Tag: Thinking globally

Fishy Fishing with the Fisheries Act

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

You know, I have been railing against the Harper Government for so long that it is even boring for me. I was one of those people after the last election thinking: well, how bad could their majority really be? Sure, he will continue to harm the economy by throwing more eggs in the Oil basket, and cutting taxes on the wealthy to create false crises as an excuse for future gutting of social programs, but he is a cagey politician and pretty shrewd, so he won’t go too far, lest Canadians get itchy and dispatch him next election. Maybe in the meantime, he will actually bring on some promised Senate or electoral reform or cut those MP Pensions. Remember Steve, your Reform Party mantra? that could be helpful in the long-term. I mean, it is only 4 years. How much harm can he do?

Then this story comes along.

To the uninformed, this seems rather innocuous to remove “habitat language” from the Federal Fisheries Act. To people who work in the Environment field, this is a huge thing.

Simply put, the Fisheries Act is the strongest piece of environmental legislation we have in Canada. It overrides all Provincial and Municipal legislation, it is so powerful that even the railways have to follow it – yes, even the Railways! It serves as the primary protection of fresh and marine water quality and aquatic habitat in the Country. From filling ditches in Queensborough to building the Site C Dam, the Fisheries Act is involved. The potential replacement of the Pattullo Bridge, and even the spill response measures for maintaining the bridge, invokes the Fisheries Act. Don’t take me word for it, ask any Envrionmental Professional you know – P.Geo., P.Eng., R.P.Bio, ask then what Canadas most important Environmental Legislation is, 80% will say “Fisheries Act”. (Most of the other 20% will say Species at Risk Act, until you suggest the Fisheries Act, then they will correct themselves. Go shead, try it. If I’m lying, I’ll buy you a pint.)

Because of the Fisheries Act, there are two terms that are ubiquitous in environmental protection in Canada: “deleterious substance” and “HADD”.

The first is what I deal with primarily. According to Section 36(3) of the Fisheries Act, no-one can deposit or allow to be deposited any “deleterious substance” into waters frequented by fish or in any place where the substance may enter water frequented by fish. As for what constitutes a “deleterious substance”, that relies on a pile of guidelines, standards, and reports backed by a huge pile or scientific research on different materials. I deal with this section of the Fisheries Act every day of my working life.

The second part is clearly an acronym: Harmful Alteration, Disruption, or Destruction. Section 35(1) of the Fisheries Act says:

No person shall carry on any work or undertaking that results in the harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat.

Basically, everything you do in or near an open watercourse that has fish in it, you need to be mindful that there may be fish present, and not harm the environment in a way that harms fish. This provided defacto protection to aquatic birds, invertebrates, amphibians and countless important plant species, while providing an extra level of protection to the quality of the water in our lakes, rivers, and oceans.

You know, that foundations of the ecosystem stuff.

Section 35(2) says that the Minister (or a Governor in Council under any other Act) may grant approval for a HADD. So even this hard and fast rule is really nothing more than an “irritant” for most. It doesn’t stop oil and gas or pipeline development (at least it never has up to now). In essence, every bridge is a HADD, but you don’t see us not building bridges. However, if your works create a HADD you must compensate for that lost habitat, and that almost always means by improving the quality of some nearby adjacent habitat so there is “no net loss” of habitat.

You want to build a ferry slip on this 20m of pristine foreshore? Then spend some money restoring that 20m of hardscape shore over there, and we’ll call it even. Want to put a span bridge across this ditch? Then do a little invasive species management in the riparian area beside the bridge and there will be no net loss. All very reasonable: do your business while protecting habitat. Win-win. These terms are negotiable, and are negotiated every day across the country by fish protection officers. Fish habitat compensation is rarely a significant portion of the capitol cost of a development. If it is, then there is usually a problem with development that needs to be fixed (see Prosperity Mine example).

