That was the message from a panel at the opening session of BC Hydro's 2011 Power Smart Forum speaking on how a changing climate is affecting the business environment. Business, government and residents need to begin adapting so that the province will be more resilient as climate-change effects become more obvious, panelists said.
Research and talk about climate change are no longer enough, said Deborah Harford, executive director of Adaptation to Climate Change (ACT) at Simon Fraser University. She said costs that business and service providers will face include increased effects on health, energy production, food services and population movements due to rising sea levels.
And as the effects increase, she said, insurance companies will probably start raising rates if infrastructure has not been planned and developed to adapt to climate change.
Bob Purdy of the Fraser Basin Council said issues such as climate change are complex but actions can be taken, such as reducing emissions on transportation fleets, which also saves costs.
Harford said most British Columbians probably do not understand adaptation to climate change.
"They would say, 'Do we need this?'" she said of expenditures that would meet impending changes.
Local governments are already adapting by undertaking long-term measures, she said, citing some of the initiatives at the City of Vancouver.
Peter Judd, general manager of Vancouver's engineering services, said the city has already implemented programs, like the downtown bicycle lanes, that are responses to climate change. Strategies are also underway to adapt to climateinduced changes to the city's water supply, which will likely be affected by drier summers.
Judd said drinking water will be more expensive. In a later interview, he expanded on the water issue, saying the city is prepared to require new residential housing to have water meters installed beginning Jan. 1, 2012. All that's needed is city council's final approval.
There will also be a rate structure to encourage residents to reduce their water use, he said, but added that ultimately, the need to conserve will mean water rates are going to go up.
"The thing that we have an opportunity to do here is to actually reduce the long-term costs. If we can reduce the amount of water we are using, we can put off or eliminate major expenses like raising the dams in the region," he said.
"One of the challenges that we have is that we expect to be facing hotter, drier summers and more intense storms in the winter. The response to some of those things, like water conservation and droughtresistant plants, are the kinds of responses that you need to address," said Judd.
He said the prospect of rising sea levels is one of the biggest challenges the city is struggling with now.
And the city's controversial downtown bike lanes, he said, are part of the city's climatechange strategy. They are aimed not only at today's bike commuters, but also at the next generation.
"We have to make sure there are alternatives for people who haven't started driving yet."
Judd said the city is adapting to more severe and more frequent storms by increasing the size of the storm-sewer pipes.
The primary need is to replace the old system where storm drains and sewage were combined in a single pipe, but at the same time the city is installing wider pipes dedicated solely to storm run-off, he said.
Already, the city has recorded an increase in rainfall along with more severe rainstorms."
*
Scared yet of the man-made GreenFear phoniness?!
Think the above greenshevism isn't enough - how about this piece of GreenFear by Ray Grigg, Special to the Courier-Islander,
"Responsibility for reducing carbon dioxide emissions is falling to cities, municipalities and regional districts because wider efforts during the last 30 years to ameliorate the threat of global climate change are not working. Multiple negotiations sponsored by the United Nation's have been unsuccessful. Developing nations such asChina , India
and Brazil
Canada
The situation is moving from serious to critical, according to the International Energy Agency that monitors global CO2 emissions. Emissions in 2010 broke a dubious record - 30.6 billion tonnes (Gt or gigatonnes) or 1.6 Gt over 2009's 29.0 Gt. The 5.52 per cent increase was also unprecedented, representing a nearly unbroken succession of yearly rises - the so-called "Great Recession" cut 2008's 29.3 Gt to 29.0 Gt in 2009 (Guardian Weekly, June 3/11).
Climatologists warn that we cannot exceed 2.0 C without invoking "dangerous climate change". To maintain any reasonable measure of safety, they estimate that 32.0 Gt of carbon dioxide is the maximum we can emit by 2020. However, if present trends continue, we will reach this threshold nine years early, "making it all but impossible to hold warming to a manageable degree" (Ibid.). The end of this century, therefore, could see average temperature increases of 4.0 C or more, about six times the temperature increase from the Industrial Revolution to the present. (Climatologists calculate that 32.0 Gt per year is not a safe level of emissions but the maximum before they must gradually be reduced to zero. Even during this transition we risk inducing serious climate change and destroying the marine ecology with fatal acidification.)
