Tag: Media

Short take on Minister Lake

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

For the most part BC Minister of Envrionment Terry Lake seems like a pretty good guy. He is smart, educated, says the right things, seems to have his head screwed on straight. One of the few “Good Guys” in the BC Liberals camp. I wanna believe.

Then I get a series of tweets from him, all talking about the great time he is having at the Vancouver Auto Show, shilling for the New Car Dealers of BC. 

Isn’t a sitting Minister of Environment providing hourly tweets promoting the Vancouver Auto Show a little… I dunno… unaware?

the Dollar Store Debate.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

OK, I will wade into it.
This was touched off by a minor local Twitterstorm last week, when some lamented the opening of yet another “Dollar Store” in New Westminster. Some had the temerity to suggest that miscellaneous discount crap fresh off the container from East Asia was not a product category of which New Westminster was suffering paucity.

Ever-opinionated, usually correct, and fiercely local Twitterista Jen Arbo was quoted in the Record lamenting that this was the best our local retail environment could offer. The counter argument being, I guess, all hail the free market and the entrepreneurs for which it stands. I have to count myself on the Arbo side of the discussion, but had little to say on the issue. I don’t go into Dollar Stores, because they have nothing to offer me, although they apparently offer something to others: go, go, free market!

Then I noticed the Record article quoted a New York Times article thusly:

“We are awakening to a dollar-store economy,”

…and I shuddered. I cannot think of a more damning lament for our economy, or for our society. No I gotta comment.

This “Dollar Store Economy” is one where the retail environment is dominated by bountiful cheap choice. If you cannot find the quality or the features you want, that is offset by the remarkable affordability of what you don’t want. As the times article points out, it is the “Luxury of Quantity”. Tired of crappy stuff? Here is some more crappy stuff. This is the foundation of the economy that makes Wal-Mart the largest retail business in the world, and IKEA the largest seller of home furnishings in the world. This is the philosophy that brings us 5000-square-foot plywood McMansions in neighbourhoods without sidewalks, straining the City’s ability to provide basic services, while the homeowner laments outragrous 2.5% property tax increases. This is the philosophy that makes it profitable to burn the crap we import and pay a dollar each for more when we find a more pleasing colour the next day.

This also creates the market condition where it is difficult to shop in New Westminster if you want to shop locally and support the local economy. Outside of Wal-Mart, there is no place to buy sporting goods in New Westminster. We have two very good bike shops, but not one place to get a decent selection of running shoes. We host the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame and one of the greatest Lacrosse teams in the history of the sport, but you cannot buy a lacrosse stick within our 15 square kilometres. The same lament for people trying to buy office supplies, gardening equipment… the list goes on.

The big-box merchants at our periphery provide a dizzying supply of low-quality replacements for all of the above. Think about it: one sure way to tell you are not an aficionado of something, but are merely a dabbler, is when you find yourself buying supplies for that thing at Canadian Tire. People who race bicycles (or even commute seriously on them) don’t buy tires at Crappy Tire; barbecue experts are not going into Home Depot to peruse the latest offerings from Broil-King; professional Graphic Designers are not picking up art supplies at WalMart. All for the same reason: these businesses sell crap for the masses who don’t know better (which also explains why I buy car parts at Canadian Tire, I guess).

Which brings me to my favourite example of the unseen cost of cheap goods. Look at the coffee table in this picture:

It looks pretty non-descript, if boring. We bought it about 10 years ago from an Amish guy when we were living near Amish Country in the Mid-West, so it is hand-made of real locally-sourced hardwood. Real joinery, too, the thing is built like a tank. Barring housefire or natural disaster, this is probably the last coffee table I will ever own. But the wood was local, made by a local artisan, and we bought it right from him: cost us about $150. I seriously think this is the last coffee table I will ever buy in my life. In that sense, it is similar to the $80 solid wood cutting board I bought from Louie at the Royal City Farmers Market. Well built, local, durable.

Now there is another way we could have gone. Drive down to IKEA, and see what they have to offer. They have a very similar coffee table, for about a third of the price; what a bargain. It is, of course, made from a compelling blend of particle board, fibreboard and plastic, wrapped in a provocative envelope of Melamine foil and acrylic paint. It is packed 3 inches flat in cardboard, with Styrofoam and plastic film, and comes with a little 4mm hexwrench to put it together.

But how long do we anticipate before the $50 coffee table starts to look tattered around the veneer edges? How long until those 4mm hexwrench fasteners start to wiggle loose in their particle board sockets, of the fiberboard shelf starts to sag? How long before this coffee table is headed for the landfill and another trip to the IKEA is required? 3 Years? 5 years? Then try to imagine how much of that $50 stayed in the local economy? The guy who sold it to you spent 3 minutes punching in the purchase, and gets paid $10 an hour. Your proportion of the money spent by IKEA that day in Coquitlam might total 10% of that purchase, and some of that will be eaten up by the landfill costs of the packaging…
That is the promise of the “Dollar Store Economy”: more cheap shit, sold by the lowest bidder, brought to you by mass production overseas, with no local content, and little contribution to the local economy, except what we can squeeze out in the form of taxes (with the resultant whining about how taxes are hurting “competitiveness” of business).

So thanks Jen Arbo, for running a local businesses that helps other local businesses succeed, and for all your work at the Royal City Farmers Market, bringing local goods directly to local consumers. You might not have thought about it this way, but you have been fighting against the forces of the “Dollar Store Economy” before you ever piped up in the Record.

Michael Mann in Vancouver

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

As part of the AAAS meeting in Vancouver last week, Dr. Michael Mann gave a talk for the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. Not this Michael Mann , but this one.

You could Wiki this, but the short Bio is thus: Dr. Mann is a geophysicist and geologist who worked with a team of scientists who used a variety of proxy climate indicators (tree rings, coral growth patterns, ice cores, stalactite layers, etc.) to measure climate over the last 1000+ years. turns out the graph showed a sharp rise in temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the last 100 years. The graph was compelling enough, and the data robust enough, that I was included in the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment report.

Around that time, one of Mann’s co-workers used the expression “hockey stick” to describe the curve on the graph, borrowing the nickname from an older graph of atmospheric Ozone made by other scientists 20 years ago during another global atmospheric debate.

The graph was such a stark image, displaying our current situation in such clear terms, that is simply could not be left unaddressed by those who see Anthropogenic Climate Change as some sort of conspiracy.

