Would we be doing more to save the planet from global warming if we had better phrasing? Jonathan Watts asks that question at The Guardian when he notes that the only time that governments have been able to overcome their pettiness was when scientists warned about an unexpected “hole in the ozone layer.”

It seemed to have a profound and galvanizing effect, and the level of intergovernmental cooperation that ensued was unprecedented.

Watts is making a good point. We are facing a planetary threat that dwarfs anything we have faced — World Wars included — and most people seem to think that buying compact fluorescent bulbs or a Toyota Prius will be enough keep climate change to a minimum.

There are many reasons why this is so, but using terms which sound so benign, like climate change and global warming, is part of the problem.

Watts suggests that we start talking about global burning. G8 nations recently pledged to keep climate change below 2°C (3.6°F) in order to avoid dangerous tipping points that could lead to runaway global warming. That’s what he’s talking about. The problem is that we really don’t know how many steps we can make into the future before we start tripping over the tipping points.

If you live in central Canada and the US midwest, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that global warming is on hiatus this year. Folks in those regions have had relatively cold winter, and a coolish summer, but throughout the rest of the world — especially the world’s oceans — it’s been a scorcher, according to data just released by NOAA. For combined surface and water temperatures, 2009 is proving to be the second hottest summer on record. The oceans have never been as warm as they are right now at 62.5°F — a full 1.04°F above the 20th century average. That’s particularly worrisome because water takes a long time to warm, and a long time to cool. In fact, it takes five times more energy to warm water than land, and that warm water will influence land temperatures dramatically. What’s particularly interesting to NOAA researchers is that this spike in temperatures is occurring while we’re going through the deepest solar minimum in more than a century.

As climate models predicted some time ago, arctic amplification is occurring now, and temperatures there are rising disproportionately, and have been for years. Siberia, for example, is experiencing temperatures that are 5.4°F above normal, and that’s why the arctic sea ice is rapidly retreating. This year will go down as the third worst melt on record, a full 18.4% below the late 20th century average.

The headlines are likely to get more dire. NASA is predicting that el Nino and global warming will combine to set record temperatures for 2010 or 2011, and that the coming decade will be the warmest in human history.

This fantastic video was created by Theramin Trees!

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* I’m one day late for Talk Like A Pirate Day… Arghhh!

God bless Greenpeace.

Faced with a multimillion dollar media juggernaut devised by the American Petroleum Institute (API), Greenpeace countered with simplicity and honesty: A grassroots campaign that speaks the truth to power, and turns up the heat on oil executives.

To cut to the chase, last week Greenpeace came to possess an API memo that described an expensive misinformation campaign — under the banner of Energy Citizen rallies — in great detail.

To their credit, API execs admitted that the email was authentic — perhaps because it was ready to launch — and that the $45 million initiative is designed to look like a grassroots rally, and not a staged event run by an experienced marketing company. It’s all about optics, and getting on the nightly news.

And that’s about as fair as I can be to API.

This is dirty pool. For one thing, rallies are to be held during business hours, and oil company employees are paid to attend. They’ve turned it into something of a carnival, and employees, contractors, and retirees are picked up in air-conditioned buses and driven right to the rally’s door where everything — including hand-lettered signs and pamphlets — are offered to all and sundry. Rally participants are supplied with T-shirts, hot-dogs and drinks, and then told that cap-and-trade legislation will lead to skyrocketing energy bills, and massive job losses

It’s playing to fear and uncertainty in an uncertain time. It’s also playing fast and loose with the truth. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Waxman-Markey bill will cost the average American family less than a dollar per day.

Greenpeace is having none of it. The letter-writing campaign they’ve designed asks executives at GE, BP, Shell, Chevron, Conoco and many other oil and energy companies, to denounce the API’s tactics by resigning.

It’s interesting as journalists solicit comments from various oil companies to Greenpeace’s challenge. At the very least, the Energy Citizen campaign should embarrass API members who have signed on with the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (US-CAP) which ostensibly supports the The American Clean Energy and Security Act.

Greenpeace wants US-CAP members to counter this faux public relations campaign by API telling the truth. So far, Shell and BP have announced that they are not involved in organizing any rally events, but that they will not leave the API.

“Our focus is on seeking common ground with stakeholders that can aid Congress in enacting a fair and effective cap and trade program,” said a Shell spokesman from company headquarters in The Hague. “We will continue to express our position within API and other business and trade associations of which we are members.”

