeps tugging at the heartstrings of the uninformed, playing the emotion game.

It would seem Mr. Vitruvius has violated his own dictum (measured values make no sense until they are scaled to a relevant context.) within the confines of his original post.

In the context of wasted tax dollars, the $100 million per annum for the gun registry pales in comparison to the $300 million+ a year thrown away to subsidize oil-sands developers through the Accelerated Capital Cost Allowance, to cite but one small example of budgetary malfeasance.
I suspect that when it comes to Conservative sacred cows, Mr. Vitruvius is about as numerate and sagacious as a post.

Churchill drank a flagon of whiskey every day, Louis Armstrong smoked reefer daily, Balzac, coffee by the gallon. If Einstein smoked tobacco, it must be OK.

The Accelerated Capital Cost Allowance applies equally to all industry across Canada.
It is not only oil sands industries that benefit.
How would you apply this program to some industries but not others?

Johann (2:27 A.M.)
I like your style!

"“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond ISBN 0-14-303655-6"
This was mentioned by Mark Steyn in "America Alone", I do believe. About how societies go under because the chop down too many trees (all their trees?) He panned it... good enough for me.

C Hoy,

Would you be kind enough to provide some reference to your oil sand subsidy claims? While you're at it, Would you please explain how this works and who loses? I have always wanted to know more about this.

Malthusians are funny - they keep claiming an imminent problems from large populations that never seem to materialize. Most regions of Canada are depopulating, and they're claiming that we have an overpopulation problem? Wrong - most areas of the world are experiencing some form of underpopulation problems, including China (think 60 million bachelors).

By the way, Albatross, on another post a long time ago I asked for an example of where Malthus has ever been right, and the example you claimed was Easter Island. Is this your only example? In decades of dire predictions? Can you really come up with nothing better than this? I'm confused, for EI to be an examples of Malthusians reasoning, wouldn't Malthus or one of his disciples have to make some kind of claim about the population of EI overrunning its resources? I'm not disputing that in one isolated corner of the world, the people there stupidly drove their environment to the ground (and for pretty wacky reasons, too, it appears). I'm disputing the hundreds or thousands of Malthusian claims on grand scales that have never come to fruition. If there's any science to what they/you claim, there should be a record of reasonably accurate predictions. Instead, we get failure after failure as humanity successfully finds solutions to the pressures that population increases brings. These human successes further increase our ability/knowledge base for future population increases, not even considering what future advances will permit.

Albatross ,
Johann has already eloquently addressed the absurdity of your post.
But your comment "Alberta and western Saskatchewan sit directly in line with the continental tropical air mass that forms over Mexico every summer" really takes the cake. A grade 2 student would know that this was a load of crap.
The debate here is whether or not man causes climate fluctuation not whether there are global temperature anomalies . It is amazing how you fear mongering gorites will dismiss the most logical explanation for in global temperature fluctuations,and that is the the sun.
Its like pointing to the color of your car interior as a reason for why the car won't start.

A little off topic but still within the abstract idea that this thread is promoting: there are potentially serious side effects in public policy when people do not make the effort to understand the basic isssues. This little YouTube video is about banning what some in the video obviously believe to be a very dangerous chemical simply because they have been told that it is in all our lakes and rivers and in the oceans too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw

Vitruvius , Thanks,... Niiiiice!

I never thought I would need this stuff again but,

Island population dynamics is well understood by the dimest resources managers, it tells the story of what happened to the human population of the Easter Islands handily.

No big whoop!

"First of all, it exists, it's man made and it is global, not just microclimates. I’ve been saying all along it’s population that’s to blame. The best solution to global warming is a reduction of the population. We don’t need to flat line the population, we need to convince the world we need to reduce it by at least half if we intend to use resources at the rate we are using them."

The best solution is a "reduction of the population."

Now I understand what you're all about, Alb, same as Mo Strong, and his fellow travellers,who pray for a pandemic to wipe out half the world's population. As long as that half doesn't include them.

Newsweek Do the math http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/columnists/story.html?id=034028d4-8a4a-4103-8012-6445ac5ba715

LMAO.... perhaps the article should go one step further and point out that to reduce Canada and the world's footprint on green house gas CO2 emissions we could just ask the Dion's, Gore's, Clinton's and Suzuki's to stop exhaling CO2... If they hold their breath long enough we all win :P

The only way you're going to stop global warming is to turn down the temperature of the Sun or block out the energy that reaches Earth from it.