Of all legislation to protect the environment in Canada, this one is the most straight-forward, the most protective, the most firmly established, and the easiest to understand. Like few things in Government (especially around the environment file), it works! Every Environmental Scientist working in Canada, and most Professional Geoscientists and Engineers who work in or near water, know the words “deleterious substance” and “HADD” and know how to apply them, they have been the law of the land for something like 30 years. Why change it? Is no net loss too much to ask for the Billions of dollars that oil sands development are exporting every year? And why fillet the most important peice of Envrionmental Legislation in the country as part of an Omnibus Budget Bill? How cynical do you have to be to catch these guys?

This laws is so fundamental that most Provincial and Municipal regulation protecting the local environment are designed to specifically dovetail with it, as are Acts regulating farming, forestry, marine navigation, Environmental Assessment… Changing the Fisheries Act language on Habitat may throw all of this other legislation into chaos.

And it may spell the end to our already threatened natural salmon stocks.

…would distract from those “fishy” phonecalls, though.

Elizabeth May tweeted from the House of Commons (at 2:43PDT this afternoon) that rumours have this coming from the PMO, not DFO. That seems obvious, because no-one with a passing knowledge of Fisheries legislation or fisheries science would suggest such a ridiculous change. This is dumb, irresponsible, thick-headed, a really, really bad thing. I have to admit, I never imagined they would do this much harm. I still don’t.

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.

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.

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Part 4: Moore and Nukes

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I opened up my analogue version of the Walrus and on page 28, there is “Patrick Moore, Ph.D, Environmentalist and Greenpeace Co-Founder” staring back at me from a glossy full-page ad extolling the environmental responsibility of the Alberta tar sands. His most recent shill for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers got me thinking it has been a while since I picked up his book. My seemingly endless review continues.

After much of the history and basic philosophy is dispatched, Moore’s book becomes a rather disjointed discussion of various environmental topics, and his “sensible environmentalist” approach to these issues.

His discussion of Energy starts with a rather nonsensical statement:

Motion requires energy, so without energy, time would stand still. (pg. 204)

Which reminds me of the Calvin & Hobbes comic where Calvin thought time had stopped, but it turned out his watch battery had died, but I digress.

His rather lengthy dismissal of most sustainable energy sources can be summarized into a few points: they are untested, unreliable and would require huge government subsidies to compete with what we have.

In many ways these very expensive technologies [wind and solar energy] are destroying wealth as they drain public and private investment away from more affordable and reliable energy-generating systems. (pg. 221)

I’m not sure how putting money into sustainable infrastructure constitutes “destroying wealth”, in fact I’m not even sure what “destroying wealth” means. He mixes this with even sillier arguments: solar panels are made of aluminum, and that takes energy to produce! How sustainable is that?

This is mostly preamble to his long argument about the wonders of Nuclear Power. Before I get too deep into it, I need to point out that I am not a reflexively “anti-nuclear” environmentalist. I think nuclear energy probably has a role in responsible energy policy, if it can be done safely with appropriate accounting for its waste streams. Those are, admittedly, very big “if”s.

I remember my first experiences writing reports and proposals in my life as a Consultant working for a major engineering firm. After interpreting some data, I wrote something along the lines of “the source of pollutant X cannot be determined”. My boss chuckled when reviewing it, and said “in Engineering, we never tell the client something cannot be done. It can always be done. We just need to outline for them the costs related to doing it, and they can decide if it should be done.” I asked what we do if the request really is impossible, and he remarked something along the lines of “impossible just means the technology isn’t there yet. So we budget the cost of developing the required technology”. I came to learn this is how engineers think. Bless them, the sorry bastards they are.

But along those lines, I do believe nuclear energy can be made safe (it is already way safer than getting energy from oil or coal), it is a question of costs and developing the appropriate technology. At this point, we have to decide whether that is a good investment in our money, or if the alternatives make more sense for our investment dollars.

However, this is where Dr. Moore’s argument falls apart. There hasn’t been a new nuclear plant built in the United States in decades, but it isn’t due to no-nukes fear mongering or radiation risks or a lack of political desire as Dr. Moore suggests, but due to something much more banal: economics.

Simply put, Nuclear Plants are too expensive to buildand too expensive to maintain. Currently, there is no business model to produce nuclear power capacity. Without significant government subsidies, like the ones Moore decries for truly sustainable energy alternatives like wind, geothermal and solar, there would be no nuclear industry at all. The people holding nuclear plants back are not environmentalists, they are accountants.

