Canada's only federal Climate Change Bill was killed on Tuesday, leaving the country without a single climate change law, and no plan at all.
The Climate Change and Accountability Act (C-311) was voted down in the Canadian Senate in a surprise maneuver by the conservative Harper government. No debate was held. In fact there was no consideration of the bill at all despite the bill sitting in the Senate for 193 days before Harper's unelected Senate quashed the action. The House of Commons had already passed the bill twice.
But according to the bill's sponsor, MP Bruce Hyer (New Democratic Deputy Environment Critic and Member of Parliament for Thunder Bay -- Superior North), "Conservative Senators had been ordered not to debate the bill since the time it arrived in the Senate, May 6. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper's hypocrisy was breathtaking."
New Democratic Leader Jack Layton was just as emphatic. "What we have witnessed here is unprecedented. The Prime Minister has lost his moral center! This vital legislation was passed by the majority of democratically elected MPs in the House, representing two-thirds of Canadians. What Harper has done tonight is not only an assault on Canadian democracy, but the worst type of head in the tar-sands negligence toward our future health and prosperity as a nation."
PM Harper defended himself, calling the bill irresponsible in fearing that it would hurt Canada's economy and possibly throw "millions" out of work. Still Harper clearly had instructed his deputies not to even debate on the bill in the Senate.
According to its sponsor, MP Hyer, the bill was ground breaking, though hardly controversial. It would ensure that Canada meet its global climate change obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Science based, it would require the Canadian government to bring greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The bill would establish a long term target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2025. To meet these goals and beyond, it establishes interim targets between 2015 and 2045, setting periodic review, measurements and reporting.
These emission targets, based on the minimum recommendations of the IPCC (United Nations International Panel on Climate Change) are the same as those adopted by the European Union. They are also the announced objectives set forth in President Obama's "New Energy for America" strategy.
C-311 would have provided the Post-Kyoto Protocol world's first mandated hard emission reductions to be passed by a democratically elected parliament. Unfortunately, the conservatives led by Canadian Prime Minister Harper sabotaged these efforts. Undaunted, progressive MPs Hyer and Layton and Canadian Sierra Club Executive Director John Bennet pledged to continue until Canada passed landmark climate change legislation.
If the warming trends were an artifact of measurement or error, we wouldn't see such dramatic shifts in the ice shelf in Antarctica, shrinking glaciers in both hemispheres, or changes in bird migrations. Every year the ice extent in the Arctic reaches a new record low. The military acknowledges the problem, because it will affect so many things, including navigation.
Within in last decade, I've seen cherry blossoms in Washington D.C., in mid winter, and I've seen plum trees blooming in the Northwest in February. Canadian geese are staying put in a lot of places, rather than flying south.
This isn't to say we don't have winter. We have cold snaps too. But what happens between? Mild spells that last a lot longer than the cold spells. Those mild spells fool plants into blooming early, sometimes exposing them to the elements again. This is what climatologists meant when they said conditions would become unstable with global warming. That prediction was spot on. You really have to go out of your way to ignore warming trends, if you look at climate, not just weather.
Harper"s Conservatives have been trying to change the system to have elected Senators instead of this appointed House of Old Cronies but the Liberals have been blocking that.
So now when the Liberals and NDP are screaming that an unelected Senate has blocked this, the logical answer - which the Conservatives have of course been using - is that if they don't like it they should get on board and reform this undemocratic institution.
It is also worth noting that the Harper government is a minority government; that is, they do not have a majority of the seat in the House of Commons. That is actually a good thing because majority governments like the Liberals had for 12 years (as I recall) before Harper were essentially elected dictatorships.
Finally, this particular bill was simply absurd in its targets and deserved to be killed. Hopefully they will come up with something better. However, the Harper line is that they are waiting for the U.S. government to act so that Canadian laws can fit U.S. ones - as is necessary for the two integrated economies - and so far I don't see anything coming from the U.S.
Watching Canadian news is entertaining.
Yawn.
The following are scientific facts:
* The Earth has warmed significantly over recent decades, to what may be the highest level in 2,000 years or more.
* Anthropogenic greenhouse gases including CO2 -- which is generated mostly by fossil fuel burning -- warm the Earth. Without greenhouse gases including CO2 the average temperature of the Earth would be below freezing.
* The atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased by more than a third since the dawn of the fossil fuel era, to the highest level in at least 800,000 years.
* Satellite measurements demonstrate that increasing atmospheric CO2 has increased retention of heat energy in the atmosphere.
* The scientific evidence strongly indicates that said increased atmospheric CO2 is due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and there is no other viable scientific explanation for said atmospheric CO2 increase.
