1 National Inventory Report, 1990–2008, Part 1, p. 30.
2 guardian.co.uk, July 6, 2010, 10.38 BST
3 These include Harper adviser and political scientist Barry Cooper of the University of Calgary, whose Calgary-based Friends of Science is among the most aggressive climate change denier organizations in Canada.
4 http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oklahoma_and_coal
1 Less than a month after the Canadian government ratified Kyoto, the Kochs, who are among the most active campaigners against environmental controls in the United States, sold their interest in Foothills to Petro-Canada. The deal had obviously been in the works for a long time. The leases are now owned by Suncor, which has yet to develop the project because of runaway labor and equipment costs.
2 Kathryn Harrison, University of British Columbia, The Struggle of Ideas and Self-Interest: Canada’s Ratification and Implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, California, March 22–26, 2006.
3 Polls taken during 2002 showed that the majority of Canadians supported Kyoto. Even in Alberta, at least 50 percent supported ratification. Critics often claimed that Canadian support was based on ignorance of the treaty and of the fact that most of Canada’s energy came from fossil fuels. But there was no indication that increased knowledge reduced support.
4 National Energy Board, Canadian Energy Overview 2007.
5 Canadian Energy Research Institute, Economic Impacts of the Petroleum Industry in Canada, July 2009.
6 National Inventory Report, 1990–2008; UNFCCC Summary of Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Canada, p. 1.
7 Canada’s per capita GHG production is about 22.6 metric tons, but there is a huge variation between the provinces. Québec, which gets 98 percent of its power from hydro, creates 12 metric tons per person while Alberta, whose energy comes from coal and which is home to the tar sands, produces 70 metric tons. This in itself creates resentment over where the burden of emission reductions will fall. Alberta wanted compensation for cutting its emissions while Québec wanted compensation for having already cut its emissions by building hydro dams.
8 May’s parents were politically active Democrats in New Haven, Connecticut. When Clinton was at Yale, he used to come to visit. When the Mays moved to Canada and settled in Cape Breton Island, they kept in touch.
9 Reuters, December 13, 2003. In 2003, Bedritsky became president of the World Meteorological Organization and in 2009 he became chief presidential envoy on climate change for the Russian Federation.
1 In addition to my interviews with Connie Hedegaard, I also interviewed Per Meilstrup on several occasions. He was not only a close adviser to Hedegaard and Rasmussen but also author of a book on the Copenhagen summit published in Danish. He wrote a summary in English called “The Runaway Summit: The Background Story of the Danish Presidency of Cop15, the UN Climate Change Conference,” published in the Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook, 2010.
2 Overview of the Reported Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 2009, Government of Canada, December 2010, p. 4.
1 New York Times, March 19, 2010.
2 www.probeinternational.org/carbon_credits; http://cdm.unfccc.int/index.html
3 Canada’s 2009 National Inventory Report states that by 2007 Canada’s per capita emissions had risen 6 percent above 1990 levels and its GDP rose 60 percent from 1990. Its total GHG increase was 26.2 percent above 1990 levels and 33.8 percent above its Kyoto target (excluding forestry and land use). With forestry and land use emissions, Canada’s GHG emissions rose 47 percent. Its population rose 20 percent. Australia’s GHG emissions increased 31.4 percent over 1990 levels by 2008 (excluding land use and forestry). Its population grew 23 percent. GDP tripled to US$1 trillion, from US$314 billion in 1990. The enormous increase is partially due to Australia’s world-leading coal exports to countries such as Japan and China. The United States’ GHGs increased 6 percent to six trillion tons while its GDP rose 60 percent, according to its 2009 National Inventory Report. Population rose 23 percent.
4 Article in The Gazette (Montréal), March 28, 2010, p. A3.
1 Greenland has been covered by an ice sheet for more than two million years, although there is evidence that parts of southern Greenland hosted a boreal forest sometime between 450,000 and 900,000 years ago.
2 The glacial cycles in the northern hemisphere began about 2.5 million years ago. Prior to that, the north was much warmer. It is thought that one cause of this cooling was the rise of the Himalayas and other mountain ranges in the north. Air currents cool as they rise over the mountains, intensifying the cooling effect of orbital forcing.
