Wayne Delbeke writes in with:
There was a very good CBC radio program referenced in one of the comments today and I thought I would bring it to your attention here.
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2012/03/12/demon-coal-part-1/
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Coal is dirty, toxic, abundant and cheap. Mining it disfigures the earth. Using it for fuel or electricity generation is unsustainable. Burning it emits deadly pollutants and greenhouse gases, and is the major cause of global warming. Right? Max Allen talks with environmentalists and energy scientists about why much conventional wisdom about coal in the 21st century is just plain wrong. Part 2 airs on Monday, March 19.
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Normally CBC is kind of left biased but this was a very balanced program – part 1 of two parts. WUWT is referenced as a source for further reading. The list of participants includes Judith Curry and Ross McKitrick to name just a few.
The first part is a bit of a listen as it talks about the negative aspects of coal, but then it gets into CO2 and Climate and it is shockingly unbiased and scientific as well as pragmatic with respect to what we should do. It even identified water vapour as the major GHG, CO2 as possibly a minor player with perhaps the sun having more impact than has been attributed to it; and that there is a lot we do not know about how the climate system works.
I liked what I heard in some of the presentations to the Canadian Senate committee. Who knows what the second episode will bring but listening to part 1 gave me hope that people are coming to their senses and looking at priorities in an appropriate way.
Ww … Mann Part I; Gleick Part II?
Coal is in fact a gift from the Gods themselves, it has allowed our civilisation to flourish as no other in human history. Without coal we would have not had the industrial revolution, there would be no industry, no technology, no comforts that an advanced civilisation takes for granted.
There should be a lump of coal on a statue in tribute for what that substance has done for humanity. Apart from oil the human race has not been gifted with a more essential and wonderful and useful raw material. The tragedy is that we always fail to appreciate the things around us that have helped us the most.
I would like to see more said about how the IR interaction by nitrogen and oxygen can be simply ignored when it is the vast, vast majority of the atmosphere. The warmists pretend (by omission) that these gases are IR transparent, but they are not. IR spectra are available for these and their absorptions are clearly present in the atmospheric IR spectrum.
So, if all of the gases in the atmosphere are IR active, how can a small change in a bit player (CO2) cause any changes. Short answer: it doesn’t.
They have referenced WUWT???? What is the world coming to?
Almost everything man-made we enjoy today is as a result of the burning of fossil fuels or nuclear power. From bringing biscuits to the supermarket and powering your computer or car or hospital. I’ll take dirty coal and warmth in a bitterly cold winter over ‘clean’ bird choppers and almost certain death from hypothermia.
I was on the CBC??
The CBC is still on the air???
Geez I got to start paying attention.
I have avoided the CBC and the Globe and Mail for a decade, ever since they embraced global warming fraud as their mantra: “Like, I mean, y’know: Everything bad in the world is caused by CO2! Like, Carbon, y’know, like, Totally!”
According to CBCNewsSpeak, “nice people” actually do not exhale CO2 – they breath “Gaia Vapours”… …and nice plants to not take in CO2 either.
The actual CBC audience is so small, it can be counted on the fingers of one thumb.
The CBC, aka PravdaKanada, survives only because of huge government subsidies.
Note to PM Harper – “Please sir, I want NO more.”
Demon Coal. The title of the program to me indicates a bias. Why not just Coal? Or Coal friend or foe? But Demon Coal says lots.
Meanwhile the Ontario provincial government is aiming for “zero” coal by 2015 for electricity generation in order to reduce CO2 emissions.
Non toxic, clean wind and solar. / sarc
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/20/us-china-pollution-protest-idUSTRE78I13S20110920
http://www.stanford.edu/group/sjir/pdf/Solar_11.2.pdf
higley7 says:
March 14, 2012 at 5:31 am
When I was doing IR spectroscopy in grad school we used N2as a purge gas because it was IR inactive. O2 is similar.
Folks, this was an IDEAS program. IDEAS a long record of giving fair coverage to alternative thinking. Don’t imagine that this program signals anything for bulk of CBC productions.
John Marshal
BBC wrong again. We ran out of fossil fuels in 1990. Just ask club of Rome.
Guess who is on the CBC program “The Current” today?
Whining Mann. Guess this is how the CBC is getting their “balance” into the system. Going to go take a shot of pepto-bismol and gravol before I listen to it. Should have known it was too good to be true but at least there is the Ideas follow next week.
This is the same CBC with their science guy, the integrity-challenged Bob McDonald, who let a guest rant about climate science deniers just two weeks ago on his Saturday science program Quirks and Quarks? Really?
I regret that I gave McDonald a morning of my time for a project I was working on at the time. You might attribute his and the CBC’s bias to ignorance, but don’t be fooled. All these consensus proclaimers are completely aware that WUWT is not the top science blog because of hits off of teanagers huddled in their bedrooms and parents’ basements visiting the site. They know perfectly well that its because hundreds of thousands of working scientists and engineers like myself visit it daily for sound, reasoned climate science information.
Glad that the CBC who, incidently, is way too far overinvested in Suzuki to be rational let alone unbiased, finally said something that’s at least balanced but don’t hold your breath for very much more very soon.
