Finally. Maurice Strong is plopped front and center in the Kyoto debate, and in a Canadian newspaper. That said, there’s the sense of an editorial black pen at work;

The Liberals’ commitment to Kyoto is economic suicide, and I believe that the whole exercise was cynical and a favour to Liberal insider Maurice Strong.
Now the Liberals are leading a charge to force the Tories to live up to commitments that the Liberals never did in four years. That’s because they realized the commitments were not realistic.
But Kyoto wasn’t renegotiated because Mr. Strong is a buddy of former Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin. When he was involved in United Nations operations, he organized the UN’s Earth Summit to deal with pollution. He asked for, and got, Canada’s unconditional support for Kyoto.

Bless Diane Francis and whatever God granted her the ovaries lacking in the rest of Canadian media. Even our local radio talk hosts cut callers off when they try to bring his name into the debate, citing “conspiracy theories”.
They must not read the Wall Street Journal.

“Somebody should be compiling a list of these scientists so 2 decades from now when temperatures go down, we can ruin their careers.”

Click for full size
h/t reader Jim.

Wait five minutes;

In evaluating industrial impact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used GDP estimates based on exchange rates rather than purchasing power: As a result, they assume by the year 2100 that not only South Africans but also North Koreans will have a higher per capita income than Americans. That’s why the climate-change computer models look scary. That’s how “solid” the science is: It’s predicated on the North Korean economy overtaking the United States.

Friday update – Cosh explains.

Open a garbage dump.
Or trust them to save themselves. Again.

The contention of climate alarmists that the late-20th century warming is unprecedented over the past two millennia has been contested with contrary scientific evidence over and over, especially in the high latitudes. As the geologic timeline that is available to the global warming crusade gets spottier, one thing is clear – they can only shorten their sights. Going back to Earth’s last interglaciation is not an option for building their argument that much of the recent warmth is unnatural—because back during the last interglacial warm period, temperatures in the Arctic were higher, and polar bears survived (obviously).
[…]
The group found evidence that the LIG persisted for 10,000-12,000 years and that Arctic summer air temperatures during the LIG were 4-5ºC (Figure 1) above present for much of the region, which was well above the LIG average temperature for the rest of Earth. The warming seems to have occurred rapidly, peaking in the early portion of the LIG. The group contends that Arctic summer temperatures were warm enough “to melt all glaciers below 5 km elevation, except the Greenland ice sheet, which was reduced by ca 20-50%.” In regard to Arctic Ocean sea ice, the group states that the margins of the permanent ice “retracted well into the Arctic Ocean basin” and the ice was of an extent that was smaller than during the highly publicized ice retreat of the Holocene. When examining evidence of vegetation changes, the group concluded that “boreal forests advanced to the Arctic Ocean Coast across vast regions of the Arctic currently occupied by tundra.” In fact, across most of northern Russia, they report that forests were displaced northward by as much as 400 to 1000 km.

Bear-scare might be more convincing had the population of the arctic carnivore not quadrupled in the past fifty years,
Related:
Iceland – “What memo?” – While the rest of the world shudders at the prospect of global warming and all that it threatens to bring in the form of floods and soaring temperatures, Iceland has been bucking the trend – and it is having a dramatic effect on fishing activity around the island.

If you are looking for a more informative view of the UN’s latest batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles on global warming hype, check out this response by Lord Monckton. The whole thing is worth reading for those following this issue, but here are a few excerpts:

FIGURES in the final draft of the UN’s fourth five-year report on climate change show that the previous report, in 2001, had overestimated the human influence on the climate since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.
UN scientists faced several problems their computer models had not predicted. Globally, temperature is not rising at all, and sea level is not rising anything like as fast as had been forecast. Concentrations of methane in the air are actually falling.
Sources at the center of the drafting say that, though the now-traditional efforts are being made to sound alarmist and scientific at the same time, key projections are being quietly cut.
Computer models heavily relied on by the UN did not predict the considerable cooling of the oceans that has occurred since 2003 – a cooling which demonstrates that neither the frequency nor the intensity of the hurricanes in the year of Katrina was attributable to “global warming”.
The UN’s models also failed to predict the halt to the rise in methane concentrations in the air that began in 2001. And they did not predict the timing or size of the El Nino which hiked temperature in 1998.
What the UN says: Paleoclimate suggests recent warming is unusual. Past warming has shrunk ice sheets and raised sea level. Recent studies show more variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures than the 2001 report.
Monckton’s response: The UN casts doubt upon the integrity of its climate change reports by failing to apologize for the defective and now-discredited “hockey-stick” graph of world temperatures since 1000 AD.