When scietific report after report indicates the average temperature on other planets in our solar system have been going up then it ain't rocket science to draw the conclusion that hey...maybe we should expect to see an increase in our own planets average temperature...ya think???

As for water levels rising from melting Ice caps...try dropping some ice cubes in your drink and mark the water level before and after they melt... Now do the same thing in your bath tub as a proportional representation of the Earth's Oceans and the polar ice caps...heck... fill the tub 50/50 ice and water and see where the water level is before and after the ice melts... then shut the hell up 'cause the water isn't going to rise and flood out New York or LA.

The concern shouldn't be focused on the smoke and mirrors of "Global Warming" or the redistribution of the worlds wealth... we should be looking at polution and poluters and be fining and taxing the hell out of people that polute and encouraging people to clean up their act...

Telling 3rd world countries in Africa, South America, Latin America and Asia they're not allowed to develope coal, gas, or oil electric plants to provide electricity to their people for simple things we take for granted like refridgeration of medical supplies and/or food, or lights at night, or power for cooking without having to light a non vented fire in their homes to cook is criminal. Especially when they have some of the largest reserves in Coal, Natural Gas and Oil in the world. That's where your "Millions are dieing"... but it's not being caused by global warming...it's being caused because of global fear mongering...

The Accelerated Capital Cost Allowance applies equally to all industry across Canada. "

Not true, Lee, not true at all.
Grithater, remember, Google is your friend.
As to who loses? Taxpayers of course.

Vit,
Unlike the poster Richard Ball, I can only be with you a maximum of 100%. Actually, I choose to hold back to 99%.

Still, it was an excellent post providing valuable context.

Albatross may raise decent points that deserve to be put to rest, however, his choice of calling you a "fool" surely, ranks amongst the most short-sighted comments I have seen lately and squarely places him in the "attack the messenger" mode of debate postures.

A toast to my favourite engineer.

I read Mr. Gunter's column in the National Post while jentaculating this morning. He does a different calculation than I did, but the effect is the same: man-made atmospheric CO2 vapour is insignificant (even ignoring the saturation effect).

Mr. Hoy's comment above comparing the gun registry to the oil sands accelerated CCA is irrelevant, as we actually got something useful, when scaled to expected costs, in the latter case. Rember, you have to scale according to useful contexts, not arbitrary ones. Although, I wouldn't know about Conservative sacred cows, as I am not a Conservative.

Oh, and Easter Island was deforested by the Polynesian rat, which arrived with the humans, and which ate the seeds of the island's trees. Also, Abraham Lincoln said, "I never trust a man who doesn't smoke or drink".

C Hoy,

Google is not my friend, google is a California based IT company. It will undoubtedly find me somtthing written by a journalist, most of whom are innumerate. Please explain this oil sands subsidy to me, and how much it costs, and who it costs. You posted it, please do elaborate.

The Capital Cost Allowance is available to all industry that produces goods for sale or lease.
PERIOD.

Comments on the scaling of problems are interesting but it all falls apart as the author steps forward and we see he wears a helicopter beanie,over a fright wig and follows every numerate item with a most innumerate and emotional rant : scorn and ridicule are heaped on his dislikes, he raises up imaginary "valid fear", and "tax dollars wasted" and (this one is my favorite) the "fear mongering" that smoking kills. It doesn't? Well, just a few years sort of.
This character needs Nancy Pelosi to tell him, as she just told another right wing extremist: "calm down".

“First, yes, the polar jet crossed Calgary today and caused the temperatures to warm because the associated baroclinic zone passed through. It's April. The upper-air pattern is transitory in April in the northern hemisphere. Right now there's a fairly meridional flow across North America, and so abnormal temperatures are being found. Not anything ridiculous as, like I said, this is April, after all. If you're going to spout about really warm temperatures in AB, you need to balance it off with talking about the record lows recorded in GA last night or the abnormally late snowstorm that spanked the maritimes last night.”

Who is spouting “really warm temperatures in AB” right now, I’m talking about really warm temps in the future? The temps are quite normal and I didn’t say anything to the contrary. What I said was the polar jet passed over Calgary and was the result of mild temperature increase experienced. The temperature change when that happens can however be much more dramatic than was experienced on Sunday. Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear enough but the purpose of explaining that was to demonstrate how weather can be influenced depending which air mass you happen to be sitting under at the time.

