“Canadian climate sleuths”, begins the newspaper article without any apparent hint of mockery, “have detected for the first time a human hand in the increasing fury of intense storms battering the Northern Hemisphere.” According to these weather detectives, greenhouse gases created by selfish human activities (like driving to work) are the reason why it rains more often in the Northern Hemisphere.

Climatologist Myles Allen, at the University of Oxford, says the research is also increasingly important because of international funding needed to help with adaptation to climate change:

“Because that money is on the table, it is suddenly going to be in everyone’s interest to be a victim of climate change,” he says. “So we need urgently to develop the science base to be able to distinguish genuine impacts of climate change from unfortunate consequences of bad weather.”

Well said, sir, well said. I was victimized badly by global warming this morning, requiring the use of an umbrella as I walked to the bus stop. What this calls for is more renewable energy sources. I’ve consistently said that what we need is less dependence on black gooey stuff from out of the ground, and more things like solar and wind power. Especially wind power because…

Uh-oh:

A $200-million wind farm in northern New Brunswick is frozen solid, cutting off a potential supply of renewable energy for NB Power.

The 25-kilometre stretch of wind turbines, located 70 kilometres northwest of Bathurst, N.B. has been completely shut down for several weeks due to heavy ice covering the blades.

Ugh. I hate it when global warming is constantly freezing things solid. It’s always doing that these days.

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

Damn humans heating up the Earth. When will they ever learn?

Bury the lede.

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

Read this Washington Post story and see who ain’t there:

Wariness abroad of new order in U.S.

“Canada’s National” whatever is certainly running up the wariness flag as fast as it can:

With new Congress, Canada can expect trade, border flare-ups

But wasn’t it the Democrats who were trying to block the planned new pipeline for Alberta oil sands crude, besides hammering the sands themselves? So why the Globe’s instant wariness?  Creating more “news” to suit their agenda?  And Postmedia News is no better with a piece that really has very little to do with trade, and in which Jumpin’ Jack Layton tells a real porkie:

Republican tide likely to hit Canadian trade
Obama also ditches plan to legislate carbon cap-and-trade system
…
NDP leader Jack Layton said he suspects trade relations will continue to dog the Canada-U.S. relationship…

He predicted Canada-U.S. trade will emerge as an issue in the run up to the presidential election in 2012, as it did during the campaign that ended with Obama’s election two years ago…

What blinking balderdash. If Canada-U.S. trade (as opposed to Mexico and NAFTA) was an issue in 2008 not one American in a thousand knew it. Canadians really need to get a grip on reality instead of stupidly navel gazing.

Otherwise some sense from Norman Spector about the Americans needing fewer Canadian pols:

Dumbest Canada-U.S. initiative ever
…
In short, can we now agree that it’s a good idea for Canadian politicians to stay out of U.S. partisan politics entirely — however tempting it might be to curry favour back home by being seen to stand up for our values in the United States?

Mark
Ottawa

Just in case you thought a Quebec City-Windsor (or part thereof) fast train corridor might help deal with global warming or something, some figuring by Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post:

Calif. rail project is high-speed pork

Somehow, it’s become fashionable to think that high-speed trains connecting major cities will help “save the planet.” They won’t. They’re a perfect example of wasteful spending masquerading as a respectable social cause…

…Here’s what we wouldn’t get: any meaningful reduction in traffic congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, air travel, oil consumption or imports. Nada, zip. If you can do fourth-grade math, you can understand why.

High-speed inter-city trains (not commuter lines) travel at up to 250 miles per hour and are most competitive with planes and cars over distances of fewer than 500 miles. In a report on high-speed rail, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service examined the 12 corridors of 500 miles or fewer with the most daily air traffic in 2007. Los Angeles to San Francisco led the list with 13,838 passengers; altogether, daily air passengers in these 12 corridors totaled 52,934. If all of them switched to trains, the total number of daily airline passengers, about 2 million, would drop only 2.5 percent. Any fuel savings would be less than that; even trains need energy…

Only in places with greater population densities, such as Europe and Asia, is high-speed rail potentially attractive. Even there, most of the existing high-speed trains don’t earn “enough revenue to cover both their construction and operating costs,” the Congressional Research Service report said. The major exceptions seem to be the Tokyo-Osaka and Paris-Lyon lines.

President Obama calls high-speed rail essential “infrastructure” when it’s actually old-fashioned “pork barrel.” The interesting question is why it retains its intellectual respectability. The answer, it seems, is willful ignorance. People prefer fashionable make-believe to distasteful realities. They imagine public benefits that don’t exist and ignore costs that do…

But nice work here for Bombardier if they could get it, eh?

Update: Version of the post is in the National Post’s “Full Comment”:

Mark
Ottawa

…surely it’s a good thing. That’s what Peter Foster at the Financial Post thinks:

The growing fallout of the shale revolution
A sign that shale gas has great potential is that greens are trying to shut it down

Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert said this week that Alaskan natural gas would likely flow through the province ahead of gas from the Mackenzie Delta. Not so long ago, such a statement would have been regarded as treasonable. Now it appears merely common economic sense. In fact, the real issue is whether either source of Arctic gas will be developed before the age of hydrocarbons ends. That is due to the stunning improvements in the technologies of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling that have made the production of vast amounts of shale gas feasible.

This gas not merely presents the possibility of an economic bonanza in many areas, including B.C. and Quebec, but of enhancing much-coveted U.S. energy independence. It also promises to rearrange energy geopolitics…

So much for running out of hydrocarbons.

As for the geopolitical implications, shale gas, which is also present in large volumes in Europe, promises to reduce the significance of both Russian and Iranian gas, along with those suppliers’ potential for causing trouble. It also augurs a huge boost to gas-fired electricity, and further undermines the economics of nuclear, wind and solar power…

Another sure sign that shale gas has great potential is that environmental activists are trying hard to close it down (or at least use it as a new source of fundraising). At the World Energy Congress, protestors covered in oily-looking molasses (Where’s a hornet’s nest when you need one?) carried banners that read: “No to shale gas.”..

…the Quebec government being hoist on its own green petard. Mr. Charest has made a great point of posturing over climate change, going so far in Copenhagen last December as to criticize Alberta and Ottawa for their wicked ways. Now this pose is coming back to bite him, since gas production will inevitably mean more provincial emissions, about which green groups are publicly fretting…

Related:

American energy pipedreams…

Mark
Ottawa