There is only one real policy solution to global warming: population control. More human beings = more carbon emissions. If we are serious about this issue, we will scrap our mass immigration policies and look at ways to control Canada's populations.

Because wealth can not be created only taken from other sectors, or the environment, no matter what the issue, or problem, big business always finds "experts" to deny it. Some experts still deny that tobacco, or fast foods are any health problems, that we're in a cancer epidemic, there are experts who deny the nazi Holocaust, who support racial superiorities, the arms race, and you name it.......

Apart from the financial backing of the deniers, it would also be helpful to look at their political and religious affiliations. If they vote Republican in the USA and Conservative in Canada, their opinions are coloured by ideological faith in the rule of aristocracies, believe that poverty is God's Will and to wipe it out by societal action is a "sin".

Just as the opinions of nazi and Marxist scientists have been coloured by their ideological madness and the religions that preached that the persecution of the Jews was punishment for the crucifiction of Christ.

There are scientists who still maintain that the Earth was created 6-7,000 years ago, some who kowtow on the floor at certain times of the day, and some who support Calvin's predestination theories and Rapture.

Any politician, or corporate ruler can open up the necessary drawers and pull "experts" out of the woodwork to support any harebrained theory.

If there's no global warming, why are millions of acres of pine forests destroyed in BC, because we had no -40C for 10 years ? If we hadn't had a few days back in '95, all the decidious trees, like poplars and aspens would have been killed by tent caterpillars by now, which could still happen.

The Interior is drying out rapidly right now and unless we get some rains, the forest fires will be the worst in history. In global warming denier Alberta, the forest fire season has already been declared a month earlier than usual.

Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Harper and his wing-nut cronies are as dirty as the oil-sands they answer to.
Stupid, greedy, ignorant, bible-thumping trash from alberta!
BRING DOWN THE HARPER GOVERNMENT!!

I am patiently waiting for an article that actually praises Harper for some of initiaitves.

He is about to reduce taxes and he did solve the softwood dispute, didn't he?

Come-on Tyee - where is the fair and balanced reporting?

Or do you all only fear monger??

This is not journalism, it is propaganda crap!

Capitalism are you a tennis ball? Yellow on the outside and a vacuum inside?

Capitalism:

Did he? I think the jury is still out on that one. What's been solved?

...says Maybel

I am patiently waiting for Harper to forward some initiatives that are worth praising.

...says I!

Capitalism
If you'd like to see what "propaganda crap" looks like, go to

friendsofscience.org and watch their video clips.

Because this organization is identified as a non-profit organization, the gullible may indulge themselves in the notion that finance does not direct the objectives of this group.

And they'd be wrong.

You want a scary conspiracy theory? How about one in which a writer who has some degree of credibility as a scientific thinker (with the pop culture masses) decides that environmentalists are the bad guys, and that global warming theories are "junk science." And lo, the writer's ideas were scattered amongst the readers of The Da Vinci Code, and they thought that this, too, was good. And it came to pass that the economists and corporations were able to go about their good works undaunted by any pangs of conscience as the living things of the earth did sicken and die. For the worshippers of Mammon had been able to take the notions of "cartel" and "cabal" once espoused by the rebel scientists and co-opt these.

Looks like you'll be waiting for that article for a long time, C, but then, I think that most of us would like to bury Harper, not to praise him.

The problem with the liars over global warming is they are going to have to be increasingly creative in developing new lies to try to explain why their earlier lies were so off the mark.

The problem for the rest of the world is that so many people are desperate to believe everything will be all right that many welcome the lies.

Yes Ed, Mountain Pine beetles, tent caterpillars
outbreaks and increased forest fire activity in the Interior show how a warming environment means drastic changes to come.

And the Albertans whether they are bible thumpers or greedy addicts of energy dollars are about to start learning the real cost of energy.

The Pembina Institute of Alberta has just come out with a report suggesting the entire flow of the Athabasca River will soon be lost to the tar sands industry, which needs so much water for steam to extract the oil from the sands.

The Athabasca, of course, is just one of Alberta's rivers that are fed by the Rockie Mountains where the loss of glaciers is already setting off alarm bells about declining water supplies.

The oil industry, of course, is trying to counter this looming crisis by suggesting that it's the people in the urban centres and agriculture who are wasting too much water doing things like ( I guess), living.

Excellent summary Mr. Gutstein. Yes, the politicalization of science is now at Canada's doorstep. The public will be inundated by heavily biased disinformation from the petrochemical industry (read: the US's largest lobbyist). And the public, who still believe Canada's media will accurately inform, will read the climate change denials. And the public will believe that there must be legitimacy in this "news". And many will conclude that yet again, the "enviros" are off their leash preaching doom. That there MUST be two sides to every story. And that it's so complicated who really knows. So therefore who are we to decide. The result will be indecision. Aka the Status Quo. The oil lobby will have succeeded in its goal.

A debate just like this would have occurred on Easter Island a couple of years before the last palm tree was cut down. There were those who raised alarm and concern about wiping out the palm forests. And there were those who said don't worry, be happy. To read exactly what it looked like a generation after they wiped out their food supply, read Captain Cook's journal entries when he first landed on Easter Island. Very, very compelling.

allan
Speaking of dams, I wouldn't be surprised if some loon decided soon that the discredited Meridian Dam project for the South Saskatchewan at the Alberta/Saskatchewan border was worthy of putting back on the table before long. The southeast corner of Alberta is getting awfully dry too.

The Athabasca River was one of the clearest, coldest, most beautiful rivers that could possibly be imagined.

The Athabasca River is now totally mud-coloured where it passes through the Alberta tar sands extraction projects.

Surely to god, there's a special place in hell reserved for the people who devised a plan which, as collateral damage, is destroying such a precious thing as that jewel of a river.

Of course, Harper has done some good. Not the softwood "solution", or the "accountability" act, but there must be something if we search long enough.

So have Nero, Hitler, Mao and Stalin and every criminal who ever lived. When I was in Austria after the war, everybody was singing the praises of Hitler, except the government who maintained that Austria was anti nazi all the time. So claimed the 3 main Christian denominations of Europe, who supplied padres to the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS.

Harper may have become a nice guy, but unfortunately, he was born into a milieu that gave him an economic miseducation and ideological madness that managed to warp his mind. If he'd been born into a nazi Germany, or a communist Russia, he would have been the blind supporter of all their crimes too, because he's the obvious type of ideological fanatics.

I have known all these characters who "must believe" in something, or else they're lost and without a crutch.

