Archive for March 31st, 2010
Ottawa revises rules of environmental review regime
Quite the most depressing news – but absolutely what one would expect.
The Conservative Government in Ottawa wants to give its supporters everything they want. They also want to avoid an election – as does the Opposition. So instead on conducting the review of the Environmental Assessment Act which was due to start in May, they have just tacked a bunch of provisions onto the budget. That way the Liberals can’t vote against it without bringing down the government. And it would seem that the Liberals will probably let them get away with it.
Not that the EA Act has been especially wonderful – after all, we still got the tar sands development. But it was the remnant of a time when Canadians seemed to care about things like forests and lakes, rivers and wildlife. And about being able to have clean water to drink and fresh air to breathe. Apparently those things are not nearly as important as making money and avoiding elections.
And no, the publish date is not April 1, it’s March 31, so it’s not a prank. This is serious.
‘Climategate’ inquiry largely clears scientists
As you would expect, after doing a piece on Monday on the James Lovelock interview I have been getting comments from the deniers – none of which have appeared. Becuase I simply do not wish to give them any platform at all. Sorry, I have no obligation to provide “balance” – the so called “debate” is way too overly anxious to publish things that support the fossil fuel industry. I will however provide what seems to me to one of the clearest rebuttals of the claims of the “climategate” crowd – which has been published by the Associated Press and is in The Seattle Times this morning.
The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that it had seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming — two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.
In its report, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact,” adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.”
That seems to me to settle the issue. It won’t of course. Any more than the bricks through the windows of Democrat Senators who voted for health care reform settle that argument either. Indeed, the parallels between the way the two sides argued in that discourse are disturbingly similar to the climate “controversy”. In both cases it is as clear as can be that the right wing is wrong and facts are against them. But that does not stop them. And it is not that the people who promote the cause of the insurance companies, or the fossil fuel companies, are stupid. They are simply doing what they are paid to do. In the case of US health care they were not unsuccessful – there is still no public option let alone the single payer that most other countries have. In the case of effective action against greenhouse gas emissions, they have also been remarkably dominant. The results are now going to be dire, because we really are heading for an unprecedented increase in global temperatures – well in our experience anyway. The same sort of people who deny climate change also like to deny the scientific evidence for the age of the planet (and the universe come to that) – and many of them believe that the end of human life on earth is all pre-destined and that they are the only ones due to be saved. Of course belief and science are two different things. You cannot actually argue with thermodynamics. But then acts of faith do not require evidence either. Just a good story. Which is apparently why they get so much media attention.
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