- The New York Times “Wirecutter” emails “The key to staying warm and looking good”. We’d settle for the first at this point, on which point they offer “The best base layers for staying secretly toasty” during that thing that supposedly ended, what was it called, starts with a w, it was just here, still is in fact…
- Remember the Climate Emergency? “Municipal Watch” comments on how “The first declaration of a ‘climate emergency’ was in the Australian municipality of Darebin, a suburb of Melbourne, on December 5, 2016.” But not the last. It reached the U.S. in November 2017, starting with the bright lights of Hoboken, NJ, and then Bristol, UK and the entire Canadian province of Quebec in 2018. Hundreds more ensued, “a veritable tsunami of climate emergency declarations!” So now what? Turn off all the appliances? Run in circles scream and shout? Spring into committee? Or just settle onto the couch, and only bestir yourself to make self-congratulatory posts? Right. Option 4 as “quite a lot of time passed, and still nothing happened. No new policies, no sense of urgency.” Underlining that such people do not attach significance to practicalities at any point in the process, from data gathering to taking effective action to making sense.
- Still, for a hot time in the old town, or at least the cave nearby, look at a study out of Japan (h/t Kenneth Richard) that uses stalagmites to deduce that the “Holocene Thermal Maximum” seems to have peaked in Honshu around 7,000 years ago at which point it was (do not cue the “hottest year ever”) um uh “approximately 3°C warmer than present”. How odd. In Hiroshima it was even hotter, some 7°C above modern levels. At least equally odd, in one place the researchers found evidence of temperatures shooting up from 12°C to 15°C in just three centuries. So tell us the one about the unprecedented pace of modern temperature increase again?
- In response to our work on tree rings as dubious climate proxies, a number of people have added things to the discussion including that a critical factor in the pace of growth and the thickness of rings is whether the tree or trees in question were in the midst of a dense forest or out on their own. One more reason tree rings do not unambiguously reflect temperature and sometimes they don’t reflect it at all.
- Canada’s government, somewhat oddly, pays third parties to challenge it in court on Constitutional grounds. The suspicion certainly exists that the real point of this program is to get the courts to order politicians to do things they want to do but voters dislike. And indeed we now learn that this secretive multi-million-dollar “Court Challenges Program” did in fact help fund some of the usual suspects to fight a challenge to the government’s own carbon tax that reached the Supreme Court. The usual suspects include the David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defence Canada Inc. and so on as well as, for some reason, Amnesty International and the National Farmers’ Union. As to which specifically got the cash, well, citizens aren’t allowed to know such a thing. After all, it’s only using their money to override their preferences so what business is it of theirs? As Blacklock’s Reporter also notes, when they asked who was funded they were told it was none of their business and referred to a guide Who We Can Fund and “The guide restricts grant applications to an individual or group ‘who assert human rights’ and are ‘in need of financial support to proceed with the case’”. So apparently you have a human right to be taxed without representation, something of a surprise, and rich environmental groups can’t afford lawyers ditto. That the Suzuki Foundation, for instance, has annual revenues exceeding $12 million and EDC over five million might make them ineligible but, as noted, it’s for them to know and us not to find out.
- As for the carbon tax being something voters clearly didn’t want, even “Green Jesus” Minister of the Environment and Climate Change All The Time Steven Guilbeault just admitted it was political poison. Blacklock’s Reporter says that in endorsing “What Me Carbon Tax?” Mark Carney as the next leader of his Liberal party, “Cabinet may not ‘go ahead with the consumer carbon price,’ Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said yesterday. He called the carbon tax ‘very unpopular.’ The rate will jump an average 20 percent effective April 1 to 21¢ per litre for gasoline. ‘Our plan is not based on one single measure,’ Guilbeault told reporters. ‘Our plan to fight climate change is based on a hundred different measures that we’ve put in place.’” Oh dear. And here the big justification was that a carbon tax was the most efficient way to reduce emissions provided it replaced less effective ones rather than being piled on top of them. And the public wanted it. And it would make us all wealthier.
- A video with thousands of likes says Canada’s Yukon is thawing waaah waaah waaah! Quite. After all the forecast for Whitehorse for January 29 is minus 23. The high. And to think it used to be cold.
Economists say that a carbon tax is the most effective way to change behaviour. Exports, no less. But it is not working. The carbon tax is more simply the cost of functioning rather than an instructive tool. The b only way for a carbon tax to work is for it to be set so high that it would be political suicide.
The court challenges program is just as you describe it which is why Harper killed it and Trudeau brought it back. Liberals without the principles to stand on their hind legs in the light of day and advocate for their policies like adults..
Poilievre to rekill it
Asap
I live on the South Coast of England in the Lewes District. Lewes Council declared a "Climate Emergency" in 2019 and last year printed a 26-page update on what they are doing to fight it. Here from the introduction is what they believe is happening: "Rewilding Britain has estimated that ‘British climate zones are moving northwards at up to 5 km a year, a rate hundreds of times faster than species recolonisation after the last ice age.’ If we applied that figure locally, in just four years our local plants and animals would have to move from Newhaven to Chailey to enjoy the same climatic conditions as they have currently. Since trees can take hundreds of years to grow, and roads, railways and built-up areas can block animal migration, it’s no wonder that so many species are in trouble "
Absolute garbage based on no evidence whatsoever - unless that is seaweed migrating north into my garden!