Second, and most egregious, is this: "The pressure of the SHPZ is a result of temperature, and with an increase in temperature comes an increase in pressure that pushes warm air and the polar jet north."
“This is 100% dead wrong. Warming creates low pressure--remember hot air rising? Well, when it rises it creates a vacuum, aka a low pressure system. Cyclogenesis 101, for those of us who actually know what the f*** we're talking about. In more general terms, saying that high pressure created by surface heating pushes the polar jet north is crap.”

I'll forgive you this time for using the word vacume, I'm sure you feel foolish enough all on your own.
That’s true at the ITCZ but not at the SHPZ. The SHPZ (a.k.a. Horse Latitudes) is descending dry air. Are you going to try and tell me that the subtropical high isn’t a semi permanent high?
Ok, seeing we have determined that you are trying to teach yourself met, I’ll ask you this and see what you make of it. What happens to the SHPZ when heat is added to the ITCZ? Here’s a clue: look up “Hadley Cell” In fact lets me start you out upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/AtmosphCirc2.png.

“Bullplop. AB and SK are drier primarily due to subsidence in the lee of the Rockies as the prevailing westerlies cross. Not because of some mythical flow from Mexico.”

Normally yes but what about that increasing pressure as was suggested above. Now we’re talking about an increased zonal component aren’t we? A higher zonal flow bring with it hot dry cT.

And BTW I've been doing the weather for a lot of years now, and I have **NEVER** seen a 60C difference across one front. Never.

Sitting at home watching the weather channel doesn't count as "doing the weather".
Well no 60 Deg C doesn’t happen. That “C” was in fact supposed to be an “F”. In fact it took place in eastern Montana 1969.

(And "solar insolation" is redundant. That's how I can tell you're an amateur.)
Is that what you figure?

What do you suppose drives the whole bloody mess and why do you figure the SHPZ pushes north in the spring?

You say, Garhaneg, that I "follow every numerate item with a most innumerate and emotional rant: scorn and ridicule are heaped on his dislikes". Thank you. Intertwining lessons on numeracy & fraud and emotional rants in a single essay while maintaining flow and reader interest is a tricky business, so it's very kind of you to confirm that I accomplished my goal.

"What do you suppose drives the whole bloody mess and why do you figure the SHPZ pushes north in the spring?"
It's called the natural cycle of weather, twit. Sheezh. Next you're going to be saying that you sitting in Mommie's basement J**king off is caused by GW,not the fact that you are an albatross, and couldn't get a date on a bet!! Trolls are so useful, IF they would only turn into compost.

"I'll forgive you this time for using the word vacume, I'm sure you feel foolish enough all on your own.
That’s true at the ITCZ but not at the SHPZ. The SHPZ (a.k.a. Horse Latitudes) is descending dry air. Are you going to try and tell me that the subtropical high isn’t a semi permanent high?
Ok, seeing we have determined that you are trying to teach yourself met, I’ll ask you this and see what you make of it. What happens to the SHPZ when heat is added to the ITCZ? Here’s a clue: look up “Hadley Cell” In fact lets me start you out upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/AtmosphCirc2.png."

(I'll forgive you for misspelling vacuum, but I'm sure you feel silly enough on your own.)

Thereby proving my point. Hadley cells are made (in part) by uneven heating--as is all weather. It's warmer at the ITCZ (more insolation) and not as warm at the horse latitudes. Ergo, it's relatively cooler. Warm air rises, and cool air sinks. You admit it's sinking at the horse latitudes, so in effect you're agreeing that it's high pressure created due to relative cool. Now when this air sinks, of course, you have compressional heating. But still, to say that adding heat anywhere creates high pressure is physically wrong.

"“Bullplop. AB and SK are drier primarily due to subsidence in the lee of the Rockies as the prevailing westerlies cross. Not because of some mythical flow from Mexico.”

Normally yes but what about that increasing pressure as was suggested above. Now we’re talking about an increased zonal component aren’t we? A higher zonal flow bring with it hot dry cT."

Actually moving the jets northward would, in effect, promote more moisture advection from the GoM.