3 http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/education/activities/pdf/Speed_Of_GRACE.pdf
4 The difference between ice caps, ice fields and ice sheets is a question of size and topography. Ice sheets cover more than 50,000 square kilometers. The earth has two ice sheets: Greenland and Antarctica. Ice caps are smaller in area and are dome-shaped and not constricted by mountains. Both ice sheets and ice caps comprise broad, uninterrupted expanses of glacial ice. Ice fields are the size of ice caps but are ribbed with glacial valleys and often bordered by mountain ridges. In any case, all of them are glaciers because they are made of ice that flows. So simply referring to them as “glaciers” is also accurate.
5 Fritz was a nickname given to him during the Second World War because his surname was German.
6 Unlike Norway’s, Russia’s and Alaska’s Arctic regions, the Canadian Arctic is a barren, cold and formidable desert of rock, gravel and ice. Aside from hunting forays, not even the Inuit ever inhabited the High Arctic. Cold War politics and Canada’s need to establish sovereignty ignited in the 1950s an urgent cultural, military and scientific drive to establish a Canadian presence in the Arctic. Climate change has revived this political and scientific urgency. That anybody lives up there at all reflects a degree of commitment that is sometimes hard to understand. Canadians still have only the vaguest idea of the region, which was handed to Canada by the British, who held a questionable claim, in 1880, soon after Confederation.
7 Scientific teams also conduct annual verification work on land ice in central Greenland and on the Arctic island of Svalbard, Norway. Three teams verify sea ice readings in the Canadian Arctic off the coast of Alert, at the top of Ellesmere Island, in the Fram Strait, north of Svalbard, and the northern section of the Baltic Sea.
8 www.nsf.gov/od/opp/budget.jsp The Office of Polar Research has a complete rundown of its budgets and expenditures. Canada’s Polar Continental Shelf Program does not reveal its budget on its website. At its fiftieth anniversary celebration in 2008, Denis St. Onge, emeritus scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada, delivered a presentation entitled “Polar Shelf or Sovereignty on the Cheap.”
9 Wohlleben emailed me an infrared photo of the entire archipelago. It showed an array of capillary-like fissures and fractures stretching over the entire sea ice north and west of the High Arctic islands, as if the area were the outer wall of a giant human heart. The truly disturbing part, she said, is that the photos are of winter conditions, when the ice is usually “really settled.”
10 One theory posited by Dutch scientists claims that this plaguedriven reduction in population caused the abandonment of farms, which in turn led to the natural reforestation of Europe. The trees absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere, which then cooled the planet.
11 “Form and flow of the Devon Island Ice Cap, Canadian Arctic,” Journal of Geophysical Research, J.A. Dowdeswell, T.J. Benham and M.R. Gorman, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K.; D. Burgess and M.J. Sharp, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta; published April 10, 2004, p. 7.
12 Given the unpredictable weather patterns, Polar Shelf maintains fuel caches all over the Arctic, including on sea ice. Because the sea ice can move twenty kilometers or more in a day, Polar Shelf has homing devices on the drums. The drums are picked up at the end of every season.
1 Jaelyn J. Eberle and John E. Storer, “Northernmost record of Brontotheres, Axel Heiberg Island, Canada,.” Paleomological Society, 1999, p. 1.
2 “The vegetation of Fosheim Peninsula is unusually diverse for this latitude, with 140 vascular plant species occurring in the Hot Weather Creek area alone. This contrasts with the vegetation in similar materials in the western and central Queen Elizabeth Islands, which generally have less than 35 vascular plant species.” Mean July temperatures at Hot Weather Creek taken from 1951 to 1980 are almost twice as high as those taken at the Eureka station. They were between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, with a mean of 5. By the late 1980s the mean had increased to 12.7. July highs reached 20 degrees Celsius and for most of the month were above 15. Sylvia A. Edlund, Geological Survey of Canada, Ming-ko Woo and Kathy L. Young, McMaster University, “Climate, Hydrology and Vegetation Patterns Hot Weather Creek, Ellesmere Island, Arctic Canada,” Nordic Hydrology 21 (1990): 273–286. Since then, mean temperatures at Hot Weather Creek have steadily risen.
3 Similar fossil forests have been discovered since 1881 on Axel Heiberg Island and elsewhere on Ellesmere. Scientists come from all over the world to study them, occasionally getting into nasty turf wars as they cart away sections of fossilized tree stumps. But the two main mappers of these finds were Jack McMillan and his fellow geologist Bob Christie, both with the Geological Survey of Canada, an organization to which Canadians owe a great deal for its often heroic mapping of the Arctic, its rock formations and its resources in extremely challenging conditions.
