It’s time to pay up
Marc Jaccard
A trenchant opinion piece that goes after the NDP - and Carl James in particular - over the carbon tax.
It is hard for an opposition politician to praise the government - especially when behind in the polls and an election os coming up. But Carol James
wrote in The Sun last week that the carbon tax is unfair and that she would exempt from the tax any person or industry complaining loudly enough, replacing the tax with ineffective subsidies. This saddens me. An honest politician would be telling British Columbians that a carbon tax is essential.
Perhaps it is expecting a bit much. The NDP has real problems with the environment, as it tends to get in the way of the special interests it tries to represent. For example, when we had a lumber industry, the NDP seemed more concerned to defend the jobs of unionised workers than the last stands of old growth rain forest. The Gateway - and the Port Mann Bridge - also has divided the NDP, since they need votes in places like North Surrey, where a lot of voters have accepted uncritically the idea that a wider freeway and a twinned bridge will help their commute. Or recognise that it is a short term fix, which can be repeated as needed indefinitely. After all, that is what we have always done before.
I have tried to talk to both the NDP and the Greens about the need to ally themselves in a common cause, but neither is interested. The Greens take the high ground - they are not running against a person or another party but for a new policy position. The NDP are less interested in policy but getting elected - though of course they do not say that in as many words - but do not see green policies as vote winners. The Labour Party in Britain was transformed in recent years, by the idea of “New Labour” which was to “take the middle ground”. Trouble was the middle ground turned out to have shifted a long way to the right, and some of Tony Blair’s actions seemed indistinguishable from Thatcherism.
We still seem to have accepted the idea that somehow the economy and the environment are a trade off. Voters do not understand - or wish to recognise - that the economy is a subsidiary of the environment. Or that “green” is about parks and wilderness not everyday life. And the NDP worries that if it shows too much leadership it will leave the voters behind them.
The inevitable outcome of this kind of process is that we do not change - or not nearly enough. And the inexorable and accelerating process of climate change is not going to forgive us for that.
Climate change ’seriously underestimated’ by UN
The United Nations’ celebrated climate change panel has “seriously underestimated” the challenge of curbing global CO2 emissions, say Canadian and U.S. researchers.
Radical “decarbonization” of the global energy system is needed to stabilize emissions — a task that is much more daunting than the panel has led the world to believe, the researchers report in journal Nature today.
“The size of this technology challenge has been seriously underestimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” say economist Christopher Green at McGill University in Montreal and his U.S. colleagues. The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for its work, showing how human activities are warming the climate system, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
And I thought the big issue was fighting the climate change deniers. It turns out that the growth of China and India has been much faster than anticipated. Now it seem to me that we also need to direct attention toward the fact that we were supposed to be doing something about this - and we haven’t. So not only is there faster growth in the developing world, but the developed world has, in general, shrugged and gone on as before. And Canada made all kinds of “commitments” which we did nothing about keeping: which pretty much sums up our foreign policy in general. Ask Mr Harper what he thinks and he will talk about the need for more economic growth for Alberta to offset the industrial decline in Ontario.
And I still see no plan of action to raise the Fraser dykes.
Giant Antarctic ice shelf breaks into the sea
The collapse of this ice shelf has been predicted for some time. The problem is that the collapse is happening much faster than had been predicted. Our experience of the impact of climate change is inadequate to build accurate predictive models. And of course the constant barrage of unscientific, self interested, “skepticism” has not helped. But do not expect any apologies from those quarters. Whatever we do now will be too late to save the Wilkins ice shelf and the consequent rise in sea level. And the loss of a huge reflective surface. Like many of the effects of climate change they have inbuilt accelerators.
I wonder how long our politicians can continue to waffle on about the economic impact of GHG reduction in the face of events like this.
The global cooling fallacy
The oft-cited ice age scare of the 1970s can’t be compared to the great volume of research that supports today’s understanding of climate change
Andrew Weaver, Ottawa Citizen
Published: Monday, February 18, 2008
Like many of you, I have heard it said that in the 1970s, scientists were saying the world was heading into a new ice age. This has always bothered me because in my 20 years as an active climate researcher, I have never come across a peer-reviewed scientific study that has actually made this claim. Fortunately, today we have the searchable database ISI Web of Science, containing information from more than 6,000 scientific journals, so getting to the bottom of this is an easy task.
