Chaos! From Roger Cohen in the NY Times on the European travel catastrophe:

Snow! Hit the Panic Button
…
Add to that dismal stew a pinch of global warming, which some people, including Matthews [British Airports Authority chief executive], apparently took to mean the end of European winters, and you end up with the current farce. Europe, thy name is pitiful…

Apparently, if you don’t want to blame greed or the cuts or Matthews or the breakdown of the French state, you can blame the North Atlantic oscillation. That, for the uninitiated, is the difference of atmospheric pressure at sea level between the Icelandic low and the Azores high. When the difference is low, Arctic air penetrates Europe. That happened a lot in the 1960s. Now it’s happening again.

This, according to some, is the result of global warming. So if all else fails, blame global warming for the freeze…

Now for some British understatement:

…
Passengers may experience delays and cancellations due to adverse weather conditions at airports across Europe. Select the relevant airport below to find out the latest situation:

Heathrow Airport Stansted Airport

Glasgow Airport Edinburgh Airport

Aberdeen Airport Southampton Airport

…

Earlier:

I’m dreaming of a white…

…kingdom…

Today across the Channel:

Paris Charles de Gaulle terminal evacuated due to snow on roof

And two days hence in the UK?

Boxing Day travellers could be disrupted by heavy snow
…

…

Update: Guess who’s involved in the profit-making at Heathrow?

…
Matthews…[is] running a vital British public service, which remains, despite BAA’s forced sale of some of its airports, a kind of monopoly – there are other London airports, but there’s only one Heathrow. At the same time he isn’t running it for its users, the passengers and airlines. He’s running it for its shareholders – Ferrovial is the majority owner, the government of Singapore and the Quebec pension fund are the others…

And it ain’t just Québec involved with British airports:

…the C$100bn (€73.7bn) Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has stakes in both Birmingham and Bristol airports…

A fellow Canadian fund, the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, owns 26% of BAA, the UK airports operator that runs Heathrow…

Mark
Ottawa

I wish I were joking. The beginning of an Associated Press article carried by the Canadian Press carried by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

This was the year the Earth struck back.

Earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed more than a quarter of a million people in 2010 — the deadliest year for natural disasters in more than a generation.

The Earth “struck back”? Sounds like a really bad B-movie.

And just what the hell is a “super typhoon”? Is it a typhoon that wears a cape and spandex tights?

Here’s the end of the article:

Scientists say Earth’s climate is also changing as a result of man-made climate change, bringing more extreme weather, such as heat waves and flooding.

That is why those who study disasters for a living say it would be wrong to chalk 2010 up to just another bad year.

Debarati Guha Sapir of the World Health Organization said the planet often strikes back as a result of bad decision-making by people.

Debarati Guha Sapir sounds like a real swell human being.

But the problem is that the largest number of deaths and disaster this year were caused by earthquake (Chile, Haiti), while the chaos caused in Europe was due to the explosion of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. The last time I checked, anthropogenic tectonic plate movement was something even Al Gore didn’t try to sell.

Now, I’m certain our friend Debarati would blame the current ice age in Europe on climate change (cold being the logical conclusion to a warming planet), but I fail to see how she can blame the thousands killed in Earthquakes for their poor decision-making.

It’s pretty specious to blame a quarter million deaths on global warming, too. Lumping everybody who dies as a result of floods, drought and hurricanes into one big catch-all category called climate change is the surest path to confirmation bias.

Hey look, somebody just drowned in a flood. Climate change. Oh no, a drought killed thousands in Africa. Climate change. A storm killed a dozen people in the South Pacific. Climate change.

The end result of such imbecility is a new generation of children who actually believe the planet is an entity and strikes back at people:

Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail nails things nicely:

…Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, declared: “This is not the end, but it is a new beginning.”

Translation: Nothing happened, but we need to save face. See you next year in Durban! Actually, something happened. There were lots of parties with Mexican music and free booze. At the end, everyone agreed to agree next time. One thing they did agree on was a $100-billion transfer of money from rich countries to developing countries – just as soon as they can figure out where the money’s coming from and where it’s going to. If you seriously believe that will ever come to pass, then you probably believe in Tinkerbell.

