Haligonians are preparing for the United Nations Climate Change
Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark next week. The meeting of world
leaders is being billed as the last chance for humanity to implement
meaningful policies to avert cataclysmic climate change.
Lil MacPherson, owner of The Wooden Monkey, leaves Tuesday to attend
the conference as an observer with representatives of Nova Scotia
Business, Inc., the province’s economic development agency. MacPherson
is also a trained presenter of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient
Truth, a founding member of the provincial chapter of Business
Alliance for Local Living Economies and a local food promoter.
“I plan to tour Denmark and look at the mass transit system, at how
they do local food and to learn about their windmill farms,” says
MacPherson. She’ll be blogging about her experiences for The Coast, at
thecoast.ca/bites.
Meanwhile, here in town, a group of people from diverse faith
traditions are coordinating a series of events to draw attention to
Copenhagen. Many of the group plan to fast from December 6 through
December 13; a candlelight vigil will be held at 5pm on December 12 at
Grand Parade and the fast will be broken at the various churches
December 13.
“People of different faiths and of no faith are coming together so
that our politicians will come together and make a strong agreement,”
explains Russ Daye, one of the organizers. The public is invited to
take part in any of the events; for more info contact Daye at russelldaye@eastlink.ca, or visit
standrewshfx.ca.
This article appears in Dec 3-9, 2009.
It is absolutely outrageous the the Province of Nova Scotia is paying the cost of MacPherson’s trip. We are broke, and facing a punishing tax increase in the new year. How can this be justified when she is clearly travelling for personal reasons?
http://www.dongenergy.com/en/business%20activitie…
tells you all you need to know about wind energy in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe. Just ignore their activity in hydrocarbons.
Dear “Go Bus”,
have you ever hear the saying “we can’t eat money”? The whole point behind this meeting in Copenhagen is the fact the in the grand sceme of things money is irrevelvent. She is travelling to learn innovative ways to support a sustainable community. That is for the good of us all.
“We can’t eat money” is a diversion. In truth you can eat with money, buy housing with money, buy clothing with money. Money is not irrelevant, it represents productive effort.
Money is simply a placeholder. It is easier to trade amongst ourselves if we all use a common valuation system. It could be gold, salt, chickens or paper and metal with pretty pictures on it. Money is not the problem.
The problem is all these people who think that, because they believe that they are going to try and save the world, they are allowed to enforce their opinions and values on all those that don’t agree with them.
Specifically, this problem is Environmentalists stealing our productive effort for their own ends, using the government’s tax and social spending policy as an intermediary.
Bo Gus — Are you talking about Lil MacPherson, the woman who has been instrumental in creating a much-needed buzz around food in this city and province? She has proven her interest in food extends far beyond the walls of her restaurant. Perhaps it’s time we embrace the potential each one of us has to affect change. Even you could make a difference…
Know what I hate? That commercial with all those little kids rioting in the streets over climate change! Give me a break, activism is sooo passe. Honestly, I think many people are starting to get tired and even bored of all these “National Day of Action” events… National Day of Action on the Environment, National Day of Action on Child Poverty, National Day of Action on Violence Against Women, National Day of Action on Homelessness, National Day of Action on Endangered Spotted Owls, National Day of Action on wearing your underwear inside out so you can get a few extra days out of it (my personal favourite).
Seriously though, underwear aside, these groups are starting to alienate the types of people they want to bring on board through their over the top sensationalism while simply “preaching to the converted.” Ohh my God, the world’s going to end if we don’t all stop driving cars and eating meat! Yawn.
@ lesefeir – I think Joblow’s point was that there isn’t much Lil can find out in Copenhagen about “innovative ways to support a sustainable community” that can’t be found on a website or even a well placed phone call.
I find it annoying the way the media throws around lines like “last chance for humanity to implement meaningful policies to avert cataclysmic climate change” when it hasn’t been proven conclusively how much if any of the current warming trend can be attributed to man/greenhouse gas. Let alone if CO2 buildup is causing warming or if it’s the warming that’s causing the CO2 buildup.