Included in those people are several Canadians: Steve McIntyre ( a retired mining engineer) and Ross McKitrick (an economist) tried their hand at Climate Science and wrote a paper in a a fake science journal claiming the graph was the product of flawed science, and the battle for “Mann’s Hockey Stick” was on.
From the beginning of his talk, it is clear Dr. Mann is exactly what you would expect: a science geek, and a reluctant public figure. His speech was not polished or slick, the images not particularly compelling to a non-science audience, but it was an entertaining talk about how one guy doing proxy climate measurements can somehow become an enemy to some, just because he collected a little data on a topic that would become a political football.

In the last 10 years, this PhD Geologist who spends most of his time counting tree rings and teaching Earth Systems Science at Penn State, has had his e-mails stolen and publicized, Has been summoned to congressional hearings, investigated by his State Attorney General, been subject to academic kangaroo courts at his university, and accused of everything from perpetuating the “greatest hoax in the history of science” to outright fraud. Numerous investigations later, no-one has found any evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.
But that doesn’t even matter, because one thing none of the people criticizing the “hockey stick” have done is collect any data that refutes it. They have instead spent so much energy and time trying to cast doubt on the veracity of the “hockey stick” that they have failed to acknowledge that there is an entire hockey league of sticks that are the same shape: measured atmospheric anthropogenic CO2, sea level change, ice extent, ocean temperatures, the list goes on.

In the end, Michael Mann is still a reluctant public figure (partly evidenced by his reluctance to take legal action against the people slandering him: he would rather just do science and find solutions). All he can do is keep reporting what he and other people doing the actual science have found. The scientific case is relatively straightforward; the greenhouse effect has been known for two centuries; we know human CO2 numbers are going up, and we know it is anthropogenic; we know earth has warmed more than 1 degree C over the last 100 years,and the trend is up. if you choose to ignore the thermometers, there are literally dozens of other lines of evidence: surface temps, permafrost loss, ocean stratification, and numerous observed biophysical reactions consistent with rapid warming. combine this with a distinct paucity of evidence against the trend, and it is remarkable anyone is still debating this.

The final point was one I have heard a lot recently: this is no longer a scientific debate, it is an ethical one. We need to make the ethical decision of whether we will burden the next generation and the one after with the unforeseen consequences of what we are doing today in the interest of Business as usual”. However, that’s s not a scientific question, it is a philosophical one. Once science has provided the data, what you do with it is not up to the Scientists.

Mann was quick to point out that the issue is not, as some suggest, the “politicization of science” (inherently, science is immune from politics, as its self-regulating mechanism will win out in the end), but the “science-ization” of politics, where a political position or immediate pragmatic need of a political group is mistaken for a scientific fact.

To beat this, we may need more reluctant scientists like Mann to take a more active part in the popular media, and provide the factual information we need to make rational decisions, informed by our ethics.
It’s the best hope we have to get past this strange, anti-science phase we are in right now in North American society.
Which is kind of what I think Neal Stephenson is getting into here:

Cluffy and the Bridge

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 5 Comments.

It is not going to surprise any CBC Radio1 listener if I admit to being a firm Anti-Cluff-ite.

Rick Cluff is the morning show host in Vancouver on the Flagship Mothership, and comes to us after a long history of sportscasting in southern Ontario. This explains why the only thing he approaches with any intelligence or enthusiasm is sports. When talking to the Sports Guy in Toronto (whoever that is this week), he is in his element. And food; he seems to really be into talking about food. For pretty much any other topic, he is hopeless.

It is worst when he is interviewing someone on a topic he is less versed in, like, say, this morning’s interview with TransLink’s Sany Zein about the Pattullo Bridge. (you will be able to hear it here, February 21, just before the 8:00 news, so about 1:50 into the 2:35 program). Rick’s technique is to prepare for the interview by finding the conflict, then writing down a bunch of questions probing that conflict. That way, during the interview, he can read the questions off the page (and the cadence he uses make it clear he is reading through the bottom of his bifocals) and not have to worry about listening to or understanding the answers. It is especially funny when an interviewee provides the answer to the question before Rick asks it, and Rick just can’t break the script and have a conversation, so he boldly charges ahead and asks the question just answered…

In this morning’s conversation , the conflict narrative was New Westminster being a roadblock to replacing the aged Pattullo. Sany Zein tried to clarify and explain that New Westminster was in the middle of their Master Transportation Plan and that the two consultations would work in parallel, and together. There is no conflict there. Then he has a canned input from Wayne Wright saying the same thing, followed by Mr. Zein repeating it, but Rick kept on narrative- How can they move forward with New Westminster being so uncooperative? It was painful.

The worst part is that Rick’s blind devotion to the conflict he wrote down on his crib sheet kept him from asking questions most of his listeners wanted to have answered. How big will this bridge be? Who is going to pay for it? Will it be tolled? How can the public get involved in the consultations? You know, useful information that the news could provide, instead of trying to find a simple conflict narrative to attach sports metaphors to.

Contrast this to Stephen Quinn’s interview approach, where he carries on a conversation, responds to the previous answer, and prepares himself ahead of time so that he can follow the conversation wherever it leads. He also has a knack for fitting in that one slightly uncomfortable question that the public wants to hear answered. Quinn is clearly the best interview talent on the local CBC. Yet again, I digress.

In the case of this morning’s interview, Rick Cluff continues his trend of seeing the world through a windshield. He is of the generation that thinks you can solve traffic problems by putting more roads down, which is a frankly ridiculous approach in the year 2012. This might be because he drives in from White Rock at 4:30 am when the roads are empty, then listens to the traffic reports all day and can’t imagine the cars are the problem.

Regardless, Sany Zein is, in my experience, an approachable and thoughtful guy. So you should feel comfortable asking him questions directly during the open houses coming up this week. Starting tonight!

The Port Declares War

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Jeff Nagel of Black Press (who is turning out to be the best Municipal Affairs reporter in the local Dead Tree Press) wrote a piece on recent proclamations by the new CEO of Port Metro Vancouver, and the reactions from various groups throughout the lower mainland.

My first reaction was – poor bastard from England has no idea what he is doing wading into ALR politics. Then I did a little research and see that CEO Robin Sylvester was party to the sell-off of part of BC Rail, so he is obviously aware of (and not afraid of) the worst of BC political morass. He knows exactly what he is wading into here, the poor bastard.

My issue with the Port Authoirty is not just their stunning disregard for the spirit of the Agricultural Land Reserve (even if, as a Federal Agency, it doesn’t apply to them), but their business model. It isn’t just farmland that the Port has declared war upon, it is our roads, our waterfronts, and the livability of our cities.