One of my best friends locally is the hottest, capitalist, stockmarket speculator alive. The nicest and most reliable friend one can imagine, always ready to help. He's using his stockamrket gains to go fishing, which I don't mind. We both know where we stand, we just don't talk, or argue about it, as there's no point in it.

I remember a dear old lady who couldn't understand the fuss over the killings of 6 million Jews, "after all they were only Jews". Not to mention the other 10 million who were not, but there must have bee a good reason for killing them.

Ed Deak.

I remember when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. 2 meteorological experts were asked what effect the particles in the air would have on the global climate. One said the earth would cool a little because the particles would block energy from the Sun. The other said the earth would warm a little because the particles would hold in energy radiated by the Earth. The temperature stayed the same.

The moral is things are complicated and they require research. Not rhetoric.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060424ta_talk_remnick

Maybe we need our own version of Al Gore here in Canada.
He seems finally to have found a way to be relevant.

speedo - for your info -

Here is my two cents worth:

I think that large monuments in stone should be erected in a few points across the land. Maybe one at the base of the Columbia Icefields. Maybe another at the Southernmost reaches of the Boreal. These stone monuments should simply record the names of the prominent skeptics and report how they argued against creating effective, market-based controls of carbon. Their names should be down for all time, lest their grandkids be simply the next generation of bastards to exploit the earth with the same arrogance being shown today by their grandparents.

Capitalism, since when do your right wing media toadies and websites publish "fair and balanced reporting"? If you don't like the mix here, you are free to take your eyes somewhere else.

I'm old enough to remember my home town in climate zone 5. Now it is a 3C. The indicator plants are everywhere in the local gardens: forsythia. magnolia. vitis vinifera (grape). azalea. We couldn't grow them 40 years ago.

In the late forties most of the cherry trees died... from cold.

How much more do you need?

R. Smiley

BC Mary:

One problem is our inability or, more likely, unwillingness, to account for the externalities you refer to as collateral damage. It's not as though the concept is unknown to economists; it's just that because they're slightly more difficult to measure than money in the bank, economists would rather close their eyes to them and assume they didn't exist.

But your description of the mucky river is testament to the fact that externalities do exist, and that nobody is doing anything about them. And, further, that we -- the people -- shoulder the final burden of cleaning up the mess or perishing from cancer or other maladies because of these externalities.

Oops. Sorry, got those zones reversed. It was a 3, and is now a 5C

http://www.agr.gc.ca/nlwis-snite/index_e.cfm?s1=maps_cartes&page=intro&region=2&type=5

Harper's apologists seem to be confused as to just who he is serving. Personally, I would define the serving of a foreign power to the detriment of one's own nation as treason, but then, using that definition, how many parliamentarians, premiers, and prime ministers from the center and right over the last 50 years are untainted? Remember the American congressional definition of honesty: Someone who, once bought, stays bought.

There are others who will probably say that, well, science isn't exactly Harper's field, but in economics, he is our blue eyed boy! For those, here is a copy of a letter I recently sent to the current Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, and local M.P. The significance of it is that Bank of Canada foreign exchange reserves (mostly U.S. dollars) are going to be gutted by the drop in value of the U.S. dollar. Now anyone would think that it would be logical for Canada to do like say Sweden: lighten up on dollars. Anybody want to bet on that? With holdings of over 40 billion US dollars, a thirty percent drop is going to be a 13 billion dollar hit. Well, Capitalism? Just who DOES Harper serve?

(next post)

April 24

The Rt. Honourable Stephen Harper

Sir:

This weekend, Alexei Kudrin, the Russian Minister of Finance, speaking in Washington while attending the annual meetings of the world bank and the IMF, openly questioned the US dollar's preeminence as the world's "absolute" currency. As you can well understand, this caused no small bit of discomfort to his American hosts, and the world currency markets lost no time in driving the dollar below the critical resistance of 88.2 cents against the basket of currencies. In practice, not only does technical analysis say that the dollar is going to fall further, but fundamental analysis does as well: the massive deficits and horrendous trade balance, which was obvious for several years as being unsustainable, is now seen to be just that: unsustainable.

The Swedish central bank, with over 300 years of experience, has been selling dollars; their reserves of the currency have dropped from 37% to 20% of total, with the Euro now making up 50%. Similarily, the central bank of Qatar has announced that they have been changing their reserve makeup, and intend to hold 40% of their reserves as Euros.

I have in the past attempted to engage the Bank of Canada in dialogue, and gotten the bureaucratic equivalent of the finger: a meaningless form letter as a brushoff. Coming from Salmon Arm, B.C., I am used to the Liberal (Trudeau personally gave us one) salute. Still, I would hope that you, having some background in economics, would understand a little more of the sea change which is taking place in the composition of central bank reserves; it is not 'cutting and running' to be first in such a case, it is only gross stupidity to be last.

The British Chancellor of the Exchequer has managed to permanently blight his future hopes of becoming prime minister by selling half of Britain's gold reserves at the absolute bottom of the market in an effort to save Goldman Sachs and a few other bullion banks from the fruit of their own folly. I would suggest that your own political base is not strong enough to take on a similar burden: If Canada takes the hit, you will be blamed even though in all justice the fault lies with the Liberals and more specifically with Paul Martin, and blame should be apportioned accordingly. Martin can hardly say that he "didn't know", yet the Conservatives will be blamed.

In conclusion, the same technical and fundamental evidence that says that the dollar is going to at least 60 cents also shows gold with an initial target of $1650 an ounce. Some of the best economic commentators on the planet (Richard Russell, for example) are openly talking of at least $3000. You are now facing the opportunity of a lifetime; you can either be revealed as a far sighted and competent prime minister who used his knowledge of economics to benefit the country at no political risk to yourself or your party, or you can take on the albatross of being seen as an economic cretin, one more of the funny money crowd that Alberta threw out along with Social Credit.

I would hope you will chose wisely.

Respectfully yours

R Smiley"

--yeah, I got the same form letter (word for word) from each of the recipients....

"commentor: allan
posted: 2 Hours Ago
The problem with the liars over global warming is they are going to have to be increasingly creative in developing new lies to try to explain why their earlier lies were so off the mark."

Exactly why we now call it "Climate Change".

When the sky didn't fall we were in grave danger of blowing the crisis away, blowing the scare tactic away and having the truth come out.

Human driven climate change is a crock, but it can be used for many other good socialist purposes such as reducing consumption and helping anyone but the Americans.

It has been fabulously successful as a fund raising ploy, but I am not sure if we can spin this story very much further just by trying a pitch change to "climate change".

