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So long as the polluters you penalize include China, India, Russia, and etc. along with your own domestic firms then fine. But to penalize Canadian firms for polluting while allowing the firms of polluting countries to import their products into Canada puts Canadian firms at a marked disadvantage and puts Canadian workers out of their jobs.

Any decisions like this should put Canada & Canadians first over any international interests.

   

Sure it is.

Here's me at Halifax in 2025:

   

No, they are not. They are propaganda and, as Blue Nose pointed out, when they are disproved a lot of legitimate research gets tossed out along with the BS.

Getting rid of pollution for its own sake is reason enough to do it.

But what happens if you bank on global warming and it doesn't happen?

Then people will be resistant (case in point: myself) when you come up with a real problem.

"The Boy who Cried Wolf!" is a moral lesson that still rings true these days.

If you keep people in a constant state of crisis then they acclimate to that state as 'normal' and then go about their lives.

Then, when a real crisis hits they ignore the dire warnings because in their experience the dire warnings have been only so much blather.

An example of this is would be the people who ignored the warnings about Hurricane Katrina.

Global cooling didn't kill them in the 1970's, alar didn't kill them in the 90's, CFC's didn't kill them in the 80's so why should they have listened to warnings about the hurricane? They'd heard it all before and nothing happened so they expected nothing would happen this time.

If you look at the state and Federal governments you'll see that they weren't expecting much to happen either: they didn't believe their own warnings.

   

But the flip side of that, how does one raise awareness about the issue? You can either do the standard press release or you can do a more attention getting warning.

One way no will listen, the other way makes the scientists look like a bunch of Cassandras.

Surely there must be a road somewhere in the middle where there is sufficient public awareness but without any Chicken Little-like warnings.

   

The effects of pollution are so slow and gradual, successive generations never notice any major changes.
People worry about smog. So what really is smog. (ret)
Back in England in the 50s smog was a mixture of sulphur laden smoke (from coal fires) and water vapour.
Those smog days turned everything yellow, and were known as 'pea soupers'.

Britain banned the burning of raw coal in open fires and gradually the air cleared.

This pollution was visible, as the sulphur caused acid rain (sulphurous acid)
which dissolved brick and stone buildings. todays pollution is often invisible and we rely upon scientific data (sometimes flawed) for interpretation.

More attention needs to placed in what we eat. Any of you guy's discovered whats actually in fast foods.

   

So you agree with Jack Layton then.

Something you guys keep missing about cleaning up pollution is that China, India, Russia, and whoever else you want to throw in their don't where their energy comes from, as long as it is there. If we develop the technology, they will buy it from us just as certainly as China wants a piece of the oil sands.

There is a profit that can be made and that profit has the potential to turn our have-not provinces into have provinces. We can do that by developing and selling the technology and we can do it by selling raw material as well.

By throwing out Kyoto what you are saying that we can't meet the targets and shouldn't even try. If we aren't going to try, why should China and India?

   

by warming, Arctic people file suit against US



Dec 07 1:28 PM US/Eastern

The people of the Arctic filed a landmark human rights complaint against the United States, blaming the world's No. 1 carbon polluter for stoking the global warming that is destroying their habitat. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), representing native people in the vast, sparsely-populated region girdling the Earth's far north, said they had petitioned an inter-American panel to seek relief for Canadian and US Inuit.



"For Inuit, warming is likely to disrupt or even destroy their hunting and food-sharing culture as reduced sea ice causes the animals on which they depend to decline, become less accessible, and possibly become extinct," said Robert Corell, who spearheaded an Arctic climate impact assessment.

More than 150,000 Inuit, formerly called eskimos, are spread throughout the vast frozen northern territories of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia and Russia.

These regions have experienced the most rapid and severe climate change on earth, according to Corell's assessment, which was prepared over four years by more than 300 scientists from 15 countries and six indigenous organizations.

Global warming has caused the northern ice cover to retreat, making it more dangerous for the Inuit to hunt food animals such as polar bears, seals and caribou, their investigation found.