* There is a strong correlation between said atmospheric CO2 increase and said recent warming.
* Known natural forcing agents of past global warming - including changes in orbital cycles and increases in solar radiative output - cannot explain the bulk of said recent warming. Neither has any scientific theory to explain the bulk of said recent warming other than anthropogenic global warming survived scientific scrutiny.
Again these are all scientific facts. Which is to say:
The scientific evidence supporting anthropogenic global warming is overwhelming.
Methane is many times the greenhouse gas that CO2 is, and nobody seems to care about that one. Everyone has their eye firmly fixed on CO2.
Changes in the climate are extremely complicated and not as well understood as you'd like to think. There are reasons why we don't do that well at predicting the up coming seasons let or alone the 50 to 100 year trend of 1 gas forcing in a simple greenhouse model. Because the models used to model these changes are incomplete and based on many assumptions that don't really hold up in the real world. It isn't known what reducing one gas will do and how the climate will rebound to that change.
It definitely can't hurt to reduce them, but that wasn't my point. We should learn to see what will happen before we hedge too many bets and bills to reduce stuff hastily.
Straight from my atmospheric chemistry book. Reducing 1kg of SF6 over 100 years has the same effect from a greenhouse perspective as reducing 24 900kgs of CO2.
i.e. Is CO2 really the best thing to reduce? Who knows.
If what you are talking about here is we don't know how much greenhouse gases affect climate change --- aka 'climate sensitivity' -- that's only correct insofar as we don't have an exact number. We never will, however, until after the damage is done.
Weatherhead: "Methane is many times the greenhouse gas that CO2 is, and nobody seems to care about that one. Everyone has their eye firmly fixed on CO2."
Wrong - of course climate scientists and policy makers take into account methane. The reason why CO2 gets top billing, however, is that it is far more plentiful and we emit far more of it and thus anthropogenic CO2 far more influential on global warming than anthropogenic methane.
Weatherhead: "Changes in the climate are extremely complicated and not as well understood as you'd like to think. There are reasons why we don't do that well at predicting the up coming seasons let or alone the 50 to 100 year trend of 1 gas forcing in a simple greenhouse model."
You clearly have no idea of what I'd "like to think," so stop with the speculative attempts at mind-reading. Moreover, of course we model 50 and 100 trends. On a related note, climate modelling correctly predicted global warming over recent decades.
I've got news for you, Weatherhead: ALL scientific theories are models, and all scientific models are "incomplete and based on many assumptions that don't really hold up in the real world."
Which is to say, to deny the validity of scientific models because they are "incomplete and based on many assumptions that don't really hold up in the real world" is to literally deny science.
Weatherhead: "It isn't known what reducing one gas will do and how the climate will rebound to that change."
Exactly? Of course not. For that matter we never will - the system is too complex to ever get an exact climate sensitivity number for each greenhouse gas. What is known with a relatively high degree of scientific certainty however is ranges with respect to how much each of these gases contribute to global warming.
Weatherhead: "We should learn to see what will happen before we hedge too many bets and bills to reduce stuff hastily."
I've got more news for you: if we "learn to see what will happen" before we act we will not act until after the damage is done.
Weatherhead: "i.e. Is CO2 really the best thing to reduce? Who knows."
Yes, it is, and we know that with a high degree of scientific certainty.
HTH.
The NDP-sponsored private member’s bill would have required the federal government to set targets to bring industrial greenhouse gas emissions to 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Without so-far unimagined developments in energy technology, this would have required an unprecedented curbing of industrial activity and jobs.
Critics claim that Canada now faces the embarrassment of turning up at the next climate summit, at Cancun in just over a week’s time, “empty-handed.†But the Kyoto process is deader than Monty Python’s Norwegian blue parrot. It fell off its perch at Copenhagen."
Peter Foster in the Financial Post.
Read more: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/11/18/peter-foster-canada-dodges-carbon-suicide/#ixzz15lcVPaVN
This, from a science denier who can't even acknowledge that the Earth has warmed statistically-significantly over recent decades.
I didn't know Phil Jones was a "science denier."
oolonthehill: "I didn't know Phil Jones was a "science denier." "
What you evidently do not know is what Dr. Phil Jones actually said. Science denier disinformation to the contrary notwithstanding, Dr. Jones never said that the Earth hasn't warmed statisticaÂÂlly-signiÂfÂicantly over recent decades. In fact Dr. Jones said the opposite - he said that there has been statisticaÂÂlly-signiÂfÂicant warming over recent decades.
So sorry for you that you were taken in by science denier disinformation.
I could care less about the global warming aspect of all this. Global warming science has been so manipulated for the past 15 years that it no longer has the same face it had when it started. It's just a tool to get you elected or to get research grants now.