You wouldn’t know this from reading Moore’s book. On page 217, he decries Germany for subsidizing solar energy production to the order of $3 Billion, then, 33 pages later and seemingly unaware of the irony, Moore is extolling President Obama for providing more than $50 Billion in subsidies to Nuclear power industries. I guess you can’t “destroy wealth” by nuking it.

This pales in comparison to his silly arguments around radiation risk. I have written extensively on the poor understanding in the popular media of radiation risk, mostly around the unfounded local concern about impacts of Fukushima. Moore did not have the benefit of writing after Fukushima, but his argument around radiation risk is so Homer Simpsonian in it’s idiocy (and remember, I basically agree with him on Nuclear energy), all I can do is quote it verbatim from page 240:

…fire can be used to Burn down a City and kill Thousands of people. Should we ban fire for cooking and heating? Car bombs are made with fertilizer, diesel oil, and a car. Should we ban those three rather useful things? Guns can be used for hunting and for defending one’s country or for committing genocide?

Unfortunately, his argument for salmon farming is no more nuanced.

On Kyoto – the Accord, not the Block.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

At this point no one is surprised, but somehow, the lack of surprise makes the disappointment stronger. After nine years of avoidance, denial, accusation, obfuscation and stupidity, Canada has finally taken the plunge. We walked away from an international agreement because we want to keep profiteering from our own irresponsibility, but don’t want to pay the toll for doing so. So much for being an honest broker; so much for solemn commitments to our international partners

To all the countries that took serious effortsto deal with greenhouse gasses? Suckers! To those who were exempted from reductions because your per capita output was a minuscule percentage of Canada’s? Get Bent! To those low-lying countries that will become inhabitable due to our insatiable need to burn gas thirst for freedom of choice? Cry me a freaking river. This is Harper’s Canada now, so you can all suck eggs.

But hey! They said it was impossible, because of the Liberals’ lack of action. Let’s not mention that the Kyoto Protocol was ratified in 2002, and Harper took office in 2006. Today is 2011. The goals set out for Kyoto have until 2020 to be met. Yeah, the Liberals were asses for sitting on their hands for four years, but you had one more year than the Liberals did, Harper, and we are still 9 years from 2020. Time to stop blaming them for your failure.

Kent is an embarrassment, but he was sent to Durban to be an embarrassment, so I guess he did his job. He whinged that Canada only produces 2% of the world’s GHG, so countries like China and India need to take the lead. Of course, China and India were signatories in Kyoto, and would now be developing reasonable targets for reductions if the agreement had survived Copenhagen and Durban. Telling the truth was not Kent’s game plan, though. He showed up with a plan to roadblock the whole thing, then took his ball and went home. Blocked the other guys at the party from talking the girl, then broke up with her by text message after he got home. Jerk.

The fact Canada, with 0.5% of the worlds population produces 2% of the GHG isn’t his problem. The fact we are #6 in the world overall in total emmissions though we are the #10 economy in the world is not relevant. That we are in the top 10 per capita emmitters in the world per capita is a non-issue. Somehow, Greenhouse gasses are everyone else’s problem.

Tearing up international agreements and punitively punishing the worlds poorest countries? It isn’t Harper’s fault: it is China’s, or Africa’s, or Obama’s or Chretien’s, or David Suzuki’s for getting us in this mess in the first place. or so I understand from watching Sun News.

Fuck.

This is, without a doubt, the most shameful point in Canada’s formerly-proud history as an international leader in common sense and good governance.

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Review – Part 3

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Sorry to be so slow, but life is really busy right now. We are in the middle of an election campaign, there were some family emergencies, and work has been crazy busy. On top of my evening blogging schedule, I haven’t had a lot of free time to read. Oh, to be bored for a change!

