WIP

And how does redistribution and the creation of a global bureaucracy negate the reality that human activity is changing the climate?

How about it's an irrelevant point to begin with? Because I could say the same thing about a bodybuilder or a football player taking steroids: no one can determine what percentage of athletic performance is attributable to natural abilities and training, and what percentage was due to the increased muscle-building capacity of taking artificial testosterones. So, the same thing can be said about the weather (and should!) We do know that ever 1 degree celcius increase in global average temperature allows the atmosphere to hold an additional 7% more water vapour. Add that to the extra heat energy, and it's easy to see that raising the global average temperatures acts like injecting steroids into the bodies of elite athletes.

Two things: there will never be 16 billion people in the world to begin with, because the intensive world agribusiness system that requires oil-based fertilizers, mined phosphates, and overtaxing and depleting topsoil and available ground water supplies, is not even able to adequately feed the 7 billion people who are on Earth right now! And those 7 billion who all want cars, are as likely to get them as I am to get my gold-plated toilet seat.

I don't know if you live in Australia, but you might have heard that in recent years, the disaster tourism phenomena that inspires some rich tourists who travel to get a chance to see the last of endangered species....apparently to brag to their friends about, have added the Great Barrier Reef to the disaster tourism brochure of must sees before they're dead and gone. So, I suspect that many in Australia who are tuned in to environment issues have already been aware that the Reef is in trouble. One point that should be made clear (and wasn't in the press report on this study) was mentioned by one of the researchers being interviewed on a public radio program over the weekend: the Crown of Thorns Starfish which is devastating the Reef builders, is flourishing because of overfishing removing their natural predators, and the starfish is better suited to the degraded water quality of the last 30 years than other species. The negative effects of ocean acidification are just starting to take their toll on the Reef and will lead to their complete extinction in a matter of a few decades.

It would be a big help, but that wouldn't solve the climate change and other related environmental problems by itself; because unless we change the way our economy functions - primarily the aspects that reward growth for the sake of growth, cleaner energy sources will not be the permanent fix. I've noticed since I started exploring environment issues that there is a divide developing among environmentalists that is best described as Big Green - the green capitalist movement that wants to build lots of windmills and solar panels, backed by some large financial interests (though not as large as oil!) and Deep Green - the radicals who are mostly anticapitalist and therefore mostly unfunded and unacknowledged in the corporate media, who try to emphasize the role that technology and increasing energy and resource demands have on the environment. So, I think it's great to build windmills. But that should not be treated as anything like a permanent fix since no alternative energy proposals (except for stuff that will never happen like fusion power) can provide the baseload and continuous power to replace existing nuclear, coal and gas-fired systems. And that doesn't even address the problem of how alternative energy proposals are going to power billions of cars on the roads and highways. So, it seems to me that a real solution will have to incorporate both renewable energy sources and a radical shift in the way our economy works. And that shift is what the deniers most fear, and what Big Green has been trying to deny ever since Al Gore discovered global warming! Their buzzwords like Sustainable Growth are just meaningless phrases that are to language what junk food is to nutrition!

NO, that is just the beginning of the peer review process! You either know this and just want to misrepresent the facts, or you're not even aware that getting a paper published just means that the referees of that journal were satisfied that the research meets their standards for publication. Now that it's published, what did their peers have to say about it, and more importantly, did their findings have anything to say on the subject of what's happening now with the climate. From what I read of that paper, they didn't even make such a claim that there was a link between the two.

