Canada yanks some climate change programs from budget

Thank you, Vivian Krause, for all your hard work, sacrifices and diligence in shining light on the abusers of our national sovereignty.

In a contest between power and patience, bet on patience.

First Queensland, now Canada. That gives me two possible places to emigrate when the Greens finally succeed in turning off the last light in the UK.
PS and O/T: How much is the WWF paying for all the internet ads telling us all to go back to the caves for an hour tomorrow? It must be a blanket ad – it’s even at the top of WUWT!

From Acorn1 – San Diego on March 29, 2012 at 11:08 pm:

I am serious..
There are some seven million species and we’re but one.
We are killing them off because we have taken a large percentage
of the Earth’s land for food.

8.7 million actually, if you accept the modeling results.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/23/species-earth-estimate-scientists

Planet Earth is home to 8.7 million species, scientists estimate
…
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 August 2011 17.00 EDT
Humans share the planet with as many as 8.7 million different forms of life, according to what is being billed as the most accurate estimate yet of life on Earth.
Researchers who have analysed the hierarchical categorisation of life on Earth to estimate how many undiscovered species exist say the diversity of life is not equally divided between land and ocean. Three-quarters of the 8.7m species – the majority of which are insects – are on land; only one-quarter, 2.2m, are in the deep, even though 70% of the Earth’s surface is water.
The study, which is published in the journal PLoS Biology, underlines just how little humans know about what is out there – and which plants and animals will become extinct before scientists can even record their existence.
“Scientists have been working on this question of how many species for so many years,” said Dr Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The quest was growing increasingly urgent. “We know we are losing species because of human activity, but we can’t really appreciate the magnitude of species lost until we know what species are there,” he said.
An astonishing 86% of all plants and animals on land and 91% of those in the seas have yet to be named and catalogued, the study said.
The authors drew on the taxonomy, or categorisation system, devised by Carl Linnaeus about 250 years ago to arrive at their estimate of 8.7m – give or take 1.3m.
…
The authors, in their analysis of existing data on 1.2m species, detected patterns between those hierarchical groupings which they could use to infer the existence of missing species that scientists have not yet described. That allowed them to use data from higher orders – such as anthropods, where there is a lot of data – to predict the number of creatures at the species level. Their estimate that the various forms of life on the planet included 7.8m species of animal, 298,000 species of plant and 611,000 species of mushrooms, mould and other fungi along with 36,400 species of protozoa, single-celled organisms, and 27,500 species of algae or chromists. The researchers did not venture to put an estimate on the number of bacteria.
…

You get how that worked? ‘We can tell by the gaps that there must be a soft-bodied cricket with easily-seen yellow spots, nonpoisonous and edible, that lives in a rainforest surrounded by natural predators. The gap is there, that species must exist. We can’t think of why it wouldn’t exist. If we can’t find it, then human interference must have killed it off before we could identify it.’
BTW, you have invoked Loehle and Eschenbach 2011, which examined real data. Abstract:

We examined historical extinction rates for birds and mammals and contrasted island and continental extinctions. Australia was included as an island because of its isolation. Only six continental birds and three continental mammals were recorded in standard databases as going extinct since 1500 compared to 123 bird species and 58 mammal species on islands. Of the extinctions, 95% were on islands. On a per unit area basis, the extinction rate on islands was 177 times higher for mammals and 187 times higher for birds than on continents. The continental mammal extinction rate was between 0.89 and 7.4 times the background rate, whereas the island mammal extinction rate was between 82 and 702 times background. The continental bird extinction rate was between 0.69 and 5.9 times the background rate, whereas for islands it was between 98 and 844 times the background rate. Undocumented prehistoric extinctions, particularly on islands, amplify these trends. Island extinction rates are much higher than continental rates largely because of introductions of alien predators (including man) and diseases. Our analysis suggests that conservation strategies for birds and mammals on continents should not be based on island extinction rates and that on islands the key factor to enhance conservation is to alleviate pressures from uncontrolled hunting and predation.

See the originating long WUWT article from 2010 by Willis Eschenbach, Where Are The Corpses? Species are lost overwhelmingly by introduction of foreign species, including man, thus isolated island ecologies are hit hardest, with the majority of losses from predation, competition, and diseases including parasites that the foreign species bring with them. Habitat loss, including changing land to farming, is pretty far down the list.
Get some real knowledge about the real reasons for real extinctions of real species, and hopefully you’ll shed the worrying about imaginary losses of imaginary species due to a possibly-real reason that’s been overblown and over-blamed to the limits of an alarmist’s fevered imagination.

JRR Canada says:
March 29, 2012 at 7:33 pm
Something good in the budget after all, sadly we still fund CBC and the UN.>>>
—————————————————————————————-
CBC funding cut 10%—Nice

Tenuk, there is no “Queen of Canada”, we have a Prime Minister and elected Members of Parliament… we’re actually independent now. Although we do put Queen Elizabeth II’s picture on our currency still, but she’s a pretty good looking queen so it’s ok. Besides, it’s her idiot son that’s going on about AGW. God, please GOD save the Queen so Charles is never king….

I think we must be careful not to overestimate what the Canadian government thinks about CAGW. I believe that the majority of Canadians think it is real, and feel out government should have implemented the Kyoto Accord. The analogy of the elephant and the mouse between the USA and Canada is very valid. Had the USA implemented Kyoto, Canada would have followed. We just know we cannot afford to commit economic suicide unless our neighbour to the south does the same thing.
The fact of the matter is that no Canadian politician, so far as I am aware, has come out and stated publicly that CAGW is wrong. We are very like Dr. Judith Curry. I am not sure how many people have read what one, cwon14, writes about Judith. He is harshly critical that she will not declare CAGW is wrong; she almost will, but not quite. That is where things stand in Canada. Our politicians are mindful of the fact that the majority of Canadians support action on CAGW, but they know we cannot afford to do anything about it, unless the USA does so as well.
So, I suggest people dont get too rosey a picture of how ungreen our Conservative government actually is.

@jim Cripwell
You are right that Canada would implement the same environmental restrictions that the US implements but it woudl be for trade reasons, not becuase the government believes any th climastrolgy which has caused most of the rest of the world to go commit financial suicide. As the US is Canada’s largest trading partner by far we cannot operate under different rules. However, environmentally the Conservative government of Canada is much different than the opposition parties which are all left of centre and some far left. Don’t forget that PM Harper said Kyoto was blatant scheme to redistribute the wealth of western nations (later admitted by some high IPCC official) and that Canada has withdrawn from Kyoto. I am very proud to be a Canadian is a world that is going increasingly insane.