Once we got past some of the painful introductory materials, the book gains some steam as Dr. Moore outlines his storied career as a Greenpeace organizer and campaigner. The short versions is that these guys were “Type-A” with a seemingly complete lack of common sense. They thought nothing of buying an old fish boat, spending a few weeks (or months) patching the holes and getting the motor running, and sailing out in the Pacific Ocean! They dodged weather and ran directly towards trouble with the US Coast Guard, the Soviet Union, the French Navy, and Japanese whaling ships. The rented helicopters and, with a paucity of planning, flew out onto ice floes in the Atlantic to film seal hunters.

At the time, they created in Greenpeace a heroic mythos though very careful collection and distribution of pictures and film. Dr. Moore outlines how co-founder Bob Hunter developed the idea of the “Mindbomb” – that perfect combination of images and words that the media (and the media consumer) could not resist putting on the front page – a phenomenon the New Media calls “going viral”.

In essence, Greenpeace did not sail to Amchitka to stop a nuclear test, they went there to create a Mindbomb that would shift the public conversation so that more people took the idea of banning nuclear testing seriously. They didn’t race around the Russian Whaling Fleet in zodiacs to save any actual whales (in fact their efforts were clearly fruitless), they did it to create the images of a bunch of heroes racing around in big seas challenging the Great Soviet Fleet to get the pictures in the newspaper and bring light to the plight of the world’s cetaceans. Dr. Moore didn’t sit on a baby seal in Labrador to stop it from getting clubbed, he did it to get photographed being arrested for assaulting a seal, when he was the only thing between that cute little bastard getting clubbed and skinned.

I found one interesting link behind all of the campaigns Dr. Moore took part in during those early days of Greenpeace. None of them are really about environmental sustainability as we think about it today. Besides his first trip to Amchitka to call attention to nuclear testing, all of his campaigns were centred around animal rights.

Although the entire anti-whaling campaign was around protecting several species of whales that had been hunted to the brink of extinction, Dr. Moore does not talk at all about this as a sustainability issue (as we talk about shark finning or the Bluefin Tuna fishery today), he talks about the majesty of the beasts, the intelligence of the animals, and the cruelty of hunting them.

“There is no way to kill a whale in a humane manner. Among the tens of whales we witnessed being harpooned over the years, most died slowly, spouting blood and gasping desperately” [pg. 70]

” With two Zodiacs and a rough sea we tried desperately to shield the whales during the next two hours as they were gunned down one after the other. The crew watched from the deck of the James Bay as blood filled the sea around us, whales screaming and writhing in agony until all was quiet… It was a gruesome scene and ironically it worked very much in our favour.” [pg. 94]

The anti-sealing campaign was more of the same, much about saving these cute fuzzy animals, with no discussion at all about whether the hunt was sustainable, economically important, socially significant. Greenpeace flew in movie stars to create “mind bombs” in the defence of defenceless (and cute) animals. Greenpeace of 1975 is not like SPEC of 2010, it is like PETA of 2011.

Notably, this was all before the Bruntland Report, and therefore before the modern concepts of environmental sustainability had really been developed, so the ideas were not well known outside of rather obscure schools of development and economics. Suggestions of future resource depletion were usually brushed aside by claims of people being too “Malthusian” or not having enough respect for engineering (see discussion of Ehrlich vs. Borlaug in this very book, pp.56-57).

This brings us to 1984 -1986 – the Second Act in Dr. Moore’s story – when he began stepping away from Greenpeace. This was a tumultuous time, with him raising a family, getting a real job, and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. But it was also the time that Greenpeace began to campaign for sustainable development in industries that were close to Dr. Moore’s roots and his family. After all, he was the son of a rain forest logger who was setting up one of the first salmon farms on the west coast.

He claims it was the Greenpeace initiative to “Ban Chlorine” that was the final straw, as he thought it wasn’t science based thinking. Problem is, no-one in Greenpeace seems to recall them saying they want to ban all chlorine from the planet. Greenpeace did take a strong stand then (and still do now) on the spilling of organochlorines related to paper bleaching, and the use of toxic chlorine-based substances when non-chlorine-based substitutes are available. That has extended to the modern practice of using PVC in places where environmentally-less damaging alternatives are practical. Considering how much of my time I spend at my work dealing with contaminated sites featuring hard-to manage carcinogenic, mutagenic and acutely toxic chlorinated solvents organochlorines, I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask questions about whether the money we save over using the less toxic alternatives is really money saved at all.