Well, you don't know me and I don't know you or your lifestyle. I do know that my worldview started to shake up 10 years ago when the loss of a 2nd income forced us out of the suburbs and into an old house in older neighbourhood. Where you live does have an effect on a lot of your attitudes about people and life in general. Now, the problem with your little diatribe here is that it is the typical strategy that all of the pro-growth, pro-greed, pro-capitalist libertarians argue: that all of our decisions come from personal wants and desires, is that we do not have control over the technologies we use today. I'm not even sure if a Mennonite can completely live free of technology in their traditional life any more (there sure seem to be a lot of them moving from farming to the furniture-making business in my area). Technologies are produced by industries looking for products to make a profit on, and supported by political infrastructure looking to gain from new technologies. The system of developing and applying new technologies is undemocratic and profit-driven. And profits can be made even when new technologies provide little, if any real benefit....exhibit A would be new drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies that do not even have to demonstrate any greater efficacy than existing drugs, since the testing is only done against placebo. Even when it comes to that damn plastic packaging that makes it necessary for me to carry a pocket knife just to open the packaging for a cheap watch I bought a few days ago. Do I have any choice about that packaging? Especially when ever other watch is similarly encased in the same layers of plastic! As for electronics products: I have a computer...that's obvious! But, just a desktop; no cell phones, tablets or other portable devices except of an e-book reader. And even though I have tried to avoid having to buy my own cell phone, I may not even have that option much longer, as I notice pay phones disappearing right and left....new plazas, malls and big box stores don't even bother installing pay phones. So, a cell phone is one more technology that everyone living in a city will be forced to buy and use in the near future. Now, when it comes to cars, I had two or three at all times in my old neighbourhood in a suburb way out in farm country because everyone living in such places is stranded without one. When we moved to the city, we once again had access to public transit, I'm close enough to work that I don't need either a car or transit, and we just keep one car that usually only gets used on the weekend. But, this is the limit to what I can do as an individual! A society of people who were really thinking as a community about their future and the needs of future generations, would be asking why we are not transforming our society now, while there is still time, to make the shift to life without cars, massive highway and roadbuilding projects, that will all be a fact of life some day...just slightly out of the timeline of most people living today. But a really ethical society would consider the needs of future generations and start the shift now, instead of wasting resources and leaving a barren, degraded world for those who have the misfortune of coming along a hundred or two hundred years from now!

Well, first of all, I've never claimed to be a scientist (I've never claimed to have a college education either for that matter), and I don't waste my time wading through the swamp trying to read research papers that are intended for the community of scientists in a particular field. I do know enough about how this peer review process works to know that getting a research paper published is just the first step, and it's put out there for their peers to either agree with or try to knock down...and that's the part that you have not bothered to provide here! What do their peers think of this research and does it have any bearing on what's happening right now up in the Arctic? You are asking me to prove a negative! I do know that back when the subject was the Medieval Warming, that there were some detractors published a paper arguing that the Pacific, especially the southern Pacific Ocean was much colder during that period, and the warming that we have assumed was worldwide, may have only been a local effect that Europeans would find great significance in.

It's apples and oranges anyway! If I was going to criticize the medical establishment, it would be for the way modern medicine treats the human body the way a mechanic fixes a car...as if our bodies are just a set of component parts that need to be treated with drugs until one of them needs to be replaced. Little real attention is given to preventative medicine, because that requires an all-encompassing approach that goes beyond what doctors and the medical establishment does. It's likely that 70% of chronic illness is preventable effects caused by what has to be described as the downside of modern life, especially for lower income people who can't afford good quality food, breathe dirty air, have to deal with high levels of stress, lack of adequate sleep, lack of exercise...would just about cover the majority of reasons why people are getting sick and living in poor health for the last 20 or 30 years of their lives. And now that our population is aging, the costs of the traditional approach of dealing with the cancers, diabetes and heart disease after the fact, are reaching levels that will bankrupt our society whether we have public health care or for-profit insurance companies running it.....now, I'll wait for some climate change denier to provide me the link between the evils of our medical and pharmaceutical establishment with their global warming conspiracy theory!

Since the Harper Government has started an ideological war with scientists who do research that conflicts with their pro-business agenda, I think we can assume that a climatologist who is sounding the alarm bells about global warming is not following a money trail - like oil company geologists; because their research funding is being directly threatened by the Government for providing information that the Government (and the oil industry) doesn't want.

See, this is where you and that small handful of scientists who share your views, show us that the denial position starts from a political ideological position of libertarian economic theory and a selfish disregard for everyone outside our borders. The first point that needs to be made is that the extra carbon added to the atmosphere over the last 150 years has not been put there by China and India! It has come from North America and Europe, so the West has to deal with those legacy costs. Also, it's not lefties who have caused the huge spike in carbon emissions in India and the Far East - it's you rightwingers, who demanded open borders (for money and products only) and outsourced more and more industrial production to countries that have rock bottom wages and virtually no health and safety regulations. The increase in carbon emissions in China have been added to the pot by those on the right who advocated "free trade" and claimed outsourcing labour-intensive industries to the third world was the libertarian way to raise their standards of living. So let's get it straight to start with who is to blame for creating this mess in the first place. Did you ever consider that the natural biosphere of planet earth is trying to eliminate that extra carbon? If you check the monthly numbers provided from the Mauna Loa Observatory, you would notice that CO2 levels rise and fall during the year. Part of the reason for declines is declines in industrial output and transportation, but part of the declines in the annual cycle are likely due to the world's oceans, photosynthesizing plants and the effects of rock weathering, that reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Part of the solution would be an obvious one - reduce the amount of carbon dumped into the atmosphere through human activity...but that seems to threaten ideological beliefs like "markets are self-correcting" and forget about those brown people who live on the other side of the world!

