In recent days, the Liberal Party of Canada has made a couple of statements indicating they think that the Government of Canada should be spending MORE of our tax dollars on new programs. Considering the problems we are having funding the programs we already have, this is hard believe – except that these are Liberals who believe more government has got to be a good thing. Keep reading »

George F. Will writes and EXCELLENT column in the Washington Post and published today in the National Post.

He clearly lays out why the Supreme Court of the United States was correct in it’s decision to overturn the ban on independent expenditures during elections.  He puts it most clearly here:

The Federal Election Commission, which administers the law that rations the quantity and regulates the content and timing of political speech, identifies 33 types of political speech and 71 kinds of “speakers.” The underlying statute and FEC regulations cover more than 800 pages, and FEC explanations of its decisions have filled more than 1,200 pages. The First Amendment requires 10 words for a sufficient stipulation: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”

The politicians and bureaucracy in America have been corrupted by power and need to go back and read their own Constitution and the writings of those who laid the foundation or wrote it, like Paine and Jefferson.

Canada can learn from this too… How many times have courts in Canada struck down similar regulations here only to have politicians reimpose them?  Too many.  And our current federal political financing system is corrupt too – giving entrenched political parties public monies removes them from having to raise funds themselves or be accountable to anyone.  And preventing third parties from advertising during elections protects the parties.

I am amazed how many people don’t understand the fundamental reason Jean Chretien changed the campaign finance rules – under the new rules, it is much more difficult (if not impossible) for a new party (a la Reform) to start from scratch again.  If you don’t already have seats in the House and already get a significant portion of the popular vote, a party is beggared by the system.  He was protecting the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP from new competition – because he knew that even the Conservatives would be corrupted by power and become mushy-middle, big government hacks just like himself…

OK, given that the evidence is now out on climate change, I am very disappointed that the Government of Canada insists on going along with the charade of Copenhagen by committing us, in a non-binding way, to a reduction of 17% in CO2 emissions from 2005 levels by 2020…

Let’s work out how much that is going to cost…  Since we didn’t reduce emissions from 2005 through 2009 (they went up, even with the reductions from economic contraction), we have to cut deeper now.  That means that to meet the goal, reductions must be of 1.75% every year starting in 2010.   The total reduction in emissions will need to be 744 Million tonnes.  From studies I’ve been involved with indicate carbon capture and storage will cost between $40 – 100 per tonne.  So this will cost at a minimum $30 Billion (today, inflation will drive this up).  The government’s own study in 2007 said that the price of CO2 (carbon tax or credit value) needed to change behaviour sufficiently to reduce emissions would be $195/tonne.  That pushes up the cost over the next 10 years to $145 Billion.  That’s $14.5 billion per year that will be REMOVED from the economy.  And that excludes any knock-on effects that reduce economic growth because investors would rather spend their money in countries that don’t waste money on things like this.  Or impose such regulations.   And it excludes the knock-on effects of the blackouts we are going to have because we can’t build enough nuclear plants in 10 years to counter-act the shutdown of all the coal-fired power plants we will have to shutdown to meet the goal.  An wind and solar aren’t going to replace the coal-fired because they aren’t reliable enough (wind) or don’t work well in the darkness that is a Canadian winter (solar).

Do you want to pay $15 Billion a year to make us “look kinda ok” on the world stage?  Or should we say no and stop chasing this non-existent problem?

I am fascinated by this news story from Toronto.

A group representing dozens of lawn care companies trying to bring charges against Ontario’s environment minister and senior bureaucrats over the province’s controversial pesticide ban is now calling for charges against 23 activists.

Group spokesman Jeffrey Lowes of MREP Communications said Wednesday that information has been laid for criminal charges against 23 individuals….

…The activists worked with the Ontario government to ban pesticides using alleged false and misleading information to undermine the industry, Lowes said.

The documents filed on Tuesday allege the activists knowingly presented false and misleading information about the health and environmental risks associated with pesticide products, knowingly misled the public, lawn care industry and government officials, and impeded access to Health Canada approved pesticide products through fraudulent means.

Hmmm.  I wonder if this has been happening in Calgary too?  I’ve written on this subject previously (here and here) – and while Calgary’s city council avoided such a ban (here), there are still forces at work trying to change that.

So, some climate scientists have published a study showing that the feared feedback loop whereby rising CO2 levels would raise temperatures which would raise CO2 levels, ad infinitum, is not as pronounced as previously believed or modeled.

It is interesting though that the scientists are very quick to discount their own research:

The authors warn, though, that their research will not reduce projections of future temperature rises.

Further, they say their concern about man-made climate change remains high.

Huh?  Why would that be?  Let’s look at another statement they make:

The report’s lead author, David Frank from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, told BBC News that many of the calculations for the IPCC assessment report did not include an integrated carbon cycle.

He said that if the results his paper were widely accepted, the overall effect on climate projections would be neutral.

“It might lead to a downward mean revision of those (climate) models which already include the carbon cycle, but an upward revision in those which do not include the carbon cycle.

“That’ll probably even itself out to signify no real change in the temperature projections overall,” he said.