4 The reason some greenhouse gases are more powerful than others has to do with the fact that they operate in different frequencies in the light spectrum. Methane is considered about twenty times more powerful than CO2 even though its life expectancy in the atmosphere stretches only a few weeks or months. Its strength is not based on its molecules having more muscle or being more persistent; rather, it is because the spectrum in which they operate has a lot less competition. It’s a bit like being the only girl at the prom. One lonely methane molecule will attract lots of radiation in its frequency while a CO2 molecule in its crowded room may not get hit on at all. And if it does, who will notice? Different molecules absorb and emit in different frequencies.
5 The Holocene climate maximum—the “warm period”—should not be confused with the so-called medieval warm period that affected Europe from about 900 to 1200 CE. Climate records indicate that this more recent warm period was localized primarily to Europe and did not reach even the temperatures we have today, never mind the temperature highs reached during the Holocene climate maximum. Deniers claim that the medieval warm period was a time when Greenland was green. Temperature records from ice coring show that Greenland hasn’t been green for millions of years except for its southeast coast, which went through a warm period about half a million years ago. It regularly greens in summer with help from the Gulf Stream, but that’s just the lichen and Arctic grasses. According to the saga of Erik the Red, he named the island Greenland “because men will desire much the more to go there if the land has a good name.”
6 Historical temperatures can be deciphered from ice cores by examining, among other things, the ratio of heavy water molecules, which scientists refer to as H218O or simply “oxygen-18,” to lighter water molecules, or H216O—oxygen-16—in deep core samples. Because it is a heavier isotope, oxygen-18 does not evaporate as quickly as oxygen-16. In cooler temperatures, less oxygen-18 will get into the atmosphere and travel to the polar regions. In warmer times, much more of this isotope will be found in polar cores. So there is a correlation between temperature and the amount of oxygen-18 in ice. Annual snow accumulations can be distinguished in the cores going back thousands of years. The coring of the raised bogs in peat lands also uses oxygen-18 techniques to correlate with temperatures. Input into these bogs is in the form of rain or snow and output is evaporation or transpiration (plants). So they contain in their sediments an archive of dry and wet climate changes that stretch back four thousand years or more, scientists say.
7 Vinther et al., “Holocene thinning of the Greenland ice sheet,” Nature, August 18, 2009.
8 NEEM project, “The last interglacial and beyond: A northwest Greenland deep ice core drilling project.” http://neem.nbi.ku.dk/neeminfo.pdf/
9 Ice is an excellent transmitter of radar, and if the signal is powerful enough it can penetrate kilometers into the glacier. Water, however, tends to kill radar, which is how scientists discovered lakes inside Antarctica’s ice sheet.
10 The entire list of countries: Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
11 Ideally, scientists would like to test for carbon dioxide in the pore spaces of ice cores dating back 140,000 years so they can assess the levels of atmospheric CO2 during these glacial and interglacial periods. The trouble is, CO2 is soluble in water. Greenland ice layers at the bedrock tend to melt due to geothermal heat and the CO2 is dissolved. Another problem is, if you have dust that contains any carbonate, the water will dissolve the carbonate and that will release CO2. Also, microbes live in the ice. They use organic carbon as an energy source and this produces CO2 in the presence of water, so you find elevated CO2 that has nothing to do with what was in the atmosphere at the time.
1 Canada’s ruling Conservative Party has a history of climate change denial. At the Arctic Five meeting, the government handed out a media package in which the words “climate change” and “global warming” never appeared. Instead, the government used the term “altering weather patterns” to account for the trend in decreasing sea ice and glaciers.
2 Translated by Linda Jakobson in China Prepares for an Ice-Free Arctic, SIPRI Insight on Peace and Security, No. 2010/2, March 2010, p. 6.
3 U.S. Moscow embassy cable to secretary of state, June 9, 2009, Wikileaks, 212098.
4 U.S. Copenhagen embassy cable to secretary of state, November 7, 2007, Wikileaks, 129049.
5 The Svalbard archipelago measures 61,680 square kilometers. Christian Schneeberger, “Glaciers and Climate Change: A Numerical Model Study,” Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, p. 23.
6 See Swedish researcher Linda Jakobson’s excellent report China Prepares for an Ice-Free Arctic, SIPRI Insight on Peace and Security, No. 2010/2, March 2010.