You're right! This is not providing information to inform the public, but instead to confuse and cloud the issues. Tim G keeps coming back to the point that the earth's climate is too complex to completely understand today....which is only true in the sense that climatologists and meteorologists are only now trying to get a handle on what the likely effects on our weather are caused by an Arctic Ocean with lots of open water. But that side of the debate has no interest in furthering any understanding of the climate forces acting in our world. It's similar to the games that the Discovery Institute and other creationist groups do with the subject of evolution. They only provide information that will confuse their church-going audience, and prefer to keep that state of confusion rather than lead to any greater understanding.

Here's a thought about tar sands oil, and oil and natural resources in general that nobody seems to ask themselves with our live-for-the-moment attitude: do we have obligations to future generations that will have to inherit the earth we leave behind? And, I'm not specifically talking about environmental damage here...I'm asking if you believe that people living today have an obligation to leave something for those coming after us in the near and distant futures? If oil is so important today, that it is needed for making fertilizers to feed our oversized world population, and to make essential plastics and other synthetics, pharmaceuticals and other products, why are we squandering it to fill gas tanks now if a continued rate of consumption means even this dirtier, more expensive to produce oil will be gone in a matter of decades?

By your standards, we won't know enough about climate change until it is too late to do anything...which is of course the strategy of those who take sides with the industries that want to make obscene profits, while they dump the costs of environmental damage onto the public...in the case of rising CO2 levels the public is the entire population of the planet. And this is why I don't trust global warming deniers! Your rebuttal is just a link to a published report done four years ago in some journal I have no way of knowing if it is even a legitimate publication with all of the fake oil-funded research that's being dumped out there for public consumption, by scientists I never heard of - maybe you can provide a little background of what their credentials are and what else they've written on the subject; and the report, while acknowledging recent rapid melting of the Arctic Ocean (something you have not done), is focused on a narrow region of the Arctic - between Siberia and Alaska. Is this a regional anomaly, like the medieval warming of Greenland and Iceland, or are there other geologists making similar findings in other sites around the Arctic Ocean? They're stated purpose says: What about the rest of the Arctic? And would the rapid disappearance of sea ice shortly after the thawing of the last ice age be similar to the reasons for rapid loss now, or is it due to factors associated with the beginning of the interglacial period? So, don't just dump a research report on my desk with no context; how does it apply to what's happening to the world today?

Just a thought -- the worst part of drone warfare is that it makes starting wars and attacking suspected enemies even easier and painless for the aggressor than when they had to risk manned aircraft. If a drone gets shot down...who cares? There's no pilot to worry about, because he's thousands of miles away in a protective bunker. It's another example of how technology makes actions more remote, and therefore more willing to commit acts of evil. After the Vietnam War, the veterans who served in the Army or the Marines and had to do ground fighting, were much less willing to advise committing troops for future conflicts than the flyboys - the guys flying overhead at 10,000 feet and dropping bombs on the enemy. I suspect that part of the reason came from that much more remote perspective to war that the bomber crew had, compared to the grunt looking for Vietcong in the jungles. Same thing happens in other applications of technology - most people would be reluctant to buy cheap Iphones or clothing if they discovered it was being produced in a sweatshop factory in their hometown that kept employees as prisoners working 12 to 16 hours a day. But, as long as it's happening in China....half way around the world...who cares! Same with all the good people who don't mind buying the cheapest meat and dairy products produced at factory farms that raise animals in appalling conditions that would get someone thrown in jail if they kept their cats and dogs in similar conditions....but, out of sight, out of mind! So, this drone technology makes committing evil against nameless, faceless people our governments declare to be enemies so remote, that few people take notice. Unarmed drones are already starting to be put to use in U.S. cities. I wonder if they'll start putting bombs on them in the future to take out enemies on the home front.

And that trial as an adult included torture to obtain confession and the dubious legal authority of the U.S. to define who's a soldier, and who's an "enemy combatant." Even if the story that he threw the grenade was true, it was an act committed on a battlefield.

To me, this is the important issue -- not what do you think of Muslims, what do you think of Omar Khadr's family, or will he be really pissed off and look for revenge when he gets out of prison -- it's that once again, Canada and the United States create laws, sign on to international laws and then pretend they don't exist whenever they're not convenient. You either live in a country that follows the rule of law or you don't!