"And BTW I've been doing the weather for a lot of years now, and I have **NEVER** seen a 60C difference across one front. Never.

Sitting at home watching the weather channel doesn't count as "doing the weather"."

Okay buddy, you crossed a line there. Don't talk about that which you do not know. Once and once only I will say: professional meteorologist.

"Well no 60 Deg C doesn’t happen. That “C” was in fact supposed to be an “F”. In fact it took place in eastern Montana 1969."

Okay, that's fair. Just gotta keep you honest. If memory serves, that was also due to a Chinook.

"(And "solar insolation" is redundant. That's how I can tell you're an amateur.)
Is that what you figure?"

Well, insolation = INcoming SOLar RadiATION.
Solar insolation = solar incoming solar radiation.
Redundant.

"What do you suppose drives the whole bloody mess and why do you figure the SHPZ pushes north in the spring?"

The sun.

Yup. The sun.

I agree with vitruvius except for the use of the word "saturation". I believe the word should be extinction. The blackbody radiation that CO2 can absorb is all used up. If there was more available the CO2 would take it.

When I first ran into the concept that there was much more atmospheric CO2 than was need to absorb all energy available I had to question it's validity. Why? Because, if true it drives a stake through the heart of Kyoto and the "CO2 is driver crowd".

That is when I googled CO2 infrared absorption and came up with these sites.
http://www.john-daly.com/artifact.htm
http://www.nov55.com/ntyg.html
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/04/02/the-history-of-the-ipcc-and-recommendations-for-unbiased-science-assesments-which-the-ipcc-has-failed-at/#comments

Am I 100% convinced.... no, but I sure would like to see more attention paid to this.

Some researchers are saying most of the 13.5 -15.5 micron radiation is absorbed within the first 10 meters of the eath's surface. Others say lab experiments are not the same as atmospheric ones. So do some atmospheric ones and lets find out. One transmitter, one receiver, one tape measure and a 10 story building should get some ball park figures and there you go. End of story either way. Either the energy is taken to extinction or it isn't.

The potential in Alberta for a 60 degree temperature difference across a front as suggested by Albatross across fronts becomes much more believable if the "C" is changed into a "F". Can anyone believe that a sharp stick like Albatross could make such an obvious mental error? I'm sure he proof reads.

So if we accept it wasn't a mental error, then Albatross is guilty of convenient exaggeration to increase his messages fear factor. That's a common black cloke he wears with many of his leftist brethren. It seems that the cause of global warming is due to the willing exclusion of the cold hard facts that would provide balance and cool off the hysteria.

I hate bumper stickers but one I'd stick on my car...

It's The Sun, Stupid!

(I'll forgive you for misspelling vacuum, but I'm sure you feel silly enough on your own.)

Oops a spelling error, I’m working on the fly here, I’m surprised it was only one. Besides I’m not getting paid for this so don’t expect perfection.

“Thereby proving my point. Hadley cells are made (in part) by uneven heating--as is all weather. It's warmer at the ITCZ (more insolation) and not as warm at the horse latitudes. Ergo, it's relatively cooler. Warm air rises, and cool air sinks. You admit it's sinking at the horse latitudes, so in effect you're agreeing that it's high pressure created due to relative cool. Now when this air sinks, of course, you have compressional heating. But still, to say that adding heat anywhere creates high pressure is physically wrong.”

I never said adding heat “anywhere” creates high pressure, I said increasing global temperature ads energy to the global atmospheric circulation. So what happens at the horse latitudes when you increase energy at the ITCZ within the Hadley cell? You create a higher pressure at the SHPZ and that air, warm dry air mass, has to go somewhere, right? It can’t go east or west, so it has to go north or south. It will follow the terrain directly into Alberta and western Saskatchewan.

“Actually moving the jets northward would, in effect, promote more moisture advection from the GoM.”

Yes but that will only affect the eastern half of the continent, the same region today, mid Manitoba to the Maritimes, that receives the moist warm humid air (mT). For those people, what do you think will happen as stated above, when pressure is increased at the horse latitudes? Answer, we end up with even more hot wet unstable air being forced north. As I said earlier in another post, the area known as Tornado Alley would grow in size and encompass southern Manitoba to Quebec.
Right now the source area of cT air is fairly small; the extreme south of the US and Mexico. If as I said before higher pressures develops over the horse latitudes, one would expect the geographical area of the SHPZ to increase simply due to the physical shape of North America. So as the SHPZ grows in size, so will the amount of cT available to move north into Canada. Anyone west of the dry line will be in desert conditions.