7 According to Arctic Pollution, 2009, by the Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program: “There have also been discussions about the possibility that the stored waste would set off a spontaneous nuclear chain reaction. Current assessments show that, even though conditions are worse than expected, a chain reaction could not be initiated without an external influence. There remains uncertainty about what the consequences of such an accident would be for the nearby area and surrounding region.”
8 Telenor website: www.telenor.com/en/news-and-media/press-releases/2008/us-federal-court-grants-telenor-motion-holds-altimo-in-contempt-imposes-fines-and-orders-altimo-to-sell-shares
9 Anker, Morten, “The High North and Russo-Norwegian bilateral economic relations,” p. 41, www.fni.no/russcasp/MA-bon1009–32–41.pdf
10 Linda Jakobson, China Prepares for an Ice-Free Arctic, SIPRI Insight on Peace and Security, No. 2010/2, March 2010.
11 AAA-06 Arctic petroleum provinces (iii): Petroleum geoscience of the North American and Greenland basins, Part 2. International Geological Congress Oslo, 2008. However, Professor Andrew Miall, a veteran Arctic and petroleum geologist and former head of Canada’s Academy of Science, dismisses the argument of the Lomonosov Ridge as a “stunt.” He says the Lomonosov is a “fragment of continental crust” with only a thin sedimentary crust where there is little more than a “slight” chance of finding oil.
1 According to documents obtained by Postmedia News through access to information laws, Natural Resources Canada instructed its scientists in the spring of 2010 that they had to obtain ministerial approval to speak to the press about high-profile issues such as “climate change, oil sands” or any subject in which a reporter from national or international media expresses interest.
2 I later obtained satellite photos taken between August 7 and 29, 2010, showing the shelf quite suddenly breaking into thousands of pieces before the Arctic sea ice packs them together again.
3 http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/phs46.html#bookmark04
4 A. Steffen et al., “A synthesis of atmospheric mercury depletion event chemistry in the atmosphere and snow,” Journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 2008.
5 Dr. Jan Bottenheim, who worked with Schroeder at Environment Canada on mercury depletion, discovered that the same chemical process each spring takes out the entire Arctic ozone layer. During our telephone interview, an Environment Canada flack named Tracy Lacroix came on the line and instructed me not to ask any questions about climate change, claiming Bottenheim knew nothing about it—as if climate change were some kind of segregated academic field. I ignored her, as, thankfully, did Bottenheim.
6 A. Steffen et al., “A synthesis of atmospheric mercury depletion event chemistry in the atmosphere and snow,” 2008.
7 One gallon of jet fuel emits 21.1 pounds of carbon dioxide, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration, fuel emission factors; 6.76 pounds/gallon. Converted to metric tons.
1 Total exports of goods to the U.S.A. in 2009 were US$224.9 billon, of which oil and gas shipments totaled US$122 billion.
2 “Notification of Proposed Research Cruise, RV Polarstern,” Alfred-Wegener-Institut für Polar-und Meeresforschung, Germany.
3 Natural Resources Canada Community Engagement Report, Grise Fiord Community Meeting, September 16, 2009.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
1 “Climate Change Scoping Plan, A Framework for Change,” December 2008, Government of California, p. 7.
2 The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is a well-financed, angry dog. When it gets its teeth into something, it doesn’t let go. So when the state’s attorney general, Jerry Brown, who opposed Proposition 23, drafted the description of the petition for the ballot, the association sued him, claiming the title and summary were “false, misleading and unfair.” The association convinced the judge to change the wording on the ballot that stated the proposition sought to “abandon” the climate change law. The association wanted “abandon” replaced with “suspend.” It also demanded the word “polluters” be changed to “sources of emissions.”
The original title description read: ABANDONS IMPLEMENTATION OF AIR POLLUTION CONTROL LAW (AB 32) REQUIRING MAJOR POLLUTORS TO REPORT AND REDUCE GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS THAT CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING, UNTIL UNEMPLOYMENT DROPS TO 5.5 PERCENT OR LESS FOR FULL YEAR.
The judge changed it to: SUSPENDS IMPLEMENTATION OF AIR POLLUTION CONTROL LAW (AB 32) REQUIRING MAJOR SOURCES OF EMISSIONS TO REPORT AND REDUCE GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS THAT CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING, UNTIL UNEMPLOYMENT DROPS TO 5.5 PERCENT OR LESS FOR FULL YEAR.