Update: And for more background on Lord Monckton’s work, his 40-page paper titled Apocalypse cancelled is also worth reading for a detailed debunking of the so-called “consensus” on global warming.

Here’s a freebee for those of you in media who get close enough to Stephane Dion to query him directly. It’s one of those questions that is so remarkably simple, so breathtakingly obvious, that I can’t believe no one has challenged him on it yet.
Call it the Kyoto Purity Test.

Mr. Dion – if global warming requires the urgent action you say it does, why are we waiting for introduction of techology and fuels not yet available? Why limit fuel efficiency standards to new vehicles that will take years to replace millions of gas guzzlers, when, with the stroke of a pen, we could achieve significant reductions in the gasoline consumption – and CO2 emissions – of every vehicle on the road today ?
Why, Mr. Dion, have you not introduced a bill in Parliament to lower the speed limit to 80 km/hr nationwide?”

Related: Gerry Nichols suggests Dion rename his dog. (link fixed)

Via Halls of Macademia, a Margaret Wente Q&A at the Globe on climate activism and the Kyoto protocol.

Edward Thomas from Kingston Canada writes: Ms. Wente, why is media treatment of climate change dominated by people with little to no expertise in science let alone climate-related disciplines? Why does the science need to be ‘sexed up’ by TV personalities, political pundits and PR flaks engaged in adversarial debate over things they barely understand? Isn’t this precisely why the discussion is shrill and unproductive? What media guidelines would you propose to emphasize science instead of theatrics?
Margaret Wente: Mr. Thomas, you’ve raised a pet peeve of mine. I think the media have done a generally miserable job on this topic. Several reasons. One, most of us are scientifically illiterate (as is the general public). Two, we like headlines that attract attention. A recent favourite of mine was a headline story in The Guardian that said “Global warming will increase world terrorism.” Three, we tend to rely too much on activists, so we have led the public to believe that there’s no middle ground between people who warn that global warming is a planetary emergency and people who deny it’s happening at all. In fact, most experts on the subject believe that human-caused global warming is definitely for real, but also say there’s been a terrific amount of overdramatization. And fourth, sometimes the media assign reporters to environmental coverage who are themselves activists.
There’s another factor. This stuff is genuinely complicated. The media deal in sound bites. So global warming is the ultimate media-unfriendly story. Far easier to show pictures of allegedly drowning polar bears.

There’s a reason activists find room on the plane for know-nothing, high profile entertainers.
(This is fun, too.)
When I learned that the Liberals had released a years-old Stephen Harper letter criticizing the accord, I thought this might happen. By pushing Kyoto front and center, they may have just cut themselves off at the knees. Probably fewer than 1 in 10,000 Canadians has any knowledge at all about Kyoto, much less what the costs and implications are for a growing, resource-based economy like ours. They’ve created a perfect opening to bring the facts to the debate (if the Conservatives are quick enough to exploit it) and I’m not so sure that’s in Did Little’s interest.
And consider this. When polled, Canadians express concern for the environment, and agree they’d make the sacrifices it takes to “meet our obligations” to reduce CO2 emissions – except when they’re asked if they’d pay higher gasoline prices.
That should tell us something – concerns over “the environment” may be a mile wide, but it’s a millimeter deep. When push comes to shove, Canadians expect other Canadians to make the sacrificing.
NIMBY.
Which jogs my mind about something else. The “megatonnes of money” thats promised to change hands in the carbon credit trade under Kyoto, brings me back round in a way to the CWB – Gordon Machej – Eagle Sterling – Iriana Resources questions. Digging about, I discovered that in 2004 Iriana amalgamated with Polaris Geothermal.

On April 28, 2006, the Company announced that Polaris Energy is now registered to sell its carbon credits produced from its SJT geothermal project. For the first year of production, which concludes at the end of June 2006, over 20,000 tonnes of carbon credits will be produced. Eventually, when the Company generates 66 MW annually, it will generate approximately 340,000 tons of carbon credits each year. Carbon credits are currently being sold for up to US$20 per tonne depending on the terms and conditions of delivery. At these prices carbon credit revenue would generate in excess of $6 million per annum for the Company at a 66MW level of production. The SJT geothermal power project is the 157th project in the world to qualify and be registered to sell carbon credits and ranks as the 16th largest to be so registered.

I have no idea whether any of the key players of Iriana still play roles or have ownership in Polaris, but it would be interesting to find out.

Gone horribly …ungreen.

An interview (mp3) on the reasons he left Greenpeace and more.
(h/t to reader Bill)

The Marshall Institute Funding Flows for Climate Change Research and Related Activities identifies the “leading suppliers and recipients of government and foundation resources in climate-based research”.