Thu, April 27, 2006

Let's put a freeze on global warming hype

By LICIA CORBELLA

Exactly 31 years ago tomorrow Newsweek carried a story that predicted a rapidly cooling world that would result in a "drastic decline in food production -- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth."

Hmmmm? It's the same doom and gloom scenario we hear today except turned on its ear -- now, however, it's not about devastation caused by cooling but rather by global warming.

Confused? Well, you need not be much longer.

Today, just one day prior to the anniversary of that April 28, 1975, Newsweek article about global cooling, Dr. Chris de Freitas, a world-renowned climatologist, geographer and environmentalist from the University of Auckland in New Zealand will help decipher all the hype and pseudo-science surrounding global warming during a lunchtime lecture at the Metropolitan Conference Centre, 333 4 Ave. S.W., ($40 tickets can be purchased at the door.)

"Recently, media and politicians have virtually stopped talking about global warming and are now referring to climate change instead," states de Freitas. "That's because predictions of doom and gloom from warming just aren't coming true. But with 'climate change,' Kyoto advocates can now cite any change or phenomenon as proof that CO2 emissions have upset the global apple cart."

It's the old 'heads-I-win, tails-you-lose' trick played on a massive scale by "the global warming industry" who want to keep their hundreds of millions of research dollars flowing when their dire predictions of catastrophic warming are proven false, if not completely fraudulent. In the Newsweek piece about cooling it states: "In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually."

De Freitas points out that predicting the weather for the next two weeks, let alone the climate for the next 100 years or so, is impossible. What he can safely predict is the Earth will cool again one day and it will warm again, too.

"There certainly isn't any evidence that there's going to be dramatic climate change because of human activity," says de Freitas over a glass of wine at a downtown restaurant. "The fear-mongering about more droughts and more floods is pure hype and pure speculation and is not based on science," he adds.

De Freitas says in the 1930s it was warmer in the Arctic than it is now -- before there was massive industrialization and man-made greenhouse gasses -- and between 1600-1800, Greenland actually lived up to its name -- it was green.

Currently, Greenland is losing ice on its southern margins but is gaining ice in its interior -- a measurable fact.

Meanwhile, the Antarctic is cooling, with the exception of a small Antarctic peninsula as a result of currents.

"There's been global cooling since 1998 because 1998 was the hottest year in the last 150 years," says de Freitas, adding "10,000 years ago it was much warmer than it is now."

"From 1900 to 1940 there was global warming," he says, even though large scale industrialization didn't start until 1948.

"Then, from 1940 to 1979 there was global cooling and that happened when we were putting heaps of carbon into the air."

"If you do consult the facts, have an unbiased, open mind and you don't have an agenda, you can't help but be at least an agnostic on this," he adds.

De Freitas then cracks a smile and challenges Canadians who believe the unsubstantiated hypothesis of human-created global warming by saying it's "environmentally irresponsible to live in Canada where it's cold and large amounts of energy are needed to survive."

He facetiously suggests the pro global warming crowd all move to Florida. Then again, if the scientists quoted in that Newsweek piece were right, Florida would be downright chilly, too.

Thanks for the info G West. I know the subsequent research into the Pinatubo (and other) eruptions. I was describing the speculation immediately after the event to make a case for the kind of research you included for us.

I suppose these "experts" would also deny that we have reached , or will reach soon, Peak Oil (Production peaks, and then declines, despite more exploration and production, especially because demand (China & India) (and us of course) increases.

Global Warming is here ask the Inuit people!
Harper is a traitor to Canada and the Canadian People.
Back room deals, gag order on his cucus, NORAD, no money for Health care, education, social programs etc. But lots of bucks for military spending & a 13+ billion surplus?
He has the stars & stripes tattooed on his butt, because every move he makes is Ok’ed by G Bush and/or by Petrocan/Shell the same corporations who murder dissidents in third world countries for oil.
You watch the big bucks to back Harper in the next Federal Election our Democratic Rights are slowly being taken away.
We have to vote this CREEP OUT of existance & the Consevitive party.
If Ken Dryden wins the Liberal leadership I will for the first time in my life vote Fed Lib.

Logjammer
Do you have any idea who and what Licia Corbella is? Or on what she founds her beliefs? It sure as hell isn’t science. I suggest you do a little research yourself - you might be surprised at what a true believer like her believes on a whole lot of other subjects. If your reading material is restricted to the Calgary Sun it's not too surprising you haven't got a clue.

Robert White, writing about the Calgary Sun columnist in Christianity today, had this to say:

As Licia finished the prayer, her office phone rang. It was Karen Taylor-Binnie from the international relief organization Samaritan's Purse. She asked if Licia wanted to participate in Operation Christmas Child, a program that distributes shoeboxes full of clothes, school supplies and toys to children in orphanages and refugee camps.

"I said yes," Licia recalls. "Then I walked out of my office, saw my publisher and asked him if I could go." Her publisher agreed, covering the cost of the trip, provided she write about her journey. In December 2003 she travelled to Kabul. The trip combined her two greatest passions: her devotion to Jesus and her love of words.

No doubt she also thinks she’s doing the Lord’s work in

Here’s what she had to say about 9/11:

By LICIA CORBELLA (she actually put her name to this tripe!)

As images of planes flying into the twin towers played on endlessly on the television set behind me, I sat staring at the much more antiseptic photo of Ground Zero as it exists today and I marvelled at two things.

First, I was struck by how clean and intact the deep foundation of the 16-acre World Trade Center is. Next, I was struck by the only other thing that remains from that remarkable complex.

A cross.

The cross -- as most of you know -- was discovered by an excavation worker a few months after the disaster.

It poked out of the ruins like a miraculous sign. It is made of the iron girders that once held up portions of those remarkable buildings.

It was not -- as I have recently read -- cut or welded to look like a cross.

It was found as is by construction worker Frank Silecchia. "When I found the cross I fell to my knees and cried for about 20 minutes," said Silecchia, who had volunteered to help with the "rescue" effort.

Other firemen and construction workers also fell to their knees right then and there, then Silecchia took it upon himself to ensure that the cross was saved.

As a result, that cross -- carved as it was by the falling building -- has been preserved and set in concrete.

It -- along with the foundation -- is all that remains of those two most imposing buildings now conspicuously missing from the world's most imposing skyline.

I then started digging through my bulging file of Sept. 11 clippings and came by a computer printout highlighted here and there by pink marker and in an odd kind of psychedelic way two words kind of popped out at me from the printed page and floated there.