Cindy Baxter, a Greenpeace campaigner, said the contradiction inherent in many oil firms’ membership of both the API and the US-CAP group means they must to clarify their position on climate change legislation. “If they do not know what their lobbyists are doing, they need to find out,” she said. “There’s a contradiction in belonging to both groups. They need to distance themselves publicly from the API’s dirty tactics, and if the API no longer represents their views, they need to leave.”

I know where I won’t be buying my gas. And which nonprofit will get my next donation.

All I can think of is that old line from Get Smart, the classic television series.

If only he had used his powers for niceness instead of evil.

This story is about the hardest working man (or woman) in DC. It’s none other than that single employee at Bonner & Associates who was deemed too sleezy to work there. I know, I know… That’s a mighty high bar to hurdle, but Bonner actually dropped this guy like he was nuclear waste. (At least, we think they did. Maybe. But not for the reason they sold to the media).

Anyway, I digress. If you’re new to the story, let me lay it out.

Bonner & Associates — an astroturfing group — was hired by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy to create a fake grassroots campaign while the epic Waxman-Markey bill was wending its way through the House. And so they went to work, doing what they do, running vocal, incendiary, dishonest crusades that are prepared by Wall Street professionals, but made to look as if they originated on Main Street.

Bonner and the ACCCE almost got away with it.

But in early August, we learned that Tom Perriello, a Democratic congressman who voted for the Waxman-Markey bill in the House, received six letters from two advocacy groups complaining that his support for this climate bill would cause power rates to rise, and put a strain on tight budgets.

The problem is that all six letters were forgeries crafted by AN employee at Bonner & Associates. Bonner immediately fired said employee, describing the person as a bad apple who deviated from standard company practice.

The advocacy groups aren’t buying it.

“They stole our name,” said Tim Freilich, an executive at Creciendo Juntos, a nonprofit network that tackles issues related to Charlottesville’s Hispanic community. “They stole our logo. They created a position title and made up the name of someone to fill it. They forged a letter and sent it to our congressman without our authorization. It’s this type of activity that undermines Americans’ faith in democracy.”

The other forgeries were purported to be from the NAACP.

But now the plot thickens. Three weeks later, a bevy of other letters have surfaced, appearing to come from advocacy groups for senior citizens, all complaining about Democratic support for Waxman-Markey. Letters trying to put the fear of God in people who are doing what is right for America, and right for the planet.

The letters are forgeries. Once again, Bonner & Associates and the ACCCE are to blame. They just didn’t take responsibility for when the story first broke because of letting sleeping dogs lie, and all that.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m thoroughly impressed that a single employee — a bad seed — could accomplish so very much in such a short time. Presuming that he is a he, this employee would have to recreate the letterheads for dozens of advocacy groups; write letters that are all subtly different (mentioning concerns particular to each group); create job titles and fake names; work on his forged signatures; and then address each letter and get it in the mail all before the June vote. But that’s not all! Since he’s probably the “new guy” at the office, I’ll bet that he had to do the Dunkin Donuts run every morning, and put up with all manner of horseplay as the old timers gave him the business.

Imagine how much closer we’d be to passing a meaningful climate bill if only he’d used his powers for niceness, instead of evil.

And make no doubt about it. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy and Bonner & Associates are evil.

Imagine our world without literature.

Whenever I can cobble moments together, I write. It’s my first, best thing. I have a middle reader under development that will be a pretty good book once I commit the final chapter to paper. It’s what I do with every stolen minute as we struggle through bankruptcy.

I write because I love to read. From my earliest days and on through a caroming adolescence, I found solace in books. Through illness and 14 years of daily migraines — more than 5,000 in all — I found hope and enrichment in our stories. And in the turning of those many pages, I discovered the strength to keep stumbling through what seemed a grey, uncaring world.

Somehow, I survived, and now feel a great debt. So how can I keep from blanching when I cast an eye to our future, and see only misery for my dearly beloved?

The planet is warming.

Thirty-five years ago, I spent three solid months each winter playing hockey on frozen lakes. Today, Nova Scotia players hone their peewee hockey skills in rinks, their parents stamping for warmth in the frozen stands. As a writer, I keenly observe my surroundings, noticing that the trees bud earlier in spring, that robins now live year-round in a place where that once meant certain death.