I think a lot of climatologists know this which is why we’ve seen a shift from the buzzword “global warming” to “climate change” – that way when the (expected cyclic) cooling trend begins in a few years they can still keep their reputations.
Actually, Murder Junkie, it has been proven that climate change is anthropogenic,
and that CO2 has led to climate change
http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.org/executive_summ…
it is a myth that scientists are in disagreement as to the cause or the reality of climate change. In fact CO2e levels have risen by 80% in the last 50 years, that’s CO2 , that’s more than ten times faster than at any time in the last 22’000 years
From where do you find “expected cyclical cooling trends”, I’ve never heard such a thing.
Cooling might be caused by meltwater in the ocean from Greenland shutting down the thermohaline conveyer belt. When that has happened before it’s killed off Ancient cultures (research the fall of old kingdon Egypt and Akkhad) and also extended the last ice age by 1’000 years.
A myth? While climate change is indisputably a natural fact, the cause is disputed by a lot a scientists, a couple of whom I know personally.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5…
Canada is committed to taking positive action to combat cclimate change.
Canada is also looking forward to tapping into the tourist potential of 100,000,000 middle class Chinese. How much CO2 is that ?
Interesting article on recycling : http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=23…
‘
San Francisco’s Department of Waste recently calculated it paid $4,000 a tonne to recycle plastic bags. Its resale price for the recycled product? $32. “Nobody wants it. There’s no value. It doesn’t make sense,” says Joseph Gho, CEO of EPI Environmental Products Inc., a Vancouver manufacturer of biodegradable plastics. “Besides the financial, the economic cost, you’ve got the environmental cost” of recycling unwanted material. “The trucks running out there, burning fuel … you have to use energy, you’ve got CO2 emissions”
Lil is travelling on her own dime.
Folks who still natter on about the doubtfulness of anthropogenic global warming would still be nattering on in the same vein, I have no doubt, whilst up to their kneecaps in sea water on Lower Water Street. That is, they would be doing such, if runaway warming hadn’t already caused massive drought, famine and die-off around the world and forced migrations of populations out of inundated coastal areas.
Everyone has an opinion on whether or not global warming is real or fake, caused by human activity or just a natural cycle, but not all opinions are created equal. Personally, I am inclined to immediately discount the opinions of those whose science education ended with, for example, naming the parts of a flower in sixth grade. I also discount the opinions put forth by all those ‘think tank’ folks whose funding comes from the very industries whose profits would be negatively impacted by changing our energy consumption habits. I also discount the opinions of academics, some with training in physical sciences and some not, who pronounce the accumulated evidence for global warming as ‘too meager’ or ‘too contradictory’ for us to take any costly steps towards the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. These last I am comfortable discounting because a vanishingly small number of these professional skeptics have any training in climate science whatsoever, while at the same time there is a broad consensus among climate scientists (almost universal) that the climate IS changing and that it likely IS caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.
In fact, there is a growing consensus among the very climate scientists who have been sounding the alarm these years that whatever steps we take towards GHG reductions will likely be too little and too late to save us from a global catastrophe. Things are happening much faster than many climate scientists predicted with the result that we may be much closer to runaway reinforcement of warming trends than we have assumed to date. Once these feedback mechanisms kick in (eg the release of vast amounts of GHG from warming northern tundras around the world) we will have embarked upon an uncontrolled climate experiment, unprecedented in this planet’s history, which may end with our species’ extinction and as the Enterprise’s Chief Engineer Scott might say: “I canna change the laws of physics Captain . . . once she goes there won’t be anything that you or I or anyone else can do to stop her”.
Forget hacked emails about ‘cooking the data’, the real dirty little secret among climate scientists is how close we may be to a tipping point that makes all of our future efforts to reduce GHG emissions fruitless.
And yet, being a misguided optimist, I believe we still have to try rather than sit tight and do nothing.
I can’t improve on Jen’s or Farmer Bob’s dissection of Murder Junkie’s lame arguments.
But I can tell MJ that scientists still use the terms global warming and climate change; it’s politicians who prefer climate change because it sounds less scary. It was a Bush crony and media consultant — Frank Lutz — who made the switch at the White House, and our own Bush accolyte, little Stevie Harper, stole a page from his nefarious book.