Or maybe Greenpeace was just using the idea of “banning chlorine” as a “Mindbomb” to get a few headlines and point the media to the real issues of chlorine in our environment. “Ban Chlorine” and “Devil Element” are much more compelling than “Organochlorides in our environment increase cancers and impact marine wildlife”. It is telling that Dr. Moore’s biggest conflict when he left Greenpeace is the guy who invented the “Mindbomb”. Dr. Moore himself admits there was no way he could save the seal pup he sat on, but he wanted to be filmed losing that fight – Mindbombs were rarely science-based.

It seems the nuance of this argument is lost to Dr. Moore, as he again dismissively waves away any concerns about the chlorine industry or the hazards of organochlorines by creating this long-winded false dichotomy argument and telling us that chlorine is the 11th most abundant element on Earth and table salt is 2/3rds chlorine, so how can that be bad?

On page 142 he goes off on a diatribe about the wonders of chlorine that includes a huge strawman argument (“[long list of potentially toxic metals]…all have important uses in health, technology, energy production and lighting”); a non-sequitor (“we have been bombarded into thinking lead is deadly, yet many of us drive around with 30 pounds of it in the battery of our cars.”); rank hyperbole (“chlorine is the most important element for public health”); the naturalistic fallacy (“Even herbal medicine is partly based on using plants that contain chemicals that are toxic”); and a long false dichotomy I won’t bore you with here. He even decries that although he was the lone scientist in the discussion, none of the other Greenpeace crew respected his scientific prowess. He follows this by describing Renate Kroesa (who, being a chemist, would qualify as a scientist to most of us) as “fanatical”. Page 142 is one of those pages of this book that I have marginal-marked the hell out of in red ink. It is just a bad argument, poorly supported, and it leads us into the wonders of his approach to fish farming, but I will blog about that in a later post.

Dr. Moore says he is proud of his work at Greenpeace, proud enough to engage in a bit of hyperbole:

“We got many things right in the early years of the movement: We stopped the Bomb, saved the whales, and ended toxic discharge into water and air.” [Pg.141]

Um, last time I checked we still have nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation is an increasing risk in the world; whales still face serious threats from habitat loss and pollution, and are still being actively hunted by several nations; and toxic discharges in to the air and water seem to continue world wide.

However, I am not going to take away from Dr. Moore the achievements of Greenpeace during his time there. He took a rag-tag groups of hippies on a fishboat and spun it into a multi-million dollar international organization that spoke truth to power on many fronts, often powered by little more than a string and a prayer. From reading his accounts of those early years, there were more than enough internal and external forces that could have torn it apart, and too many strong personalities and personal agendas (Paul Watson, anyone?). It should not have lasted, but pretty much everything we know in 2011 about the environmental movement, the good parts and the bad, can be traced back to the early efforts of Dr. Moore and Greenpeace.

Without him, I imagine this blog would have a different name!

Becquerels and Sieverts, Oh My!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

For some reason, the Georgia Straight keeps writing articles about the radiation from the Fukushima Nuclear plant causing us harm here in British Columbia, and the massive conspiracy involving several governments and hundreds of scientists, working to cover it up.

My cynicism makes me suspect the large number of Georgia Straight advertisers selling bogus “Cleansing” and “detoxifying” services may be influencing their editorial decisions. But what is the source of my skepticism? Perhaps it is their dishonest use of technical terms, without explaining what the terms mean.

Look at this story from last week’s edition. There are many scary statistics there: 0.69 Becquerel per Litre (Bq/l) of radiation in Vancouver rainwater, 8.18 Bq/l as an average in Calgary, 13 Bq/l as a spike in Burnaby! But no-where does it put that number into context. I guess it is expected anyone will think any Becquerel in our water is a Becquerel too much!

Part of the problem with radiation is that the science and the numbers are pretty technical and are often really big or really small, so we have a hard time wrapping out minds around them in a physical sense. It is the job of “journalist” to translate this information to the public, not to fear monger by throwing out terns you know your audience doesn’t understand. So let’s talk about Becquerels.

