There's nothing about "climate change" that requires "urgent" action on anyone's part let alone Canada's. The evidence for AGW has always been weak. The recent Climategate scandal showing that key climate scientists have been tampering with data and interferring with the scientific review process makes the scare-mongering IPCC's case even weaker.
The only useful "turning point" will be when our governments come to their collective senses and start to demand verifiable evidence before wasting, or promising to waste, truckloads of taxpayers money.
Update: In the comments Halfwise notes that "Big Carbon", "the Spawn of Enron", was kept alive by Copenhagen. Here's how the carbon markets have been performing as indicated by iPath Global Carbon ETN NYSE:GRN which kicked off at $50 in 2008 and has fallen by over 50% since. Post Copenhagen it dropped from $28 to $23. Note also that volumes are 1000 shares a day or less:But, meanwhile, if it's a contest in climate la-la land between Mr. Prentice and greener than thou idiots like Charest or Campbell, give me Prentice any day!
But the truckers were having none of it:I find the editorial support for the Truck Light Parade amazing (Dec. 4). Eighty decorated trucks drive around the city, spewing exhaust for nearly three hours.
There are plenty of other light displays that bring delight and wonder and where collections can be made for the food banks. Let's make sure that this unnecessary contribution to global warming is not repeated next year.
Daphne Dunbar, Victoria
Bravo, Mike (and Harold and Dennis)!As a past president of the Island Equipment Owners Association, which organizes the Truck Light Parade, I take exception to the litany of attacks we put up with year after year from armchair environmentalists.
Many of the trucks cost thousands of dollars to decorate, and all this is done to create an amazing charity event that is most likely a bigger event than any other in the district. We collect and deliver thousands of pounds of food to the food
banks.Why don't you attack the Victoria Day Parade, the Oak Bay Tea Party or the Santa Claus Parade? We bring the Truck Light Parade to the communities rather than asking everyone to drive to it.
When the couch environmentalists can show me that they are living in mud huts they built by hand and light and heat by burning dried cowpies, drawing water by hand from a hand-dug well to clean the rabbit they are skinning for dinner, then they can come with their complaints.
Until you are so pure, the next time you see the Truck Light Parade, stop and say thanks for the nice house you live in, the parks you use, the school your child attends, the recreation centre that you swim at.
Also, you should thank us for helping all those people that the Truck Light Parade fed through donations brought out for the occasion.
Mike Cownden,
Past president, Island Equipment Owners Association
More here:... The HST is opposed by an overwhelming 82 per cent of British Columbians, according to a new Canwest News Service poll.
But it now appears the only way the HST will be stopped is if eight Liberal MLAs in Gordon Campbell's provincial government break ranks in Victoria.
After this week's show of political "bravery" in Ottawa, I wouldn't hold my breath.
... By a vote of 192 to 32, the House of Commons voted to approve a ways-and-means motion that clears the way for the government to introduce legislation as early as Friday that enables Ontario and B.C. to harmonize their provincial sales taxes with the federal goods-and-services tax.
... The Liberal leader has said that votes on the matter will be "whipped," meaning Liberal MPs will be expected to vote with the party.
However, 27 of the 77 Liberal MPs did not show up. The absentees included B.C. MPs Hedy Fry, Keith Martin and Joyce Murray, as well as such Ontario MPs as Mark Holland, Jim Karygiannis, Dan McTeague, Paul Szabo and David McGuinty, brother of Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty.
"The recent coolness was caused by transitory natural factors that temporarily masked the human-caused signal..."Bwaahhahaha! Riiight! All cooling is natural and all warming is caused by humans. Another pearl of climate wisdom for the nitwits at Hopenhagen or as one guy puts it, "Jokenhagen". Good grief, don’t these clowns realize how idiotic they appear/are?
Not only that but skeptics are nasty right-wingers:... Like other scientists working in the climate-change field, Weaver says they face a well-orchestrated campaign of harassment by global-warming skeptics. ["Well-orchestrated" by skeptics on a budget that is infinitesimal compared with massively funded climate scaremongers like Weaver.]
... Weaver worries that climate-change deniers, many funded by large oil companies, are succeeding in scaring or confusing people. [That’s hilarious! Compared to the miniscule funding skeptics get (from any source), the AGW scaremongers’s coffers are awash in Big-Oil funding.]
If he had any real integrity or courage Weaver would, like his fellow climate alarmist George Monbiot, be condemning the actions of the CRU climate scammers, and not ridiculously playing victim. Oh, and by the way, Andrew, even the UK Met Office thinks the CRU's global temperature data analysis is hopelessly tainted (but who'd trust them to do the re-analysis?)Many skeptics are libertarians who do not want government interference in their lives, Weaver said. Others have vested interests in discouraging change. [True, but skeptics genuinely distrust the weak science and shrill propaganda behind claims of impending doom. And who in his right mind wants our governments to waste billions and trillions gambling on Weaver’s toy climate models.]
... the level of animosity is surprising, he agreed. [Hardly "surprising" - understandable and entirely predictable given the warm-mongers' treatment of "deniers".]
...Tom Pedersen, director of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions at UVic, has monitored most of the climate-change-denial blogs and has found the common thread is an animosity toward government regulation. [Unlike Weaver and co. who apparently love the idea of global regulation and micro-management of our lives.]
... The CRU materials also reveal paranoia on the part of scientists who believe that in trying to engineer "consensus" and alarm about warming, they are a brave and embattled minority. Actually, never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject.
... Were their science as unassailable as they insist it is, and were the consensus as broad as they say it is, and were they as brave as they claim to be, they would not be "goaded" into intellectual corruption. Nor would they meretriciously bandy the word "deniers" to disparage skepticism that shocks communicants in the faith-based global warming community.
... The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate-change models partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars -- and substantially diminished freedom.
Update: Here's a companion story featuring Weaver in yesterday's Post; and a couple of letters (one, two) responding in today's Post.
*Andrew Weaver is Victoria’s and one of Canada’s top 'political' scientists who, when he’s not telling tall climate tales, he’s fiddling with climate models to generate fodder for yet more tall climate tales.