I guess if we can redefine oil down far enough we'll be calling coal deposits oil also. No, that's a bogus story concocted by "Watt's Up" and maybe started at one of the other denial websites first. Fact is the Southern oceans are warming also...in some areas faster than the Arctic. The reasons why the Arctic is melting fast, while the Antarctic is not, and the East Antarctic Ice Sheet may be slightly increasing in volume would likely have more to do with topography than temperatures. The ice in the Antarctic is on a large land mass, while in the Arctic, we have an ocean - which allows circulation of warmer water coming up through convection currents. In the past, the Arctic Ocean and Greenland have melted numerous times, while we have to go back pretty far to find the last time the Antarctic Continent was ice free. But, the important point is that Antarctic is far from gaining enough ice to balance the dramatic rate of ice melt in the Arctic. And for us, living in the Northern Hemisphere, it's the melting of the Arctic that affects us, not what's happening in the Antarctic. Okay, which orifice do those numbers come out of? The Holocene started less than 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age...and the ice didn't immediately melt! It was a gradual thawing.

Well first, welcome aboard Mapleleafweb....although I'm not that qualified to serve as the welcoming committee as I was away for...actually I can't remember when I last posted a comment here. I often get sick and tired of politics, fade out and see if anything's changed 6 months later. On this subject, it's already been pointed out that the problem is not that we are completely out of petroleum, it's a matter of how much more carbon intensive and energy intensive the oil we're extracting now has become. And it's not just a problem with tar sands and shales! All mining and resource development goes after the low-hanging fruit first, and just as mining started with the highest ore quality/easiest to develop deposits, petroleum started with oil deposits that were close to the surface. So, back in the 1930's, the energy return on energy invested - EROEI of the average oil deposit was about 100 to one - one barrel of oil producing 100 barrels of oil to send to the refineries. Over the years, EROEI numbers have been steadily dropping as most of the major oil fields that are still being pumped today were discovered more than 40 years ago. The EROEI of oil from tar sands has also been dropping since Shell Oil started digging up surface deposits with those giant shovel machines back in the late 70's. Today, bitumen is extracted from the deeper deposits through steam assisted gravity drainage systems that can only recover at most, about 75% -- leaving a lot of residue to seep into lakes, rivers and groundwater over the coming decades in Northern Alberta. This area will be a giant toxic wasteland for decades and likely centuries to come. But the wider implications for carbon emissions come from the fact that, after upgrading and refining bitumen, the EROEI drops to about 3 to 1, using one third of that oil just to get the rest out of the ground and turn it into something that can be used to fill your gas tank. There is just no sense to going down this road, except that there is not the will or resolve in leaders and the population to do anything dramatic that will radically change a lifestyle that has only been around for about 80 years. No, even if it was happening naturally, like through intense volcanism as occurred a few times previously in Earth's history, we would still have to do something about it or face extinction. If we lived during the period of the Permian/Triassic Extinction 250 million years ago, when what is now Siberia, was an area of constant, slow moving lava flows for at least 100,000 years, we would have to find ways to sequester to either stop the flow or sequester an awful lot of carbon - or go extinct, as more than 99% of species living on Earth at the time ended up. Most of the world's population has a low carbon footprint. It's the millions of cars, the factory farms, the airplanes, the factories...in China now...which produce a barrage of consumer products, most of which serve no real purpose. This is where the extra carbon emissions are coming from! And, to put it in proper perspective, it's not that human activity is producing 100% of the carbon; it's that our extra contributions are more than can be sequestered through natural processes like rock weathering. It's worth pointing out that so far, half of the extra carbon has been absorbed by the world's oceans, lowering ph and this ocean acidification is killing off corals, shellfish, and if it continues long enough, will kill off the rest of ocean life as the world's oceans turn into anoxic swamps filled with cyanobacteria....it's happened at least once before in the planet's history and is already in the process of happening again. When cost of production is factored in, windmills don't have a great EROEI either.

That interpretation should not be broad enough to include substances that burn through ordinary pipelines. And the carbon emissions emitted from the extraction and upgrading processes means tar sands and shales are too carbon intensive, and would be left in the ground by a sane, rational species of animals who had even a slight concern for the survival of future generations. If there's not enough oil to supply gas for cars, then get rid of the damned cars! Maybe the rapid pace of climate change, environmental degradation and natural resource depletion is a notification that it is our economies and our entire way of life that needs to change...not sources of energy! Well, I see that an Arctic Ocean with 25% ice cover is still not enough to convince you that global warming is real, so I guess you'll be denying reality right to the bitter end. If the climate models were overestimating changes you might have a case; But climate models so far have underestimated the increases in temperatures and CO2 levels because they do not incorporate the positive feedback effects of open water in the Arctic Ocean and melting permafrost. A prime example is the fact that modellers never even thought about 6 degree warming scenarios until very recently. It was assumed that four degrees would be the upper limit until the last couple of years.

