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.
Even as we speak there is a top level climate, renewable,s and sustainability conference in Vancouver BC Canada. The BC provincial Government are meeting the Washington, Oregon and California state governments planning out the new green economy with the promise of cheap sustainable energy and at least ONE Million green jobs to be generated by this wonderful Navana.
Question: Do these people/ politicians and rent seekers live in a warmist VACUUM.
Don’t they look at the Endless failures and equate it to reality? Here in BC we have the Salmon farm (wild fish killing) farms that pollute the oceans with massive amount of antibiotics and fish shit that is overwhelming the ocean and produce huge schools sea lice that can and do kill baby wild Salmon as they swim past on there way to the open ocean.
There is a serous crisis just being reported the BC Run of rivers hydro projects that have/are littoraly destroyed Salmon runs and river use recreation, as well as enriching a few with sky high kwh feed in tariffs to our efficient low cost /kwh Hydro dams.
BC Eco fanatic Liberal government crackpots introduced the first and only money sucking Carbon tax in Canada on energy and gas even to the school system. In Washington and Oregon you have the wind power fiasco that pays them not to produce. What can I say about California that doesn’t boil the blood of any sane rational person. These are our governments that have Learn’t nothing about the real state of the Climate or the Phony renewable power industry that is failing world wide.
Please fill in the blanks with examples of where you live, I am to furious to carry on!!.
CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti lost her journalistic credibility a long time ago she is as big a cheerleader for CAGW as Richard Black (IMHO).
Not a coincidence that this Mannian puff-piece (the politest term I could come up with) aired in conjunction with the neutral IDEAS show. My belief is that the CBC in general is not allowed to promote CAGW (like the ABC or BBC) thanks to government oversight (an expectation of some level of professionalism) but individuals are still free to show their biases.
The only Canadian media outlet that comes close to fairly/accurately covering this topic is SunTV. They are good for multiple pieces per week so they also the most prolific.
The issue of whether or not a certain data set demonstrates warming would be about “the science”. The issue of what causes warming (now, throughout history, or even in the future) might be about “the science” depending on how the individual in question went about looking for such knowledge. The debate about Global Warming (& its children, Climate Change & Global Weirding) has never been about “the science”.
You, of course, may choose to look only at the science, but I will remind you that a fairly large bloc of purported individuals wants to take your money, your liberty, your ability to publish, your artificial lighting, your automobile, your house, your warmth in Winter, your right to procreate, & even up to your life itself, and they’re using your “the science” to do it, whether you’re right or wrong. The other side of the debate (a fairly large bloc itself) wants to keep the money they’ve earned, live their lives in peace, read what they want to read and read it at night, drive places, live under a roof, heat their houses in Winter, raise a family, and mostly stay alive, & they don’t care what “the science” supposedly tells them they out to do.
A whole lot of us frankly don’t care if it’s warming. A good number of us have lived in 40°C weather & -40°C weather & we think the whole debate over 1.6°C over a century is stupid. And the whole debate over causality is even stupider since it assumes an undemonstrated effect. Nail “the science” down, just like y’all managed to do with the first three laws of thermodynamics, & then we can talk about causes & effects.
As for me, I’m frankly happy to oppose the eugenicists & malthusians on a purely personal basis.
“abundant and cheap” and int the next sentence “Using it for fuel or electricity generation is unsustainable”
Makes you wonder.
I thought Judith Curry came across very well…
If it weren’t for hockey games the CBC would have ceased to exist a long time ago. I think the vast majority of their viewers are for that icebound sport. That is probably the only money making part of their operation. Maybe the CFL as well (3 down football, pass-pass-punt).
Please go to the CBC website and comment or support more of this kind of programing. After hearing it I had a dream that the debate had been won and there was no more endless talk of Global Warming. When I awoke I realized if there was no more endless debate on CAGW we would have to look at all the real problems. Then I got depressed.
i find two concepts under emphasized in the debat about Co2. One is the clear benefits of CO2 which enables every crop on the planet to grow 10 to 15 percent more food on the same amount of land and water as compared to what would be grown if the world still had only 280 PPM CO2. The other is that all the carbon tax and alternative “green energy” substainable BS done, has virtualy ZERO affect on the planets temperature when China and India continue with their common sense developement of resources, including coal.
Monroe…I agree. Unfortunately only a 100-200 people seem to concur although given the CBC’s ratings and this had nothing to do with ice it is to be expected (hockey, figure skating, and curling are just about their only profitable productions)
My personal favorite comment from one of the alarmists: “I point out that when I was in high school, we learnt that CO2 comprised 0.03% of the atmosphere – as indeed it did, at that time. After 50 years, it is now, rounded to the same level, 0.04% – a 33.33% increase.” Given this degree of accuracy, this person is clearly a climate modeler (/sarc).
TRM says:
March 14, 2012 at 1:07 pm
If it weren’t for hockey games the CBC would have ceased to exist a long time ago.
Ha! Fat chance. The CBC is the pork conduit for a sizable chunk of the arts and leftie intelligentsia community in Canada, especially in Toronto. I suspect it’s Quebec’s chief source of income, after equalization subsidies from the other provinces. It wouldn’t matter if a 100 people watched it; they’d still feed the Leviathan its billion per year.
