Climate Change
November 30, 2005
Global scam
By LICIA CORBELLA
About 10,000 delegates from 189 countries have have flown in at great expense and distance to gather in Montreal to attend a UN conference on climate change.
Out of all of those people, you'd think a large contingent would be made up of scientists who specialize in climate change, right? Wrong.
Indeed, many of the world's top climatologists who live right here in Canada, have not even bothered to take a short train ride to attend the meeting. Why?
Well, let's ask Dr. Tim Patterson, a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences (paleoclimatology) at Carleton University in Ottawa and a world-renowned expert in the field.
"I can't be bothered," he replied from his university office. "It's just a waste of time.
"The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body) is primarily a political operation and the scientists have pretty much been cut out of it. Nobody at that meeting in Montreal wants to hear scientific fact; they want to make posters and make uninformed proclamations and policy based on untruths," said Patterson.
Harsh words to be sure. But, Patterson gets even more blunt.
"If we knew what we know now about climate science 10 years ago there would be no Kyoto," he said of the Protocol that calls on signatories to cut back on CO2 emissions.
Canada, for instance would have to ground every plane, train and automobile, as well as shut down all of our manufacturing plants and we still would not meet our Kyoto commitments.
At the opening of the UN meeting, running until Dec. 9, Canada's environment minister and the meeting's chair, Stephane Dion, said climate change "is the worst threat the world is facing from an environmental perspective. ... It's putting at risk our relationship with the planet."
That kind of comment is simply uninformed, unscientific hot air, says Patterson, who defines himself as a "real" environmentalist, rather than one of those poster-makers.
He says it's tragic to watch all of this money and effort being wasted on a non-issue when the money could be better spent fighting air and water pollution, the degrading of the environment, urban sprawl and a whole host of other much more pressing problems, rather than combatting the relatively benign CO2.
"In 10 years from now people will wonder why did we waste all of our time and money on that. As a colleague of mine said, Kyoto is a house of cards and it's going to start collapsing in upon itself."
Patterson then goes on at length explaining sunspot cycles, celestial forcing, solar forcing and carbon cycling among other phenomena that affect our climate -- all backed up by dozens of real scientific papers and facts unlike the pseudoscience that feeds Kyoto.
While our federal government has already declared CO2 to be a toxic substance, Patterson says the biggest greenhouse gas by far -- at 98% -- is water vapour.
"The IPCC says CO2 is the keystone greenhouse gas, but that's simply not true," said Patterson.
"If you look at the various records the temperature goes up and then CO2 follows usually after about 800 years.
"The reason for that is biological productivity picks up when it gets warmer and then CO2, which is all part of biological productivity, starts to go up along with it."
What's more, the polar ice caps, he says, are getting thicker. And some 400-million years ago, when CO2 levels were 16 times higher than they are today, the world was covered in ice.
"It was a lot warmer five to 6,000 years ago," added Patterson, "than it is today. Climate is cyclical.
"If you look at it, most of the warming since we came out of the last little ice age happened prior to the Second World War and most of the CO2 emissions happened after the Second World War when we suddenly went into temperature decline that lasted until the 1980s."
In 10 years, when Kyoto gets dropped like a rapidly cooled potato, will any of these self-aggrandizing phonies be held to account for the billions of dollars wasted?
Don't count on it. They'll have moved on to the next phony cause. Global cooling perhaps!
Global scam
By LICIA CORBELLA
About 10,000 delegates from 189 countries have have flown in at great expense and distance to gather in Montreal to attend a UN conference on climate change.
Out of all of those people, you'd think a large contingent would be made up of scientists who specialize in climate change, right? Wrong.
Indeed, many of the world's top climatologists who live right here in Canada, have not even bothered to take a short train ride to attend the meeting. Why?
Well, let's ask Dr. Tim Patterson, a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences (paleoclimatology) at Carleton University in Ottawa and a world-renowned expert in the field.
"I can't be bothered," he replied from his university office. "It's just a waste of time.
"The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body) is primarily a political operation and the scientists have pretty much been cut out of it. Nobody at that meeting in Montreal wants to hear scientific fact; they want to make posters and make uninformed proclamations and policy based on untruths," said Patterson.
Harsh words to be sure. But, Patterson gets even more blunt.
"If we knew what we know now about climate science 10 years ago there would be no Kyoto," he said of the Protocol that calls on signatories to cut back on CO2 emissions.
Canada, for instance would have to ground every plane, train and automobile, as well as shut down all of our manufacturing plants and we still would not meet our Kyoto commitments.
At the opening of the UN meeting, running until Dec. 9, Canada's environment minister and the meeting's chair, Stephane Dion, said climate change "is the worst threat the world is facing from an environmental perspective. ... It's putting at risk our relationship with the planet."
That kind of comment is simply uninformed, unscientific hot air, says Patterson, who defines himself as a "real" environmentalist, rather than one of those poster-makers.
He says it's tragic to watch all of this money and effort being wasted on a non-issue when the money could be better spent fighting air and water pollution, the degrading of the environment, urban sprawl and a whole host of other much more pressing problems, rather than combatting the relatively benign CO2.
"In 10 years from now people will wonder why did we waste all of our time and money on that. As a colleague of mine said, Kyoto is a house of cards and it's going to start collapsing in upon itself."
Patterson then goes on at length explaining sunspot cycles, celestial forcing, solar forcing and carbon cycling among other phenomena that affect our climate -- all backed up by dozens of real scientific papers and facts unlike the pseudoscience that feeds Kyoto.
While our federal government has already declared CO2 to be a toxic substance, Patterson says the biggest greenhouse gas by far -- at 98% -- is water vapour.
"The IPCC says CO2 is the keystone greenhouse gas, but that's simply not true," said Patterson.
"If you look at the various records the temperature goes up and then CO2 follows usually after about 800 years.
"The reason for that is biological productivity picks up when it gets warmer and then CO2, which is all part of biological productivity, starts to go up along with it."
What's more, the polar ice caps, he says, are getting thicker. And some 400-million years ago, when CO2 levels were 16 times higher than they are today, the world was covered in ice.
"It was a lot warmer five to 6,000 years ago," added Patterson, "than it is today. Climate is cyclical.
"If you look at it, most of the warming since we came out of the last little ice age happened prior to the Second World War and most of the CO2 emissions happened after the Second World War when we suddenly went into temperature decline that lasted until the 1980s."
In 10 years, when Kyoto gets dropped like a rapidly cooled potato, will any of these self-aggrandizing phonies be held to account for the billions of dollars wasted?
Don't count on it. They'll have moved on to the next phony cause. Global cooling perhaps!
posted by Gerry Surtees at Monday, December 19, 2005
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