“Becquerel” is the “metric” measure, and it is easy to visualise: 1 Bq is one atom of radioactive material decaying (and therefore releasing one “unit” of radioactivity) per second. That is the smallest possible amount of radiation per second, so we usually think in terms of millions or billions of Bq, which sometimes makes the number cumbersome. The more common unit is the Curie (Ci), which is equal to 37 billion Bq (37,000,000,000Bq = 1 Ci).

So that is the technical meaning, but what do the numbers really mean in the real world? A good way to look at them is to think about the element potassium (K). The world is full of potassium, it is the “K” in NPK, the Nitrogen-Phosphorous-Potassium ratings for fertilizers. However, a small proportion of it (about 0.012%) is a naturally radioactive isotope Potassium 40. You can’t easily separate the two without advanced lab equipment, so it is randomly mixed in with normal potassium and in all chemical terms, acts exactly like “normal” potassium. So of the ~150 grams of potassium in your bones, teeth, and cellular nuclei, about 0.018 grams is Potassium 40. Atoms are really small, so that that 0.018 grams of Potassium 40 represents about 280 quintillion atoms, that is 280,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

Radioactive atoms. In your bones. These are not “toxins” that you can cleanse yourself of, unless you cleanse yourself of all the potassium in your body, which would be very, very bad for your continued existence.

Potassium 40 has a half-life of about a billion years. So over a billion years, about half of those 280 quintillion atoms will decay, releasing a single unit of radiation each. 140 quintillion decays over 1 billion years equals about 4,400 decays per second. So the normal radiation level of a healthy human body from potassium alone is about 4,400Bq. Every second of your adult life you are exposed to 4,400 Bq of radiation from your own cells.

Notably, your body also contains about 13kg of Carbon, about 1partp er trillion of which is Carbon 14, resulting in another 3,700 Bq of exposure. You also get much smaller doses from the iodine, radium, and other trace radioactive substances in your body.

We also take in and excrete radioactive nuclides all day, and they exist (naturally) in our food, especially things like bananas that have lots of minerals (and are therefore good for you!). Banana contain enough potassium to provide about 130Bq per kilogram, and enough carbon for another 100bq.

It stands to reason that 1 kg of drinking water containing 1Bq or radiation is not going to change our environmental exposure to radiation. It is, in effect, much lower than our “Background” exposure.

This story draws some alarm over vanishingly small measurements of airborne radiation:

“The level of iodine-131 in Sidney, B.C., rose to a high of 3.63 millibecquerels per cubic metre in the air on March 20. That’s over 300 times higher than the background level of 0.01 millibecquerels per cubic metre or less.”

This also benefits from a bit of math. 3.6 mBq is 0.0036 Bq, per cubic metre of air. The average person breathes about 11,000L of air a day. That means a person breathing at Sidney would be exposed to 0.04 Bq of radiation per day. That is less than one ten-thousandth of the radiation you are exposed to from your own bones.

Now ask yourself, why does the Georgia Strait reporter never, in his multiple articles on the Fukushima incident, mention what a Becquerel is?

I would be remit to mention that Bequerel are not the entire story. The number you want to calculate when analysing environmental exposure to radiation is the Sievert: which is a measure of dose exposure. That is a relatively complicated measure to take, as it involves the medium delivering the radiation, and the media receiving it. I have already gone on way too long here, so Will not get into that in this post.

Now compare this to . this story in the Georgia Straight which jumps from Becquerel to Sieverts without putting either number in context.

But which is worse? The “Main Stream Media” have reported nothing, so people have no access to better information. Why can’t our media educate and inform?

Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout Review – part 1

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.
About a month ago, fellow New Westminster Blogger David Brett provided an intriguing review of Dr. Patrick Moore’s book “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout”. Part autobiography of one of the founders of Greenpeace, and part manifesto for a new, “sensible” environmentalism, this book is a first-person account of how Dr. Moore helped found Greenpeace, became disillusioned by it, and forged his own path towards a more pragmatic form of environmentalism. Moving away from protest, he worked to engage government, business and industry to help them become more sustainable.