All of this discussion skips over the reason we have n ALR. It is because BC has very little high-quality farmable land, and most of it is very close toVancouver. Once farm land becomes industrial land, commercial land, or a neighbourhood, it is neigh impossible for it ever to be returned to agricutural use. none of these characterisitcs are true for Industrial Land. Industrial Land can be located anywhere, and land that was once industrial can be easily converted to other uses – and land under other use can easily be converted to industrial use. All it takes is for someone to spend the neccessary money to convert the land. So the need for an “Industrial Land Reserve” is a red herring. There is no scarcity of land to put warehouses upon, although there is currently a scarcity of people willing to spend money to deveop industrial land, and a lack of willingness for Cities to provide appropriate industrial zoning within their land base.
Which brings us to the Port, an organization that is exploting these issues, and is rapidly getting out of the business of taking things off of and putting things on to boats. If farmland (which is commonly located right next to the River) is sacrificed for that, they may have an argument for balancing out industry and farming. Frankly, if the current buzz-word “Food Security” is our primary concern, it is no worse than Golf Courses or cranberry bogs, or even the 100-acre greenhouses being built on ALR farmland today:

140 Acres of our best Reserved Agricutural Land in Delta

Except that the port isn’t using our prime farm land to take things on and off of boats. They are using it to take things on and off of trucks, something they can do on any land, really. No need to use ALR land. The only reason they choose to do this on ALR land is because they can buy ALR land at a fraction of the cost of non-ALR land. Since they are able to remove it from the ALR with federal fiat, they can convert it to valuable lease space for warehouses, instead of buying expensive commercial- or industrial-zoned land that municipalities have set aside for just that purpose.

This is because the Port is no longer in the business of taking things on and off of boats, they are now a real estate development and lease business. How else can one justify the purchase of more farm land in Richmond? Look at the port land adjacent to their recent purchase in Richmond:

click to zoom it. or go to Google Earth yourself

All those warehouses (actually there are more now, this photo is a little old), a new highway overpass to connect this land to the East-West Connector, and only one thing is missing: Docks. There is a single berth there for ships, where a single business moves wood pulp onto barges from the rails. Every other business there is truck-oriented, with only a couple even having rail spurs. This is the Port Authority business plan for ALR land. Buy cheap, develop, lease for cheaper than anyone else can. That’s the free market, I guess.

So what? Notice how much of the talk about the traffic issues in New Westminster are around “goods movement”. The issue always comes up of trucks crowding our roads, or our livability being eroded by the noise and pollution of all this container traffic on our roads. When people wonder why we aren’t using the river or the rails more, why there are all these trucks on the road. They aren’t bringing laves of bread to Safeway, they are shuffling goods from the actual Port to “Port Facilities” like these, and to the vast warehouse ghettos of places like Port Mann, Port Kells, and Port Coquitlam – all locations of huge truck warehouses, and all lacking in actual Port facilities to move things on an off of boats (with the occasional exception of logs and woodchips).

How will we ever make use of the goods movement opportunities of the River, when it is against the business interests of the Port Authority – the only agency with any jurisdiction over the waterfront?

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Review – Part 6 – Fit the last.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 4 Comments.

As diligent readers are aware (Hi Mom!), I have been ploughing my way through Dr. Patrick Moore’s dissertation on “Sensible Environmentalism”. What started as a review turned into a lengthy criticism. This is the last fit of a 6-part essay, and it is worth reading it all if you want to learn about how Patrick Moore and his Greenwashing company use misinformation, self-contradiction, and frankly absurd ideas to market everything from coal mining to salmon farming as “Green Industries” You can follow these links:

Although this book is full of ideas with which I disagree, and many ideas that are just flat wrong, I always suspected Dr. Moore at the least came by his ideas honestly, or for the most pragmatic reasons. His debatable ideas on clear-cut logging (the best thing one can do for a forest!) and fish farming (the only way we could possibly save the native salmon!) likely rise form his history working as a logger and a farmer of fish. His call to end government subsidies for wind and solar, while at the same time making the use of ground-source heat pumps mandatory, may have to do with his promotion to Vice President of NextEnergy: “the Canadian leader in designing and marketing geothermal systems for the home!”

Or maybe those are coincidences.

However, in his discussion of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), Dr. Moore not only loses his remaining credibility, but loses any claim to being science-minded, skeptical, sensible, or an environmentalist. Coming from someone with the intelligence, training in science, and access to information that Dr. Moore is alleged to have, his arguments are so poorly thought-out, so anti-science, and so ill-informed, that it can only be the result of a disingenuous and callow disregard for the truth, and for the intelligence of his readers. I am going to waste a lot of words discussing this part of the book, because it is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the current public discourse on AGW.

To get there, we have to first take a step back and talk about Duane Gish. Dr. Gish is a Young-Earth Creationist who met with some small fame holding public debates against scientists on the topic of Evolution. Dr. Gish brought to these his opinion that the Bible is literally true and that the Universe was created in a single 6-day fit about 8,000 years ago, in exactly the order that is written in Genesis. Clearly, this is a preposterous position to debate against a serious scientist with academic expertise in genetics, geology, astronomy, or, for that matter, physics or chemistry. That did not stop Dr. Gish. Paradoxically, audiences would quite often leave the debates feeling Dr. Gish had “won”. This is because he used a rhetorical technique that he wielded with such might and power that it now bears his name.

The Gish Gallop is a debating technique where one uses their allotted time to throw out such a large number of disconnected, unsupported, misrepresented or simply untrue “facts” that the opponent can only hope to refute one or two of them in their rebuttal time. After rebuttal, the Galloper ignores the countering points made by their learned opponent, and just throws out a new random pile of other points, or even the same ones slightly re-phrased, until the opponent is left to throw up their arms in frustration. It is less the shotgun technique than the M61 Vulcan technique.

The point is: for the Galloper, it is not important that you support any of your allegations with truth or data, or even if several of your allegations contradict one another – just keep shooting out stuff and let the poor bastard on the other side try to refute it all. To a general audience, one guy sounds like he has all the facts, the other guy can hardly refute any of them, so guess who wins? The Gish Gallop is well known by Creationist “debaters”, and has been adopted very successfully by people like Lord Monckton when discussing AGW. In skilled hands, it is an effective debating tool. It is also the mark of someone who knows that few of their actual arguments will stand to scrutiny on their own, so in that sense, it is the epitome of being disingenuous.

