Tag: global warming

  • IPCC’s Global Warming Report and its Influence in Canada

    IPCC’s Global Warming Report and its Influence in Canada

    This week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a special report regarding the potential impact that a temperature increase of 1.5 °C, caused by global warming, could have on the world as we know it. The goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions was set during the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, with a target temperature increase of less than 2 °C, the ideal goal being the reduction of this temperature increase to 1.5 °C by the end of the century.

    The risks associated with an increase over 1.5°C include increased incidence of droughts, floods, extreme heat, and, by extension, poverty. Therefore, this goal is about more than avoiding a temperature increase: it represents saving millions of lives by preventing the increased incidence of natural disasters and extreme weather such as heatwaves, and avoiding the economic disruption caused by the associated costs for reparation and rescue efforts that follow extreme weather.

    Despite the public acting to reduce individual pollution by lobbying for change through consumer action, such as refusing plastic straws in restaurants and bring-your-own-bags programs; plastic pollution is still a major issue. Even with consumers aiming to minimize their plastic usage, it’s a nearly impossible task to achieve when retailers sell products in unrecyclable packaging.

    William D. Nordhaus, the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences recipient, has stated recently that carbon taxes are a viable solution to reducing greenhouse gases, as industries should have the incentive to use more environmentally-friendly alternatives such as renewable energy to avoid paying the extra tax. This could potentially change investment trends, which might in turn discourage the six Canadian financial companies currently investing in new coal plants from doing so, as coal is considered one of the dirtiest power sources.

    Along with the potential for more frequent and more devastating natural disasters, a 1.5°C global temperature increase would result in an average sea level rise of 48cm, based on the analysis of 70 peer-reviewed climate studies completed by Carbon Brief, a UK based climate science and policy website. With our lovely Wolfville residing on the coastline, we are at risk of facing major issues associated with climate change, some of which we are already noticing. Climate change had a local effect just this year, with Annapolis Valley farmers taking a major hit this spring as a result of a severe late frost event, which damaged a variety of crops, from berries to apples to wine grapes.

    Along with abnormal temperature patterns such as this frost event; Eastern Canada is expected to experience 26% more extreme rainfalls with this 1.5°C increase. Canada’s current environmental action plans include nationally pricing carbon, eliminating coal-fired power plants, renovating homes and businesses to be more energy efficient, and investing in cleaner technology and renewable energy. While Canadians and Canadian industries should be implementing plans to contribute to the reduction of emissions, the general consensus was that the 1.5°C goal may not be attainable.

    The next step when prevention is not possible is preparation, meaning homes and businesses must be prepared for the consequences of this global temperature rise, such as more frequent flooding, forest fires, and storms. An example of what this might entail could be avoiding building in areas directly adjacent to the coast, a fairly common practice for the construction of vacation homes and cottages in Nova Scotia, as these will likely succumb to rising sea levels or storm surges.

    Regardless of one’s position as to the legitimacy of climate change, action plans to prevent global warming objectively improve the quality of life of the population. Famine is often caused by weather events which damage crops, and many health problems can be attributed to a lack of poor air quality caused by pollution, in conjunction with a lack of access to clean water. Almost all aspects of human health are influenced by the environment, which is in turn affected by climate change. Therefore, tackling the issues we are undeniably observing, whether their cause be climate change or otherwise, is a task for everyone and must be addressed accordingly by international organizations.

    Laura Porter-Muntz is a fourth-year Biology (Co-op) student and the Science Editor of The Athenaeum

  • Why the Environmental Movement Has Been Hijacked

    Why the Environmental Movement Has Been Hijacked

    Editor’s note: the views expressed in this article are solely the views of the individual. The Athenaeum is in complete support of the consensus of the scientific community that climate change is unequivocally driven by man made emissions.

    There are many carcinogenic toxins coming from burning fossil fuels like car exhaust, which we breath in daily while waiting for the bus, or crossing a street, or sitting in a side walk café enjoying our fair trade organic coffee, but carbon dioxide (or CO2) is not one of them. When Barack Obama blames his daughter’s asthma on CO2 emissions, he is wrong. In fact, carbon dioxide is a life-giving gas. It is an essential plant food, as important as oxygen and water in sustaining life on the planet. Carbon dioxide is essential in the process of photosynthesis in plants and in the production of life, giving oxygen, without which humankind could not survive. As part of the photosynthesis, plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Humans breathe in oxygen and release carbon dioxide which the plants then use to produce oxygen. Hence, carbon dioxide is an important link in a beautifully interconnected system that sustains life on the planet for plants and humans alike.

