Thursday, December 22, 2011

Climate realists testify before the Canadian Senate



Excellent presentations by very credible people - Ross McKitrick, Ian Clark, Jan Veizer and Tim Patterson. There was a goofy event during Ian Clark's (U of Ottawa) briefing on CO2 and the paleoclimate record in which he used several graphs which unfortunately were not being displayed.  The chair, Senator Angus interrupted Prof Clark (at about the 27 min mark) to explain that the graphs were not being broadcast to TV and web audiences because they were not bilingual.  Idiotic but, hey, this is Canada.  Happily, this lead to a good discussion by Clark of greenhouse gases and the dishonesty exposed by the Climategate emails.

Professor Patterson hit one of my favourite contentions - that global cooling is a much greater threat than warming, especially to Canada.  If we were properly looking out for our own interests we'd be promoting anything that might lead to warming not trying to suppress it.

Senator Paul Massicotte (Liberal) brought up the "concensus" issue.  He asked why should he, a non-technical political decision maker, believe the skeptics when the vast majority of scientists including government scientists believe in AGW?  Tim Patterson attempted an answer but Massicotte wasn't impressed.

Senator Banks (Liberal) believes that we should be following the precautionary principle.  Gaaakk! He laid out four extreme but uncertain scenarios and asked: Where should we place our bet? McKitrick responded that Banks had set up an impossibly difficult decision-making problem and suggested that rather than betting on one of a set of bad options a carbon tax based on global temperature could be set up (McKitrick's T3 Tax).

Senator Richard Neufeld (Conservative) said he agreed with Massicotte.  They hear from scientists on one side that it that it's so simple, AGW is happening [probably that's all that they've heard until this session] and from the other side not so or not necessarily so. He said he's not sold either way and asked how many scientists would be "on the same wave length" as the four presenters.  "Are there a lot of them? Are they just quiet? Why are they quiet? Because the other side is very loud."  [Good point! Thank you Senator!] The chair, Sen Angus, then spoke up to confirm that the committee had heard much, much more from AGW true-believers (not his words) than from skeptics.  Good answer from Prof. Veiser starting with a bandwagon analogy and his experience with bandwagon thinking in communist Czekoslovakia.  He moved on to the corruption in the UN IPCC process, including suppression of contrary views and intimidation tactics.

Senator Robert Peterson (Liberal) brought up the tipping point ("break point" or catastrophic AGW) scare. Clark said these "break points" are based on speculation about the predictability of how climate will behave. Climate is too complex to reliably predict. He referred to such talk as "alarmist" and "wild speculation" (giving as an example the prediction by the scientific advisor to the British government that "in 100 years the only habitable place on the planet will be Antartica").

More to follow (next post) re idiot Senator Grant Mitchell's disgraceful, insulting remarks (see video at 1hr 50 min mark).

7 comments:

Patsplace said...

Wow!! I'm only 11:08 min. into the clip and already I can hear heads exploding in the distance. Great stuff!!

Thanks,
Pat

Patsplace said...

A good point that we should be encouraging global warming. All of the great periods of growth, certainly for "the Great White North" have been during periods of global warming. Bring it on, global cooling is not a neat thing at all, unless you live in the Saudi Desert, in which case it would become more habitable. Hmmmmm, enormous amounts of money, supposedly brilliant scientists lying and trying to push an agenda...naw!! Couldn't be.

JR said...

That's right, Pat. Enormous amounts of money funding the AGW alarmist side. The skeptics - not so much. That comes up in a response to a question from Sen Neufeld.

Anonymous said...

There are 2 facts that Al Gore and Suzuki will not talk about.
First there is the Astronomy angle I have followed for 30+ years which can show the detailed NASA charts for how the Sun Flares cause a direct change in earth temperature via about a 8 year lag for the Solar winds to reach us. These charts are in any University level Astronomy Course book or to view at a Chapter's book.
Second is the latest series of Ice-Core samples from the Polar caps that went back over 20'000 years and countered that CO2 claims by the Warmists selling Doom&Gloom for a price. There is also the frozen Wolley Mamoth found in the gound in Siberia and intacted with plant food in the gut.
Earth have been cooling
for the last 11 years and now the Global-warming scam is re-branded as "Climate-Change" or the USA Climate-Chaos as if the USA has weather records going back 2000 years for a pattern.

Check out Chris Horner who had the guts to quit ENRON back when Al Gore tried to market the Carbon-Credit Scheme with ENRON to get rich in the Quasi-Pyramid Scheme unitl it ran out of suckers as ENRON did.
Chris Horner was a Lawyer/Accountant at that time and refused to Sign-Off on a Doctored report with unproven Scientific Claims to sell the carbon credit scheme.
His book is "Red Hot Lies" , and he's on many Youtube videos but ignore the cyclist with the same name, this Horner is older with grey hair.

Humans are better off in warm
climates where water is not frozen or the cold spend a huge amount of calories to keep us warm.
Suzuki should ask people from the Tropics how they handle the equatoral heat and no cold winters.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, I watched the whole video and it does link the Sun to some Temperature .
But Grant Mitchell fails to give an opinion of his own and just repeated views by other people to show how ignorant and shallow he is with any understanding of Climate and Astronomy.
Global Warming started at the time cell phone became cheaper and lead was taken out a gasoline, thus , cell phone and unLeaded gas must be the cause of Global warming...right???

JR said...

Good points:)

Tom Harris said...

International Climate Science Coalition (http://www.climatescienceinternational.org) as now created a web page that has the four scientists' Senate testimonies as well as the 12 Q&A's all uploaded as separate videos (varying from 2 - 15 minutes each) as well as the supporting documentation that the witnesses submitted to the Senate committee. This is far more user-friendly that the whole 2+ hour video.

You can view this Web page here: http://tinyurl.com/7mkgfw8

Comments welcome indeed!

Tom Harris
ICSC