U.S. Inaugural Address spurs Canadian Government climate statements
By Tim Ball and Tom Harris
Any doubt that Canada’s climate policies are actually decided in Washington DC evaporated last month. In the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s promise in his Inaugural Address to “respond to the threat of climate change,” three speeches by Canadian government ministers and three Environment Canada news releases all reaffirmed our commitment to the regulatory path being followed by the U.S.
Speaking to the Sault Sainte-Marie Rotary Club on January 22, the day after Obama’s climate pledge, Environment Minister Peter Kent said that:
“We are determined that Canada will meet its Copenhagen commitment”.
The Minister then echoed Obama’s statements about the science.
“Sound science,” Kent told the Rotarians, “frames our ability to responsibly manage increasingly complex and changing environmental issues such as climate change”.
Environment Canada (EC) quickly issued a news release reporting on Kent’s presentation explaining that he “highlighted efforts to reduce greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions and address climate change.”
The next day, speaking on Kent’s behalf, Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney announced a $71,000 grant from the EcoAction Community Funding Program to a Quebec-based environmental group to, once again, reduce GHG.
EC immediately sent out another news release, mistakenly claiming that the project will “support local action to reduce pollution and improve air quality.” In reality, reducing carbon dioxide (CO2), the GHG most targeted by these plans, will do nothing to improve air quality since CO2 is not a pollutant. This is only the tip of the iceberg of the millions being wasted by EcoAction to support the climate scare.
By January 25, Kent was giving his Sault Sainte-Marie speech again, this time to the Guelph Chamber of Commerce. As before, he boasted that,
“We’ve also put in place [GHG] regulations on coal fired electricity making Canada the first country ever to ban the construction of new coal plants using traditional technology.”
EC issued yet another news release highlighting “the important role of science in driving the development of world-class regulations in Canada.”
Coincidence with Obama’s speech, Bob Robichaud, an EC “warning preparedness meteorologist”, told media that
“The climate change experts are saying that we’re going to get heavier rainfall events and more frequent non-tropical type storms.”
Never ones to miss an opportunity to appease Canada’s enviro-lobby, the department announced that the cause of these events is the supposed warming trend across Canada, reflective of global warming of course.
Besides trying to generate good media coverage in the wake of Obama’s climate pronouncements, EC officials are working to soften Canadians up to more costly CO2 regulations to supposedly help stop climate change. 2013 is the year the Conservatives promised oil and gas companies will be hit with new emission rules.
None of this has anything to do with real science. It is politically-driven propaganda designed to keep activists at bay and harmonize our regulations with those being imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, rules that Obama’s address indicates are going to become much more severe.
EC demonstrates ignorance of climate science with their extreme weather statements. In contradiction to their claims, the potential for more severe weather decreases when the world warms.
Globally, severe weather occurs most at the boundary between tropical and polar air, traditionally called the Polar Front. The degree of storminess is determined by the temperature change across the boundary. Because of the difference, the strongest winds in the atmosphere, the Jet Streams, occur along the Polar Front.
Warming, if it occurs, is projected to be greatest in Polar Regions. This would reduce the temperature difference between the topics and the poles and therefore reduce the potential for severe weather. History shows that severe weather increases with a cooling world, not a warming one.
EC should know that current weather patterns are different because of significant recent changes in the Jet Stream. Instead of low amplitude Zonal waves (see below), the Jet Stream has been following larger amplitude Meridional Wave patterns. This pushes cold Arctic air toward the Equator and allows warm tropical air into Polar latitudes. The result is record high and low temperatures and extremes of precipitation across the middle latitudes (35 – 65°). It has nothing to do with global warming.
A change in the pattern of the northern polar Jet Stream is the real cause of recent weather extremes.
Regardless, the record shows no warming for the last 16 years and demonstrates a lack of correlation between temperature and CO2 levels. The higher temperatures of the late twentieth century are simply because we are near the peak of warming that began in about 1680 during the Little Ice Age. The only reason official records show warming in recent decades is because of the dramatic reduction in data used from colder rural weather stations and the deliberate lowering of the old surface temperature records to make the slope of the temperature curve appear steeper than reality.
Significant cooling is forecast by many scientists for the next 30 years and it is cooling, not warming, that most threatens high latitude countries such as Canada.
But this contradicts the position of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization EC was instrumental in creating. So, EC tells Canadians the opposite of what science really shows, and billions are wasted preparing for warming.
For years now, the IPCC and EC have used instruments of the State to dominate and control the science, attacking anyone who dared to pursue proper science. The solution to this problem is clear. We must withdraw from the IPCC to escape much of the international pressure that is driving the climate scare. Then we must reduce EC’s role to collecting weather and other environmental data, putting an end to their politically-motivated activities.
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Tom Harris is the Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition (climatescienceinternational.org/). Dr. Tim Ball is a Victoria, B.C.-based environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Both Ball and Harris are advisors to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