The words were, foundation and cross.

Need I say more.

ripponfalls:

In the short term, your observation/comment may be the most important one on this thread. The nations that figure this out early (and switch, for example, to the euro) will make huge windfall gains. We'll likely be left holding crappy dollars.

Oh please do Alci. I love that LICIA CORBELLA, she's a looney-toon.

Now I'm all for Logjam's point we should look at who is making claims and what other possible motivation there could be.

But global warming seems to have gone beyond debate, its at the point where its actually happening and we can all hear the stories from people on the ground such as the Inuit.

Anyway, I just wanted to address the use of 1948 as a marker. Industrialization was on well before 1948. There was plenty of industrial activity going on during the two world wars and in between. There were even some nukes going off. Even back in the 1800's there was plenty of coal burning and such so it might have been on a lesser scale but it was dirtier. Therefore saying there was already evidence of global warming occurring in 1900 begs the obvious response of "yup there was"

It might help if fat, luxury addicted Canadians stopped promoting urban sprawl and waste by addressing their own selfishness.

The US dollar has been held up for years by the daily purchase of about $1. billion worth of bonds by Japan and communist China to keep up the puchasing power of the long worthless dollar for a few more years.

Meanwhile US and other industries have been moving into China at a growing pace. In a way, China has been purchasing those industries by keeping up the dollar, so they didn't lose much.

I always felt that one day, when China is strong enough, and the so called "industrialized" countries have been deindustrialized by their idiot, market capitalist governments, they'll tell the barbarians to go to hell and kick them out without compensation. Regardless of what the WTO or the IMF may say.

Now that China is strong enough and can afford to make the switch, they're gradually divesting their dollar holdings, as do many other nations not imbued with the admiration of America, as are our own politicians. I wouldn't be surprised to find that it is these Asian countries who are driving up gold prices.

Of course, industrialization for exports also means environmental destruction, therefore, how long the Chinese can go on with this madness is another question ?

In any case, the dollar is kaputt and so are all currencies created by deregulated banks. $3,000 gold is not a far fetched idea, as we're in an extreme inflation of artificial, fiat money that has been going into overcapitalized
resource destruction.

This has naothing to do with any admiration of gold, only with the simple fact that gold based currencies are basically a barter system, whereas fiat money is a pseudo religion that goes with the loss of faith in its value.

Ed Deak.

So harper et al have stuffed the kelowna accord in favor of tax cuts for white folks and money for the gateway project.
i.e. facilitating massive exploitation and transfer of natural resource wealth in Canada for benefit of corporate greed. Also, said resources bound for south-east asian slave labor manufacturing hubs with little or no environmental standards!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well how about another announcement:
NO ELMBRIDGE PIPELINE EVER
NO OFFSHORE OIL EXPLORATION EVER
BLOCKADES BLOCKADES BLOCKADES

Frank,
further to logjammer's post, there's this:

which can't be ignored in respect of the 1900 - 1948 period I guess - in addition to what you've already observed above, of course.

I suppose this'll lead to some retrograde analysis that all we need to solve global warming is a lot more volcano eruptions.

logjam
Thanks for your clear headed comments.
It's not Global Warming, it's simply weather.
Kyoto was finally killed in today's budget, thank God.
I am so happy with Harper in charge.

Wait a minute G, I hope you haven't got a copyright on that idea because I'll claim it as my own. I'll charge industry big bucks to set off volcanic eruptions around the planet to keep the temperature down! :-)

IAMC

What do you think happens when we combust 100 million barrels of oil each and every day worldwide and pump the resulting amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

Why don't you take a course in atmospheric chemistry you idiot.

jesterjogger said: "Also, said resources bound for south-east asian slave labor manufacturing hubs with little or no environmental standards!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Are you saying "jj" that two pipelines are being built by "Enbridge". One carries the raw, unprocessed bicrum, and the other carries the chemicals to process it...but ALL are going to China for cheap, unregulated, unsensored processing??? If this is true, it answers the question of why not process in Alberta, and pipe to Kitamat with one pipe...thoughts?

Peace.

RTB

IAMConfused says:"I am so happy with Harper in charge".

Of course you are...

RTB

Frank
Naw, won't work. I thought it was such a good idea I checked for copyright on it before I posted. Alas, the idea's already registered to somebody called Licia Carbonarra, er CORBELLA. ;-D

IAMC:
Lets see... Harpers agenda:

Axe the wheatboard.

Why not? Makes more room for our U.S based Cargill and Pioneer's to come in and increase their market share in Canada with the wheatboard gone. On this note, little things you might not know, like the fact that western farmers have to sell their grain to the wheatboard (and no one else, unlike Eastern Canada which has no such restrictions) might seem to lead you to think that its fine to axe the wheatboard. I'm all for keeping it, but with the right to sell my grain to whomever I like. Do I like monopolies? Nope. What will we have when the western farmers wheat board monopoly is gone? An american one. Far worse.

Harper wants public health care privatized.
If you think its otherwise, check out morefreedom.org
and tell me its different. Harper was prez of this U.S. oil corp propped organization from 1997 to 2001, and the dirt on NCC is long and dark. They've been trying to divide and conquer Canada since the 60's. (Yup, its not surprising that Harper didn't axe 1.5 billion in oil company subsidies. Cant bite the hand that feeds you)

Harper wants the RCMP looked after by the provinces, like the U.S. has with each state policing their own. Let the contracts expire. No universality. Thats what capitalism is entirely against, because universality or any version of nationalized assets is an enemy to capitalism.

Capitalism wants everything bought and sold on the market including healthcare, police, insurance, and the privatization of any other crown corporation, provincial or federal, as crown corps compete with individual ownership in the markets. Who pushes it the most? The rich, of course, and the brainwashed dummies who believe the propaganda that its in our best interest. Look at our environments and tell me it is, or are you just another yes man saying global warming is a hoax, while the glaciers melt, Greenlands icepack melts and the artic becomes wide open water in the summers 15 to 20 years from now. Sorry, dude. Saying global warming isn't man made or doesn't exist is friggin retarded at this point.

Harper wants the provinces, particularly Alberta, to look after its own senior citizen pension plans as well. This facilitates their separation, of course, but this is what Harper has always been since he was a Reformer. You know, a western separatist.

Axe KYOTO:
Naturally. It would take a big bite out of oil company profits. Who wants that? And while oil is 75 dollars a barrel and rising, our federal royalties percentages are falling and Alta's scheme of 25% corporate royalties on profits means nothing to Exxon, Esso, Enron shell game accountants. And since the U.S. owns most of our oil anyways...