When I read Dr. Moore’s discussion of AGW, I couldn’t help but see Gish Gallop all over it. He, in turns, argues that it isn’t getting warmer, that warmer is better, that climate scientists lie, that scientists are incompetent, that most scientists don’t believe in AGW, that CO2 cannot cause warming, that the warming caused by CO2 is good for plants, that the ocean is not acidifying, that ocean acidification is good for corals, that human action can’t possibly impact the climate, that human activity might have prevented an ice age, that AGW will lead to more species, that sea level is not rising, that sea level rise is a good thing, that ice is not shrinking, that ice shrinking is a good thing…etc. etc. It is painful to read, mostly because it seems that Dr. Moore forgot that Gish Galloping does not work if those you are debating against have infinite time to refute each point one at a time.

Now I cannot hope to address each of his points here. Even given infinite time and near-infinite bandwidth, my patience to stupidity is not infinite, nor should yours be. So I am going skim the cream off the top of his Gallop, and allow you to find out for yourself if there are any curds below.

Dr. Moore’s discussion of AGW starts by suggesting there is no scientific consensus on AGW. This argument can be summed up into three Logical Fallacies: Argument from Incredulity, Argument from Authority, and Argument from Popularity.

The first argument is basically this:

“The subject of climate change… is perhaps the most complex scientific issue we have ever attempted to resolve. Hundreds, possibly thousands of factors influence the earth’s climate, many in ways we do not fully understand” pg. 330

This is a rather uncompelling argument. I hardly think measuring the basic energy flows of the earth’s atmosphere is all that more complex that, oh, I don’t know, tracking speed-of light particles with half-lives measured in the picoseconds at the Large Hadron Collider or unravelling the 3 billion base pairs in the Human Genome Project. Yeah, complicated, but hardly insurmountable, and with numerous lines of evidence from dozens of different disciplines pointing to the same conclusion, and a well-understood causation train, it is not really that big a scientific leap to conclude that increased CO2 output results in higher atmospheric CO2, which results in a stronger Greenhouse effect.

Argument two sounds like this:

“A comprehensive scientific critique of the IPCC’s findings… was signed by more than 31,000 American scientists and concluded, ‘there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of…greenhouse gasses is causing or will cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere’. Clearly there is no overwhelming consensus among scientists on the subject of climate.” Pg 332

The 31,000+ name petition of which he writes is none other than the one generated by the venerable climate research foundation the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. You need to follow that link to see what they are about, seriously, take a look. It is telling that Dr. Moore talks about their work, and provides lots of references to them in this chapter (more on that later), but he clearly recognized that linking to this source would not improve his credibility. This is what I mean by being disingenuous.

I know, that is a bit of an ad hominem (although, ad hominem is actually a valid rebuttal to Argument from Authority), so lets take a closer look at the 31,000 scientists. You can see from the Petition Project Site that, of the 31,000, exactly 39 self-declared as Climate Scientists. This in comparison to the 2,000+ Climate Scientists who took part in the IPCC Working Group that the Petition Project was a response to. Sounds like something close to a consensus there. What of the other 30,961 scientists? A random mix of biologists, geologists, computer scientists, chemists, engineers and medical doctors. Yes, more than 13,000 were trained in medicine or engineering (I know my podiatrist has strong feelings about Climate Change, but does his M.D. really represent authority on the subject?) The only selection criteria for this Petition Project is that you had to get at least a B.Sc. in some physical science field, or medicine, or engineering. To put that in perspective, there are, according to recent counts, at least 10 Million Americans who have received their B.Sc. in an applicable discipline since 1970. So the 31,000 represent about 0.3% of “American Scientists” the way the petition itself defines them. I dunno, 99.7% sounds pretty close to a consensus to me.

As an aside, they seem to put a lot of emphasis on the scientific credibility of TV weather forecasters. I rest my case.

Ultimately, the Petition Project is a marketing exercise, not a scientific survey. It was a voluntary on-line sign-up, with no vetting of actual credentials. Luckily, a scientific analysis has been done, judging the opinions of climate scientists, other scientists, and the general public. It seems the consensus decreases the less people actually know about the climate and about science. Likely the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Which brings us to Argument #3.

This third argument is a general discussion of how the general public doesn’t believe in AGW. He quotes a bunch of public opinion polls indicating the “man on the street” does not believe in AGW. Or even that people don’t believe that other people believe in AGW, like that is relevant to the scientific certainty of the issue:

“ a poll taken by Ipsos Mori found 60 percent of Britons believed ‘many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing the climate change’. Clearly a majority of the British public does not believe there is a scientific certainty on the subject”. Pg 334.

Now, I hate to sound like a weedy academic elitist, but polling public opinion about the opinions of researchers is not really the best way to find scientific truth.

Do I really need to say that to a guy with a PhD?

Again, for perspective only, I can list things that a majority of Americans think, according to polls similar to the ones Dr. Moore cites, and you can decide if these are, therefore, scientific facts:
80% believe in the literal existence of angels;
78% believe Evolution by Natural Selection is false;
60% believe that Noahs Flood actually happened.
So much for the wisdom of the majority.

Soon after this, Dr. Moore’s honesty takes another dive. There is a bit of intellectual dishonesty that people often engage in, on both sides of this discussion: “cherry picking” data. This is a type of scientific fraud where you pick data that supports your theory, but disregard data that does not, without any justification for that dismissal. Aware of this concern, Dr. Moore says:

”I will try not to ‘trick’ the reader by cherry-picking timelines that support a particular bias” pg336

Then, on the bottom of the very same page he engages in this blatant piece of cherry picking:

”Since 1998 there has been no further warming and apparently a slight cooling” pg336

On… the… very… same… page. He also engages in timeline cherry picking in other areas, such as on Page 344, alleging “cooling” between 1940 and 1980 (when there was actually a slight slowing of the continued warming trend), but let’s concentrate on the first cherry pick, as it is very commonly heard in the Anti-AGW noise.

The grain of truth in that pile of bullshit is that 1998 was previously thought to be the year with the highest average temperature ever recorded by surface-based instruments since reliable instrument records began around the turn of the previous century. It is more commonly held now that 2005 and 2010 were both warmer, with the benefit of more robust analysis. The argument about 1998 vs. 2005 vs. 2010 is kind of irrelevant, though, seeing as how the nine of the hottest years recorded have happened in the last 10 years, with 1998 being the one outlier. Plain and simple: the world is getting hotter at a rate unprecedented in our recorded history, or in the proxy record (Tree rings, varves, coral layers, ice cores, etc.). Surface temperature logs are not the only effect that we measure that demonstrates AGW.