As I commented to Dave at the time, being a “sensible” (and by that, I mean skeptical and science-based) environmentalist, and engagement with stakeholders (as opposed to protest) has been my goal, so Dr. Moore’s story is interesting to me. Since I reviewed the autobiography-manifesto-vanity project movie on David Suzuki last year, I will do the same with this book.

The advantage of the book is that I have it in front of me and can discuss it at length. I am currently about 4 chapters in, and have very little time to read these days, so the review may take some time and several posts.

I promised Dave that I would read with an open mind, and I have not read any other reviews than his (and the blurbs on the back of the book!), but my openness was challenged in the first chapter of the book. It just doesn’t start well.

In Chapter 1, Dr. Moore starts off by defining “sustainable development”. This is a good idea, as it is a term bandied about too much by people with little understanding of what it means. It is currently a sexy buzz phrase used by a lot of people who have never understood (or cared about) the definition.

The problem is, Dr. Moore immediately dismisses the definition used by people who work in sustainability: the standard-model definition and, unfortunately, the one most commonly ignored by people who are misusing the term. That being the definition from Brundtland Report. Dr. Moore immediately tosses it aside and replaces it with a definition that fits his needs.

Compare this:

Brundtland Report: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”

To this:

Dr. Moore: “Sustainable development requires that we continue to obtain the food, energy, and materials necessary for our civilization, and perhaps even increase these resources in developing countries, while at the same time working to reduce our negative impacts on the environment through changes in behaviour and changes in our technologies” (Pg. 14)

The second definition is fine, full of great ideas and feelings, but it is, unfortunately, not a definition of sustainability.

It is like I start my book about American actresses by describing Uma Thurman as the greatest actress of our generation. Then I decide the definition of Uma Thurman as “the star of the Kill Bill Films” is not a very good definition. Instead, I like to define Uma Thurman as “That woman from Kramer vs. Kramer and the Bridges of Madison County who has 2 Academy Awards from 16 nominations”. That definition makes my argument that Uma is the greatest actress of our time much more compelling, doesn’t it?

Although Dr. Moore’s definition contains many soft environmental ideals that we should probably strive towards (as loaded with weasel words as it is), it does not define “sustainable development” the way it is used by anyone other than Dr. Moore. At best, it is one small aspect of “sustainable development”; at worst, it is a dodge of the real issues raised by limited resources on a consumption-growth based economy. It also completely misses the point that sustainability is not an “environmental” concept any more than it is a social and economic one.

I don’t think the problem with “sustainable” is its overuse, but rather its common use in a way that does not relate to the actual definition of the word. As such, it is indistinguishable from “green” or “environmentally friendly” or “clean” or other popular marketing words. I am a believer (as are most scientists) that strict definition of terms is as important to political discussion as it is to technical discussion. Dr. Moore makes the problem of fuzzy definition worse in Chapter 1 when he invents a new definition for the term.

New West Doc Fest – Day 2

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

It was quite the full day! Besides taking tickets, helping promote the NWEP at the booth, and visiting with folks, I still got to see most of the films, although I did not get to spend as much time in the Q&A sessions as I would have liked.

The day began with a short called “The Most Livable City”, which talked about one of those little social development topics most people just don’t think of – where to the City’s homeless, and those living in run-down decrepit SROs, go to get a drink of water? The City has few operating fountains in the summer, and even fewer in the winter. Public washroom facilities are few and far between. Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer raises the point that the City has purposely removed these types of things to discourage drug use… how’s that working out?

The main morning feature was “Tapped” – about the bottled water industry. A topic I have mentioned here in the past. If I was to review the movie (um… which I guess I am doing), it was about 20% new and quite interesting information (in the States, the bottled water industry is regulated by the FDA, unless the water is bottled in the same state it is consumed. Since most of it is filtered city water sold locally, more than 80% of the bottled water industry is completely unregulated), 60% was info well known to anyone who has been awake for the last decade (billions of discarded PET bottles are mucking up marine ecosystems around the entire Pacific Ocean; buying bottled water is a ridiculous consumer choice, 2000x the cost of safer tap water), and 20% is unfortunate hyperbole (PET is made using a substance in the same family as benzene, which causes cancer! well, if the same family you mean aromatic hydrocarbons, you are right, but PET does not cause cancer, and no-one seems to be concerned about all the benzene we are consuming every day breathing car exhaust).