I'll tell you why I like this Bill. Pollution reduction. Although it doesn't affect everyone directly it is a problem that would be nice if we at least put a little effort into tackling. We will never know if reducing a certain gas in the atmosphere will have a net gain or loss effect to global warming... but we do know that inhaling pollutants is bad for our health. It's proven... many people die each year during those hot smoggy days when the humidex goes through the roof.
I'm tired of the bain aid solution to everything. You can walk through a thorn bush every day and yes, a bandaid will stop the bleeding. But the next day you are just going to bleed again. And eventually you're going to run out of bandaids.
The cure is prevention. But hey, why would the government want to fund something like that, when their pharmaceutical companies make billions feeding us pills instead of preventing the illnesses.
good luck.
We have a good idea about what will precipitate wars of the future and the wisest investments would therefore be to eliminate those causes.
The U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Joint Operating Environment 2010 identifies dwindling, energy, water, food and fish stocks as potential future military flash points.
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion can solve all of the above as well as the cause and effect of climate change.
The largest collector of solar energy is the ocean’s which have accumulated between 80 to 90 percent of the heat attributable to global warming with a consequence we have sea level rise, melting icecaps and dieing oceans.
OTEC is baseload renewable energy that converts part of this damaging heat to productive energy.
The first law of thermodynamics dictates that the increase in internal energy of a system = heat supplied to the system - work done by the system
Lockheed Martin is working on OTEC as well as F-35s. Instead of spending $16 billion on the latter, the Environics poll indicates Canadians would be better served investing in the former or better yet our own, homegrown, OTEC technology, the Global Warming Mitigation Method.
To heat one kg of water we need 1 kcal of energy
To evaporate one kg of water we need 549 kcal.
Water vapor is invisible gas and lighter than most gases in air – nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide.
As lighter gas water vapor has tendency to go up to cloud level, where most vapor condensed to water droplets, and released back energy, needed for evaporation.
WHAT IS DIFFERENCES?
It happen on 2-7 miles close to space and energy goes to space more easy, than from ground level.
Clouds reflect back to space direct sun radiation.
In air we always have not only water vapor but also WATER DROPLETS IN FORM OF FOG, CLOUDS AND PARTICLES MOSTLY RESPONSIBBLE FOR VISIBILITIES.
Winds all across atmosphere partially evaporate these water droplets and help cool surrounding air.
Any windmills reduce cooling effects of evaporation water droplets in air and therefore are disaster as for economy, as for environment
CONCLUSSION: PROPERTIES OF WATER ACTUALLY HELP COOL THE AIR, despite water vapor is GHG.
Climate change is real.
EXPLANATION FOR REASON OF CLIMATE CHANGE BY SCIENTISTS, WHICH ADVICED TO AL GORE IS WRONG!!!
BEFORE SPEAKING ABOUT ANY SOURCE OF ENERGY WE MUST REEVALUATE SCIENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE!
please stop flinging science facts around in an unorganized manner to prove a misguided point. Your heart is in the right place... but you are just as bad as most of the global warming science.
The truth about global warming is that yes, we know a lot of unorganized facts about it, but we still don't have the slightest clue about what's actually causing it, and I'd wager we won't really know until 100s of years from now.
Yes h20 can have a cooling effect on the surface temps. Cloud cover in the lower troposphere has a cooling effect, while clouds in the upper troposphere have a warming effect. Adding more H20 doesn't necessarily mean more cloud.. in fact we don't know what it means. It could just mean heavier rain in the pockets of convection... more convection means more cirrus clouds however. There isn't an answer to this it's just too complexe of a problem to solve with one silly answer.
If you'd please like to use your physics to explain to me how wind evaporates water cause maybe I'm overlooking something.
I am pissed about this bill for one reason. I want CLEAN air. The climate is going to change with or without us, but the more pollution we dump into the air, the more disgusting ground level ozone days we're going to have. And with those you have death and health problems. At least a little cleaner air would be nice.
I don't think that word means what Hyer thinks it means.
Canada had no chance of meeting the IPCC targets, not when combined with a growing population and an improving standard of living.
So the government had a choice: Lie in an attempt to appease environmentalists, or be honest and kill the bill.
In a way, Canadians have chosen an undemocratic form of government.
But we don't need IPCC-mandated targets to do something about greenhouse gases, particularly when those targets are impossible. I suspect that few or no countries will meet these targets anyway. The only difference is that some are honest about it and some aren't.
In regards to Alberta, the federal government really does not have the option to shut down or limit the oil sands. I suspect the province would secede if there were such an attempt. Anger over federal intervention in the petroleum industry still runs deep.