Why does no one tell the truth? Maybe they believe that, so long as they keep clapping, Tinkerbell won’t die. Even worse, they’d be forced to admit that the hopeless UN climate process, in which they have invested so much lip service, is a ridiculous boondoggle that benefits no one but the vast bureaucracy needed to support it.

Besides, events such as Cancun are an inexpensive way for politicians to show they really care about the planet…

Mark
Ottawa

I kid you not. And I thought they didn’t believe in negative campaigning. Dan Gardner (talk about muscular writing) of the Ottawa Citizen reveals what’s at the core of Jumpin’ Jack Layton’s thought, Vladimir Ilyich he is not.  No ringing call for “Peace! Bread! Land!”

New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton faces a problem that has plagued the left for 30 years: Nationalization and wealth redistribution have vanished from the intellectual climate.
Photograph by: Mark Blinch, Reuters, Ottawa Citizen

…Layton elaborated. “If you look at the new approach to energy, for instance, it’s all based on decentralization, particularly around energy efficiency. My buddy Amory Lovins likes to talk about negawatts. If you can save a megawatt cheaper than you can produce one, then go out there and save it. And by the way, you’ll also create more work by doing that. And we’ve got lots of negawatts out there. We’ve got lots of homes, we’re moving into the heating season, and they’re turning up their furnaces, if we have people out there with caulking guns, insulation, and new tripleglazed windows, all over the country, people apprenticing, young people having jobs in their local area, you wouldn’t have to fly to the tarsands for a three-week shift or a two-week shift and then go back home for a week. You’d be able to work right there in your own community, upgrading the building stock.”

Now, I like triple-glazed windows as much as the next guy, but we were talking about global politics at a pivotal moment in history. This sounded like the third bullet point on page six of a really boring campaign brochure. Could there be a clue here about why the left is failing to seize the day?..

The piece is Norman Spector’s “The column I wish I’d written” today. Well chosen.  As for the V.I. guy:

Nice threads, at least Jack has that in common.

Mark
Ottawa

Two interesting stories:

Copenhagen Climate Cables
The US and China Joined Forces Against Europe [once again the world did not need more Canada]

Canada accuses China of intransigence on climate change

See also the end of this post:

I’m dreaming of a white…

And last year from Adrian:

I’m Sure Murray Dobbin Can Find A Way To Blame Stephen Harper

Strangely, a few recent articles in international news makes no mention of how a failure to come to a global agreement in Copenhagen is all Canada and Stephen Harper’s fault.

…

Mark
Ottawa

…kingdom, not like the one I used to know:

Plus comment in the Daily Telegraph of a sort you’d be hard-pressed to find in our major media:

Cancun climate conference: the warmists’ last Mexican wave
The global warming scare was fun while it lasted, but the joke’s over, says Christopher Booker.

And guess who’s driving the final stake through Kyoto’s heart? From Spector Vision:

On Wednesday [Dec. 1], Montreal French-language newspaper Le Devoir reported a remarkable development in the climate change file: “Japan won’t agree to extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 even if that means isolating itself at the UN climate change talks next week in Cancun, Mexico, a senior Japanese negotiator said [last week].”..

Mark
Ottawa

Who a thunk it, given the hysteria (‘President Obama Calls Gulf Spill “Greatest Environmental Disaster”‘)?

The Obama administration’s latest report on the Gulf of Mexico disaster set off a war of words Wednesday among scientists, Gulf Coast residents and political pundits about what to make of the Deepwater Horizon spill and its aftermath.

The report, the subject of an extended White House briefing, claimed that most of the estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil that have leaked into the gulf could be accounted for, that much of it was effectively gone already, and that most of the remaining oil was in a highly diluted form. The implication of the report was that future damage from the oil might be less than had been feared…

Plus:

‘Static Kill’ Appears to Be Working, BP Says

Earlier:

Crude horror, or, let the U-boats win

Mark
Ottawa

To watch this NBC Nightly News video piece is perhaps only to conclude that oil is just too dangerous to produce.