Sorry, dude. If you love the states so much, their healthcare system that leaves 15% without any coverage, a further 30% with only partial coverage, policing changing from state to state or province to province, universality thrown out the window on anything and everything no matter how efficient and benificial it is to the consumer with anything you can think of... and if you get a Harper majority, you'll get what you wish for. A privatized CBC, privatized heathcare, and the final nail on the coffin of soverignty, the allowance of bank mergers from U.S. banks to buy out Canadian ones, not to mention heavily increased separation tensions from Quebec and Alta... (as if they don't own a good chunk of it already through our markets, bad old globalization) then just vote Conservative. And if you fail in your quest, just move to the states where you love it so much, yah friggin dimwitted traitor.

IMAC (I AM A Con, or slow or dense, or stunned, or lame or whatever else it stands for) Cont.

Did you really think the Cons did something for us with softwood? Outright giving them a 1.1 billion dollar discount for something that should never have been "negotiated" to begin with? And this doesn't by any means help the lumber companies that went broke or even remotely begin to account for the currency disparencies. Factor in currency, and we can add another 1.5 billion to the pool. No, dummy, we got screwed by your ever lovin dirty Liberal turned dirty Conservative Emerson, former CEO and still major shareholder of CANFOR of which, this softwood agreement puts 280 million into their pockets... checked out their shares lately?

Their budget of 10 billion in increased gov. spending combined with GST and income tax cuts to the rich will run deficits when commodities fall, triggered by the same economics that is about to sewer your beloved country, the U.S. of arrogance. If you want to bend over for your friends, thats your perogative. Free will to be a dummy, and all that... But their not my friends... They are my competition. If I looked at it any other way, I'd be a willing slave and puppet looking as bad as you in all respects, especially financially.

What I don't understand is why we don't use this great conservative strategy all the time if its so good. We'll give the Americans a billion dollars for each type of product we want to sell to them. Every 5 years for each product they get another billion.

Talk about win-win...right?

It would be like giving handouts to some offensive beggars to get rid of them and away from our property. Good idea !

How about "creating" enough nmoney to get rid of their carpetbaggers? Especially like Cargill and Tyson and the oil companies.

Remember how the profits of the oil companies doubled in one year? I had my gastank filled with marked gas today, after a 2 weeks wait. Normally they were here in a couple of days. So I asked the driver what was the holdup? He said they don't feel like coming out for such small quantities. Like the 801 litres he pumped into my 1200 litre tank, costing $784. Chickenfeed to them.

This is what we call the free competitive market economy, designed to satisfy the customer with "free to choose". The other companies are no better, or even worse. They're competing who can screw the customers for more.

Ed Deak, BC small rancher.

Hey Duncan, haven't seen you posting before; welcome! Always glad to see another sane soul on these threads. We've actually taken to calling your interlocutor I AM Clueless. He is a handy fellow to have around though: always willing to pose as a straw man and never reluctant to hold up a bull's eye in front of his groin. How are things on the farm this spring? Cost of fuel must be getting pretty hard to carry, no?

Me, and tens of thousands of ordinary schmucks like me, have oil companies in our RRSP portfolios. And who can count the number of union mmebers who have oil companies in their pension finds.

So the wonderfully large profits being made, when distributed to the tens of thousands of us ordinary folks, are realized as money on our pocket, I have to say "bring on the profits". . . it is making me richer and my retirement more secure.

Profits, they are a good thing for shareholders.

Shareholders are socialism in action. Really. we own the company. Cool eh.

Time to move past the old commie creed sociliasm that say the government has to run everything & unions are faultless.

Private enterprise is more efficient, better for workers and better for the country.

time to reel in the the public sector in Canada. The PS is a cost, not a profit center.

Cool, let's get rid of it. I'll join you in dismantling the entire Cdn and provincial gov'ts and every single person on their payroll so we can live as God meant us to live, tax-free with no oversight by Ceasar.

I'm in. Without public servants I expect capitalism to last about 10 minutes. Hard to run a stock market when people walk off with the computers.

says Logjam(med in brain)..

Interesting viewpoint. Might I suggest the log you have jammed in your cerebral cortex is affecting your thought processes?

Tell that to the dozens of dead forestry workers who were victims of the race to the bottom known as private enterprise.

No taxes, no government, no laws, no police...sounds like fun times for all, especially for those that are well armed.

Yep, that's what we want. A Road Warrior economy !

Ed Deak.

Donald Gutstein should have checked his facts on Tim Ball. Ball is not a climatology prof. He is a professor of geography who did his PhD on a topic in historical climatology of the Hudson's Bay era. The University of Winnipeg has never had a climatology department or a climatologist on staff.

same old predictable blather here. the only thing the conservatives are guilty of is not accepting the lefty bullshite carte blanche like chretien and martin did. for the libs it was all about keeping the special interest groups happy. whether it made good sense or not had absolutely nothing to do with anything.

"what happens when we cobust 100 million barrels per day ?"
This consumption by humans , throughout all of history, doesn't surpass one Mt. St. Helens as far as the amount of the evil particles spewed into our atmosphere.
It's BS. Right now there is a volcano in South America actively producing more carbon and greenhouse gases than mankind's entire output to date.
The weather always fluctuates. Remember when the volcano Krakatoa darkened the earth for centuries ?
It's mankind's vanity that is being harnessed by the eco-frauds, Some kind of mysterious way of stealing the west's fortunes.
Don't fall for it.
For every sixty scientists who write a letter to Harper, there are sixty to contradict their claims.
There were dinosaurs as well as glaciers.
One hot, one cold.
America always invents everything (fact), and they will get us through any obstacle, because they always look at the most humanistic way of doing things.
I say to those all worked up about so called Global Warming to, take a pill.

IAMC:

You ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer are you, Dude? (Fact)

IMAC said: "I say to those all worked up about so called Global Warming to, take a pill"

Perhaps we will, but NOT a halucinogenic like yours dude...RTB

Yes, pills are supposed to be the instant solution for every good neocon.

What would you guys do without your daily dose of pills ?

Perhaps, while they're at the most humanistic way of doing things, like in Iraq and Panama and a few dozen more places they're bombed, the Americans will invent a pill that will make global warming and pollution disappear? Come to think of it, Red Skelton did indeed invent such a pill, in one of his shows 40, or 50 years ago.

I'm sure, all it needs is some wealth creating capital investment into some multinational drug company. Just look at the potential profits !

Ed Deak.