    While carbon dioxide helps to support life, the following substances, which also come out of the car exhaust or the burning of fossil fuels, do not. In fact, they are so toxic that they are well placed within the group of deadly gases or highly toxic carcinogens. They are: carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, benzene, formaldehyde, and polycyclic hydrocarbons. These are the ailments they can cause: pulmonary and respiratory distress, cancer, cardio-vascular diseases or right-out death (carbon monoxide). Therefore, it is no question that as long as these harmful toxic substances are being released by the burning of fossil fuels, those toxins must be eliminated through green energy and alternative technology. But it must be clearly stated that carbon dioxide is not one of these toxic substances.

    Freeman Dyson, a mathematical physicist and scientist at Princeton University, started studying the effects of Carbon Dioxide on vegetation 37 years ago, and his work has shown how the increase in CO2 has been overall very beneficial to the Earth. His research shows that the effect of CO2 is highly favorable for the increase in agricultural yields, forests and all kinds of growth in the biological world. This makes sense, because CO2 is nourishing plant food and therefore has a positive effect on plants and therefore our food production, and consequently, is not a pollutant.

    The supposed danger of CO2 does not stem from any toxicity but from the fact that it acts as a greenhouse gas by trapping the earth’s heat and causing global warming. We must then ask how much CO2 is emitted and trapped into the Earth’s atmosphere before sounding the alarm bells. CO2 constitutes 38/1000th of 1 percent of atmospheric gases. Ivar Giaever, Nobel Laureate in Physics, explains the following:

    Consider a very large room (20 square feet x 10 feet height). Imagine you wanted to create in this room the same CO2 emissions that all the cars in the world belch into the atmosphere during the whole year. How many matches would you need to burn daily, weekly or in total over the whole year to inflict on this room what all the world’s cars do to our atmosphere in a year?

    THE ANSWER: One single match lit in the room is the equivalent to 20 years of car driving by all the cars in the world.”

    This is why scientists like Dr. Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus of Geology at Western Washington University, asserts that with such minute amount in the total atmosphere, CO2 is incapable of acting as a greenhouse gas. And even if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would double, it still would only come to 76/1000th of one percent. He further explains that the highest temperature records in the last century were set in the 1930’s, before the rise of CO2 and that since 1998, according to ground and satellite measurements, a global cooling is presently in effect also called “The Pause”. This is affirmed by the former White House national policy advisor and NASA headquarters consultant, John Casey, who investigates solar activity and concluded that we are now in a phase of global cooling for the next 30 years to come because of a reduction of solar output from the sun also referred to as solar hibernation.

    What is it then with the data showing dangerously global warming? The data confirming dangerous trends in global warming due to CO2 are derived from computer generated CLIMATE MODELS rather than MEASURABLE DATA. This is how it works: assumed data is fed into the computer on which a climate model is produced and then published as scientifically proven with “scientific consensus”. If we were dealing with facts, we would not need a consensus since facts speak for themselves. Indeed, true scientific method is never based on any consensus but on empirical data, which are absent with the climate models. The problem with these models is that if the primary data on which models are based are false, then the end result will be false as well. And so in order to make the facts fit the models, the cart is put before the horse, and the data is adjusted to fit the model of global warming predictions. When Professor Friedrich-Karl Ewert, a retired geologist and data expert from the University of Paderborn in Germany, said that when he examined publicly available archived temperature records from 1,153 weather stations around the globe going back to 1881, he found evidence of “massive” tampering by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies between 2010 and 2012 to create the illusion of dangerous global warming.

    In 1989, the United Nations predicted global warming would destroy entire Nations by the year 2000 due to rising sea levels. Now we are in 2016 and these apocalyptic climate predictions have not proven to be true. No islands, like the Maldives, are under water as predicted, nor entire nations, no polar bears are going extinct. In fact, they are thriving, and no polar caps have disappeared, as predicted would be the case by 2012 by Al Gore. In fact, the Antarctica’s ice grew in 2015 according to NASA. Dr. David Evan’s research, main modeler of carbon dioxide from 1999 – 2005 in the Australia’s atmosphere shows that empirical data from ENVISAT (European Satellites) reveal how the sea level is rising 0.33 mm per year (3.3 cm per century), far below the modeled predictions of the IPCC (International Panel of Climate Change led by the United Nations) of 26-59 cm per century or the Al Gore’s fear-mongering predictions of 20 feet per century.