Ross McKitrick – it was “Ideas” and I believe they used a tape of your presentation to the Senate … and even though Max Allen, like Rex Murphy, may not reflect the political consensus views of the CBC, it was a breath of fresh air listening to you and others talk rationally. Much better than the usual psycho babble the CBC broadcasts.
“Normally CBC is kind of left biased”
Greatest understatement of the last 19 or 20 years.
Too bad the Conservatives are in power; our cultural elite will claim they strong armed the CBC into broadcasting this.
Shows an advantage of a directly gov’t-owned broadcaster. Clearly the Canadian gov’t has turned solidly toward sanity, and thus their broadcaster follows.
Won’t happen here in America, because PBS and NPR are non-profits with small gov’t subsidies. Like all other non-profits, they rigidly obey the will of Wall Street. Even if a Santorum Administration turned solidly toward sanity, it couldn’t turn PBS and NPR. Only Wall Street can do that.
Brad, there is no such thing as “centrist rational policy”. For policy to be truly “rational”, it can be neither left, right or centrist – it must only be correct.
Wayne Delbeke says: March 14, 2012 at 8:05 am
Guess who is on the CBC program “The Current” today?
Whining Mann…
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Please Wayne, show a little respect. Mann’s first name is Piltdown.
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Jay Davis says March 14, 2012 at 8:46 am
Brad, there is no such thing as “centrist rational policy”. For policy to be truly “rational”, it can be neither left, right or centrist – it must only be correct.
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Agree Jay. Both sides of the political spectrum are too fixated on ideology – perhaps because It is easier than thinking.
It’s not about right and left. It’s about right and wrong.
Global warming mania is not wrong because it is leftist dogma, it is wrong because the science is wrong – there is no global warming crisis. We (Dr. Sallie Baliunas, Dr. Tim Patterson and I) confidently stated this conclusion in an article published a decade ago.
Since then there has been no net global warming.
Since then the ClimateGate1&2 emails have provided incontrovertible evidence of conspiracy and fraud by the global warming “science” elite.
How much more evidence do rational people need?
OK, there is more to come. I also predicted in an article published in 2003 that global cooling would soon resume.
Bundle up!
Maybe someone is playing “bait & switch”. Your typical eco-loon tunes in to have his worldview validated, and is sucker-punched by reality. 😉
Jay Davis said:
“For policy to be truly “rational”, it can be neither left, right or centrist – it must only be correct.”
Exactly! That’s why it’s useless to try to make points either for skeptics as “right wingers” or against warmists as “left wing commies”. It only lets the greenshirts say that it’s just angry old self-serving white men who don’t aligne with the supposed “consensus”. I personally want to choose my politics carefully and left wing and right wing is just way too restrictive. I don’t want to end up being the poster child for the Teaparty or any liberal cause or any political movement for that matter.
Science is either correct or not. Stick to the science.
Don’t give Canadians too much credit – even though I like to think we’re a sharp crowd. I know folks that are educated professionals who are cool-aid drinking true believers and if it wasn’t for the fortunate circumstance of having a prime minister from Alberta, tar-sand territory, we would be pretty much in Australia/UK spiral. If the NDP or other benighted individuals, e.g. Trudeau’s spawn, were in power you would see activity like here in Nova Scotia were the big push is on for sustainable energy coming from the usual losers like wind (not much good in Winter), tidal (fraught with all kinds of issues and unknowns), etc. and push back against gas/oil exploration.
Mann’s “interview” with a very sympathetic Anna Maria Tremonti is here: http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2012/03/14/climate-activist-michael-mann/
The famous CBC balance is provided by a clip of Rick Santorum. As DeSmogger James Hoggan offers: “We help clients identify the optimum frame and establish it in the public mind. In a crisis, we can help lift a story out of a frame that might have been set up by critics.”
Interestingly, he describes the Hockey Stick as “an extension backwards” from instrumental temperature records.
We built our country on coal used for cheap energy and steel. Even if if we had not made the slightest effort to mitigate the pollution from burning it we stand here today in debt to those who mined it, still mine it and for what it did for us. It made the steel to build our cities, transcontinental rail service and the arms to win 2 world wars. It made the electricity to light homes that helped save the whales, (in addition to kerosene). It powered locomotives to save our forests. It brought us air conditioning, refrigeration and mass production to increase our standard of living to heights never before imagined over a century ago blessing us with things like better health, more fresh food, clean water supply all which increased life expectancy more than any other single factor in history and with more years added than at any other time in history.
These puking liberals IGNORE all that, IGNORE the fact that pollution from coal was brought down to less than that from forest fires over 40 years ago and IGNORE the fact that we have plenty of known coal left to power us for another hundred years by itself – longer with natural gas and crude oil. They are completely wrong and I spit on them.
Mining coal disfigures the earth? Nothing compared to the vast system of highways that scar the world.
But the CAGWCF crowd drives on highways so they excuse their excessive Earth disturbance–they don’t have a clue where their electricity comes from so they harp on mining instead.
Talk about clueless hypocrites.