ROTFLMAO Bear. Good one . Here, I am Clueless have a nice glass of Kool Aid .
Yea, Harpo is simply amazing he co-opted all the Liberals tax cuts, raises taxes by almost 1% and calls it candy .
Well I ain't swallowing it .
Cozying up to the separists is gonna bring this Governemnt(?) to its knees .
They survive because the BLOC are so Phuquing stupid they believe his bull shit about fiscal imbalance which is a total Red Herring .
They gutted the Kelowna accord which would have seen billions of dollars go to the FN's .
Yea, what's not to like ?

hannibal
I'm not even sure the Bloc actually 'believes' in the Harper's promises re the fiscal imbalance. My friends in Quebec say that the Bloc would lose 10 - 12 seats if there were an election tomorrow. Duceppe will likely keep Harper in power for that reason and also because the Parti Quebecois is in pre-election mode (provincial vote most likely in spring summer of 2007). You’re right that the fiscal imbalance thing is just an illusion at present – I don’t think there’s any expectation of talks on the subject until fall at the earliest – but by making it a budget contingency he’s enabled the Bloc to do what’s in its own self-interest and to ensure passage of the Budget when it comes to a vote in the House.

If the Charest Liberals lose the provincial vote look for the Bloc support for Harper to disappear immediately thereafter. At that point, the Bloc couldn't care less what happens in the resulting Federal election because all their efforts (and the efforts of a new PQ Govt) will focus on the next referendum.

The future of the whole country is going to depend, imo, upon what happens in the next Provincial election in Quebec. I'll be watching for Harper to do anything he can to try and resurrect Charest's fortunes (and Mario Dumont's) in that province. I’ve always thought he’d give away the store (in terms of tax points) to the provinces anyway and I think he’ll do that in a way that permits Charest to take at least a modicum of credit for it.

Ironically though, it may be the nation's First Nations people who have the jam to put Harper's feet to the fire. He's ideologically opposed to the very idea of First Nations' governance and that may well be where the wheels start to come off his government.

I see the usual suspects are out this morning spinning Harper's message. Can a big advertising campaign be far behind?

One point that few people talk about. The radiation output of the sun has increased greatly over the past 15 years. this increased output makes any assumption on the effect of green house gases impossible to calculate. I got this little bit of information during a conversation with dr. Mark hanus, University of Oregon, whose post doctorate work was on the effect of turpen gas release from forests on global warming. since he helped to develop the computer models that are used to predict GHG effects I consider his assestment to be fairly accurate.

Higher CO2 leading to increased temperatures sounds logical but it still isn't provable when you consider the increased solar output. But at least it may convince people to conserve energy in the long term.

The increase would only be significant to Earth's climate if it has been going on for a century or more, said study leader Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The Sun's increasing output has only been monitored with precision since satellite technology allowed necessary observations. Willson is not sure if the trend extends further back in time, but other studies suggest it does.

"This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change," Willson said.

In a NASA-funded study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, Willson and his colleagues speculate on the possible history of the trend based on data collected in the pre-satellite era.

"Solar activity has apparently been going upward for a century or more," Willson told SPACE.com today.

Significant component

Further satellite observations may eventually show the trend to be short-term. But if the change has indeed persisted at the present rate through the 20th Century, "it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years," he said.

That does not mean industrial pollution has not been a significant factor, Willson cautioned.

Logjammer 603, I simply smiled at your reply yesterday given that the 603 said a whole lot about your view of the world.

But I wet my pants laughing as you later offered up your capitalist dogma on the economics of oil.

Could you kindly show us an economic report on your favorite industry that actually delves into the down side.

By the down side I don't mean the odd blip in the ever increasing profits at the well head or the gas pump, but the cost of dealing with a wasted environment and increased cancer rates from using or absorbing various petro-chemicals.

As a Calgary resident, do you follow the water flow rates on the Bow River?

I'll bet you'd find a few surprises if you did.

Some mystics have been said to make wine out of water. Any chance one of your alchemist friends in the oil patch can do them one better and make water (to drink) out of oil?

Yes,well from everything I have read .Charest is as dead as a door nail in the next election and nothing can save him .
I hope and pray that is true 'cause Harpo would lose his best ally(sp).
Harpo ,really imagines his majority(?) will come with the help of Quebec who are traditionally leftist in their politics .
The only thing he san do is to give them independence without the independence(in name only).
Quebecers are ,far,too sophisticared to fall under this bozos snake charms .
This budget reminds me of the Hoo Doo, Voo Doo economics of the Reagan era .

Oh,yea forgot to mention but you probably already know that one of Harpos dearest friends is that avowed racist Tom Flannigan he of the'First Nations Second Thoughts ' diatribe that stated that the FN's should be assimilated into our society and that all native tradition (including land claims) was a load of,total, malarkey .

hannibal
Oh Yeah! These guys are dangerous - Harper has been smart enough to keep Flannigan under cover after the debacle of the previous election campaign - I have no doubt he's still holding Stevie's hand in private and the submarining of the Kelowna accord financing was all the evidence I needed.
On the Quebec file, he's sadly getting himself enmeshed in the same kind of comptomised marriage of convenience that Mulroney did with Lucien Bouchard. Sadly for Canada and it's long term future as a united country I might might add.

It's not ironic to me that exactly the same sorts of selfish people are supporting his kind of treason. You should see the stuff Garth Turner is pumping out to his supporters this morning. A veritable flood of middle class joy. Happy times are here again. CHeck his website. Anyone who expected criticism and sober analysis from that bird has another think coming.

the above should be 'compromised' - r and t are next to each other on the keyboard after all, he types in mitigation - and where did that apostrophe come from in its (the first one)? Sigh!

Um, no, actually. A few centuries ago I was on Mars. But Krakatoa's big eruption was in 1883, barely 123 years ago. Centuries? 123 years is not "centuries".

And they both were around when Preston Manning's Dad was Premier of Alberta, too. (these jabs at IAMC of course; no one else around here is coming up with anything nearly so silly).

Yea, I know G. I like to lob a few written hand grenades onto his site just to keep the neo-cons awake.
One idiot even suggested I be censored for calling Harpo a 'Show boat' and a 'Suck hole'
Figures,eh ?

LMAO Skookum. I was wondering if someone would do the math and point it out to IAM Clueless .

Consensus
:
The sky is falling
or not

Will this record be accessable after the Super Storm/Earthguake/Tsunami/disruption of Social Order/whatever wierdness(benevolent or otherwise) comes down the pike? Could be that the parameters that Fraser Institute use to make their predictions last for a while yet and we can all breathe a sigh of releif and pat ourselves and chosen like thinkers on the back while buying gold and energy stocks and watching DIY Home Improvements "Reality" shows.