(Partial view)
The top recipients of foundation funding for the 2000-2002 period represent some of the most well-known names in the climate change debate. Ranking first on the list, having received more than $9 million, is Strategies for the Global Environment, which is the umbrella organization for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the Center for SeaChange. The Energy Foundation also ranks highly on this list as it is the recipient of considerable support from other organizations. It received $7.6 million over the three years surveyed. Rounding out the top three is the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which brought in $6.7 million for climate change-related projects between 2000-2002.
[…]
These lists are indicative of the minimum amount expended in this area, but they are not definitive. The nature of the initial constraints on the quality of the data used for this analysis precludes definitive statements about maximum dollar values for climate change related activities, as many foundations do not identify the specific activities for which their contributions are granted. These general operating or support grants can be used for any purpose by the recipient; some of those uses may be in the area of climate change, but the specific proportions are not known.

See the PDF for full charts and analysis. Also in HTML.
Via CNS News – ‘Scientist’ Group’s Funding Comes with Liberal ‘Strings Attached’

The Stern Review: A Dual Critique (download PDF), for The World Economics Journal of Current Economic Analysis and Policy.
The abstract;

The Stern Review, described as the most comprehensive review ever carried out on the economics of climate change, was published on 30 October 2006. The twin papers from a combined team of scientists and economists present a critique in two parts of the Stern Review. Part I focuses on scientific issues and their treatment in the Review. It forms the point of departure for Part II which deals with economic aspects. Each paper has its own list of authors. In relation to both scientific and economic issues, the authors question the accuracy and completeness of the Stern Review’s analysis and the objectivity of its treatment. They conclude that the Review fails to present an accurate picture of scientific understanding of climate change issues, and will reinforce ill-informed alarm about climate change.
Two interrelated features of the Stern Review are that it greatly understates the extent of uncertainty as to possible developments, in highly complex systems that are not well understood, over a period of two centuries or more; and its treatment of sources and evidence is persistently selective and biased. These twin features have combined to make the Review a vehicle for speculative alarmism. In the judgement of the authors of the Dual Critique, the Stern Review mishandles data; gives too little attention to actual observation and evidence, as distinct from the results of model-based exercises; and takes no account of the failures of due disclosure, and the chronic limitations of peer reviewing, that have been characteristic of work relating to climate change which governments have commissioned and drawn on. As to specifically economic aspects, the authors note among other weaknesses that the Review systematically overstates projected costs of climate change, partly though by no means wholly as a result of its failure to acknowledge the scope for long-term adaptation to possible global warming; underestimates the likely cost—including to the world’s poor—of the drastic global mitigation programme that it calls for; and proposes worldwide adoption of a specially low rate of interest for discounting the costs and benefits of mitigation, on the basis of inadequate analysis and without regard for the problems and risks that would result. So far from being an authoritative guide to the economics of climate change, the Stern Review is deeply flawed. It does not provide a basis for informed and responsible policies.

The Stern Review online
BBC: Stern Review at a glance.

Or face excommunication;

The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to “Holocaust Deniers” and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.
The Weather Channel’s (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program “The Climate Code,” is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their “Seal of Approval” for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.
[…]
Cullen’s call for decertification of TV weatherman who do not agree with her global warming assessment follows a year (2006) in which the media, Hollywood and environmentalists tried their hardest to demonize scientific skeptics of manmade global warming. Scott Pelley, CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent, compared skeptics of global warming to “Holocaust deniers” and former Vice President turned foreign lobbyist Al Gore has repeatedly referred to skeptics as “global warming deniers.”
[…]
Cullen’s call for suppressing scientific dissent comes at a time when many skeptical scientists affiliated with Universities have essentially been silenced over fears of loss of tenure and the withdrawal of research grant money. The United Nations Inner Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process has also steadily pushed scientists away who hold inconvenient skeptical views and reject the alarmist conclusions presented in the IPCC’s summary for policymakers.

There’s that “consensus” we keep hearing about.
Update – A challenge for Al Gore – declined;

Al Gore is traveling around the world telling us how we must fundamentally change our civilization due to the threat of global warming. Today he is in Denmark to disseminate this message. But if we are to embark on the costliest political project ever, maybe we should make sure it rests on solid ground. It should be based on the best facts, not just the convenient ones. This was the background for the biggest Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, to set up an investigative interview with Mr. Gore. And for this, the paper thought it would be obvious to team up with Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” who has provided one of the clearest counterpoints to Mr. Gore’s tune.
The interview had been scheduled for months. Mr. Gore’s agent yesterday thought Gore-meets-Lomborg would be great. Yet an hour later, he came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he’s been very critical of Mr. Gore’s message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore’s evenhandedness. According to the agent, Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter. These conditions were immediately accepted by Jyllands-Posten. Yet an hour later we received an email from the agent saying that the interview was now cancelled. What happened?