In the end, the message was on track, and if they drifted occasionally into hyperbole, it may be a cause for people to do their own research. Like most exposes of Corporate America, the best moments were the “caught-ya” moments when the corporate spokesflak realizes he is in over his head when says something like “There has never been a bottled water recall in America”, or “We are not in competition with tap water”, then are confronted with their own press releases that say the exact opposite. The lingering camera on the silenced spokesflak is always good for a chuckle.

I think the movie “65_redroses” is well known to most New West folks. Although I was familiar with Eva Markvoort’s story, I had never seen the movie. If you have not seen it, you should, mostly because the filmmakers did an excellent job accentuating the positive side of organ donation and how this young woman gained her life back through science, through good luck, and through the immense support she received from friends, family and strangers. In the end, they do not dwell on the sadness of the end, but on the hope and happiness of the brief life Eva had.

Before 65_Redroses was a short, “Corona Station”, also about love and loss. Beyond being a humorous theme, the short is remarkably well filmed, easy to forget these are film students!

The “Vanishing of the Bees” is a very smart and insightful look at Colony Collapse Disorder, and issue impacting commercial honey bees across the world. Although the movie emphasises the strongly suspected link between systemic pesticide use and CCD, it also explores how the way we manage bees is likely the main issue, with the systemic pesticides one very large hammer in drawer full of other nasty tools. We ship bees around in the backs of trucks from mono-culture crop to mono-culture crop, even in the bellied of airliners from Australia to California, completely messing with their natural rhythms. We keep them in massive crowded populations, one beekeeper managing 40,000 hives, where parasites and diseases can prosper. We artificially inseminate the queens (yes, they show the not-so-romantic procedure!), then kill them off after the eggs are laid and replace then with surrogates. We take their honey and feed them refined sugars. When hives start to die off, we split them in half and introduce new queens (in cages to keep the bees from killing the interloper), potentially spreading diseases around. All this to keep a pollinating population alive for the fruit and nut industries, as the market for honey production has been eroded by cheaper imports (often containing “honey blends” with corn syrup or lactose syrup).

With all this stacked up against them, it would be more shocking if 30% of the bees weren’t dying off! Although the film starts with gloom and doom, it is clear that the scientists, policy makers (in Europe at least), and the farmers are starting to realize what the issues are, and are working towards reforming the way the beekeeping industry is managed.

On the topic of pollinators, don’t get me started on mosquitoes and larvicides.

The final film, “H2Oil” I had seen before. All I can say is that the way Canada has mis-handled the Athabasca Tar/Oil Sands is criminal, no less than an act of war against our own country. If anyone can see how a nation responsibly manages a dumb-luck oil find, look at the case of Norway. Then ask yourself, how have the Tar/Oil sands benefited you? How does the rapid expansion and export of raw bitumen and the linking of the Canadian dollar to the cost of oil help any other sector of Canada’s economy?

I was unfortunately too busy to sit in on the post-film chat with local MPs Fin Donnelly and Peter Julian. If someone out there in blogland wants to write up a quick review, please let me know!

The Doc Fest itself was seamlessly run. The NWEP basically provided volunteer time and a little logistic support (our budget could not have bought our members tickets!), but it was Andrew Murray and the ladies from the Green Ideas Network who did most of the heavy lifting. Tireless volunteer Kathleen did a bunch of fundraising, and found a wide range of sponsors, all interested in building this community – they need to be thanked, and supported!

The good news is that for a first year- they pulled it off. Everything went smoothly, the films were on time, the extra entertainment (musicians, poets, artists) were entertaining, the venue worked out great. The early report is that the fest broke even with a little bit of a profit, to be reinvested in next year’s show. The foundations have been laid, and next year will be bigger and better.