These subtle changes have been wrought with less than 1°C of warmth. Yet even that shift is profound. The scorching summers of Harry Potter’s Britain would flabbergast Oliver Twist. So what should we expect when 5°C (9°F) of warming befalls our children, and their children, as scientists now predict will come this century?

We have a good idea, and I can easily hit the low points. For every degree average temperatures rise, rice yields will fall by 15 percent, leaving huge swathes of population hungry. The U.S. Midwest’s famed bread basket will become a dust bowl, and Mediterranean crop yields will fall by 30 percent or more.

As the glaciers melt away, more than one billion Asians and South Americans will be left without adequate water. The Amazon rainforests will all but disappear, as that teeming mass of flora and fauna cannot adapt to dramatic temperature swings. More than 50 percent of the world’s wildlife diversity will be snuffed, so rhinos, lions, and giraffes might only live on in legend.

Massive hurricanes will be rife, and sea levels will rise by as much as six feet, so humanity will gradually abandon coastal cities like Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Mumbai. Considerable parts of Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Florida, will become uninhabitable swamp. Dozens of Darfurs will erupt, and our planet will swarm with brown, yellow, black and white climate refugees.

Many reputable scientists think that Earth will support fewer than one billion people by 2100, so this isn’t a fantasy conjured by a melancholy fatalist.

This is our path.

We can quibble at the edges, but the science supporting this dystopia is as irrefutable as the research proving that smoking causes cancer, or that natural selection creates new species. If you have heard otherwise, it’s because fossil fuel companies and ideologues have muddied waters with slick campaigns that have fooled journalists and economic pundits.

Lord Nicholas Stern, former World Bank Chief Economist, suggests that one-third of global GDP will be spent mitigating climate change if we don’t act soon. Humanity will be so stressed by the endless struggle and suffering that our very best things will be stricken from memory. I know from personal experience that physical pain strips the words from writers. But then again, who will have time for Isabel Allende when harvest after harvest fails? Could some new Picasso inspire anyone as Amsterdam is returned to the sea? Could Mozart’s Requiem move future generations to tears as they huddle through their sixth Katrina in as many years?

Our scientists have done a great service in defining the treacherous path that awaits. Now artists and artisans must heed that call, and bring their talent and creativity to bear. We need to breathe life into this message, so that our brothers and sisters, our politicians, our teachers, our manufacturers and regulators will hear the cry, and create justice for those who follow. Artists must get informed, and act boldly. We need our writers, poets, designers, sculptors, inventors, and musicians to use their creativity to bring action to a world that sorely needs it.

North America’s First Nations have a wonderful expression: We do not inherit this world from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

We must rise to the greatness of our myths and legends, or we shall diminish, and those few who follow will hate us for as long as they draw breath, long after we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

I often write that the science supporting global warming is every bit as strong as the science that proves smoking causes cancer. But I then go even further by linking the fossil fuel and tobacco industries, suggesting deeper sins, claiming that oil companies actually stole a page from the tobacco industry by hiring right-wing and libertarian think tanks to confuse the uninitiated. On anti-science web sites, such an argument is called emotional and scientifically dubious.

Well, it is an emotional argument. But it’s also true. I make the link because the two industries are intimately connected, and they’ve made the connection.

Tobacco Ethics

In the 1990s, concerns over secondhand smoke were informing tough new anti-smoking regulations. So the tobacco industry boldly established a number of bogus and phony institutes comprised of sock puppets and tobacco industry public relations experts whose sole job was to convince as many people as they could that the science on secondhand smoke wasn’t conclusive. These groups were in the business of manufacturing doubt.

Even then, the medical evidence that dangerous carcinogens are present in sidestream smoke was overwhelming. As one expert epidemiologist noted at the time, the only way to make the smoking evidence stronger would be to conduct repeated and prolonged forced smoking experiments on human subjects, and measure how many illnesses they suffered as a result.

It’s obvious that tobacco companies don’t give a rat’s ass for the lives they destroyed. Even in 2009, these purveyors of doom and misery are still trying to hook generation after generation both here and in the developing world — they have always preyed upon the poor.

But here’s something so many poorly-informed climate deniers don’t seem to understand. When many of these sock puppets were creating their anything-for-a-buck institutes, they planned for the future. Perhaps knowing that the tobacco fight would soon be lost, they solicited second and third industries to replace the first. They knew that Exxon-Mobil would be happy to work alongside Philip Morris and that both would pay to keep the lights on.