For everyone else here, I report on global warming for Triple Pundit and a few other environmental and business publications, and there is a new sense of hope at Copenhagen that just emerged over the last seven days. It won’t be a full treaty, nor will it be what the science demands, but it will be a start, and I doubt that Harper will be happy.
I actually envy those of you who can ignore the scientific method in favor of media hype (sounds like One Blue Marble’s career depends on it) and political agenda. The truth is any good geologist will tell you that climate change is real. Any good scientist will tell you that we don’t have enough data to say for sure how much if any of this can be attributed to man / CO2.
Sounds like Urban Farmer Bob believes there wasn’t “massive drought, famine and die-off around the world and forced migrations” before the industrial revolution. Sounds like you’ve seen “The Day After Tomorrow” a few too many times and no doubt believe it’s a documentary.
Are any of the scientists in this video any less credible / trustworthy than say, Al Gore?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5…
A few other things a lot of people who blindly embrace the theory of AGW don’t understand:
If atmospheric CO2 is linked to global climate how insignificant man’s production of CO2 is compared to volcanic activity, decomposition, and above all the ocean.
It has much more to do with politics than actual science.
How easy it is to model data to show exactly what you want it to show.
How much the big evil energy companies are actually going to profit from green energy that (in the case of solar & wind) is expensive and inefficient. Guess who the worlds largest producer of solar panels is? (BP)
I actually consider myself to be an environmentalist. The real problem I have with this whole thing is it takes our eye off the ball of the real problems such as the pollutants (which CO2 is not) that are actually doing damage to our environment. Here we are depleting non-renewable resources at an alarming rate, destroying rivers such as the Saguenay, unable to even keep our own harbor clean while 1/3 of the world is without electricity while we put all this energy into something that may not be real.
@MJ
The film in your video link (The Great Global Warming Swindle) was something I’d seen before.
You asked “Are any of the scientists in this video any less credible / trustworthy than say, Al Gore?”.
The fifth person featured in the video might not be as well-known as Al Gore, but I know him quite well because I took a geography course from him over thirty years ago at the University of Winnipeg. Professor Tim Ball has built a significant reputation in the climate change denial industry, which perhaps exceeds his reputation in the field of climate science. He hasn’t had an affiliation with the University of Winnipeg since 1996. He has been notable lately for a public speaking campaign funded in part by the oil and gas industry and commercial electricity generators through a number of cut-out organizations like Friends of Science and something called the Natural Resources Stewardship Project.
Does this make Prof. Tim Ball less credible/ trustworthy than Al Gore? I think these ties to industry groups should at least raise some questions in the minds of those who give credence to his views. You will see Prof. Ball’s own denial of such ties at 1:06:15 in the video, but I think he is being somewhat disingenuous.
It no longer shocks or surprises me to see an academic ‘expert’ sit in front of a camera and make bald statements that are not supported by the facts. Academics hold political views, too. In fact, one of the themes of the video is that the majority of climate scientists (who are supposedly suppressing the views of the minority) have some kind of political axe to grind. If you accept that theory is it that much of a stretch to believe that Tim Ball has his own axe to grind?
Also credited in the video is Prof. Ross McKitrick, whose own specialty at the University of Guelph is economics, not climate science. That lack of expertise hasn’t prevented McKitrick from publishing fairly detailed work on climate change subjects, coauthored one hopes by people with more specialized knowledge than McKitrick. But significantly he has done a lot of this work while a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute, well-known right wing/ pro-business think tank and policy institute. What particular axe does he have to grind?
Al Gore doesn’t ever lay claim to being a climate science expert, but he is probably at least as well qualified to speak on the subject as Prof. McKitrick.
The film itself has been widely criticized for its distortions and misuse of data and misrepresentations of the views of other scientists. In fact, a number of the climate scientists quoted in the film later complained that they were misquoted or their statements were edited to give the incorrect impression that they doubted an anthropogenic component to global warming.