Patrick Moore;

I soon discovered that trees are just large plants that have evolved the ability to grow long wooden stems. They didn’t do that so we could cut them up into lumber and grind them into pulp; they actually had only one purpose in mind and that was to get their needles or leaves higher up above the other plants where the tree could then monopolize the Sun’s energy for photosynthesis. When foresters create openings or clearcuts when they harvest trees, one of the reasons for doing it is so the new trees growing back can be in full sunlight. Trees are basically plants that want to be in the sun. If trees wanted to be in the shade they would have been shrubs instead, they would not have spent so much time and energy growing long wooden stems.
Forests are home to the majority of living species; not the oceans, nor the grasslands, nor the alpine areas, but ecosystems that are dominated by trees. There is a fairly simple reason for this. The living bodies of the trees themselves create a new environment that would not be there in their absence. Now the canopy above is home to millions of birds and insects where there was once only thin air. And beneath the canopy, in the interior of the forest, the environment is now protected from frost and sun and wind. This, in combination with the food provided by the leaves, fruits and even the wood of the trees, creates thousands of new habitats into which new species can evolve, species that could never have existed if it were not for the presence of the living trees.
This gives rise to the obvious concern that if the trees are cut down the habitats or homes will be lost and the species that live in them will die. Indeed, in 1996 the World Wildlife Fund, at a media conference in Geneva, announced that 50,000 species are going extinct each year due to human activity. And the main cause of these 50,000 extinctions, they said, is commercial logging. The story was carried around the world by Associated Press and other media and hundreds of millions of people came to believe that forestry is the main cause of species extinction.
During the past three years I have asked the World Wildlife Fund on many occasions to please provide me with a list of some of the species that have supposedly become extinct due to logging. They have not offered up a single example as evidence. In fact, to the best of our scientific knowledge, no species has become extinct in North America due to forestry.
Where are these 50,000 species that are said to be going extinct each year? They are in a computer model in Edward O. Wilson’s laboratory at Harvard University. They are electrons on a hard drive, they have no Latin names, and they are in no way related to any direct field observations in any forest.

Moore was a founding member of Greenpeace.
h/t Sheldon Kotyk.

Prepare to be creeped out.

Late Afternoon Update – (via radio) Police and emergency services are asking people not to use cell phones in the area unless necessary, as the system is being overloaded, and causing them problems. There are still a lot of drivers stranded on the roads, in and out of Saskatoon. Reports of 20 – 30 vehicles on the highway outside Rosetown, for example.
More U of Sask webcams. Noon Update - Current Sask highway conditions;

Saskatoon highways are temporarily CLOSED due to zero visibility, blowing and drifting snow North Battleford Area highways are temporarily CLOSED due to zero visibility, blowing and drifting snow. TRAVEL NOT RECOMMENDED In Unity, Kerrobert, and Rosetown areas. #3 Highway East and West of Melfort is CLOSED due to Zero Visibility, Loose Snow, Snow Drifts, Swirling Snow, Drifting Snow, TRAVEL NOT RECCOMENDED throughout the Prince Albert Area Meadow Lake Area Highways are temporarily CLOSED due to zero visibility, blowing and drifting snow.

There are also several streets in the Saskatoon closed or blocked by drifting, and motorists around the province reported stranded - including a Greyhound bus full of passengers bound for Edmonton that was forced to spend the night a few km outside North Battleford. More at the link. 2 PM (local time) UPDATE - believe it or not, this thing is getting worse. Saskatoon schools are not allowing children to walk home on their own, and are calling parents to get them. That may be difficult as there are multi-car pileups in various locations around the city. Winds at the moment are a sustained 70km/h. These are photos I took minutes ago on my street, looking west and east. (Click for larger version) Links to video and photos from listeners at CKOM radio. (link fixed) Update - two deaths reported at the Onion Lake reserve, when two people left their vehicle after getting stuck on a grid road. More, to the west of us (where things look postively sunny by comparison) Darcey asks you "take a little time out of your day to thank John Baird. He’s been Environmental Minister for just a short little time now but look at the difference"

WSJ, Jan 3 (behind subscriber wall);

“We are concerned,” said Mr. Kempthorne, that “the polar bears’ habitat may literally be melting” due to warmer Arctic temperatures. However, when we called Interior spokesman Hugh Vickery for some elaboration, he was a lot less categorical, even a tad defensive. The “endangered” designation is based less on the actual number of bears in Alaska than on “projections into the future,” Mr. Vickery said, adding that these “projection models” are “tricky business.”
Apparently so, because there are in fact more polar bears in the world now than there were 40 years ago, as the nearby chart shows. The main threat to polar bears in recent decades has been from hunting, with estimates as low as 5,000 to 10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. But thanks to conservation efforts, and some cross-border cooperation among the U.S., Canada and Russia, the best estimate today is that the polar bear population is 20,000 to 25,000.