And so when they drew up their tobacco disinformation campaigns, their argument held that second-hand smoke was junk science, no more to be believed than the junk science suggesting that heavy pesticides use is harmful to humans, or the junk science proving that CO2 emissions were warming the planet.

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means for establishing controversy.

• Smoking & Health Proposal • Brown and Williamson

A dozen years later, right-wing think tanks with consequential names like the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heartland Institute still run these sophisticated PR campaigns, using a practice now known as astroturfing. The whole point of their tactics are to run interference, and convince enough people that climate scientists are still debating the science of global warming, just as they did 15 years ago with secondhand smoke.

Big Oil and Big Tobacco: Marriage Made in PR Heaven

Every single one of these institutes takes has taken serious money from oil companies, as the Union of Concerned Scientists and Exxon Secrets relate. It should go without saying that in the world of scientific endeavor, this fact alone should marginalize their debating points. If your bills were being paid by ExxonMobil and Shell, are you really likely to write a treatise entitled Goodbye Amsterdam, Mumbai, and Miami?

Yet deniers still hold to discredited orthodoxy, suggesting that the money isn’t the issue, it’s the quality of their research that matters — a courtesy they refuse to extend to other scientists. This position is hopelessly naive. Let’s forget for the moment that these institutes don’t conduct ANY scientific research at all. Let’s judge them by the company they keep, and by the things that they say, and understand that that they’d sell their own mothers to line their pockets.

The Heartland Institute runs the annual International Conference on Climate Change — a skeptics conference in New York — but they’re also the go-to think tank for the tobacco industry. They currently list five tobacco policy experts on their web site, and they are noted repeatedly in Philip Morris documents as playing a crucial role in disinformation campaigns. The Heartland Institute is run by Joseph Bast who has written (in a self-published book) that secondhand smoke isn’t a health issue.

Anti-smoking activists give smokers a stark choice: Stop smoking or die! In fact, there is a third path: Reduce the harm by shifting to less-hazardous kinds of tobacco products. For example, moving from unfiltered to filtered cigarettes, and from regular to “low tar” cigarettes, both appear to reduce the risk of lung cancer….

And later in the same book:

No victim of cancer, heart disease, etc. can “prove” his or her cancer or heart disease was caused by exposure to secondhand smoke.

The Cato Institute is also notable for its ties to big tobacco and big oil. RJ Reynolds documents indicate that the group’s executive have been drafted to support the tobacco industry by writing pro-tobacco editorials, and appearing on television and radio as tobacco experts. The group insists that the cigarettes are unfairly taxed, and that the reported death rate attributed to smoking is wildly inflated. The Cato Institute has also argued that smoking bans infringe on personal liberty, and that health risks from secondhand smoke are debatable.

The Cato Institute employs Steve Milloy, who runs the web site Junk Science, and who moonlights as a pundit on Fox News, so although he’s not a scientist, he does pretend to be one on TV. He equates environmentalism with Nazism, he has worked as a lobbyist for Philip Morris, and for a Morris front group — now defunct — called the The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, so at least we know he has a sense of humor. He also claims that dioxin, pesticides in foods, environmental lead, asbestos, secondhand tobacco smoke and global warming can be categorized as scares and scams, and that all climate scientists at the IPCC are lying in order to attract more funding for their research. Since he has just published a book called Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin your life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, it seems Milloy does know a thing or two about lying to attract more funding.

The American Enterprise Institute charged the tobacco industry $25,000 to write a report supporting their position, and they’ve frequently taken money from major tobacco and oil companies. In 2007, they AEI offered scientists $10,000 to write articles that would “undermine a major climate change report” written by the IPCC. Lee Raymond, former Exxon CEO, is a vice-chairman at the AEI, and several of the policy makers at the AEI have worked for Philip Morris, or for the oil industry.

Over the last few years, new astroturfing sites devoted to climate change have emerged, including the Friends of Science, The Fraser Institute, and the Science and Public Policy Institute. They do not accept money from the likes of Philip Morris, but they are waist-deep in big oil money, and not surprisingly, do everything they can to the support industries that are driving climate change.

If you think global warming is a scam, then this is the company you keep. And I’m not really sure how you sleep at night.

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You’ll notice an absence of links. Every link that blogs give to a right-wing think tank would boost their web traffic, and I’m not going to help them lie to North Americans.

