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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (26118)	12/2/2009 1:28:14 AM
From: average joe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

Monbiot has hissy fit and calls Canada a 'corrupt petro-state' Cathal Kelly British journalist and environmental activist George Monbiot took aim at Canada's climate policies today, calling this country a "corrupt petro-state" whose government behaves with "the sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party." Monbiot's column in London's The Guardian is one of the most influential intellectual platforms in Europe. He is in Toronto today, slated to debate climate change at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies tonight. On the eve of his appearance, he fired a fusillade at the Harper government from his journalistic perch. He writes that he is so appalled by Canada's climate policy that he has broken a self-imposed ban on flying in order to come to Toronto (jumbo jets are far and away the worst transportation emitters of climate-destroying carbon). The piece is titled, in part, "(Canada) is now to climate what Japan is to whaling." "Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada," Monbiot writes. "Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works." The column comes just as the international spotlight shifts to Denmark, where the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference is set to begin on Monday. The greatest target of Monbiot's wrath is Alberta's oilsands, a multibillion-dollar investment that represents the second-largest deposit of oil on Earth. Extracting the oil is a dirty, expensive business, and has long outraged environmental activists. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has come under harsh domestic and international criticism for his laissez faire attitude to carbon emissions reduction. At Copenhagen, Canada is promising to reduce emissions to 20 per cent below 2006 levels by 2020. The U.S. is promising a similar cut. Climate change scientists have called for a far more drastic reduction. In his book, Heat, Monbiot called for an immediate 95 per cent-plus reduction by developed nations. A recent Harris-Decima poll showed that two-thirds of Canadians believe that global warming is the "defining" crisis of our time. A similar number thought that mankind will rise to meet it. "It feels odd to be writing this," Monbiot closes his scathing column. "The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada." thestar.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (26118)	12/2/2009 2:54:04 AM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

Wharfie, spot the odd man out: Economists Climatologists Politicians Scientists <Within the field of economics, academics work behind the scenes constantly trying to undermine each other. I’ve seen economists do far worse things than pulling tricks in figures. When economists get mixed up in public policy, things get messier. So it is not at all surprising to me that climate scientists would behave the same way. > Exactly. Climate "scientists"/economists ... birds of a feather. The emails are not a surprise to me, nor the fudged and deleted data. Mqurice

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (26118)	12/2/2009 6:05:13 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

Ah hell, Rat, if the emails showed them contracting hits on skeptics, you'd say thats just the way science is done, yuck yuck. Lying, fiddling data, destroying data, conspiracy to the same is NOT science. Except to for you Climate Scientologists.

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (26118)	12/3/2009 1:29:52 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Respond to of 36917

Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals? Not to me, but I think it will be to many people. At least a large minority of people have an inflated view of scientists, and of the process of current science on controversial issues. If such people (or at least the more intelligent among them) had a proper understanding of climate science and scientific process and level of understanding, they would have already at least slightly discounted the conclusions about global warming, but many did not. Perhaps this will help cure some people of that misunderstanding.