It also turns out that most of the alarm over the polar bear’s future stems from a single, peer-reviewed study, which found that the bear population had declined by some 250, or 25%, in Western Hudson Bay in the last decade. But the polar bear’s range is far more extensive than Hudson Bay. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain concluded that the ice bear populations “may now be near historic highs.” One of the leading experts on the polar bear, Mitchell Taylor, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory in Canada, has found that the Canadian polar bear population has actually increased by 25% — to 15,000 from 12,000 over the past decade.
Mr. Taylor tells us that in many parts of Canada, “polar bears are very abundant and productive. In some areas, they are overly abundant. I understand that people not living in the North generally have difficulty grasping the concept of too many polar bears, but those who live here have a pretty good grasp of what that is like.” Those cuddly white bears are the Earth’s largest land carnivores.
There is no doubt that higher temperatures threaten polar bear habitat by melting sea ice. Mr. Kempthorne also says he had little choice because the threshold for triggering a study under the Endangered Species Act is low. The Bush Administration was sued by the usual environmental suspects to make this decision, which means that Interior will now conduct a year-long review before any formal listing decision is made.
Nonetheless, the bears seem to have survived despite many other severe warming and cooling periods over the last few thousands of years. Polar bears are also protected from poaching and environmental damage by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, so there is little extra advantage to the bears themselves from an “endangered” classification.
All of which suggests that the real story here is a human one, namely about the politics of global warming. Once a plant or animal is listed under the Endangered Species Act, the government must also come up with an elaborate plan to protect its habitat. If the polar bear is endangered by warmer temperatures, then the environmentalist demand will be that the government do something to address that climate change. Faster than you can say Al Gore, this would lead to lawsuits and cries in Congress demanding federal mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The rest of the article has been copied here.

Darcey has been busy collecting the imminent disaster global warming headlines. Best so far – “Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012”
That’s right – the process will be complete just five years from now. So, again – who needs Kyoto? It looks to me like this “human-caused global climate change” is a problem on the brink of solving itself.
Idiots.
Well, time to get moving. I’ve got to batten down the hatches in preparation for tonight’s forecasted blizzard.
Headline updated, h/t commentor Rob, who may have just coined the new word of the year ;

Your search –Y2Kyoto – did not match any documents.

What sort of world is Marvin leaving for his grandchildren?

If Stéphane Dion gets his way on the Kyoto Protocol we, too, could follow Britain and implement a Bovine Flatulence Mitigation Program:

Farmers will be told today they could be penalised if they do not stop their flatulent animals farting so much methane gas. The environment secretary, David Miliband, will tell a farming conference in Oxford that agriculture now contributes 7% of all UK greenhouse gas emissions…

Reader Manny writes [via email, and in the comments – slightly edited].

I created a composite between the photo of the beast from our own Radarsat (link below) and a map of Canada from MSN Encarta World Atlas (free online) to illustrate the size and distance of the thing.

full size
About the risk to the Hibernia oil platform[*], it is 4,500 km away from it (straight line). That’s the distance between Montreal and Calgary. Can everyone please relax?
PS: I was intrigued by Ice island vs Iceberg. From the Canadian Encyclopedia:

“In the Arctic Ocean, the term “ice island” is applied to pieces of floating shelf ice that form principally on the north coast of ELLESMERE ISLAND. These thin tabular icebergs are 20-60 m thick, often up to 100 km2 in area, and typically protrude 2-6 m above water.” …”The thinner arctic ice islands have a much lower natural period of oscillation and, having horizontal dimensions much greater than their thickness, tend to absorb ocean waves as filtered travelling waves, which induce flexing of the ice. As the ice island thins by melting, this process may lead to it fracturing and breaking into smaller pieces.” … “Since 1985 a Canadian station has been maintained on an ice island that calved from the Ward-Hunt Ice Shelf in 1983. Because many ice islands become trapped in Arctic Ocean current gyres, they survive for many years, melting and crumbling at the edges only slowly.”

More unmentioned data;

As this table indicates, the vast majority of ice shelf loss occured in the first half of the 20th century, assuming there’s been no difference in the Helocene ice shelves. from 4500 years ago to 100 years ago. To me, that’s a significant assumption.

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