You’ll also note the many links to Sourcewatch. Might I suggest a donation to support the work they do?

Don’t forget. Earth Hour is Saturday, March 28, 2009 — between 8:30 and 9:30 pm in your time zone.

Turn out the lights, shut off the power. Light candles. Be quiet and still. Spend the hour with your family. Connect with each other, share stories. Talk.

And then get angry. Get informed. We are staring at the abyss, and we need action now.

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Earth Hour on Facebook. Many regional groups exist, too.

A few months ago, I was debating Canada’s sorry record on global warming on a CBC message board with dozens of people from across the country. As I wrote, a hurricane was bearing down on Nova Scotia. Several people raged at me, arguing that I was way off topic; I was told that this story was about good people getting battered about in a tragic display of nature’s power, and my attempts to link it to global warming were not only wrong, they were in incredibly poor taste.

Have a thought for the poor people in Nova Scotia, you moron, and stop trying to score political points! one Westerner suggested. Or words to that effect.

Moron indeed! Perhaps he didn’t realize that I lived in Nova Scotia, that Hurricane Kyle was going to pass right over my head. Perhaps he didn’t realize that the poor people in Nova Scotia have been hit by three hurricanes in 12 years that have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, and destroyed pristine wilderness areas. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that climate experts are expecting our hurricane seasons to grow longer, and more intense for a very simple reason: Global warming is increasing oceanic temperatures, and higher temperatures feed stronger hurricanes. Perhaps he didn’t realize that the special climate change advisor to the UK government recently described 4 Hurricane Katrinas hitting the US each year as a “credible threat.” *

And now we have Victoria. Like the high arctic, Australia is the proverbial Canary of the Coal Mine, the place where climate change would first hit — hard and unforgivingly. What’s happening in Victoria seems like something conjured by a Hollywood disaster movie, only it’s real, and terrible, and heartbreaking.

The media has, by and large, miffed the story. (Reuters gets it right, the AP gets it wrong). The fires were caused by arsonists, but they were no ordinary fires. Dr. Tim Flannery, the biology professor at the University of Macquarie who wrote The Weather Makers, takes up the story in an editorial in The Guardian.

This February, at the zenith of a record-breaking heatwave with several days over 40C, Melbourne recorded its hottest day ever – a suffocating 46.1C, with even higher temperatures occurring in rural Victoria. This extreme coincided with exceptionally strong northerly winds, which were followed by an abrupt southerly change. This brought a cooling, but it was the shift in wind direction that caught so many in a deadly trap. Such conditions have occurred before. In 1939 and 1983 they led to dangerous fires. But this time the conditions were more extreme than ever before, and the 12-year “drought” meant that plant tissues were almost bone dry.

Despite narrowly missing the 1983 Victorian fires, and then losing a house to the 1994 Sydney bushfires, I had not previously appreciated the difference a degree or two of additional heat, and a dry soil, can make to the ferocity of a fire. This fire was quantatively different from anything seen before. Strategies that are sensible in less extreme conditions, such as staying to defend your home or fleeing in a car when you see flames, become fatal options under such oven-like circumstances. Indeed, there are few safe options indeed in such conditions, except to flee at the first sign of smoke.

My country is still in shock at the loss of so many lives. But inevitably we will look for lessons from this natural tragedy. The first such lesson I fear is that we must anticipate more such terrible blazes in future, for the world’s addiction to burning fossil fuels goes on unabated, with 10 billion tonnes being released last year alone. And there is now no doubt that the pollution is laying the preconditions necessary for more such blazes…

We need to act now. Our planet has warmed by less than 1°C over the last 100 years. But if we continue business as usual, we could see warming of between 5°-7°C by 2100

In my part time, whenever I can grab a minute here and there, I work on a novel. So I have a vibrant imagination, but I can’t make my mind go there.

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If you want to read more about global warming and how it’s affecting Australia, might I suggest Brave New Climate.

*OK, OK, so unless he had a time machine, that westerner in October couldn’t have known about comments that would be made in his future — and just a few days ago — by Jonathan Porritt. But I still don’t think he was very bright!

But I digress; I had another point to make about Hurricane Katrina. Anyone who says that a single devastating hurricane was caused by global warming doesn’t understand the science. So many variables went into creating this particular storm of the century that we can’t know exactly what role climate change played.

