All posts tagged denialists

  • May 5, 2013

    A slight misunderstanding?!

    Just the other day we read a commentary on Earth Day by Tom Harris, a contributor to the website Canada Free Press.  This Website is a source of denialist (anti-climate change) “information (!)”

    One paragraph in this commentary referred to a statement by President Obama on Earth Day:

    “Obama often labels carbon dioxide (CO2) as “carbon” and “pollution”. Anyone who remembers their grade 5 science knows that this is a serious mistake. CO2 is an invisible, odourless and naturally-occurring substance essential to plant photosynthesis and so to all life on Earth. It is anything but a pollutant.”

    Read more

  • April 22, 2013

    Coal Fired Electricity Generation

    Canadian public opinion is solidly against environmental pollution that directly impacts personal health.  Greenhouse gases (GHG), generally referred to as pollutants, cause global warming over the longer term but do not directly affect personal health.  So the public is less concerned by higher levels of GHG.

    Many commentaries by government and non-governmental organizations frequently focus on environmental pollution caused by use of fossil fuels for industrial activity, ignoring the longer term consequences of global warming.  These commentaries do not distinguish between direct public health consequences and longer term risks.

    A recent study of the Ontario Green Energy Act published by the Fraser Institute was in this category.  Based on a 2005 consultant’s paper, the study concluded that the environmental goals of the Act, including reduction of GHG, could have been met by more effective pollution control equipment on coal-fired electricity generating plants.

    The Ontario Environmental Commissioner immediately issued a rebuttal of the study under the caption “Fraser report on the Green Energy Act misses the mark.”  

    The Commissioner, who is very familiar with Ontario legislation, observed that a key purpose of the Green Energy Act was phasing out of the use of fossil fuels in energy generation.  The Act was not directed at industrial pollutants from coal fired plants, although a side benefit of phasing out this form of energy generation would be a reduction in these pollutants.

    The author of the Fraser Institute study, Ross R. McKitrick, a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, referred to “climate change” only twice in a 42 page study, and then without commentary on climate change issues. As Professor McKitrick is a denialist this failure to characterize properly the fundamental purpose of the Green Energy Act is not surprising.

    The Canadian public deserves better information. For further commentary of direct and indirect effects go to Climate Change and Public Health.

  • January 30, 2013

    Discussions with Friends about Climategate

    At a recent reunion of members of a legal institution, a colleague and I started talking about the success of the Canadian Federal Conservative Party (Fed Cons).  He supports the Fed Cons particularly because of their record in “managing the economy”.

    I could not support the Fed Cons since, despite their earlier statements, they have not taken sufficiently strong measure to address the consequences of climate change.  The more time that passes before such measures are taken the greater the cost and the less the chances of successful containment of the risks.

    My colleague questioned whether scientific opinion supported such measures.  He believed that there was less than unanimity on certain important climate change issues. My response:  global warming is a fact, caused by the emissions of Carbon Dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Any continuing differences of opinion relate to the time frame and/or magnitude of the consequences, the reconciling of the conclusion of global warming with other scientific data and/or the areas of the world most at risk.

    Referring to Climategate, my colleague expressed another concern:  Why did climate scientists falsify information?  I explained that they did not falsify information in the report in question:  errors in presentation were not errors of fact, and did not invalidate the conclusions reached.  I had hoped that with this concession we could then focus on where science stood three years later in the light of more recent information.

    My colleague re-stated his concern in stronger words.  In his view the authors of the report had lied.  They deliberately presented certain conclusions in the way they did knowing the many readers of the report would be mislead!

    In several short minutes the thrust of our discussion had shifted from global warming to the ethics of certain scientists. We had reached the “agree to disagree” impasse –and so we both turned to other topics.

    I have since reflected on this very brief discussion in the light of my experience as litigation counsel. A tactic used by defence counsel defending an individual charged with committing a criminal offence is to attack the credibility of a prosecution witnesses on an issue that is only indirectly related to the proof against the individual. The hope is that by shaking the Court’s faith in the credibility of the witness counsel has raised there enough “doubt” raised as to the witness’s reliability as a whole that the Court will not accept the witnesses evidence.  Often that is enough to lead the Court to dismiss the charge.

    So it is with Climategate – in the Court of Public Opinion the Climategate Criticism has led many to dismiss the conclusions of scientists as untrustworthy.

    You are encouraged to read our basic comments
    on scientific issues connected with Climate Change
    prepared by Steering Committee Member, Guy Hanchet.

    Or if you are interested in the science of global warming
    go to this Canadian Website – the Tyee

    And check out this blog: Climate Conversations with Club Members

     

  • January 26, 2013

    A convert to global warming?

    Margaret Wente, a columnist with the Toronto Globe and Mail, is retaining her denialist credentials – well sort of. This time the principal point in her column is based on the comments of Judith Curry, the head of the Climate Science Department of Georgia Tech. Professor Curry claims that climate models do a poor job of making predictions over a significant time scale.

