The other day I wrote a blog post on one of our national disgraces, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver. While in Washington recently promoting the proposed XL Keystone pipeline through the United States, Oliver took the opportunity to insult and denigrate one of the world’s leading climate-change scientists, James Hansen.
Continue readingTag: climate change deniers
Montreal Simon: Joe Oliver and the Pipeline Parable
The last time I saw Joe Oliver he was still trying to sell his dirty oil pipeline.Still trying to convince us that the water from the tailing ponds was safe enough to drink.But since then there have been some unfortunate developments eh? It turns out it's NOT good to the last drop.
Continue readingMontreal Simon: The Harper Cons Shame Canada Again
OMG. That wretched little Monkey King has done it again.Pooped on the planet. And shamed us in the eyes of the world.The Harper government is pulling out of a United Nations convention that fights droughts in Africa and elsewhere, which would make Canada the only country in the world outside
Continue readingMontreal Simon: Stephen Harper and the Con Deniers
It is without a doubt the weirdest weather I have ever experienced. One moment the lake was frozen.The next moment it wasn't.Toronto and London hit record highs of 14 C on Wednesday morning while Windsor saw a 15 C high early in the day, shattering the Jan. 30 record of
Continue readingMontreal Simon: The Cons and the Country We Could Have Been
It was the first day of my holidays, and I couldn't wait to go sailing eh? But when Seb and I got down to the lake it was so hot all I could do was just stand there. Then dive into the cool water to try to escape the suffocating
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Climate Change – Much Worse Than We thought
James E. Hansen has some very impressive credentials. Not only has he headed the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies for 31 years, he is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. But wait, there’s more: Hansen is best known for his
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Media Quietude Over Climate Change
A few months ago, when we were seeing mid-summer temperatures during early spring, I remember Tom Brown, the CTV weatherman, looking grim and saying words to the effect that “This is something we all need to be concerned about.” It was, I assume, a brave but oblique allusion to climate
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: The Cost of Profound Ignorance
At the risk of sounding arrogant, I have to admit that the profoundly ignorant deeply distress me, especially those who revel in that ignorance, wear it as a faux badge of independent critical thinking, and refuse to entertain the possibility of error. Take, for example, climate-change deniers. Despite the overwhelming
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: We are All Complicit in Environmental Degradation
Recently I wrote a post about the chilling effect that the federal budget will have on charities, especially those devoted to environmental activism. Unfortunately, I chose to ignore another reality that is equally grim – the fact that all of us (forgive the sweeping generalization) are to blame both for
Continue readingScientific American’s John Horgan should be fired
Scientific American is a respected journal of science. Why it publishes the ridiculous rantings of an anti-science flat earther is beyond me. But this John Horgan, apparently a teacher or professor, is an climate change denier dream. Read this article where he blames the whistle blower for not blowing his
Continue reading350 or bust: Heartland Institute Funded By Fossil Fuel Interests To Work Against Public Interest
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s one that gives some background about so-called “think tanks” and their anti-science, climate change denial agenda. These guys cut their teeth on denying/suppressing/ridiculing the science demonstrating that cigarette smoking caused cancer (see Fake Science, Fakexperts, Funny Finances, Free of Tax) and
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: We Have The Fraser Institute, They Have the Heartland Institute
Adding the word ‘institute’ into one’s ‘think-tank’, a measure devised to give the patina of legitimacy to what is frequently simply a right-wing propaganda machine, is nothing new, given their ubiquity on both sides of the border, the Fraser Institute and the Macdonald Laurier Institute in Canada, the American Enterprise
Continue reading97 out of 100 climate experts think humans are causing global warming
From John Cook’s Skeptical Science blog comes this intriguing bit of factoid goodness. The 97% figure comes from two independent studies, each employing different methodologies. One study surveyed all climate scientists who have publicly signed declarations supporting or rejecting the consensus (Anderegg 2010). Another study directly asked earth scientists the
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: More on Harper’s Hypocrisy
In yesterday’s post, I railed against the hypocrisy of the Harperites in their efforts to convince us to boycott Chiquita banana over their refusal to use our dirty tarsands oil for their transportation needs. In her most recent column, Linda McQuaig reminds us of the consequences of Haper’s renegade position
Continue readingTom Flanagan: Time For Climate Change Deniers to Come Out of The Closet
Yep, ol’ Tom is a denier and proud of it, boys ‘n’ girls! He also wants all deniers to ‘come out of the closet’! Er, Tom, hasn’t that ship already sailed a long time ago, and haven’t they been debunked over and over again? Somewhere, Dr Jabba the Roy must
Continue reading350 or bust: Anti-Science Hackers Recycle Stolen Emails Prior to Durban Climate Talks
It turns out the fossil fuel industry is into recycling (who knew?). The hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s climate centre have been re-released just prior to COP17, the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa next week. While ultimately all the climate scientists who were widely vilified
Continue reading350 or bust: The Denial Tango: As The Waters Rise Around Me, I’ll Just Hold My Breath And Say It Isn’t So
I’m on vacation this week on the beautiful West Coast. On Saturday I attended TEDx Victoria, which had a line-up of interesting and thought-provoking speakers who spoke for 10 minutes about their special area of interest. Raffi Cavoukian inspired the crowd with his discussion of childhonouring: “being earth-friendly is the
Continue reading350 or bust: University of Calgary Prostitutes Itself To Big Oil & Gas
Canadian journalist Mike DeSousa, who first wrote three years ago about the anti-science group with the Orwellian name “Friends of Science”, who funded a PR blitz meant to cast doubt on the science of climate change. Friends of Science paid…
Continue readingOil Illiteracy. University of Calgary paid to deny climate change.
When a university takes money from an oil company to build skepticism for climate change, you not only have a dishonest higher educational body but also one that goes against everything that is sacred about the pursuit of knowledge. It becomes one big Con of a PR firm, you know like the Fraser Institute. Plus, . . . → Read More: Oil Illiteracy. University of Calgary paid to deny climate change.
Continue readingScience mag editor resigns after publishing faulty climate change denier paper
Disgraced Mr. SpencerEditor-in-Chief of the science journal Remote Sensing has resigned after discovering that the magazine had published an paper by climate change denier Roy Spencer that contained an ‘egregious blunder’ in the ‘fundamentally flawed’ …
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