It turns out that there is not a single peer-reviewed original scientific study that argued this to be the case.
This caught my eye today, because of something I read yesterday and decided to ignore. It was a vicious personal attack on David Suzuki published on the opinion page of the Vancouver Sun. It followed the unpleasant norm of “if you can’t win the argument, attack the man” pattern. And it repeated the canard that Andrew Weaver demolishes today in the Ottawa paper from the same stable.
While there was only one peer reviewed paper that raised the possibility of a new Ice Age (which was quickly debunked) it did catch on with the popular press. And was repeated, but without the balance of the caveat “it’s utter nonsense”.
In 1975 Wally Broecker, an eminent scholar from the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, wrote an important article in the journal Science, noting that: “… the natural climatic cooling which, since 1940, has more than compensated for the carbon dioxide effect, will soon bottom out. Once this happens, the exponential rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content will tend to become a significant factor and by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1,000 years.”
Broecker was right.
Andrew Weaver is a Canada research chair in climate modelling and analysis at the University of Victoria. He was a lead author on the IPCC 2nd, 3rd and 4th scientific assessments. He is chief editor of the Journal of Climate and his book Keeping our Cool: Canada in a Warming World, will be published by Penguin Canada later this year.
Now can someone explain to me why this article is not in the Sun?
False creek - flooding?
The following item was sent to the trans-action email list serve by Jack Becker. It is reproduced here with his permission
How Susceptible is the City of Vancouver and the False Creek Neighbourhood from Global Warming and Rising Sea Levels?
At an open house for the Southeast False Creek Lands, the Olympic site, before its approval at the City’s Council, I asked a planner if provisions were being made in the development for the predicted rising of the sea level from global warming. He responded that there were not and further that city management did not want to consider that need.
As a resident on the north side of False Creek, my thoughts were that the city wanted to get into the sand bagging business or wanted to throw a lot of work to the retaining wall builders when water levels were threatening to cross the seaside roads and enter into the doors of the roadside townhouses.
Today, around noon as I was cycling along the seawall, I noticed that some of the gangways to the False Creek ferries docks were bending slightly upwards at the docks, not downwards as is usual. Also, I noticed that the walkways along the seawall were submerged with the water level almost reaching the underside of the benches facing the water.
Sure it had snowed somewhat for two days and rained for the last 18 hours. But the Pacific Ocean is a wide body of water with capabilities to absorb such rainfall. False Creek is not a river.
So, with high tide, the water level was within one and a half meter of Marinaside Crescent and about two to two and a half meters from the front door of the townhouses abutting the Seaside Path.
Is there a lesson here for us?
H-JEH (Jack) Becker
50 years on: The Keeling Curve legacy
It was 50 years ago that a young American scientist, Charles David Keeling, began tracking CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere at two of the world’s last wildernesses - the South Pole and the summit of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii.
His very precise measurements produced a remarkable data set, which first sounded alarm bells over the build-up of the gas in the atmosphere, and eventually led to the tracking of greenhouse gases worldwide.
I am not sure but I would bet that the deniers promptly started their very unscientific campaign to throw doubt on the data. And especially the linkage between burning coal and oil and the change in our climate. In fact “climate change” itself was a response to the sand thrown in peoples’ eyes by the use of the term “global warming” since in some places more severe winters began to be experienced from the same cause
How Lucky Do You Feel?
Shorter news items
More on the SkyTrain gate nonsense - but this time quoting people who have at least read the previous GVTA reports on the issue. Of course it doesn’t help that Kevin Falcon knows that Translink’s figures on fare evasion are wrong. He doesn’t have any better information of course
Combined with the costs of installing the new gates, amortized over 20 years, the 2005 report put the total annual cost of fare gates at $32.2 million.
In contrast, it estimated gates would reduce fare evasion by only $2.9 million.
Based on extensive spot checks, TransLink estimates about 4.9 per cent of SkyTrain revenues are lost through fare evasion.
Falcon and Brodie said they think the rate is much higher.
“There’s no way in an open system you’re going to be losing that little,” Falcon said.