Does it matter whether "global Warming" is due entirely to Human activty? Personal observation (not just mine) seems to agree on that at least: local weather has changed it's pattern in our lifetime.

James Lovelock recommends that it's time to "Circle the wagons"

Maybe I'll just print all comments and articles from the Tyee to hard copy and store them for a few years.

How does Harper w/a minority have so much power? This isn't democracy.
check out the iwtnews.com if it's real news you want with out commercial or politcal bull
"For the People by the People"

Good point BC Dude.
Why build a risky, expensive pipeline all the way from syncrude to Kitimat, over the fckin Rockies thru countless watersheds when you could build a flat pipeline to Edmonton?
Not to mention the risks associated with a oil tanker port and thousands of trips up and down the passage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why?
Cuz greedy oil corporation filth can ultimately realize MORE profits this way.
Environmental considerations don't even enter into their cynical equations.
See that fat pig who retired last week from exxon with a 400$ million dollar golden parachute. That swine was the very living embodiment of corporate greed that plaques our planet.
I hope I see that fat fcuk up in whistler someday.

Yup What a BS budget, just for the reich oops rich Whistler, that's another highway to the worlds rich playground built by the working poor.
2010 is a way to keep the poor working ppl poorer for years to come.
But I have hope for the people of the world as we get stronger!
Look @ Agentina taking over the oil rights & kickin the greedy oil barons out.
Now Bolivia also the 3rd world countries have had enough

I have to watch those whistler a$$wholes drive by in their hummers and mercedes every day!
I like to think of whistler as a modern day soddom and gammorah.
By the way did you notice the disgraceful vancouver sun today. Their headline, with sadistic glee, proclaimed that low wage earners are the big LOSER'S in the tory budget!!
They're not satisfied just having slaves they actually need to rub our noses in it!!!
And if that's not bad enough today's paper had a huge insert devoted entirely to new model mercedes including big suv's!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's fckin beautiful man!
Well I guess the corrupt, corporate elite got the budget they wanted and their shill of a newspaper had to herald the event ostentatiously.
Ruling class take note! Madame Guilliotine awaits!!!!!!

Street Fighting Man
(M. Jagger/K. Richards)

Ev'rywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy
Well then what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy Vancouver town
There's just no place for a street fighting man
No!

Hey! Think the time is right for a palace revolution
'Cauce where I live the game to play is compromise solution
Well then what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy Vancouver town
There's no place for a street fighting man
No!
Get down

Hey! Said my name is called disturbance
I'll shout and scream, I'll kill the king, I'll rail at all his servants
Well, what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy Vancouver town
There's no place for a street fighting man
No
Get down

High Duncan :
Welcome to our little corner of the web .
Don't mind Elliot and I am Clueless they are still searching for the John Birch website .

Oh,here it is here.
http://www.jbs.org/

Thank you, Donald Gutstein for bringing me up to date on an issue I'd lost track of. This is important writing.

Gee rikia, where have you been ? Frozen in Antactica ?
But nice of you to give credit to the writer.

G West:

Price of diesel is out to lunch, G. It's interesting how after two years of bottomed grain prices and topped out fuel prices, the parties are finally getting around to looking at ethanol and bio diesel plants to prop up grain and oil seed markets. Are they slow in more ways than one? Yup. Didn't hear it mentioned in the budget. Go figure.

Not to slow with the subsidy checks, though. Instead of getting it in Nov., we got it already. (Always makes me wince when someone tries to buy my vote)

Maybe someone should tell IAMC that if you want to take over a country, I'd get a puppet in there as a leader (like the states with Harper), buy 'em out in the markets (like the states has done with the majority of what we have), and get some separatist movements generated with the puppet. The U.S. doesn't have to roll the tanks anymore (accept for those nationalized gov's). All they have to do is what they are already doing and the Cons are the perfect vehicle for this fast asleep country of ours.

Would the states try putting in a puppet plant for PM? Oh, no! They wouldn't do that! Would they invade IRAQ for oil? To drive up Haliburton stock so Cheney can become a billionaire? He only owns 14 million shares worth 84 dollars a share. In 2002, before the U.S. handed Haliburton a 200 billion dollar unbid contract, Haliburton was 9.00 dollars a share. Do the math. Are the Cons corrupt south of us? Its ugly to watch. Are they corrupt here? A large majority of them are, with the rest being a bunch of yes men. Its sad.

When I travel out of the country this year, I'm going to have to apologize wherever I go, using the excuse that we have a minority Con gov to try to save face for Canada shitting on Kyoto and wiping Bush's ass in Afganistan.

Duncan
My brother farms there still; my Dad is in an old folks home - I try to get back a couple times each year. Fuel and chemical prices, fertilizer etc. are just about killing him and of course he and his wife both work full time off the land as well. These neo conmen who post around here and pretend they know shit about hard work and real competition are laughable.

Somehow or other the sane people have to start talking to each other and get organized or Harper and this bunch are, as you say, really going to sell this country down the river.

Keep in touch. I'll point you to an email address if you're interested. We can only do so much in places like this.

Cheers.

I read you with interest, G. We didn't all vote Con out here, but so many brains have been washed. Its alot of anymosity against Trudeau's bilingualism and metric and West givaways to the east for the old school, along with corrupt media and herd mentality with the new schools out here.

And your right. quips in forums like this will only do so much. But the truth is a powerful thing.

The Cons that post here look at the states like they are heros. I see the U.S. as a squandered failure, an empire teetering on the verge of collapse, ruined by greed and individual interests at the cost to all and everything else. They smear universality as communist when we know through crown corps and healthcare that universality is the most efficient way to go, and gives consumers a needed break with essential services like healthcare and insurance. But when you look at where individual ownership has taken us with capitalism... I'm all for owning certain things, but I don't own the air or the water, or the ground I'm standing on. Its on loan and I'll be judged by how I keep it.

We've got idiots who post here, that I can see, who are no different with their stock portfolio's than the dummy who lights tires on fire in town limits, not caring who's downwind because its "my property" and I'll do what I want, and you know the few more thousand I's in the rant that follows.

There isn't a one of them that questions what will happen to the guy who buys or sells the stock they just unloaded. Not a one of them care about the baggage they just unloaded to the next guy and thats why capitalism fails. The disconnection between profits and how it was obtained, what environments suffered, who was exploited, none of this registers to the shareholder. The shareholder doesn't ask why EXXON Mobil and Haliburton's major shareholders (like shotgun Dick Cheney) bribe Bush to gear up the war machine in the name of Capitalism (I believe they officially call it democracy). "As long as I get MY Money."