Allan MacRae says:
March 14, 2012 at 9:43 am
……It’s not about right and left. It’s about right and wrong…..”
It’s a cool, snappy line, Allan…I like it…alas, it’s not the case in the real world. Debunking junk science…which is what this battle is really about… is, as you can see, hard, tiring, expensive, time-consuming, politically costly and sometimes impossible. Culture will always over-rule knowledge. You can keep on trudging away at exposing lies, trying to showcase the truth…and don’t get me wrong, it;s a crucial activity… but if the majority has been swayed by propaganda, it won’t matter one wit in the end. A new administration in the US, a more sober Conservative party in the UK, the turfing of Gillard’s Labour in Aussie-land and another Conservative term in Canada will kill the beast more certainly than all the proof against the scam you can muster in a century.
And hark and mark, when this bloated AGW teat stops giving milk, it will be the political and economic players who will determine and switch to the next urgency and as always, science, or to be more exact, many scientists, will jump to play the bum-boy who makes it all possible. It’s not pleasant to think of science as another human cognitive activity that has been corrupted by politics, but that’s the way it is.
I think Stark Dickflüssig puts it well, “You, of course, may choose to look only at the science, but I will remind you that a fairly large bloc of purported individuals wants to take your money, your liberty, your ability to publish, your artificial lighting, your automobile, your house, your warmth in Winter, your right to procreate, & even up to your life itself, and they’re using your “the science” to do it, whether you’re right or wrong.”
Allan MacRae says: March 14, 2012 at 9:43 am
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.
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Peter Kovachev says: March 14, 2012 at 6:44 pm ….
Peter, I am not saying quite what you think. I gave up writing “only about the science” circa 2005, when I became convinced that the “global warming elite” were not only scientifically incorrect, but deeply corrupt.
Some of the events that led me to conclude they were corrupt are described in the following article, published in E&E in early 2005. The article’s title, which is decidedly unscientific, is “Drive-by Shootings in Kyotoville”.
Full article at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/28/the-team-trying-to-get-direct-action-on-soon-and-baliunas-at-harvard/
The point I am trying to make is that real science is neither left or right, and real scientists should simply go where the facts lead them.
I know people from all parts of the political spectrum who are adamantly opposed to global warming mania. They recognize the junk science and crass political opportunism of the global warmists, and understand that this attempt to gain political power through warmist scare-mongering is destructive to our prosperity and our civilization.
That is what I mean when I say “It’s not about right and left. It’s about right and wrong.”
(BTW, I used a similar line in an article which I wrote in July 2003 for the Calgary Herald – but the line too good to be original – someone must have used it somewhere before – I just googled this exact phrase and found over 5000 hits.)
I must commend CBC for the first part of this program. It was fairly balanced, for the most part. My only quibble with Max Allen is that he somewhat glibly sidesteps a lot of the political dynamics of the issue and spends an insufficient amount of time on that aspect. We will see next week what CBC has to say.
I still believe that a large part of the reason for the hysteria on the issue of climate change is that many of the warmistas, especially at the IPCC, are trying to justify their jobs. In particular, the IPCC, which is a clique of bureaucrats who, with the rest of the UN bureaucracy, are attempting to increase their power and influence throughout the world. You can call it world government or whatever, but it is a fact of political life in the world these days. I think Judith Curry really did well to speak of the fact that weather effects are variable naturally and predominantly local or regional, and I compliment her on her rational, thoughtful, statements in the program. The kinds of things that could be done by policymakers to adapt to changes in climate are best left to local and regional governments, not to worldwide consortiums or even to national governments. If you have an urban heat island effect, why not deal with it locally? That is one of the reasons why I have generally supported things like green building codes on a local level – if, in fact, those who make such codes study well and apply their standards on the basis of what is happening locally in regard to climate as well as what is best locally in terms of sustainable development. The politics of this is geared to expanding power to a handful of bureaucrats, scientists, and politicians at the expense of the rest of us.
The tides are turning.
When it announced it would not participate in Kyoto II, the Cdn gov’t explicitly said it would not destroy the economy and impoverish the population to contribute to a minuscule hypothetical reduction of a trend which was probably favorable for the country, Canada was in line for huge multi-billion dollar “penalties” for missing targets …
Cassandra King is spot on.
The other thing that coal teaches us is that during the Carbonfierous Period, especially, the climate was stable for millenia allowing the coal deposits to form. And that the insects hadn’t evolved to digest lignin.
Reference The Nature and Origin of Coal and Coal Seams, Raistrick A. , Marshall C, EUP London 1939
Q: Have you ever wondered why laser printers don’t get any better than 1200 dpi resolution (2400/4800 dpi addressability) .. you know the way it’s been to 20 years now ?
A: The answer is that if they make the toner particles any finer and some were to be released to the air, the particles would float in the air and be inhaled and land in your lungs, giving you the same symptoms as asbestosis.
My point is that, like coal and asbestos, there are many other particles that can be bad for your lungs. You can stay up at night worrying about them, or you can learn to live around them.