3 http://www.aqmd.gov/comply/1118/rpts/2010/TesoroWilm10.htm; http://www.aqmd.gov/comply/1118/rpts/2010/Ultramar10.htm
4 projects.publicintegrity.org/oil/report.aspx?aid=347
5 Koch Industries website: www.kochind.com/ViewPoint/lowCarbon.aspx
6 March 1, 2011.
8 Jane Mayer, New Yorker, August 30, 2010; and Greenpeace, “Koch Industries Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine,” March 2010, http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/media-center/reports/koch-industries-secretly-fund/.
10 http://mercatus.org/publication/environmental-protection-agencysrequest-comment-petition-control-emissions-new-and-use-. See also the Greenpeace report entitled “Koch Industries Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine,” March 2010.
12 The National Academies include the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.
13 According to Environment Canada, tar sands emissions increased 11 percent in 2009 despite industry claims that they were falling. Canada’s 2009 National Inventory Report on greenhouse gas emissions shows that while tar sands emissions continued to rise, Canada’s overall emissions fell in 2009 about 6 percent largely because of the recession. Mark Johnson, a spokesperson for Environment Canada, told me in May 2011 that “oil sands emissions increased from 5.5 percent of (Canada’s) total in 2008 to about 6.5 percent in 2009.”
14 In December 2009, U.S. ambassador David Jacobson sent a cable to Washington in which he stated that Québec premier Jean Charest might have been influenced by Power Corporation, the huge Canadian financial conglomerate, to soften his criticism of Ottawa for its weak climate change policies when Charest attended the Copenhagen climate change conference. The cable, released by Wikileaks, stated that “Whether (Jean) Charest was influenced by Power Corp. to tone down his criticism of the federal government is unclear, but the corporation’s provincial and federal influence is undeniable.” The cable noted that Power Corp. is the major minority shareholder in the French oil company Total S.A., which has invested $6 billion in the tar sands. At the time, La Presse, the Montréal daily owned by Power Corp., criticized Charest in an editorial, calling his Copenhagen statements “arrogant” and “disloyal to Ottawa.”
16 Fugitive Emissions Projections 2010, Australian Government, Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency.
17 A metric ton of coal generates about 2.7 tons of CO2; http://greenhouseneutralfoundation.org/articles/2010/05/24/king-coal-in-australia-the-ugly-political-truth/
18 As Jessica Irvine from The Sydney Morning Herald calculated in her February 11, 2011, column: “For every dollar the mining lobby spent fighting the tax with emotive ads, featuring wholesome-looking miners, it saved another $2,750.”
19 Proposed Carbon Pricing Scheme, Seamus French, published by Minerals Council of Australia, 2011.
20 http://cal-access.ss.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx?id=1323934&session=2009&view=received
1 John J. Magnuson et al., “Historical Trends in Lake and River Ice Cover in the Northern Hemisphere,” Science 289, September 8, 2000. The time series range from 1846 to 1995. Some records go back much further and indicate that changes to the length of the ice season were already occurring in the eighteenth century. There was a reverse trend towards a longer ice season from about 1872 to 1897, but this is the single exception, the authors say.
2 Philipp Schneider and Simon J. Hook, “Space observations of inland water bodies show rapid surface warming since 1985,” Geophysical Research Letters 37, 2010.
3 Jay A. Austin and Steven M. Colman, “Lake Superior Summer Water Temperatures,” Geophysical Research Letters 34, 2007; Jay Austin and Steve Colman, “A Century of Temperature Variability in Lake Superior,” American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, 2008.
4 Ankur R. Desai 1, Jay A. Austin, Val Bennington and Galen A. McKinley, “Stronger winds over a large lake in response to weakening air-to-lake temperature gradient,” Nature Geoscience 693, 2009.
5 “Confronting Climate Change in the Great Lakes Region: Impacts on Our Communities and Ecosystems,” a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Ecological Society of America.
6 Cindy Chu,* Nicholas E. Mandrak and Charles K. Minns, “Potential impacts of climate change on the distributions of several common and rare freshwater fishes in Canada,” Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
7 Ibid.
8 “Threats to Water Availability in Canada,” Environment Canada, 2004.
1 Compiled by DARA, a Madrid-based international organization that assesses the effectiveness of aid to poor and vulnerable countries, in partnership with the Climate Vulnerability Forum. See daraint.org.
2 I once asked Yvo de Boer, executive director of the UNFCCC, what will happen to the Netherlands when the seas rise. His reply was immediate and tinged with a sense of pride: “We’re a wealthy enough nation to adapt.”