The importance of Rate of Change is a topic that Dr. Moore completely ignores. In 15,000 words on AGW, where he often mentions that the temperature has been warmer in the past (ironically putting trust in scientists who make assumptions about the earths temperature millions of years ago, but not trusting them when they suggest that it is warming now…. cognitive dissonance much?), he never mentions that the rate of temperature change is as important as, if not more important than, the actual amount of change.

This is strange, because Dr. Moore spends a bunch of time talking about how easy it will be for the planet’s species (including people) to react to climate change (after denying it exists). The scientific literature has been pretty clear in demonstrating that adaptation to natural epochal shifts in temperature is a normal part of the world’s ecosystems, but it is the century-scale shifts of multiple degrees that will cause most of the negative ecological effects of AGW. There is no way the boreal forests will have time to shift north if the planet’s temperature increases markedly over less than a century, to give a single example.

Dr. Moore even talks about how the planet was warmer 9,000 years ago by almost 3 degrees during the Holocene Thermal Maximum (which he actually lies about, since the HTM was a regional temperature trend driven by the recession of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, not a global trend, and it was only about 1.6 degrees warmer in areas than today.) but not notice that 3 degrees over 9,000 years is a much different thing than 3 degrees over 100 years. I suspect he is being deliberately obtuse here, or he just hasn’t read the science.

Or maybe he figures the researchers who spend their lives studying historic climates don’t know about the HTM, just like he assumes NASA doesn’t know how to locate or read thermometers. This is the basic accusation he makes against NASA and NOAA. On Page 337 he purports that the Urban Heat Island Effect is causing us to observe increasing temperatures due to local effects only (blithely assuming the scientists at GISS and NASA, who I note are able to put a freaking temperature probe into orbit around Jupiter – haven’t thought about this little detail).

Then on Page 345 he accuses NASA of deliberately removing the “colder” thermometers (an accusation of scientific fraud that has no actual data to support it, and nonetheless has been proven false) to lead to a false conclusion about current temperature trends. He is conveniently avoiding mentioning the myriad of other ways we measure the earth’s temperature aside from the surface thermometer record, such as ocean temperature, satellite observations, and dozens of proxy techniques.

With his scientific credibility tied to Ecology, Dr. Moore, should know more about plants than he is letting on. Perhaps this points to his lack of Masters research, and his apparent lack of academic publishing after his PhD (which was a study on mining policy and local tidal effects). So when he states that the measured increase in atmospheric CO2 is good for plants – and uses some ridiculous horticultural greenhouse studies to support his argument – it is hard to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he knows not what he thinks.

Dr. Moore (taking cues from other climate change deniers) takes the argument to the most ridiculous extreme on Page 352, suggesting that if human society and the industrial revolution hadn’t come along to produce all of this CO2, then plants probably would have died out from lack of CO2 (wait, didn’t he, few pages earlier, argue that most of the CO2 increase was natural? Yikes).

While it is true that in a hydroponic greenhouse system where there is an infinite supply of all nutrients available to plants, CO2 (which is not plant “food”, but is more plant “air”, to correct the allegory) may become a limiting factor in growth. In this case, adding more CO2 may hasten the growth rate of plants in that very specific, tightly controlled environment. Of course, this translates nada to the real world outside of greenhouses or basement pot farms. The reason for this, as Dr. Moore surely knows, was well understood in the 1800s, when Liebig developed his Law of the Minimum.

Like most biological ideas form the 1800s, this makes perfect sense to even the uneducated in the subject today. Plants require a suite of nutrients to grow: CO2, water, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, etc. Liebig demonstrated, using fertilizers, that their growth is limited by one “limiting nutrient”. That nutrient in nature is usually either water or nitrogen (or, more specifically, the ability of soil bacteria to fix nitrogen). This makes sense to animals too, if you are deprived of water and carbohydrates, no amount of oxygen in the world is going to keep you alive for very long. In reality, increasing atmospheric CO2 enough to dramatically raise atmospheric temperatures will have a negligible effect on plant growth rates, and if it did, it would likely dramatically increase demand for nitrogen in the soil – already the limiting factor for most commercial farming. Even this response is likely to be short-lived and have severe negative repercussions. Don’t take my word for it. And certainly don’t take Dr. Moore’s.

Idiotic is the word that comes to mind when Dr. Moore starts talking about sea ice. He ignores all of the data currently available (on the very website he cites!) that demonstrates that Arctic Sea Ice is continuing to decline in mass, not recovering from 2008 levels as he implies on page 359. He takes one graph from the Cryosphere Today, claiming it shows no reduction in sea ice, yet fails to cite this graph from the same page, or this one, or this one from Antarctica. He also falsely claims that

“Our knowledge of the extent of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic began in 1979, the first year satellites were used to photograph the polar regions on a continual basis” Pg 359

This is stunning ignorance. Sea ice was measured by mariners for hundreds of years prior to 1979, and even longer by Inuit. There are also ice cores (which tell us the age of any single piece of sea ice), and dozens of analysis techniques that can be applied to arctic sediments such as varving of sea-floor sediments around arctic deltas, palynology records, arctic flora and fauna growth patterns, and other techniques to trace back the history if ice on both poles. This is another Argument from Personal Astonishment. I don’t know if you noticed, but we know there was ice over Georgia Straight 15,000 years ago, even when we don’t have satellite photos to prove it!

One has to wonder about his ability to do basic journal research when reading his discussion of ocean acidification. On pages 361-362, after quoting a paper by Orr et al that states “Between 1751 and 1994 surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.179 to 8.104 (a change of -0.075)”, Dr. Moore replies writing:

”One has to wonder how the pH of the ocean was measured to an accuracy of three decimal places in 1751 when the concept of pH was not introduced until 1909”

Well, one does not have to wonder, because one actually cited the actual freaking scientific paper! All one has to do is read the paper one cited. If one does that, though, one finds the paper cited by Dr. Moore contains no such quote! The quote seems to have been lifted from the esteemed scientific journal Wikipedia, as it appears in the introductory paragraph on the Wikipedia entry on “Ocean Acidification” , although with less precise numbers (which further erodes part of Dr. Moore’s original whinge, doesn’t it?)