To read this Globe and Mail news story is perhaps only to conclude that oil is just too dangerous to move by pipeline.

Skip back to 1942 for this story:

U-boat tanker sinkings rise relentlessly
Environmental costs call Allies’ war effort into question

E.g:

And that tanker did not even sink.

Update alternative: Really?

Mark
Ottawa

According to the Globe and Mail, three provinces are working independently to introduce a greenhouse gas cap-and-trade system that would price carbon. Along with Ontario and Quebec, the province of British Columbia will join California and New Mexico as part of the “Western Climate Initiative”.

The most frustrating part of learning about this is that British Columbia already has a carbon tax, which currently sets a price on carbon at around $20 per tonne of CO2 emissions. That price is set to rise to $25 per tonne in 2011, and $30 per tonne by 2012.

According to the BC government website, the carbon tax will top out at 7.24 cents a litre for gasoline at the pump by 2012. But although some people living outside of the province might think the tax only applies to gasoline, the list is much larger and more comprehensive than that.

Diesel will be 8.27 cents per litre, along with light fuel oil. Heavy fuel oil will rise to 9.33 cents per litre; aviation gasoline to 7.34 cents; jet fuel to 7.87 cents; kerosene to 7.68 cents. But it doesn’t stop there.

Home owners pay $1.49.64 per Gigajoule on natural gas heating, widely touted as a “clean energy”. We also pay taxes if we buy propane for our barbecues, butane, ethane, pentane, and oven gas. Hell, the province will charge $62.40 in taxes for each tonne of whole rubber tires.

The carbon tax has already pushed Vancouver to the distinction of having the highest gasoline prices in the country. Not that it’s managed to magically remove cars from the road, as the B.C. government had predicted. If anything, the roads have never been more congested.

The problem with energy consumption taxes is that Canada is heavily dependent on non-renewable energies, and the government isn’t really offering us any alternatives. So the carbon tax has the effect of increasing our overall tax burden, without having any positive environmental effects whatsoever. In fact, in 2008, B.C. was the only province to increase emissions in Canada.

Energy taxes are responsible for inflation in the province, as the costs to business are passed on to consumers. The transportation costs of delivering food aren’t swallowed by the food industry. They distribute that increased cost in each item that arrives in the supermarket. So when you wonder why your B.C. grocery bill is $250 a week, a part of that cost must be factored into the carbon equation.

A carbon market would likely act in very much the same way, but with much worse potential pitfalls. Carbon trading manipulation can lead to people “playing the market” in order to earn millions of dollars, and would pave the way for “green lobbyists” trying to get the government to subsidize their industries. None of that will do anything toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s just moving a fictitious commodity price around.

It’s particularly disturbing that the federal Conservatives are entirely on board with this scheme. They must realize how poorly the European carbon market has fared, and how much it will affect the common taxpaying mule. Yet we still have Jim Prentice representing the Conservative Party’s continued policy of pandering to pie-in-the-sky ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with stopping global warming, whether that be real or fictitious.

Well, actually, the COP15 was disgraceful and it was a fiasco, but it wasn’t entirely a fruitless enterprise for the green racketeers. After all, Canada was snookered along with the rest of the “developed world” into contributing to a $30 billion wealth transfer to the “developing world” to cope with climate change:

Canada has set up a $400 million fund to help developing countries cope with climate change, a move that has earned the country a rare cheer from environmentalists.

The fund is Canada’s contribution to an annual $30 billion global pot that rich countries agreed to establish through at a climate gathering last December in Copenhagen. The financial commitment, good through 2012, was one of the few concrete outcomes of the meeting, which had planned to broker a global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions between 2012 and 2020.

Environment Minister Jim Prentice said Canada is responsible for 2 per cent of the world’s emissions but is contributing 4 per cent of the fund.

Sigh. The “Conservative” Party.