The CBC reports,
Prime Minister Stephen Harper once called the Kyoto accord a “socialist scheme” designed to suck money out of rich countries, according to a letter leaked Tuesday by the Liberals.
The letter, posted on the federal Liberal party website, was apparently written by Harper in 2002, when he was leader of the now-defunct Canadian Alliance party.
He was writing to party supporters, asking for money as he prepared to fight then-prime minister Jean Chrétien on the proposed Kyoto accord. CBC
Time served in Ottawa can drop IQ and integrity rather markedly.
Written by jay on January 31st, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Look for hysteria come Friday when the IPCC releases its next report. We’re all going to die…die I tell you.
Lorne Gunter poured a little ice water on the over heated rhetoric we can expect Friday.
The January issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, contains an article by scientists at the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, in Liverpool concluding “the rates of sea level change observed over the past 20 years were not particularly unusual.” In fact “the rate of sea level change was found to be larger in the early part of the [20th] century in comparison with the latter part.”
In the past decade, the Southern Hemisphere has warmed only half as fast as the Northern Hemisphere. Ice cover at the South Pole is expanding, rather than melting. Since 2003, the upper layer of the Atlantic has lost 25% of the extra heat it had built up in the past three decades. Worries that the Atlantic currents were slowing due to warming have been shown recently to be unfounded: For thousands of years, Atlantic currents have sped up and slowed down as they are doing now. And the broad consensus among solar scientists is that the Earth’s warming is almost entirely explicable by increased solar activity that began about 100 years ago, and which will end around 2020. national post
We can rest assured that this will certainly not be mentioned in the IPCC report.
But will silence be enough? The problem is that as climate change hits “top of the mind” status for the great middle class quite smart people are beginning to ask several rather sticky questions:
- Would Kyoto actually solve the problem?
- How big is this problem?
- How much would implementing Kyoto cost?
- What is the trade off in present lives lost as against potential future gains?
The CPC have become born again climate activists with help from the NDP. A billion here, a quarter of a billion there: pretty soon you’re talking real money. Though not even the most hardened CPC partisan thinks that Canadian windmills are going to offset several hundred Chinese coal fired electrical generating stations.
(And, speaking of denial, KMG pointed out to me yesterday, the CPC righty partisans over at the Shotgun have has surprisingly little to say about the CPC’s sudden conversion to climate activism. The Blogging Tories are, however, jumping all over the science, economics and politics of climate change hysteria.)
Rumour has it that, once you skip past the IPCC Executive Summary (which as Gunter points out is written by bureaucrats and political folks rather than scientists) the actual science in the IPCC report is rumoured to be a little less than terrifying. For one thing it apparently walks back sea level rise claims to a relatively manageable foot to two feet at the top end.
At a guess a detailed examination of the IPCC science is going to begin to suck the proverbial oxygen out of the climate change bubble. Combined with more and more information on costs and a hardnosed approach as to benefits, the climate change hysteria is going to abate.
Like television shows which somehow lose their point, climate change, Kyoto and the lunacy of spending billions now for uncertain benefits in the distant future, will cease to seem so urgent.
Global warming may very well be arriving at its shark jump moment.
Written by jay on January 31st, 2007 with no comments.
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