Clearly, Dr. Moore didn’t even bother to read the papers he mis-quotes, nor did he bother to read the papers that Wikipedia cited as the source of the quote, because that paper from JGR explains that ocean-atmospheric gas exchange can be very accurately determined if you know the chemistry of the ocean and atmosphere, and a bit about temperatures (all of which can be currently measured from proxies, such as sediment cores, carbon and oxygen isotopes, and coral ring growth). Just because pH hadn’t been discovered, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. Gravity existed before Newton, you nitwit.

Can we all agree that the days if citing Wikipedia in any discussion about anything other than Wikipedia is irrelevant? It is the internet equivalent of citing the Encyclopaedia Britannica while writing our grade 9 reports on Argentina – the teacher didn’t like it then, and they wouldn’t accept it now. But Dr. Moore cites Wikipedia no less than 12 times during his discussion of AGW.

This crappy citation rigour is, unfortunately, a trend continued during Dr. Moore’s brief Gish Gallop on pages 345-346 to how scientists used to predict a new ice age was coming, providing two excellent references: Spiked Online and something called ZombieBlog. I wonder if their scientists signed the petition.

Yet another argument from Dr. Moores’ personal incredulity is to question if the increases in atmospheric CO2 are actually man made, or just a natural trend; after all, CO2 has been higher in the past.

“Many scientists assume that human emissions of CO2 from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of this [observed] increase [in atmospheric CO2 since 1958]. Some scientists question this assumption.” Pg 336.

This is such an important point of contention, he raises the question rhetorically a few pages later:

”Is CO2, the main cause of global warming, either natural or human-caused?” pg 338

Except this is not an assumption made by scientists, nor is it a rhetorical question, it is an observable phenomenon. Atmospheric scientists can differentiate CO2 from natural and anthropogenic sources, using carbon isotopes . It is pretty clear from isotope analysis that the observed increases in atmospheric CO2 during the 20th century are dominated by fossil fuel burning. If  “some scientists question this assumption”, they need to come up with some data to support their point. They haven’t.

There are other topics of scientific illiteracy in this book, but at some point they are coming on so fast and so erratically, that response would be futile. Pure Gish Gallop Gold. Dr. Moore’s profound lack of understanding hydrology leads him to opine that glaciers don’t do anyone any good (Pg357). He suggests a warmer world is better because… wait for it… people like warm weather and can freeze to death when it isn’t warm enough (Pg340). Since wetlands are so good for migratory birds, what’s the problem with rising Sea Levels (pg366)? After a while, throwing this terrible book against the wall was causing me repetitive strain disorders.

Speaking of repetitive strain, Dr. Moore also jumps into “Climategate”. The book first makes a passing reference to this alleged scandal early in his discussion of AGW:

“in November 2009…thousands of emails, leaked or hacked from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the U.K. shocked the climate change community. These revelations were quickly dubbed ‘Climategate’” p337

After a paragraph introducing the topic, Dr. Moore Gish Gallops off to talk about the Copenhagen Conference, causation vs. correlation, polar bears, climate changes over time, etc. for 7 pages, before mentioning “Climategate” again in another stand-alone paragraph

“…the revelations of ‘Climategate’ in November 2009 … clearly showed that many of the most influential climate scientists associated with the IPCC have been manipulating data…”pg 344

There is another drive-by mention a page later, where he at least mentions there were inquiries in to the “scandal” (but fails to mention the scientists were exonerated in all inquiries, and many newspapers were forced to retract their stories previously written about the “scandal”. After no less than 22 pages of random garble on a variety of unrelated topics, Dr. Moore once again raises the topic of “Climategate”, in perfect Gish Gallop technique: if you mention it enough, the words will stick, even if you don’t make a convincing case.

It is actually this fourth mention of “Climategate”, 368 pages into his 390 page book, where Dr. Moore cements the case that he was not interested in the truth. He actually repeats the basest accusations of “Climategate”, the ones that forced reputable newspapers and media outlets to retract the story once they were found to be false. He dismisses the three separate independent inquiries in to the scandal that exonerated the scientists as “whitewashes”. He very clearly did not read the “damning” emails in context, nor did he read the results of the inquiries into the scandal. The only newspaper he cites is the Telegraph of UK, the only one not to retract its “Climategate” reporting.

He also accuses the journals Science and Nature as having “a marked bias in support of human-caused climate change”. It is apparent he is talking about the magazines, but he may as well say the same thing about actual nature (which keeps reacting predictably to a warming planet) and actual science (which keeps finding more evidence of AGW).

Sorry, Dr. Moore. No “Sensible Environmentalist” can continue to ignore both science and nature, and maintain their credibility.

My final review? Don’t read this book. It will make you dumber.

On Pipelines, Parks, and Rhetoric

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I could start this post apologizing for not writing more recently, but things are pretty crazy busy and… well.. most of my recent posts have been of the “haven’t written much lately” genre, so just read one of those if you come here for lame excuses.

I did stay up last night to see Stephen Harper talk to Peter Mansbridge. The take-away quote for me came when the Prime Minister suggested :

“But just because certain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park for the northern half of North America, I don’t think that’s part of what our review process is all about.”

First off, for those interested in the he art of rhetoric, this is a textbook example of a “Strawman Fallacy”. This is when you re-phrase your opponent’s argument using a deliberately extreme caricature of it. You then argue not against your opponent’s actual position, but against the extreme caricature of your own creation. The name comes from the idea of building up an effigy of your opponent, but make it of straw so that it is easy for you to defeat.

Like most logically fallacies, it is pulled out when you cannot refute your opponents’ actual position. Really, the only way it works is if his opponent falls for it, and tries to defend the Strawman position without realizing that it is an exaggerated version of their position.

So, just to prove it is a crappy Strawman, I’m going to do exactly that.

The Northern Gateway Pipeline has benefits to BC, no doubt. According to the Astroturf organization the Northern Gateway Alliance , these benefits can be counted as 3000 short-term jobs, 500 long-term jobs, and $1.2Billion in tax revenue over 30 years (that is $40Million a year). That is pretty impressive.

However, compare that to the benefits Alberta receives from its National Parks. According to the Albera government, just Alberta’s Rocky Mountain National parks provide almost 20,000 fulltime jobs (40x that of the Northern Gateway), $1.14 Billion in annual revenue, and $398 Million in government revenue every year (more than 10x the Northern Gateway).

I’m with Steve! It’s a no-brainer. Lets us stop the Northern Gateway Pipeline and open the Northern Gateway National Park. Have you seen that part of the Province? it is spectacular! One Peter Jackson movie, and we’re in gravy!