"And BTW I've been doing the weather for a lot of years now, and I have **NEVER** seen a 60C difference across one front. Never.
Sitting at home watching the weather channel doesn't count as "doing the weather".

Oh take a ribbing.

Well no 60 Deg C doesn’t happen. That “C” was in fact supposed to be an “F”. In fact it took place in eastern Montana 1969.

“Okay, that's fair. Just gotta keep you honest. If memory serves, that was also due to a Chinook.”

I’m quite sure it was a frontal passage. Point being, one person on one side of the polar jet can be suffering from frostbite while one on the other side can be getting a nice tan. Temperatures can vary greatly depending on the source of the air mass that you are being influenced by. My original point was to demonstrate a possible outcome if Alberta sat permanently or semi permanently south of the polar jet. Any meridional flow they get from the mountains will do nothing but give them cool dry air rather than warm dry air. Either source of air will do nothing for moisture.

“We, insolation = INcoming SOLar RadiATION.
Solar insolation = solar incoming solar radiation.
Redundant.”

Well ok I’ll have to admit that’s a bad habit, do you ever say ”hot water heater"? The point here is the increasing energy we received from the sun in the summer. I’ve now forgotten the point I was tying to make over insolation. I think it was to do with insolation forcing the ITCZ north in the summer along with the SHPZ. Well anyway, moving on.
To sum up.
Increasing global temperature will increase the rotation of the Hadley cell, thereby increasing pressure over the horse latitudes. Increasing pressure over the horse latitudes (SHPZ) will force the polar jet further north than we see today and increase the geographical area of the cT air mass. This will increase the amount and influence of hot dry cT air pushed into Alberta and Sask., cutting off any spring or summer moisture they might receive, basically turning that region into an extension of the Mojave desert. Now combine that with shrinking glaciers and a growing demand for water at the tar sands?
"What do you suppose drives the whole bloody mess and why do you figure the SHPZ pushes north in the spring?"

“The sun.” Wrong it’s insolation. Now that’s splitting hairs.

Vitruvius said-

"Albert Einstein said that his favourite things were smoking his tobacco pipe and sailing his little sailboat. I hardly think that Mr. Einstein was a fool."

Ah yes, the good old days when we believed smoking was good for you and we could light up for enjoyment.
Albert Einstein was neither a biologist nor an oncologist, we can forgive the errors in his words.

Johann,
I found your posts to be a very interesting read. It is also fun to watch you hand Alby his ass back on a platter.
I am really curious to know what most of your peers think of the current hype on climate change?

Albertaman
Might I point out nothing has changed and that my argument of future desertification of the west still stands? The ball is again in Johann's court.

You albertaman can feel free at making an attempt to pick apart my claim of an expanding region cT in the southwest US due to global warming. If you think you can.

Albatross,
I am not going to debate the science of meteorology with a pretend meteorologist. I understand the statistics of GW but I have never pretended to be a meteorologist.
You have been revealed to be a fraud by Johann and not worth being taken seriously. It has been made clear that this about feeding your arrogance and delusions of grandeur and I longer see any benefit in feeding those delusions.

"You have been revealed to be a fraud by Johann and not worth being taken seriously."

Oh really? Where? Cut and paste where you think that happened.

I think you have come to the correct conclusion, Albertaman.

Albatross,
How many ways does one have to tell you are full of s--t before you understand you have been told you are full of s--t .

1)This is 100% dead wrong. Warming creates low pressure--remember hot air rising? Well, when it rises it creates a vacuum, aka a low pressure system. Cyclogenesis 101, for those of us who actually know what the f*** we're talking about. In more general terms, saying that high pressure created by surface heating pushes the polar jet north is crap.
2)"And "solar insolation" is redundant. That's how I can tell you're an amateur".
3)"Bullplop. AB and SK are drier primarily due to subsidence in the lee of the Rockies as the prevailing westerlies cross. Not because of some mythical flow from Mexico."

I thought you said, Albertaman, that you no "longer see any benefit in feeding those delusions".