What did it take for the U.S. citizen to openly question GW Bush's competency? A price spike at the pumps. When the price is low, Bush is doing great. When the price is high, he's a failure. It doesn't matter how many die in a war or how much life dies from pollution, so longs the gas is cheap. Pretty friggin sad.

I'll look for you, brother.

Duncan
http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/04/04/LegRaidCase/

Have a quick read just near the end of the comments thread on this little story pasted just above and look for a post from a friendly varmint.
You'll know what to do then.

from over at Steyn's blog

IT'S OUT OF OUR HANDS

Kudos to you as always in slaying sacred cows, this time that of climate change. As an academic so-called “glacial geologist” who has been working on the problem of why Earth experiences major ice ages in the remote past (over the last 3 billion years) I completed my Masters degree in the late seventies precisely at the time the climate went through a short cooling phase. There was as more than one correspondent has pointed out, much hooing and hawing about impending ice ages, especially in Canada where the next ice sheet was supposed to grow from the “ground up” so to speak, from a series of poor summers when the previous winter's snows didn't fully melt and extensive snowfields over Canada's vast expanse of northlands would grow, coalesce and thicken. Much of my thesis (funded by the Canadian gov't) was about how we could get glaciers to melt faster by dusting their surfaces and lowering their albedo (decreasing the amount of solar heating that was reflected back and thus “wasted”). This was of direct practical use given that there were at that time mines located very close to glaciers and thus at risk from their expansion. Anyway, it didn't happen and all that's past. Now to the present.

Many of your readers will know that the basic timing of glaciations and interglaciations is driven by so-called “astronomical variables”, identified by the astronomer Milankovitch early last century where Earth's elliptical orbit, its axial tilt and wobble all combine to create systematic periodic fluctuations in global climates; ocean circulation also plays a complex role in amplifying such influences but the point is that Earth's recent ice ages of the past 2 million years or so (what are called the Pleistocene ice ages) are driven by external influences. No scientist questions this basic rhythm. Carbon dioxide may be an amplifier but its changes through time actually lag behind changes in temperature. Examination of long ice cores from Antarctica that go back 400,000 years through many glacial/interglacial cycles, the temperature changes first and then CO2. In other words the latter is in response to changes in climate and not the prime cause. Over large parts of the geologic record there is a lousy relationship between CO2 levels and climate. In many ways, a continuing fixation on carbon dioxide by the media displays a clear lack of familiarity with modern scientific findings. As soon as I hear someone belabour carbon dioxide I know they are completely out of touch.

So what's new in the climate debate? What has replaced carbon dioxide? It increasingly looks according to the work of Jan Veizer at the University of Ottawa that yet another type of external forcing is also critically important (check out his overview paper in Geoscience Canada for 2003, v.32, 13-28 for example). Plainly out, certain millennial (acting on a thousand years timeframe) centennial (that one's obvious) and decadal changes in climate are once more, closely tied to so-called “celestial drivers” namely the cosmic ray flux and changing solar output. Yes folks, an outside, entirely external control on what happens right here on the surface of planet Earth. Of course there are internal feedbacks, amplifiers etc and possibly a small(ish) role for gases such as CO2 but not to the extent promoted by IPCC. Overall the links between variations in external variables and climate are much much better (impressively so) than for CO2 over various timescales. All out of our control folks. Sure, to continue to keep pumping out carbon dioxide doesn't make sense as it is a greenhouse gas (so some sort of control makes sense, providing everyone signs on) but climate marches to the beat of quite another drummer.

So keep up the good work Mark.

Nick Eyles
Toronto, Canada

Jammer
Mark Steyn and his blog are now a source of scientific knowledge. Now there's a compelling thought. With the demise of tubby black's empire at the Daily Telegraph Steyn isn't even published in England anymore. Without his friends at CanWest and at a few neo conman journals and websites in the States the man would be forced to hand out his waybills in the high street. Has the news not reached Calgary yet?

Logjam 603:

Its interesting that while you are aware of Milanckovich's orbital take on things, as well as (and I'm assuming this now) EPICA's ice core samples, you refused to acknowledge the fact that CO2 is 130% higher than at any other time in recorded history over 900,000 years according antartic ice assays. You've also failed to note that the concentrations of Methane has more than doubled then at any other time over this same period. For whatever reason, you've also failed to mention the depleted ozones reduced ability to reflect solar radiation that you say is on the increase, without validation.

In a time where we have knowingly spiked CO2 and methane gases while reducing the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere and troposphere, deforested a full third of the forests in the world, checkered the landscape with farmland and literally changed the environments in ways that we have yet to understand, you, for some reason, still say "its out of our hands."

Its a bit too boring to actually have to rebuttal your post with the blatant reality that humanity as a whole has a proven collective influence on Earths life sustaining environments.(yawn)

Thanx, G.

I am a renowned global warming skeptic, where can I apply for the big funds?

Hi guys, I'm from Australia and I just thought I'd comment on this thread.

The Global Warming alarmism is scary not because it is true but due to the fact that it shows the way in which science has been corrupted by ideology.

Some facts here:
- Computer models that predict future temperatures are lovely fiction. The climate is the most complex natural system that we know and yet we are arrogant enough to believe we can predict temperatures when we admit we don't even know the impact of all the inputs (solar flares, albedo etc). That's something but it aint science.

- There is a natural disposition to believe in:
bad mankind; bad conservative governments; the purity of science; the purity of environmental groups. Sorry, if you're an environmentalist you come into this debate with as much bias as someone working for a fossil fuel company.

- There is a reverse Macarthyism happening in which anyone who questions the prevailing global warming orthodoxy is shouted down and called a lackey of the oil companies. The fact is that questioning scientific findings is a necessity. What's happened to science here?

- A scientist who take sa grant to study the effects of global warming is hardly going to use that evidence to sink his or her own boat, you know?

- The environmental groups learned long ago that to get their message across they had to become politically savvy. Which they have. To think of them as pure advocates is just plain naive.

- Environmentalists are not climatologists. They should only comment on the effects of warming but not the causes.

The Kytoto Protocol is dead. The US will never sign it. China and India (over a throd of hte world's population adn advancing industrially at an incredible rate) are not part of it. What's the point? Best estimates are that if everyone signed Kyoto it would save us 0.05C in 50 years. Has the world gone crazy?