Even if it only sees 10% of the visitors of Banff, we will still be way ahead economically, and we don’t have to worry about the long-term environmental impacts, the oil tankers, the GHG emissions, or anything. Best thing is that this is sustainable in the long run, and it wouldn’t require us slowing down on Bituminous Sands extraction at all, as there are already plenty of places to ship the stuff. Or maybe we can start refining it domestically and see some value added, but I am digressing here…

OF course, I am being facetious (a little bit), but really, this just puts the lie to the biggest logical fallacy that is made by Stephen Harper here, and by his entire “you are with us, or you are radicals” crowd: the false dichotomy they create between environmental protection and economic development. I’m not just saying that both can exist simultaneously, I’m saying that they had better exist simultaneously.

Otherwise, what future do we have?

With Enbridge, or Against Us?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 7 Comments.

The Environmental Assessment for the Northern Gateway pipeline project has started its public consultation stage. As is typical, the Harper Government has used this potentially-divisive event not to demonstrate leadership, but instead to draw sharp the divisions, and to demonstrate it doesn’t respect due process or the laws of the nation.

It started a few days ago when Steve declared that he was going to make sure radical groups with foreign funding don’t “hijack” the process. Now Steve may have his faults, but using language loosely is not one of them. Every message sent out by the PMO is carefully crafted to frame the discussion. Therefore, his choice to use the language of the War on Terror (“radical”,”foreign”,”hijack”) is designed to intentionally draw anyone who values environmental sustainability over the profits of Multi-national Oil Companies as non-Canadian, and not to be trusted. You are with Enbridge or you are against us.

Then he sent one of his less familiar minions, Joe Oliver, to sign a highly inappropriate and inflammatory “open letter”. The inflammatory part is obvious (read “radical ideological agenda”,”foreign special interest groups”, “radical groups”), but the inappropriate part comes from what he does for a living. As the Minister of Natural Resources and a member of the Conservative Cabinet, he is one of the people who will need to review and eventually approve or reject, this project: a job best done, in my humble opinion, after the data-gathering and the public hearings, and after the Joint Review Panel makes a recommendation. Actually it’s not just my opinion, it is the Law.

Given the nature of the open letter, how could anyone conclude the Joint Review Panel is anything but a sham process, when it is clear that the Federal Government as already made up its mind. You are with them, or you are against Enbridge.

Once again, Elizabeth May is the only one in Parliament standing up and speaking truth to power.

I keep on jumping on and off the Elizabeth May bandwagon, but with this open letter and her frighteningly frank comments coming out of Durban, I can see myself enjoying my current bandwagon seat for quite some time. I know many members of our Loyal Opposition feel the same way on this topic as May, but the realities of a large party system probably limit their ability to speak as clearly and truthfully as She does in response to John Oliver. Why, oh suffering Canadian Media, do we give Kevin O’Leary more air time than Elizabeth May? looking for inspiration in the vacuum left by Jack Layton? Read her blog. I digress…

Since he raised the spectre of “foreign special interest groups”, I might just agree with the concern expressed by Minister Oliver, except that all of those pejorative terms are so poorly defined. What is a “special interest group?”

Looking at the Joint Review Panel documents, one can actually see who is planning to hijack this process.

“Interveners” are interested stakeholders who are able to present written or oral evidence to the Panel, and to ask questions of other Interveners when they are presenting evidence. In essence, if you want to “hijack” the process, being an Intervener is the way to do it.

The Joint Review Panel lists 216 registered Interveners. Of those, 91 are private citizens, almost all from the northwest of British Columbia, or those most directly affected by both the positive and negative impacts of the proposed pipeline. There is really no way to know which of those are “for” and which are “against”, or which are just kind of curious. I suspect this group also includes small business owners who may have a vested interest one way or the other, or even journalists, bloggers, and local politico types who just want to take part in the conversation.

The Interveners list includes one labour union that has already expressed opposition to he project, and two academic institutes associated with Universities, who may be presenting evidence, or may just be interested in collecting data for research purposes.

Twelve of the Interveners are governments: BC, Saskatchewan, and a whole bunch of Municipalities. Except that, as Elizabeth May was quick to point out, the First Nations are also effectively governments, and there are no less than 48 First Nations groups listed as Interveners. I wonder if Minister Oliver suspects these as the source of “Foreign interference”?

If not, that leaves us with two more groups: Non-Profits (34) and Corporations and businesses (28). The first group is pretty diverse, including everyone from the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation and the Douglas Channel Watch (whom I think we can safely say are opposed to the project) to oil-industry funded lobby groups like the Oil Sands Developers Group Association, the In Site Oil Sands Alliance, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, whom we can be equally assured are in favour of the project. I will leave it to you to determine which Non-Profits are more likely to be well funded from abroad, and which are more likely to have the local community’s interests in mind.

Which leaves us with 28 Corporations and businesses. I am not going to presume that all of them are in favour of the pipeline, but seeing as they fall into two main categories: Oil Companies, and companies that contract to Oil Companies, I think the vast majority see oil pipelines as a good thing. Since Minister Oliver seemed specifically incensed by the untoward influence of foreign money, I am going to pass on calling out any Canadian companies (hey, they are Canadian, and Corporations are People too… give ‘em the voice!), and instead call attention to a few of the standouts:

ExxonMobil (Irving, Texas, annual revenue $383 Billion), and their subsidiary Imperial Oil, are listed as two separate Interveners.
BritishPetroleum (London, UK, annual revenue $309 Billion);
Total E&P (Courbevois, France, annual revenue $203 Billion);
ConocoPhillips (Houston, Texas, annual revenue $198 Billion);
Sinopec (China, annual revenue $197 Billion) as “SinoCanada Petroleum”;
Koch Industries (Wichita, Kansas, annual revenue $100 Billion) as “Flint Hills Resources”;
Inpex (Tokyo, Japan, annual revenue $16 Billion);
Daewoo International (Seoul, South Korea, annual revenue $13 Billion);
Kinder Morgan (Houston, Texas, annual revenues $12 Billion)
Japex (Tokyo, Japan, annual revenue $2.6 Billion) as “Japan Canada Oil Sands”;

So Severn Cullis-Suzuki and the Fort St. James Sustainability Group are going up against an organized group of foreign-owned companies with $1.4 Trillion (with a ”T”) in combined revenue, and our Prime Minister is more concerned about where the Environmental Groups money is coming from? Surely, this is parody.