Wait – so you are telling me that the climate models used by the IPCC don’t consider the carbon cycle?  But since we know there is a carbon cycle, isn’t ignoring it questionable?  Based on what Frank is saying, including the carbon cycle decreases the warming…  Unless of course you wanted to amplify the warming effect for reasons other than scientific inquiry…

Since the models should incorporate the carbon cycle, it should have a downward revision of projected temperatures. But that wouldn’t get you more research money from the IPCC supporting governments now would it?

And the same reason is likely behind their “concern” remaining high…  Concern for their grant money, not the climate itself.

The “uncertainty” behind global warming science that got its real start with the ClimateGate emails is getting legs as more and more “questionable” things start to pop up.  Here is the latest:

Glaciergate

The IPCC and it’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, are starting to take real heat, particularly in India and the UK for promoting the completely speculative idea that the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 (90% probability).  This was a complete failure to follow their own rules of only using peer-reviewed literature, since they got this from an interview with one of Pachauri’s TERI scientists, Hasnain, in New Scientist, via the World Wildlife Fund.  TERI is now facing serious questions for claiming as recently as 15 January 2010 in a request for funding that the Himalayan glaciers will soon be gone…  Even the lead author on the IPCC AR4 section is now distancing himself from this

Amazongate?

Similar to the aforementioned problem with Himalayan glaciers, it also appears that the IPCC relied on WWF and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as the primary source for their claim that the Amazon rainforest would dry up and disappear…

IPCC using non-peer reviewed primary sources?

The IPCC AR4 report draws heavily on publications by the World Wildlife Fund, which is most definitely NOT peer-reviewed science.

Cherry-picking weather stations…

The NASA GISS group that puts together the GHCN temperature measurement database appears to have been cherry-picking which weather stations they use, discarding those at high altitude or latitude.  This includes: using four stations for all of California, all of which are located near the beach; 35 stations in Canada, instead of the 600 that were used in the 1970s, and no stations in Bolivia on the odd basis that the Bolivians were late every month in submitting the data (couldn’t you go back an insert the missing data???).  The result is that temperatures far from the few weather stations are being interpolated from the limited dataset in use.  A NASA staffer is quoted as saying:

Schmidt also said a smaller sampling of weather stations in the Canadian Arctic wouldn’t have a significant impact on the data. He said any long-term temperature changes recorded at the high Arctic station at Eureka, would likely be “representative” of changes elsewhere in the region, even in a sub-Arctic city like Yellowknife.

“Temperature anomalies don’t vary that much from one (nearby) station to another,” he said. “You don’t need thousands of stations across Canada to know what the monthly anomalies are.”

This is like saying that temperature measurements in Edmonton, Alberta are a good guidance for Houston, Texas…  And why does Bolivia always seem so warm in the NASA databases…

Or just adjusting the data…

The NASA GISS group also appears to have scrambled around trying to cover up a change in how they handled data post 2000, by altering the previous data in the same way and then denying that it changes their results…  McIntyre has more on this one.

No basis for linking global warming and natural disasters:

The IPCC claimed in it’s 2007 AR4 document that “the world has suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s” and “One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend.”

The problem is that the “one study” wasn’t yet published, nor peer-reviewed, and when it was finally published in 2008, it contained this caveat:

We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.

Interesting.  So there isn’t any science behind this either.  h/t to Jonathon Leake at the Times.

It is also interesting that this same paper was the source for much of the doom and gloom in the Stern Report.   Interesting too that the UK government has been “editing” the Stern Report very recently to try to make some of the “false claims” disappear.  Too bad their math doesn’t add up.

I hope that the government in Ottawa is reading all of this…

Quebec is taking it’s own crazy socialist path by imposing restrictions on car makers and dealers with so little warning that it is impossible for them to meet the deadline.  The result will be that car sales in Quebec will necessarily drop off, residents of Quebec will buy cars in Ontario, New Brunswick or the USA and import them too Quebec.

Is Charest going to prohibit the registration of cars purchased outside Quebec in the name of green?  Really?

Yet another Quebec government comes up with an idea that will drive people and business out of the province.

For anyone who believes in socialism, the recent events unfolding in Venezuela are the beginnings of the death-throes of socialism in that country.  The people, and the army, will eventually realize they are broke and long speeches from Hugo can’t fix it.

Today, the Jerusalem Post published the best editorial I have ever read on the danger of Islamic fundamentalism and the so-called jihad being waged against western civilization.

Further, the JPost calls out western leaders who fear calling a spade a spade.  And the best part is right at the end:

Obama needs to tell Americans and Europeans willing to listen that, though the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists, pretty much all terrorists are Muslim, hence the need for profiling.

An overstretched army, supported by a weary home front, against an ill-defined enemy, does not offer a viable strategy for success. Better to tell people that the enemy is radical Islam, which wants to spread its religion using the sword, and that defeat would mean an end to Western values of pluralism, minority rights and democracy.

The war isn’t in Afghanistan, or Yemen. It’s everywhere. And until we the free peoples of the world realize that fact, we are losing.