But we can say that climate change is creating conditions that make hurricanes like Katrina far more likely, and we can say that its likely to get much worse. Climate stations in the US and the UK are predicting that — barring a volcanic eruption — one of the next two years will be the warmest years on record.

That means that we’ll see more catastrophes like the ones that devastated Victoria and New Orleans.

Every so often at One Blue Marble, we’re going to present the Climate Change Double Dumb Ass Award to the man or woman who does something really moronic during the previous week.

Truth to tell, every seven days brings dozens of potential winners… Politicians who put personal gain before the welfare of their constituents… Columnists who are easily duped by simplistic astroturfing campaigns… Oil executives who talk out of both sides of their mouths. Sadly, the permutations and combinations are endless.

Another truth is that it would be far too easy to give the Double Dumb Ass Award to an utter nim-cow-poop like Senator James Inhofe who — by most accounts — isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. We’re going to try to avoid naming the obvious names.

But frankly, I’m shocked to be writing this post. The first-ever winner of the Double Dumb Ass Award is a brilliant Canadian who I never expected to see on these pages.

In Canada, our national broadcaster — the CBC — offers an animated phone-in program every Sunday evening called Cross Country Check-Up, and it’s hosted by the erudite and personable Rex Murphy, a voluble Newfoundlander and Rhodes Scholar who can spin words that float across the airwaves like gossamer. I’ve always enjoyed the show.

Murphy is a right-wing iconoclast, but one that I can usually respect. And that’s why I was shocked after reading his most recent Globe & Mail column called Armageddon Theory: Vancouver. As always, it’s brimming with ten-dollar words and pointed jabs and the irascible Murphy wit. But here the highfalutin’ words are just a cheap conjurer’s tricks hiding a remarkable dearth of facts and a shoddy understanding of science.

Of course, you could lay all the Canadian journalists who don’t know a whit about science end-to-end, and create something that looks remarkably like the Trans-Canada Highway, but I simply didn’t expect Murphy to be among their number. I obviously haven’t been paying attention, as the following two paragraphs relate. Murphy is talking about the perpetual food crisis mentioned in the previous post.

Perpetual? I haven’t seen that word, outside of a prayer book, for 30 years. And as to being “confident” of what’s going to be going on in this busy world in 2080 or 2100, well, let’s not call that science. Let’s call it hubris on steroids. Has the global warming movement given up all pretense of rigor entirely? Because they’re now not only telling us what the weather will be like 30 or 50 years from now, they’ve tied their fanciful projections and ever more intricate modeling to lining up the causes for World War IV. They’re giving us the causes for events that haven’t happened yet. I think Newton would have frowned on that approach.

I tie it all to Vancouver. So much of what the alarmists promised was supposed to be happening now isn’t happening. So many events are running counter to their near-term projections, they’ve decided to go all Armageddon with their long-term ones, projections for a future that none of us will be around to check. So here’s the test: The colder it gets in Vancouver, the hotter the dubious scenarios for the globe a hundred years from now will be.

Murphy is only right about only the most basic of facts. Canada is having a cold winter, the second in a row after a bevy of mild ones. Mild, green Vancouver is being buried by the snow, and the Canadian Prairies have been locked in a deep freeze for weeks.

And none of that comes as a surprise to climate scientists in Canada, or anywhere’s else for that matter.

The planet is warming. This is an undeniable and incontrovertible fact supported by the 2,500 climate scientists who worked on the IPCC, and by the national academies of science of the world’s G8 nations. Over the last two or three years, we’ve seen Arctic Sea Ice retreating to its lowest volume in 125,000 years, and watched as a melting Greenland poured 21 Chesapeake Bays into the Atlantic. Thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies all point in the same direction. But Murphy is having none of it.

The simple explanation is that rising CO2 emissions aren’t the only factors at play in determining Canada’s climate. For the last two years, our weather has been driven by La Niña, the cold sister of the El Niño – Southern Oscillation. Scientists know all about it, and their computer models account for it.

When the influence of La Niña lifts, as the Hadley Centre in Great Britain expects will occur this year, we’ll start hearing about droughts and record-breaking heat waves once again. But I doubt that we’ll hear any five-syllable-word apologies from Murphy.

Rex Murphy is the unfortunate first recipient of the Climate Change Double Dumb Ass Award. (Hat Tip to Desmog Blog).