MANDATORY READING FOR ALL MPS BEFORE SPEAKING ABOUT CLIMATE!

[Tom Harris]

http://tinyurl.com/yn8n6n

here is the text:

Climatic hubris: The Ellesmere Island ice shelves have been disappearing since they were first mapped in 1906

Dr. Fred Michel
16 January 2007
National Post

On Saturday evening, the science director of the David Suzuki Foundation told CBC Newsworld that world scientists agree—we must act now "to stabilize the Earth's climate." We have heard a similar refrain for years. We are told over and over that the rise in temperatures during the 1990s is accelerating the rate of melt of our polar ice caps as never before and worldwide flooding will wash away coastal settlements. Droughts, hurricanes, pestilence and all forms of calamity will be upon us and future generations if we do not reduce our carbon dioxide emissions that, so they say, is causing global warming.

A couple of nights earlier on CBC News, Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria asserted with respect to recent events, "[This] is nothing -- wait 'til 2050. This is scary. I mean the kind of climate change in store in the next 50 to 100 years is equivalent to the climate change that existed between when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth in the Cretaceous and today. That's 60 million years of climate change happening in a hundred years!"

Besides the fact that the mass extinction that wiped out most of the dinosaurs was actually 66 million years ago, Weaver apparently also does not realize that in those millions of years the climate has been extremely variable, ranging from nearly tropical in polar regions to ice sheets covering much of North America and Europe. This period also saw changes from some of the highest sea levels ever to some of the lowest.

In late December, the media expressed shock as a large piece of ice shelf on the north end of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic broke off and created seismic waves. It was reported that 90% of the northern ice shelves had now been lost. Not mentioned was the fact that this is an ongoing, albeit intermittent event. Since the ice shelves were first mapped in 1906, they have been gradually disappearing. In fact, research papers on this ice shelf, published in 1986 and 2001 by Dr. Martin Jeffries of the University of Alaska, show that by 1962 roughly 60% of the ice shelf had already disappeared. Since then, an additional 30% has broken away with a larger loss than the most recent one occurring about 30 years ago. In other words, 60% of the ice shelf was lost in the first 56 years of this period (over 1% per year) versus 30% in the last 44 years (or 0.67% per year). Is that acceleration? Before today's global warming hype, Jeffries reported that "the coincidence of tidal and seismic events in 1962 created a critical condition that caused the ice shelf calving." He concluded that further losses were to be expected.

In the work I have been involved with on Bylot Island in the eastern Canadian Arctic, we have found a fairly continuous glacier retreat of 40 to 50 metres per year since the late 1940s when air photos were first taken. Clearly, this retreat is nothing new -- it is a long-term response to natural variations in climate. The Little Ice Age from the 1400s to the mid-1800s was the coldest period in the past millennium, cold enough to allow skating on the canals and rivers of England and mainland Europe. Before that it was much warmer - 6,000 years ago during the 'climatic optimum' the Canadian Arctic was perhaps as much as 3C to 5C warmer than today. Then, the depth of thaw of the upper permafrost was much more than we see today.

Last year, when a conference was held at Tuktoyaktuk on the shores of the Beaufort Sea, news reports blamed global warming for the massive coastal erosion that is endangering the community. However, research has documented that such erosion has been occurring along this part of the Mackenzie Delta at a rate of tens of metres per year for centuries, if not millennia. At one time the community would have been kilometres from the coast. The shores of this region are ice-rich and susceptible to erosion by waves and warm temperatures. What we are witnessing is natural, ongoing change and certainly nothing new.

The success of the human species has been largely due to its ability to adapt to environmental changes. With the evolution of megacities, we now seem to feel that we are powerful enough to change the environment at our whim. Hurricane Katrina's devastating impact on New Orleans should have been a wake-up call to the fact that we must still be ready to adapt to environmental change, including climate variations. Instead, it has been used by alarmists to promote their impossible goal of "stopping climate change." In reality, climate is constantly changing and will continue to change no matter what we do.

We need to put our energies and resources into solving real environmental problems -- air, water and land pollution, the loss in biodiversity, and urban sprawl, to name just a few. "Stabilizing the Earth's climate" as suggested by Suzuki's science director, is sheer fantasy. Its time to chill out on climate change hysteria.
_______________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Fred Michel, an advisor to the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (www.nrsp.com ), is the director of the Institute of Environmental Science and Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa.

[Blue Canadian]

I think most CPC MPs know that Climate Change(TM) is a fantasy, but it's one that they dare not challenge openly.

Expressing doubts over the validity of Global Warming(TM) is quickly jumped upon as apostasy (and I do mean it in those terms); for a conservative to do the same is utter blasphemy and proof positive that they do not care about the environment.

That it at once a curse and a blessing in disguise: the public is convinced of our common culpability in ravaging the environment (from an ecclesiastical point of view); they have been sold Climate Change(TM) as its sign and Kyoto as their salvation.

You cannot argue in the face of this kind of nascent religious belief. But you can divert and shape it.

The public is genuinely concerned about the environment (apart from the religious guilt-tripping aspects of this belief, who isn't?), but quite uncertain on what to do about it. Well, not completely undecided: some one else should fix things but ensure that day to day life is disrupted as little as possible.

Enter the Green hucksters who feed that guilt and disguise their agendas under a veneer of pseudo-science. They know they're pulling a scam; look at this quote from none other than Maurice Strong:

Canadian billionaire socialist Maurice Strong, who presided over the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, is somewhat less tentative. "The real goal of the Earth Charter," said Strong, "is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments." <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2002/09-23-2002/vo18no19_religion.htm">The New American</a>

But for all the proselytising done by the Green NGO's they're vulnerable: public skepticism of ANY institution is still quite high, and public trust in the NGO's, in Kyoto and the "sustainable development" crowd can be just as easily lost.

Most people have no clue about basic science or about climatology: any explanation offered often enough is considered as true. They do, however, have a knowledge of their day to day economic well being.

The solution, as I see it, is threefold. First expose the economic fallacies of Kyoto - in personal terms, not referencing GDP - and highlight all corporate and monetary scams associated with the Green crowd. Scandal sells. This must be done repeatedly, to drive the message home to the public that their would-be Green saviours are just as unsavoury, if not more so, than the usual list of Big Oil or greedy capitalists.

That part is relatively easy. The harder part is to come up with alternate plans and policies that will satisfy the religious hunger to protect the environment (note that this has nothing to do with science, ecology or the actual environment) but will not feed the existing Green propaganda machinery. This is a delicate balancing act of convincing the public to loose faith in their current saviours (easy), while simultaneously building up trust with the new messengers (hard).

And all the while, the third element has to be at work in the background: debunking the junk science underpinnings of Global Warming(TM) at every stage. Repeatedly and noisily. Ultimately, this effort will deprive the hucksters of the validity of their claims. This may prove to be the hardest chore of all.

[fourhorses]

I think most CPC MPs know that Climate Change(TM) is a fantasy, but it's one that they dare not challenge openly.

Open Challenge:

The accuracy of Global Warming predictions is at best 36%

Are we going to gamble $ 172 Billion where the odds are stacked against us 2:1 of it being untrue ?



http://www.freedominion.ca/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=73839

[Faramir]

So hard to say. Global warming is gaining acceptance now among conservatives - then again, it may just be that the right is exhausted and have followed the bugs bunny mantra "If you can't beat ' em, join 'em".