The current consensus on climate change has been built up over decades and is based on the scientific method, contrary to its what its detractors might suggest.
She may be traveling on her own dime, but she’s flying and making a huge carbon footprint by doing so. Not to mention all the laundry that the hotel will do to clean her bedsheets, towels, etc. If she really cared, she would have stayed in Halifax and left no carbon footprint.
Murder Junkie:
Let me start with our slight area of agreement. I agree, too, that global warming needs to start with the scientific method. But it could be that with degrees in science and journalism, and the fact that I read hundreds of clean tech and global warming stories every week, that I understand the science better than you do.
For one thing, I would never suggest that volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans. (It’s completely and verifiably false). And I’m shocked that anyone would think that spewing about 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year is insignificant. (True, it’s less than that emitted by natural processes, but it’s been enough to tip the scales).
So let dispel a few illusions for you. The first is that you are not an environmentalist, and the second is that you don’t really understand how science works. Finally, let me state emphatically: I get exactly 0 percent of my climate science from Al Gore.
The information that you are pedaling here comes from a cheap, dangerous, cynical astroturfing campaign run by fossil fuel companies. All you have is sophistry and not one whit of science.
So let’s return to those pesky facts. Our understanding of global warming isn’t based solely on climate models, nor does it have anything to do with politics. It’s based on study and experimentation, and on publication and debate in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
That’s why you keep talking about Al Gore. You’re trying to hide the fact that your position has NO science to support it. No evidence. Nothing. You are entitled to your opinion — just as you’re entitled to belong to the Flat Earth Society, or to believe in Creationism — but your position is entirely without scientific merit.
So let me fill in the blanks for the parts you left out. The study of anthropogenic global warming actually began in 1890s for crying out loud, and it’s been accumulating since that time. For instance, if you do a database search of the peer-reviewed scientific literature between 1993 and 2003 to look for studies that either confirm or refute global warming, you’ll find 928 which support, and 0 which refute.
I know that, over the last 3 years, I can find more than 1,500 studies that support my position, all published in peer-reviewed journals. How many can you find, MJ? I’ll save you the trouble and tell you that it’s fewer than 15, and that NONE of them debate the basic premise of global warming. They nibble at the edges, suggesting that maybe sea level will only rise by 15 or 20 inches instead of 3-6 feet. And they’re most assuredly wrong because they haven’t found further support in peer-reviewed studies.
No one who actually works the climate science community is seriously debating whether or not changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations alter the greenhouse effect, or if the current warming trend is outside of the range of natural variability, or if sea levels have risen over the last century. No one. A handful of scientists merely suggest we have time to reverse direction, or that technology will save the planet.
Only a very small percentage of climate studies rely on computer models. Most come from real world experimentation with verifiable results. And these real world results are showing that climate change is coming harder and faster than predicted by the computer models. It will be devastating, for the poorest countries in particular.
Anyone who lives in a Northern country already sees it coming (because of a process called arctic amplification). Anyone who grew up in Nova Scotia during the 1960s and ’70s knows that our climate has changed dramatically over the last 20 years.
If I’m wrong, we slice a point — maybe two — off the GDP by 2050, and we have a much cleaner, healthier world. (Since reducing carbon will also reduce almost every other sources of pollution).
If you’re wrong, the planet will be burning.
Premier Dex confirmed yesterday that we are picking up the tab for Lil’s trip. A shameful waste of taxpayer dollars.
Bo Gus:
Can you provide a reference? All the media sources I’ve looked at state that Lil Macpherson is paying her own way, as are a number of other Nova Scotia business people who will be traveling with the provincial government contingent.
Farmer Bob and Bo Gus:
I was at a seminar last week, and Lil said that she was traveling to Copenhagen on her own dime.
Thanks for the confirmation OBM.
I find with internet discussions and forums it’s too easy for people to put unfounded rumours out there that are then repeated and through repetition acquire the aspect of truth.
Every post from this idiot is negative. Ignore Bo Gus’s rants.
She is absolutely paying her own. Flight, room, meals, everything. Some people are so petty.
More free publicity from Commie Tim B for his commie environmentalist pals