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Gore brilliantly explains the stakes at Copenhagen.

I’m not sure that Saran Palin understands. She had this to say about global warming in a Washington Post editorial.

I know that Carbon Dioxide is a great gift from God, also a gift that brings warmth to us during the long Alaskan winter, and by burning natural gas and oil, we are honoring Him, sending a blessed and holy plume of smoke skyward to our great Father in heaven, imploring him to watch over Americans, and our troops, and also to bring us energy security, also to the great state of Alaska, and the first Dude and my beautiful family. And then as the glorious sun sets over the Last Frontier in shades of red, white and blue, I know with every ounce of my being that Russia, silent in the distance, will never understand the joy that I feel right now, a joy of freedom.

Please add your own Sarah Palin quotes. Visit Slate for inspiration; this was a GREAT contest.

Three things you should read if you’re a Canadian.

Collossal Fossil

Canada garners a Fossil of the Day Award at Copenhagen for being a climate dick.

“Canada garnered today’s award for its unwavering commitment to stand firm in its inaction throughout these negotiations [...] Since announcing its emissions target in 2007 of reducing GHG emissions by 20% below the 2006 emission level (equivalent to 3 % below the 1990 level), the Harper government has consistently refused to adopt any regulatory framework to start reducing emissions, namely form the rapidly growing sector of tar sands.”

Canadians want climate action

But 64 per cent of respondents to a Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey said rich nations have a responsibility to commit to higher and harder targets than developing countries.

Most also want to see a binding agreement come out of Copenhagen, and 81 per cent said Canada should act independently of the United States.

The Conservatives insist Canada must tie its policy to that of the U.S. because of the countries’ extensive economic relationship.

The Harper government says it’s waiting for the Obama administration to come out with a suite of policies to which Canada can synchronize its own.

Climate Change and Canadian Unity

Chantal Hébert’s perspective on how Harper is undermining Canadian unity for his Alberta power base.

Harper’s base is in Alberta. His minority government will soon have to address a record federal deficit. The strength of the economic recovery will determine how painful that exercise will be. Over the next few years, the energy sector is expected to soften the impact of a dramatic restructuring of Canada’s manufacturing sector.

The flip side to this lose-lose equation for the environment is that the activist climate-change agenda of the three biggest provinces is not unfolding in a political vacuum.

Together, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec speak for three-quarters of Canadians. Slowly but surely their green ambitions are making the laissez-faire attitude of the Harper government politically unsustainable.

Let’s just look at clean energy. This year in the budget, Obama is outspending Canada 14 to 1 per capita on green stimulus, 6 to 1 if you just look specifically at new investment into clean energy. And the result is Canada is bleeding jobs, good investment, and good renewable companies to the US. We are missing the boat on developing the low-carbon economy and creating an alternative to the oil and gas money that’s flowing into Ottawa. So there’s two issues that we need to look at on what any government is doing to address this challenge. One is: how quickly are they reducing global-warming pollution, and what policy mechanisms are they putting into place to do that? And how quickly are they scaling up the alternative in clean energy? And the Harper government’s doing neither. So there is not a single policy in place to reduce global warming pollution since they came into power. Not a single policy. So they’ve talked about cap-and-trade, but we have nothing on the books. They’re just waiting, waiting, waiting. And Canada’s emissions are going up, not down. We’re one of the top ten polluters in the world. And we’re one of the only countries—in fact, the worst record of any G8 country in terms of how fast our global warming pollution is going up.

Thanks for Joe Romm for the tip!

George Monbiot in The Guardian

When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world’s peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

In 2006 the new Canadian government announced it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.

It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won’t accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.

After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world’s 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th.

In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada’s obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.

In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation – especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries – could scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the wellbeing of the world.

Why? There’s a simple answer: Canada is developing the world’s second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It’s actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, comprising pristine forests and marshes, will be be dug up – unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.

To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated water is held in vast tailings ponds, some so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases.

Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta’s tar sands operation is the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.

Canada hasn’t acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is Shell, a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it. The British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to you and me (the government’s share will soon rise to 84%), has lent or underwritten £8bn for mining the tar sands.

The purpose of Canada’s assault on the international talks is to protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada’s politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.

Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of Neanderthals to trample over it. Timber firms were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government’s scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.

I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?

To the Honourable Michael Ignatieff, David McGuinty, Bob Rae, and Michael Savage (who is my MP):

I am not an NDP supporter, but I am urging the Liberal government to put partisan politics aside and vote in favour of Bill-311.

I’m discouraged by Canada’s slow, dishonorable slide on the international stage because of our country’s obstructionist climate policies. I’m ashamed that we’ve been named 2008’s Colossal Fossil as the world’s worst climate change villain by more than 400 NGOs in Poznan, and that the Climate Action Network places Canada in the same league as Saudi Arabia.

But it’s not only environmental groups who are condemning Canada. In article entitled “Canada takes its Lumps at Poznan,” Embassy magazine offered this analysis of Canada’s role: “At the most recent round of international climate change negotiations, Canada once again emerged as a leading “spoiler,” attracting scorn and condemnation from both environmentalists and foreign delegations alike.”

The situation is desperate. Climate scientists convened an emergency session in Copenhagen last March because climate change is occurring faster and harder than even the most dire predictions from three years ago.

When is Canada going get the message to start to transition to a low-carbon economy?

The news from the scientific community has been unrelentingly grim. Climate scientists have been describing a devastating future for Planet Earth, and they are warning that we’re on a path to a 5°C rise (9°F) in global temperatures that will leave barely one billion standing in 2100. We’ve detailed reports that global sea level is expected to rise by at least 40 inches — and perhaps as much as 80 inches — in the next century. And that’s just the beginning.