"Albertaman

You seem to have overlooked my post at 6:51. It appears Johann misunderstood what was being warmed and the mechanisms I was refering to creating the change.
Now unless you have something to contribute to the conversation, other than nodding your head like drunken bobble head at what Johann said, might I suggest you butt out until you figure out what's going on.

Vitruvius, you seem to want to step into this debate. So tell me, can you see the contradiction in these two sentences?

"Hadley cells are made (in part) by uneven heating--as is all weather. It's warmer at the ITCZ (more insolation) and not as warm at the horse latitudes.

But still, to say that adding heat anywhere creates high pressure is physically wrong."

I'll give you a hint. If you removed the energy at the ITCZ, would there be a high pressure zone where we find the subtropical high?

Johann said
“Actually moving the jets northward would, in effect, promote more moisture advection from the GoM.”

Johann is partly right, but we don't have to wait for global warming, it happens now and it's what makes Ontario and Quebec uncomfortable humid in the summer. So here's a question for you Vitruvius; considering the above statement from Johann, explain the deserts of the southwest US. Now for everyone’s sake here, why don’t you tell us why Death Valley is not only one of the hottest but is also one of the driest locations on the planet. How come moisture from the Gulf of Mexico isn’t turning that area all nice and green?
What do you think Vitruvius.

What do I think? Well, considering that the topic of this discussion is The Numbers Game, and that the topic is not "prattling on about the juvenile meteorological fantasies of Albatros", I think that you are off topic and are engaging in extended debates and flamewars, and thus I think that you are, as usual, in violation of the rules explicitly stated just under the Post a comment words below, all of which taken in toto contributes to why I generally ignore you, and will now return to so doing.

Well I have to admit, this is all making my head spin. It's a lot of rival figures and facts and theories, but it's certainly thought-provoking.

I'm a very strong environmentalist who believes in clean air and water. I'm skeptical of anthropogenic global warming, but I'm always open to be convinced.

I don't believe Canada is a real problem, though. For the low number of people we have, in a very large (and forested) country, which is very cold and needs heating inside dwellings and workplaces, I don't accept that Canada is 'bad'.

And even if global warming is real and man-made, I will not accept that Kyoto is a workable or effective solution. That is a numeracy question that even this amateur can see through.

And on numbers, my favourite line was "the amount the Liberals were supposed to steal". ;)

Vitro
I am done with the "Legend in his own mind".

Well Vitruvius I do believe this string related to discussions about water. I believe the conversation is relevant.
I’ve already pointed out that in your posts you tend to make up numbers and fudge the information. I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying. “if you can’t dazzle them with brains, baffle them with bulls—t”. Well that’s you all over; yes you are a fraud, a fake, a phoney.

You back Albertaman but can’t back a statement of why nor do you answer some simple questions on the atmosphere, and yes those were very simple questions. You and Alberaman back the words of Johann because he though it fitting to declare me an amature when I made a minor error in terminology, I know PhDs that make that same mistake on a daily basis.. However, you and Albertaman seem to ignore Johann’s error regarding vacuum. You do remember what Da Vinci said about a vacuum don’t you? Johann is a self proclaimed meteorologist, I seriously doubt this, his errors are too great
For example he posts “Bullplop. AB and SK are drier primarily due to subsidence in the lee of the Rockies as the prevailing westerlies cross. Not because of some mythical flow from Mexico.
Then contradicts this by saying “Actually moving the jets northward would, in effect, promote more moisture advection from the GoM.”
Oh well, no use flogging a dead horse, I proved my point.

I think that's wise, Albertaman. The "Legend in his own mind" wrote here at SDA about a week and a half ago: "My day is complete, I offended a redneck". It is clear that he is not interested in civil discourse, he is only interested in feeding his juvenile personality disorder. One can only feel sorry for him. I hope his immaturity doesn't cause him too much hardship once he turns eighteen and becomes legally responsible for behaving like an adult.

To Albertaman: actually you are wrong in saying that Greentards ignore record cold temps - they are attributed to the "instability" caused by Anthro Climate Change. Convenient, eh?

Albatros39a - why do you use the name of a German aircraft of World War I as your nym? Go write that term paper son, adults are attempting civilized discourse here.

re smoking:

It seems that over the last 100 years or so that fascists have been responsible for more "premature deaths" than smoking has. The fascists seem to be winning here. I now regard the smell of tobacco as the "Smell of freedom"

Frank Vancouver