Not many things surprise me anymore! The Canadian Government (under Chretien) had a choice between applying the law or applying political expediency in the Omar Khadr case....and we know what they chose...and what the Harper Government has chosen since then. Because he is the son of an Islamic jihadist who wanted to go to war with U.S. proxies and put his sons in battle also, the Canadian Government washed its hands of its obligations to Canadian citizens in the Khadr Case. He was 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan. Even if the dubious case declaring him to have thrown a grenade that killed a U.S. CIA interrogator was true, he was not old enough to be tried as an adult for something that would have been more correctly an act of war, not a murder. But Canadian governments, both Liberal and Conservative, are more worried about looking "soft on terrorism" than they are in acting according to international law and our own law. This attitude is after all, why that same Chretien Government allowed a Canadian national (Maher Arar) to be intercepted and sent to Syria to be tortured for information (yes, that same Syrian Government that the U.S. and allies are now declaring as an evil violator of human rights). They just took the word of CIA informants and washed their hands of him, rather than having the guts to follow the proper laws and procedures.

Okay, since I felt the need to drop in with a comment for the first time in months, let's get a few things straight: 1. That shit is called Tar sands because that's what it is! It is not oil, and hasn't been petroleum in any real sense of the word for at least 100 million years ago when it was formed. The fact is that that these deposits, as with other tar sands and shale deposits, stayed too close to the surface over the millenia, where they were fed on by microbes and ended up as badly degraded bitumen today. It's not like Albertans didn't know the tar sands were there all along. But, as long as there was still oil being pumped out of the ground, the only thing these deposits were considered useful for was paving roads! Turning this crap into something that can be called "oil" and mixed with water and a bunch of undisclosed chemicals so it can flow through special pipelines, does not make it oil! 2. The NDP is mostly filled with opportunistic douchebags, just like every other political party! This should be a prime example, since even if your political views are on the left, or the far left as myself, any political party that is willing to coopt the tar sands industry in an attempt to grab the Prime Minister's Office is hardly worth the effort. Because, by having all of the political parties in Canada except for the tiny Green Party, lining up in support of tar sands exploitation, they are effectively guaranteeing that atmospheric CO2 levels will be greater than 1000 ppm or 1% of atmospheric gas contents by the end of this century. Along with the effects of killing off ocean life as we know it, this will guarantee a 6 degree C+ increase in global average temperatures, and will likely seal the fate of the coming generations to eventual extinction. So, how important was beating Harper again? I can't say I'm completely surprised that the NDP doesn't want to take on the tar sands industry. Before Jack Layton got sick, he was floating trial balloons indicating that his Party was changing course or at least the NDP approach to tar sands development. I knew the NDP would be useless when it came to environment issues a few years back when Stephan Dion, as Liberal leader, made the bold move to support a tax on carbon emissions -- which is the only real strategy that will reduce carbon emissions in a capitalist market economy. What did the NDP do? First, they attacked Dion and the Liberal Party for proposing a carbon tax, and then they came up with some mealy-mouthed cap and trade scheme virtually identical to the one that the Harper Conservatives claimed that they were going to propose. The unfortunate history of events showed us why politicians avoid political risks at all costs and are more interested in doing what will get them elected rather than doing the right thing, because Dion's bold action got him stabbed in the back and dumped out as Liberal leader, and politicians who love their jobs will never mention a carbon tax again no matter what the future brings.

Maybe that's why this board is a waste of time! To you, it's okay to lie and misrepresent someone else's statements...or perhaps not understand the difference between "a" and "the", but not okay to call them an asshole for doing it! So, we have a bunch of assholes here who word games rather than engage in anything resembling honest debate. Total fucking waste of time! I want to delete my account, but this forum seems to have no way to let you leave on your own!

Look asshole...I didn't say the report stated ocean acidification was the only cause of decline of fish stocks. I misrepresented nothing. The lies are coming from you assholes who pull a few quotes and statistics out and misrepresent them as a case against global warming!

Like maple_leafs said, this just looks like it was another market bubble created by free money from the Federal Reserve. If I was a cynic, I'd suspect that the Obama Whitehouse was just trying to boost the GDP numbers enough to look good for re-election. What really bothers me when all of the economists gather to discuss how to grow the economy, is that economic theory from left and right just assumes that the resources needed to make their theories work, are going to keep on growing to meet growing demands. I don't find very many economists trying to grapple with the question of whether we are heading into biosphere limits to growth...but at least there's one or two pondering how to keep capitalism working in an overcrowded, resource-depleted world: John Fullerton: When Growth Bumps Into the Biosphere