3 This report combines datasets from the U.K.’s Hadley Center of the Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia; the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. The report is peer reviewed.
4 The Climate Action Network Canada published a report in November 2010 outlining Canada’s lobbying attempts to persuade foreign governments not to enact clean-fuel legislation. It was based on documents obtained through access to information legislation. See http://www.climateactionnetwork.ca/e/news/2010/release/index.php?WEBYEP_DI=66
5 Ambassador Jacobson cable to U.S. State Department, November 5, 2009, Wikileaks.
6 2009 Victoria Bushfires Royal Commission Final Report, http://www.royalcommission.vic.gov.au/Commission-Reports/Final-Report/Summary/Interactive-Version.
7 Italics inserted by author.
8 Australia National Greenhouse Gas Accounts, National Inventory Report 2008. In 1997, Australia negotiated a clause into the Kyoto Protocol that allowed it to include the halting of deforestation in its 1990 reference level. In other words, because it has not destroyed 108 million hectares of forested land, this carbon sink means that Australia can now claim to have increased its emissions only 9 percent. It’s one of those clever loopholes countries become so proud of and climate change drives a cyclone through.
9 “Analysis of options to move beyond 20% greenhouse gas emission reductions and assessing the risk of carbon leakage,” European Parliament Communication, Brussels, 26.5.2010, COM(2010) 265 final.
10 Ibid., p. 5.
11 Ibid., p. 8.
12 http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3156
13 World Energy Outlook 2009.
14 “Free allocation of emission allowances and CDM/JI credits within the EU ETS,” Oko-Institut for Applied Ecology. www.oeko.de and www.wwf.de
15 Earth System Research Laboratory, Mauna Loa, Hawaii, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United States. www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo
16 As per data collected by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office among other meteorological institutions.
17 Mark New, Diana Liverman, Heike Schroder and Kevin Anderson, “Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications,” Royal Society Publishing, 2010.
18 Fai Fungi, Anna Lobez and Mark New, “Water availability in +2°C and +4°C worlds,” Journal of the Royal Society, November 29, 2010.
19 February 10, 2010, cable from Brussels to U.S. secretary of state, Wikileaks.
20 February 10, 2010, cable from Brussels to U.S. secretary of state, Wikileaks.
21 Bolivia has the world’s largest lithium resources, but they have yet to be mined because they are in a remote area of the country that lacks water and infrastructure and also because Bolivia demands 60 percent of the profits.
22 U.S. embassy La Paz cable, February 2010, Wikileaks.
1 Compiled by the Center for American Progress.
2 http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=n00005195
3 Alain Tremblay, Louis Varfalvy, Charlotte Roehm and Michelle Garneau, “The Issue of Greenhouse Gases From Hydroelectric Reservoirs: from Boreal to Tropical Regions.” Springer, 2007. Emissions from reservoirs decline after about ten years. These so-called fugitive emissions are often not reported in national GHG inventories.
4 http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/archives/3rdedition/environment/climate/020
5 www.conferenceboard.ca/topics/economics/budgets/quebec_2010_budget_EN.aspx
6 D. Kahan, D. Braman and H. Jenkins-Smith, Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus. Journal of Risk Research, DOI: 2010.
7 Ibid.
8 Spring 2011 U.S. Climate Extremes, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Climate Data Center: www.ncdc.noaa.gov/special-reports/2011-spring-extremes
9 New York Times, John M. Broder, June 15, 2011; Associated Press, Randolph E. Schmid, June 16, 2011.
1 In his Jan. 13, 2012, column in the Times Colonist, Postmedia pundit Michael Den Tandt claimed that “Canada’s future economic prosperity depends” on the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline, which is designed to bring tar sands oil to the British Columbia port of Kitimat for shipment to Asia and California.
2 (RAMP) Scientific Peer Review of the Five Year Report (1997–2001). (Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada). page iv. “The problems with the report are found in lack of details of methods, failure to describe rationales for program changes, examples of inappropriate statistical analysis, and unsupported conclusions. That being said, the reviewers raised significant concerns about the Program itself. They felt there was a serious problem related to scientific leadership, that individual components of the plan seemed to be designed, operated and analyzed independent of other components, that there was no overall regional plan, that clear questions were not been addressed in the monitoring and that there were significant shortfalls with respect to statistical design of the individual components.”
3 “Oil sands development contributes polycyclic aromatic compounds to the Athabasca River and its tributaries”, Erin N. Kelly et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 29, 2009.