These animals also face decline or extinction, unable to adapt to warmer temperatures as their own access to food sources, breeding grounds and migration routes are altered.

And, rising sea levels and flooding threaten coastal Inuit communities.

"Inuit are an ancient people. Our way of life is dependent on the natural environment and animals. Climate change is destroying our environment and eroding our culture," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the ICC chair.

"But we refuse to disappear. We will not become a footnote to globalization."

The petition urges the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to declare the United States to be in violation of the 1948 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man.

It also wants the Commission to recommend that the United States adopt mandatory limits of its greenhouse-gas emission and join international efforts to curb global warming.

And it wants the Commission to declare the United States should help the Inuit adapt to unavoidable impacts of climate change.

If the Commission rules in favour, the impact will be more political than legal, the ICC acknowledged.

The panel, part of the Organisation of American States (OAS), is empowered to investigate and comment on human rights abuses, but has no power of enforcement.

Rising emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases primarily caused by burning fossil fuels are expected to warm the Arctic about 4-7 C (7.2-12.6 F), about twice the global average rise, over the next century, the ICC report concluded.

These dramatic climate changes "violate the Inuit's right to practice and enjoy the benefits of their culture."

Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin added to this gloomy tableau.

"High in the Arctic, in our interior and along our coasts, the country we know is being transformed," he said.

"Winters are growing milder, summers hotter and more severe, there is plant life where before there was none; there is water where before there was ice. Our permafrost is thawing -- and releasing methane gas into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change itself."

"Within short decades, the Northwest Passage, the famously un-navigable thoroughfare of history, may be passable -- a striking and unsettling example of our delicate balance succumbing to untenable strain," Martin added.

The United States, with only five percent of the world's population, emits some 25 percent of all harmful greenhouse gases.

Washington signed the 1992 Rio Convention on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol, but refused to ratify the latter.

The Inuit petition came as more than 100 ministers gathered Wednesday for the main part of a UN climate change conference in Montreal that has been going on since November 28 and is to end Friday.

   

Now, as much as global warming isn't necessarily a positive thing, this suit is just dumb; it's equilvalent to a blacksmith suing Henry Ford because the demand for horseshoes dropped. The idea that you can single out any one entity as responsible for global warming is absurd.

   

"Theres a little McDonalds...in everyone" and it's generally near our hearts in the form of fat. But hey, the food tastes good. As long as you don't have too much of it too often you are fine. As far as what exactly they make the chicken mcnuggets from, all i can say is that it tastes like chicken and i think chicken is the cheapest meat that has that taste, and it's the same story for the rest of their meat.

oops, off topic...Global Warming...that's what we were talking about

   

Its good to cut emissions, yes, SOx, NOx, PM etc. are all good emissions to cut, however, CO2 is an expensive waste of time to try and cut which provides no benefits to us. Furthermore several of the technologies to cut CO2 do so while increasing the other emissions.

   

No its not based on the assumption that greenhouse gases are additive by mass, its based upon the water vapors efficiency as a greenhouse gas and the amount there is. Leading to overall contribution to the greenhouse effect. The issue of clouds is irrelevent since we are talking about water vapors effect on the greenhouse effect. So if there is a clear day, then water vapor will be contributing large portions of the greenhouse effect, around 50-90%.

Condensed water droplets are not vapor, but when they do reflect light, they do so to the exclusion of any other greenhouse gas retaining the heat.

So simply put on a cloudy day, its colder because clouds block it out, on a sunny day, it is warm mainly due to the water vapor in the air.

   

This is incorrect. Kyoto certainly would reduce economic growth.

An economic analysis done by Global Insight published by The International Council for Capital Formation.



The effects on Germany, Italy, Spain and The UK. Kyoto would cost 200,000 jobs in Italy, 300,000 jobs in both Germany and the UK, and 700,000 jobs in Spain by 2010. GDP would be sliced by about 1% in the UK and Germany, 2% in Italy, and 3.5% in Spain.

   

That's exactly what people, even in this thread, are doing.

   

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