    Nobody disputes the difficulty of modelling what the climate will be at some point in the future.  That is why projections as to temperature rise for example have a relatively wide range, as models cannot predict an exact level for any time during this century. So we can more or less agree with Wente when she says that “our uncertainty about the future is rather great.”

    She refers to the recent invasion of Arctic air sweeping across Canada.  She then asks: “Hey! Whatever happened to Global warming?” Dear Margaret, no climatologist has said that the Canadian winter was going to disappear with the global warming experienced to date.  Cold weather continues despite global warming of .8 degrees Centigrade.

    She also referred to the wintry conditions in Britain and Northern Europe – but these conditions are consistent with the chaotic weather patterns to which global warming contributes.  

    She ignored an article appearing in the Globe and Mail on the same day as her column that quoted a remark of the Director of Environment Canada’s Climate Change Project that “climate change is a done deal!” (See “Global Warming? Climate Change? What’s the difference?”)

    At the same time she states: “I’m not questioning the basic science of global warming”. This one sentence puts her status as a denialist in jeopardy, but we won’t declare that she has converted just yet.  Still it would not be surprising if she slowly abandoned her denialist position.

     

  • December 20, 2012

    Biases in Media Coverage of Climate Change

    Newspaper headlines influence readers, and often leave a stronger impression than the text of an article. This impression could well be misleading, as headlines may not be balanced or the article may not present the full facts, a practice known as selective reporting.

    For example, the December 13 Canadian edition of the Epoch Times, a weekly newspaper published throughout the world, headlined an article on climate change “New Funding to help poorer countries combat climate change”.  The article quoted Peter Kent, Canada’s Minister of the Environment, who explained that the financing provides ‘concrete help for some of the most vulnerable countries’.

    The headline could well lead readers to think that Canada was doing its share of combating climate change by generously aiding “poor” countries with new funds. Yet Canada had previously committed to provide funding for developing countries to fight climate change under the 2009 Copenhagen Accord .  The amounts referred to by Peter Kent were not new: they were part of Canada’s commitment under Copenhagen.

    Many readers would probably not appreciate the complete picture: two weeks before, at the 2012 Doha UN Conference on Climate Change, Canada refused to advance further sums to support the Green Climate Fund for developing countries; a fund that had been agreed on at Durban in November 2011, until a climate change treaty was in place.

    The Times article had a further sub-headline: “The Science is unclear” – words that are known to be the mantra of Denialists.  That assertion was based on a letter signed by 134 scientists to the Secretary General of the United Nations. The Times did not explain that these individuals represented a very small percentage of the scientific community, a community that has overwhelmingly concluded that global warming is a reality, and threatens the future of our world.

    The letter stated:  “ . . . the weather of the past few years cannot be caused by global warming that has not occurred. Whether, when and how atmospheric warming will resume is unknown”.

    This conclusion was based on data from the UK Met Office that shows that there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years.  As the UK Met Office has pointed out, these years are all record high temperature years.

    Global warming is here to stay! Unfortunately so is denialism!

     

  • November 19, 2012

    It is worse than you think!

    For many years scientists have been analysing the future progression of climate change. Their conclusions generally presented a best and a worst case scenario. The differences between these scenarios were striking.

    Denialists seized on the wide variation in these conclusions as demonstrating the weakness of climate change theory. The more extreme projections were categorized as “alarmist” and their authors were heavily criticized, even to the point of suggesting that they had been dishonest in the formulation of their projections.

    Michael Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, was frequently the target of denialist criticism.  He was one of a group of academics that produced a graph of reconstructed temperature data that was dubbed the “hockey stick”, a description seized on by denialists. He continues to be the target of personal attacks: recently the National Review stated that he had been guilty of fraud.

    Mann recognizes that scientists were cautious in formulating their conclusions, knowing that grim  predictions would lead many Denialists to explode with verbal fury.  As a result scientists tended to be “conservative in their forecast out of fear that they will be attacked for overstating evidence”. As a result of this caution, their best case scenarios were over optimistic, and their worst case scenarios underestimated. There were scientists who predicted that catastrophic results of climate change would arrive much sooner, but their conclusions were generally lost sight of in the public debate.

    The reality is that, assuming “business as usual“, the severe conditions that will be the result of climate change will arrive sooner than anticipated. There are two examples where the worst case had materialized when before it was expected. No scientist forecast the actual rate at which Arctic ice has disappeared.  No scientist foresaw the disappearance of island states because of rising sea levels in the time frame now considered probable – within a decade!

    Mann also acknowledges that there remains uncertainty about climate change.  So even projections based upon a realistic recognition of the actual progress of global warming may not give us the real picture!

    For more about the disappearance of Arctic ice go to

    Climate Breakdown   is right here, right now!

    2000   – 2010 Warmest Decade Ever

    A   Canada Day Message

     

     

    (Sources for the information appearing in this blog: Care2.com and the Manchester Guardian)

     

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