He said transit operators in Europe told him their fare-evasion rates are as high as 30 per cent, but neither Falcon or Brodie was able to identify any flaws with the way TransLink compiled its figures.
I would just love to know which operator told him that - and how they arrived at that figure. That’s the trouble with “sources” like that - no one can check them out. If there is an incentive to minimize the losses to evasion, then surely they are the same for all transit operators.
There is also more on the bizarre notion that fare gates reduce crime generally - which is also entirely unsupported by experience. Probably different types of crime. But SkyTrain has both video surveillance and, now, real police officers. With guns. Of course, no one mentions that when you increase the number of police in an area, the amount of reported crime increases.
B.C. bus crash renews calls for highway upgrades
Of course the calls come from bus company and local pols - they have wanted twinning of the TransCanada for a long time. It is, of course, much too early to determine the cause of the crash, but last night on CBC a local mountie was saying that accidents he has attended are usually determined to be due to driving errors - too fast for the conditions, too close to the vehicle in front, and driver distraction were all mentioned. Twinning the TransCanada will not make it safer, any more than upgrading the Sea to Sky will make that road any less dangerous. The drivers will continue to speed and tailgate and play with their GPS systems and DVDs while they do so. And the severity of the consequent collisions - and the amount of traffic involved - will be greater, so the casualty rate will probably not change very much.
Areas along Fraser sinking at startling rate, study warns
When you dyke a mud bank, it starts to sink. That is because the water that you drain out no longer supports the surface and it compacts. The dyke means no additional alluvial material is added. And if you put buildings on it - especially really heavy structures - it sinks faster. What is amazing to me is that this is now being reported as though it is news. YVR has known about this for years. When I first came here my colleagues on the engineering side of the firm were concerned about the differential rate of subsidence between the airport terminal building and the new apron they were constructing in front of it - especially as the new terminal was to be serviced by aviation fuel in pipes rather than big tanker trucks. Yes, they had done the preloading. But even so the apron and the floor of the new building were not matching up.
We have also known about sea levels rising. And the strange sense of complacency at the City of Richmond that refuses to admit that its dykes might not be enough in the event of a major event. Like a tidal surge, or an earthquake. Which both seem to me to be increasingly likely - though for different reasons.
Can science really save the world?
Some really way out ideas are reviewed for their potential to reverse the effect of global warming. Some are familiar, others are new, but all are remarkably cavalier in their attitude to the other life forms on the planet.
Do we really think it is a good idea to pump millions of tons of sulphur into the atmosphere? (Actually something that happens anyway when you burn coal and oil and gives us acid rain.)
I cannot believe for a moment that we think it worth while to consider these kind of remedies in order that a small percentage of the human population can continue their current grotesque over consumption of the world’s fossil fuels. Let’s poison the upper atmosphere so that we can continue to drive our Hummers - and crank up the air conditioning!
Returning from a two-decade road trip to find a region at the crossroads
Being a broadsheet, the Sun gives its opinion writers a lot more space - 3 times as much for the new municipal affairs writer. In a substantial piece, he compares Metro Vancouver with other cities around the world - using sources like Grist - and finds us wanting. He also flags up Gordon Campbell’s upcoming announcement at UBCM and notes
I’m also keen to hear just how our hybrid-driving leader squares building bigger bridges and wider highways for more cars with the hard fact the automobile is the region’s biggest source of greenhouse gases.
And he’s not alone there. I am looking forward to reading more coverage of the region from him. But so far I do not think there is going to be quite as much to argue about, as he seems to be a lot “greener” than his colleagues or his editorial board
Wherever you stand on climate change — believer, denier or agnostic — there are undeniably big ideas at play that will shape the next generation of cities.
It is not a matter of faith. The “deniers” can only attack by throwing doubt where there is none in the scientific community. There has not been one single piece of research in a peer reviewed scientific journal which challenges the consensus that has existed among scientists in this field for many years. The same technique was used by the tobacco industry to throw doubt on the link between smoking and lung cancer. You cannot be agnostic in the face of evidence such as the recent reports of the shrinking of the arctic ice sheet - global warning is not only happening it is accelerating, and we have no alternative but to reduce our growing use of fossil fuels, as well as mitigating the inevitable rise in sea level. Certenig should be alright for a bit in Kits - but I am seriously considering moving from Richmond.