As an aside, this morning on the radio business news, I hear Chris Carter stating that the high gasoline prices we are seeing now are only partially caused by high crude prices. The biggest reason for high and fluctuating prices is a chronic lack of refining capacity in North America leading to difficult-to-manage inventories.

This is something to talk about. Why are we spending billions setting up systems to export raw crude, when we could use the money to build the needed refining capacity? This would provide way more jobs, would increase the “value added” we receive from the Bituminous Sands, and could potentially lead to more stable fuel prices for Canadian businesses.

The question is, of course, rhetorical. Lower and more stable fuel prices, producing jobs in a relatively expensive labour market, increasing domestic value form Canada’s natural resources: none of these serve the purposes of the real decision makers in Ottawa, the Multi-national Oil Companies with offices in Calgary.

Starting 2012 Off-line

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.
As has become custom, I have been using the year-end holiday season to recharge my batteries, chill out, relax, etc. This means a lot of reading, a lot of new learning, and very little writing. Along with the increasingly-frustrating ravings of Dr. Moore, I have been reading Master Transportation Plans, found a couple of interesting new on-line sources of better science around environmental issues, and have even been reading a bit of fiction: a rare luxury for me. So I have not been writing much.

However, once again, the News Leader asked me to contribute to the year-ending Looking Back / Looking Forward feature, on the topic of local environmental issues. I can’t help but feel 2011 was a good year locally for the environment, just as giant steps backwards were taken nationally and internationally. 

I’m not one prone to New Years Resolutions – my life is full enough of half-realized aspirations – but I do have some plans for 2012. Obviously, the Master Transportation Plan and Pattullo Bridge public consultations will be meaningful and interesting. There are a couple of big captial projects at the Royal City Curling Club that have been on the back burner too long, and I will relish being the “Past President” of the NWEP, seeing what exciting new directions the group takes under the refreshed Board and crazy-smart and outspoken new President. I also need to take a little more analytical approach to my gardening, the shotgun approach is getting frustrating. Oh, and finish the basement renos, and ride my bike more, and replace the back fence, and spend more time on Saturna, and stop using the car to commute so often, and get a day of curling practice in every week to work on my draw weight,  and… what was I saying about half-realized aspirations?

The Premier Year

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.
I keep on saying I am generally non-partisan. I say that, because in 20+ years of voting, I have probably voted for most parties at least once. Maybe instead of saying non-partisan, I should say ” omni-partisan”. In the same way most omnivores will eat vegetables, meat, fruit, whatever, I am more than willing to taste any candidate, and see if I like them. 
I have very partisan friends who will always support their particular party of choice, often the same one their parents supported, and much like some vegans, they are doing so out of principle, not a real understanding of what it means or what the other food groups might have to offer. That is one way to go through your political life (or your dinner… is this metaphor getting a little thread-bare?), but I just don’t know what those people do when their party does something really stupid (like make Glen Clarke leader) or offers them a less-than-appetizing candidate (like Bill Vander Zalm). 
All of this is preamble to me saying I think Christy Clark is, so far, a terrible Premier. This is not a partisan attack, it is a judgement on her ability based on watching her operate for the last year. 
The latest example is a 5-minute YouTube video she has released, like an early Christmas gift to Adrian Dix and Grandpa Cummins, and embedded here for your viewing pleasure:

First off, it is billed as a “Conversation”, but much like this Government’s conversations on everything from the HST to the Gateway Project, this is really her telling us what she has to say (with quick edits between talking points). At least it is a source of some mild amusement. 
My first chuckle was at 0:27, when she started on about building public trust. I’m not sure paying hush money court costs to convicted felons builds a lot of trust. Especially when they seem to have taken the fall so the Premier can avoid testifying about her knowledge and the role of her brother in one of the largest cases of defrauding the Taxpayers ever perpetrated in this Province. Building public trust would be holding an independent investigation of the Basi and Virk cases, and to have the results of that investigation released to the public. 
The hilarity ensues at 0:45 when she proclaims a Municipal Auditor will assure the people of British Columbia are getting good value for their Municipal Tax dollar. This from the leader of the Government whose own Auditor last month called the accounting of the Gateway Project unsupportable, and has repeated chastised this very Government for not following appropriate accounting principles in their management of everything from BC Hydro to Provincial Corrections… Only to be ignored by this very Premier?

1:20 Here comes the Jobs Plan. Love that jobs plan. Equal parts selling off University eats to the highest overseas bidder (instead of making it easier for British Columbians to get the education they need to compete in the 21st Century global economy), and “cutting red tape” for mining companies, so we can compete with Chile and China on the global race to the bottom of mining environmental practices. 

2:00 sticking to our fiscal plan (hmmm…. How’s that deficit, Christy?) will somehow… Magically….create jobs. Kind of the Underpants Gnome model of fiscal planning. 

2:16 Small business is not the biggest employer in British Columbia. Christy Clark should know, because she is. The BC Public Service is the largest employer in the province by far. 

2:33 “when I talk about families…um…I think people get it”. Did that make anyone else cringe?

2:44 Random mom & baby shot? Oh! Now I get it! families! She sure looks understandin’ there. 

3:07 Nicotine cessation!?! Now I don’t get it anymore…

3:11 “We dealt with the HST, for example…” You have got to be kidding! The people of the province dealt with the HST! You lied about it, broke your leadership campaign promises about it, lost the referendum, and now are both dragging your feet getting rid of it, and using it as the catch-all excuse for your lack of financial prudence.  When it comes to the HST, you were the one that got dealt. 

3:54 Those tough challenges have “brought people together”? Like Barry Penner, and Iain Black? Or more like the 30% of BC voters who still support the Liberal Government? 

I’ve said it before, the Lady just lacks gravitas. She is so heavy on the aw-shucks folksy (note the paucity of the letter “g” at the end of words: she is “workin’ at”, “talkin’ to”, and “tryin’ to”) that it belies her corporate collar and big-ass pearls. Pressing your fingers together in front of you to emphasize vapid platitudes does not make them into kernels of great wisdom. 

But mostly, she says nothing. She is good at listing concerns, but where is her plan? Where is the Water Act update, delayed for three years now? Where is the plan to fix the governance of BC Hydro, TransLink, and BC Ferries? Where is your energy plan? How about the ongoing dispute with Teachers? Where are you, Ms. Clark, on anything that matters?

If you were really listening to British Columbians, you would be doing what the majority want right now: calling an election.