Scientists now suggest that just 2°C (3.6°F) of warming could trigger bacterial growth in the arctic permafrost and release billions of tons of CO2 and methane, creating a terrible feedback loop in which warming creates more warming.

A rise of 4°C (7.2°F) will eliminate more than 85 percent of the Amazon rainforest by killing trees which are highly susceptible to small changes in temperature, creating yet another massive carbon time bomb. What’s particularly frightening about this study — conducted by researchers at the Met Office Hadley Centre — is that the death of the rainforest has the potential to alter regional weather patterns in ways that researchers simply cannot predict.

The scientists at the congress are worried that politicians are reading from a hopelessly out-of-date policy paper: the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. To drive home their urgent message, researchers are describing a 5°C world that will be wracked by floods, droughts, severe hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, and desperate heat waves. The oceans will become far less productive, the corals will die, and extinction will take more than 50 percent of species.

Part of the problem is that Environment Canada’s climate experts are no longer allowed to speak to the media without the permission of the Environment Minister’s office. In fact. Don MacIver had to resign his chairmanship from the World Meteorological Organization’s Climate Conference-3 because Jim Prentice would not allow him to attend the recent climate summits.

In recent weeks, Mr. Prentice has been quoted repeatedly in the media as suggesting that his government is on the side of the angels, and doing all it can to solve this vexing problem. In truth, they are trying to lock Canada into a fossil fuel economy for another generation, to protect their Alberta base.

And the Liberal Party, by not supporting Bill-311, is giving them a Get Out of Jail Card.

I don’t particularly like the Jack Layton, but it’s time for the Liberal Party to put the needs of the country ahead of the needs of the Liberal Party.

Tell the world that Harper and Prentice are doing a lousy job. Support Bill-311.

With respect,
Richard Levangie
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia

_______________

Editor’s Note: Please write to your Liberal MPs, and to Michael Ignatieff and David McGuinty.

If you’re wondering about the dire science I mention, here’s a link.

I’ve sent him the following letter. I urge all people who care about future generations to write a letter of thanks.

Senator Graham:

Your bipartisan work on the climate bill will be remembered by historians as a pivotal moment in American politics.

I work in environmental publishing, and so I read hundreds of clean tech and global warming stories every week, and I’m fully versed in what the climate scientists are saying. This is the most serious threat ever faced by humanity, and we will either rise to the greatness of our parents and grandparents who fought a world war on our behalf, or we will diminish, and those who follow will suffer for our lack of resolve.

First Nations in North America have a haunting expression: We do not inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

Against this sentiment will your work be judged. I think your children and grandchildren will be proud of you.

Just days after Rasmussen reported that 47 percent of U.S. citizens suggested that it was OK to put the economy before climate change concerns, one of the key advisors to the German government suggested that North Americans know less about climate change than just about anyone else in the world.

Professor John Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, is one of the world’s foremost climate experts. On the sidelines at a climate conference at Oxford University, he predicted that it will be several years before the U.S. will be able to get its house — or perhaps Senate — in order to join the world in cutting emissions. And until that happens, says Schellnhuber, developing countries like India and China won’t set hard emission targets. It’s a dangerous Catch-22. He’s hoping that most G20 economies will reach some measure of an agreement at Copenhagen, and the U.S. and Canada will follow in a few years time.

And Schellnhuber hopes that will be enough because time is getting short. Global warming has often been sold as something nebulous that could bring ruination several generations into the future, but a new report prepared for the British government — and presented at the Oxford conference — is warning that most people alive today will see dangerous levels of warming. According to scientists at the Met Office in the UK, climate change will be a problem for our children — not our great-grandchildren — with a 4°C (7°F) rise temperatures expected by 2060 if humanity fails to cut emissions significantly. A temperature increase of this magnitude would likely threaten the water supply of half the world’s population, wipe out up to half of animal and plant species, and swamp low-lying coastal areas. Local impacts, in places like Africa and the Arctic, could be even more severe, leading to much greater temperature increases.

“We’ve always talked about these very severe impacts only affecting future generations, but people alive today could live to see a 4°C rise,” said Dr. Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre. “People will say it’s an extreme scenario, and it is an extreme scenario. But it’s also a plausible scenario.”

The landmark 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report included scenarios that predicted more rapid warming, but these predictions were considered less likely to occur. More recent observations suggest just the opposite: That global warming is barreling along, and greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise faster than predicted in the worst-case IPCC projections. That’s why Met Office scientists used new computer models to update the IPCC predictions — models which include so-called carbon feedbacks that occur when warmer temperatures release more carbon, such as methane, from melting tundra. That, too, is already occurring, decades earlier than expected.

The Met scientists are quick to dismiss claims that the planet is doomed. If the world’s nations reach an international climate change agreement, and emissions peak sometime in the next decade, we still have a shot at keeping the rise in temperatures to below 2°C (3.6°F).

Once, on a comment board, a provocative poster asked why Republicans — who think the economy takes precedent over the environment — don’t love their children as much as Democrats. If Republican leaders in the House and Senate don’t stop wearing their scientific illiteracy like a badge of honor, that biting comment might gain currency among the next generation.

Photograph: Vinay Dithajohn, EPA

More than 100 of world’s leaders met this week in New York at the United Nations Climate Conference.

And where is Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper? He didn’t attend, preferring to meet New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg at a coffee shop. He just sauntered in to the UN in time for dinner.

For the sake of the planet, we need to bring Harper’s government down now. Layton, Ignatieff, Duceppe… It’s time for the three of you to stop squabbling. Work together RIGHT NOW for progressive change.

Defeat the Conservative Fundamentalists NOW!

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.