Time for Liberal McGuinty to acknowledge role of Climategate in Ontario's flawed energy policy

Holly Martin wrote in "Virginia’s attorney general asks EPA for more time to challenge climate findings", (Manassas Environmental News Examiner, Feb.17, 2010, here):

"Today, Virginia's attorney general Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, asked the EPA to delay final consideration of its finding last year that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant that endangers public health and welfare. Virginia now joins Texas and Alabama in fighting the EPA in its efforts to regulate CO2.

Carbon dioxide is a colorless gas created by human beings with every breath as a natural part of the carbon cycle. It is required for green plants to grow. It’s also a natural by-product of burning fuels made from organic (carbon-based) sources, such as coal, oil and natural gas.

In making its finding, the EPA relied heavily on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR report of 2007. In this report, the IPCC declared that the earth is warming and that humans are responsible for most of that warming. The report also declared that CO2 emissions from human activities must be quickly cut, in order to prevent global catastrophes, including droughts, floods, hurricanes and famines.

Reducing CO2 emissions would require that the global economy, which is currently powered by fossil fuels, must be dramatically restructured within a very short time. To do this, governments would have to heavily subsidize “clean” energy sources, such as biofuels, solar, wind, and possibly nuclear power, in order to make them profitable, while taxing coal, oil and natural gas, which are still the cheapest sources of electricity and heat.

The result, says Christopher Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, would be “the biggest regulatory intervention in history: the restricting of carbon emissions from all human activity.” The CEI has filed two petitions in federal court to reconsider the endangerment finding, and has filed a lawsuit with the EPA.

In 2007, the Supreme Court declared that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are pollutants. This finding was heavily based on recommendations in the IPCC’s 2007 report.

In April, 2009, President Obama’s newly appointed administrator of the EPA, Lisa P. Jackson, announced that the agency had determined the CO2 and other greenhouse gases are pollutants that endanger human health and welfare. Then on December 7, 2009, Jackson, announced that the EPA would move forward on regulating CO2 as a pollutant.

New information may contradict scientific"consensus"

According to the Associated Press, Attorney General Cuccinelli asked for time to review "newly available information" that might directly affect the EPA’s decision.

Last November, thousands of emails and electronic documents were released from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the U.K. These emails showed scientists who are an integral part of the IPCC reporting process may have conspired to prevent other scientists from obtaining climate data that might be used to disprove their conclusions.

They may also have improperly tried to block the publication of research that called into question the view that “the science is settled” on climate change.

Professor Phil Jones, a central figure in the CRU emails, and who was responsible for keeping the official climate data records used by the IPCC, has stepped aside pending the results of an inquiry into the scandal. Last week, Jones said in an interview with the BBC that scientists did not yet agree that current warming is greater than at anytime in the past. He also admitted that the datasets he controlled were in disarray, and that the rate of Earth’s warming was not significantly higher in the past 15 years than it was at other times in history.

Problems with the IPCC report

In January, the IPCC was forced to admit an error in its report, which had predicted most of the ice in the 3-mile thick Himalayan glaciers would be melted by the year 2035. Such an early date would mean a primary water source for millions of people in Nepal, India and China would be dried up 25 years from now. That date was actually a typographical error, and should have read “2350.”

The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, insisted, up until last month, that the 2035 date was accurate. Several scientists, including reviewers on the IPCC panel, have stated publicly that they recognized the impossibility of the claim and let Pachauri know about the error months, and even years, earlier, but he refused to fix it.

The glacier error was soon joined by others, which seemed to exaggerate crop losses in Africa, sea ice losses in the Arctic, and loss of rain forests in the Amazon, as some began examining the thousands of pages in the IPCC report more closely. Many of the supporting documents for the report turned out to be articles written by non-scientists, or by those working for climate advocacy organizations such as the World Wildlife Federation.

Last week in the U.S. Congress, the Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Collin Peterson, introduced a bill that would prevent EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. According to a story by Reuters, Peterson said, “I have no confidence that the EPA can regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act without doing serious damage to our economy."

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It's about time the Climategate fraud was challenged and exposed, in the States as well as in Canada.
The IPCC's now-discredited Pachauri was a golden boy for the greenshevik TM lefties in Canada's Liberal Party. Many greenpagandized Canadians believed in the climate change/global warming fear spread by the likes of Al Gore, David Suzuki, Stephane Bumbledore Dion, and of course, Sir Kyodiot Liberal MPP Jim Bradley.
It's time for Canada's politicians [especially for Ontario's Liberal climate-fear-mongering premier, Dalton McGuinty] to also acknowledge that the alarmist, fraudulent "science" (or, more aptly, doctored speculations) upon which they based their energy policies was never "settled".