    And just when the empirical data was catching up with the climate models and proved them to be exaggerated or outright wrong, the term “global warming” was quickly replaced with the term “climate change”. The term climate change is conveniently more generic so that even global cooling can now serve as proof how CO2 is disrupting the climate even though the original narrative was that CO2 is heating up the planet. The term climate change encompasses now every little variation in weather. The problem is that weather and climate are two completely different things. Variations in weather do not necessarily entail that the entire climate is changing. In fact, you need 30 years or more to determine climate as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. For instance, the hottest decade with the longest and severest droughts in the US happened in the 1930’s long before cars were on the streets and fossil fuel were burned like today. The fact is that droughts and floods have always happened in the past and will occur in the future. The 1930’s drought was no evidence that the entire climate was changing. But in the light of today’s climate change narrative, every little variation in weather is proof of climate change due to CO2 emissions. When people started to catch on that earth’s climate is changing and has always been, and is in fact presently cooling (remember that ice ages have come and gone, and that there are climate-optimum periods when the earth’s climate was warming to the great benefit and advancement for people and civilizations (i.e. Renaissance period)), the term “climate change” was replaced by “climate disruption”. Therefore, we have gone from “Global warming” to “Climate change” to “Climate disruption.” One has to ask oneself: why this constant change of narrative? It is to make the facts fit the theory, or in other words, to make the facts fit the computer generated climate models. To what end?

    There is no question that there are serious environmental problems that need to be addressed urgently, but a carbon tax is not one that will do anything else other than fill once again the coffers of the politicians. Al Gore’s cap-and-trade system is outright fraudulent. One would have thought the first thing that would be addressed in order to reduce the burning of fossil fuel is to address consumer behaviour. What happened to the “One Tonne Challenge” campaign? Or the Atlantic Superstore’s initiative to stop providing plastic bags free of charge, so as to encourage consumers to bring their own reusable bags? No Green Party was to be seen or heard to encourage this initiative to stop the use of fossil fuel produced plastic bags. No word from the otherwise so eloquent Elizabeth May. Instead, the Atlantic Superstores lost business when people stopped going there because they wanted their plastic bags. The end result is that plastic bags are still mindlessly being used and thrown away each time an item is bought. And if we are so concerned about the burning of fossil fuels, why is there no initiative to produce consumer items of high quality that might at first be more expensive but last a lifetime? Consumer items are being produced with an built-in short lifespan, after which they are dumped into the landfill sites to pollute the soil, air and ground water like the energy efficient light bulbs that were forced upon us with their highly toxic mercury.

    If in the end it is not about changing consumer behaviour, what then is it then about? The answer might be found in the following quote from Al Gore: “We are running out of time, we must have a planetary solution to a planetary crisis”. The logical consequence to a planetary crisis is “Global Governance”. This is underlined by a quote from the “Club of Rome”, an international think tank for international political issues, with the following statement:

    “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention….and thus the real enemy, then, is humanity itself… It does not matter if this common enemy is a real one or….one invented for the purpose.”

    And so the voices like the one of Travis Rieder, a philosopher with the Berman Institute for Bioethics at the John Hopkins University, get louder and louder by proclaiming that we could protect our kids (from a bad environment) by not having them. This goes hand in hand with a proposed depopulation childbirth tax to save the environment by discouraging people from having children. Rieder proclaims that by reducing childbirth rates worldwide by half a child per woman, carbon emissions could be reduced to save our climate. According to the Sierra Club: “Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license.” But this is not all. Out of the CO2 emission frenzy has also sprung the “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement” which proclaims that humans should commit “species suicide” to save the environment. And so the gloves are off, and we need to understand that the issue is not climate change at all; the real agenda is a New World Order where you and I and our children and childrens’ children are no longer allowed to exist. The CO2 apocalypse serves the United Nation’s Agenda 21 (Agenda for Sustainable Development) which has now been coined Agenda 2030. It is “ an action plan to be implemented worldwide to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world”, and all this in the name to protect the environment. Under this United Nation’s action plan, private property, single family homes, and private vehicles among others are considered unsustainable and must be stopped. Visit www.democratsagainstunagenda21.com for more information. If there is man-made global warming, it is caused by one thing: geoengineering, the elephant in the room.

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