CO2 emissions are the key environmental force affecting almost every other corrective environmental action we undertake. We cannot restore wild salmon runs if rivers are too hot for fish and oceans are too acetic for marine life. We cannot protect endangered ecologies if temperatures rise above levels species can tolerate. We cannot sustain agriculture if the weather is too extreme for crops. We cannot cope with displaced people if hundreds of millions are fleeing rising oceans, drought, floods and unprecedented storms.
Unlike the federal and provincial governments that have been incapable of reducing CO2 emissions, cities, municipalities and regional districts are closer to the grassroots of communities. Their smaller size allows them to be more responsive and manoeuvrable, better able to initiate the many incremental reductions that can have a huge cumulative effect on total greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, this is what many of them have already done. And given the overall severity of the emissions challenge, this should be the primary guiding principle of all local planning and development.
Several helpful options exist. First is to increase population density downtown. This concentration of people has multiple advantages, all of which are efficiencies that directly or indirectly lower CO2 emissions. Walking, biking or using public transit reduces the need for cars, long commutes from the suburbs, and the costly matter of building roads and servicing dispersed properties. As collateral benefits, city centres become more vibrant, social, interesting, healthy and safe. Public services such as schools, hospitals, libraries, water, sewage and law enforcement are easier and cheaper to provide. Think medieval towns and cities. Their efficiency has been tested and proven during the centuries before we had the energizing power of fossil fuels.
Garbage is a topical problem these days as landfill sites fill and methane escapes from existing dumps - methane is a greenhouse gas about 20-times more powerful than CO2. Burning is probably the worst option for garbage disposal because it emits CO2 and innumerable toxins. Expensive incinerators also commit communities to long-term agreements and eliminate better options as they come available. The best option is careful household streaming of garbage that can then be composted, recycled or stored. Sophisticated technologies such as anaerobic digesters and thermal depolymerization can process waste into reusable materials, thus creating useful heat, oil, gases and solids that can substitute for non-renewable resources.
The two communities ofCampbell
River and the Comox
Valley
Climatologists warn that we are reaching a critical tipping point in our misadventure with fossil fuels. If senior governments are not capable of curbing greenhouse emissions, then the responsibility for corrective measures falls to local communities and individuals. Given the evidence of all other failures, this is the place where important change must begin."
*
Scared yet?!
The above kind of GreenFear crap is the same kind of GreenFear crap which Liberal Jim Bradley and his Ontario Liberals also most assuredly believe in.
We've heard this same kind of climate-change / global-warming-fear spread in Niagara, as well, by the Jim Bradleys, by the Brian McMullans, the Walt Lastewkas, the Jim Diodatis, the Stephane Dions, the Iggy Poops, the Gary Burroughes'... the same global warming fear-mongering, inevitably and predictably coupled with the same bolshevik GreenFear thuggery which is then offered - sorry, FORCED - upon the population as a supposed green "cure".
In St.Catharines, Liberal Jim Bradley has been babbling about global warming for years. The local newspapers have NEVER demanded any specific evidence from Jim Bradley to justify his "solutions" to the "problems" of "man-made global warming".
Wendy Metcalfe, the St.Catharines Standard boss, and Mike Williscraft, the Niagara This Week chief, can maybe check their files, going back... ohh... I dunno - how about, say... twenty years (is that long enough?) - and recount for readers exactly how many interviews they have had regarding Jim Bradley and the issue of climate change /global warming; and how many times Jim Bradley had ever been publicly asked by the press to actually cite the specific AGW evidence which he (supposedly!) had, and which he has since used to justify his Liberal greenshevism.
They'll find nothing; if anything, the local Niagara press has fawned over and supported - mostly with little-to-no serious criticism - Bradley's GreenFear policies, from the beginning.
Now, in Oct.2011, that Jim Bradley, the Liberal GreenFear kyodiot, has become McGuinty's environment minister, do you think that the St.Catharines Standard's Wendy Metcalfe, or Niagara This Week's Mike Williscraft, will dare ask Jim Bradley about his specific evidence of AGW / man-made climate-change / global-warming, or whatever Jim's calling his GreenSocialism these days? Or will the Metcalfe/Williscraft gang continue to kiss Jim Bradley's Liberal ass, without question?
Since Jim Bradley was thrown out of the House in Queen's Park in October 2002, back when he was GreenFear-mongering about Kyoto, will Metcalfe or Williscraft now - in October 2011 - ask their local Niagara Liberal MPP Jim Bradley to publicly provide the SPECIFIC evidence which Bradley had at the time, extant in 2002, to support his GreenFear-mongering?
Jim Bradley has never actually provided any evidence to support his Green Fear-mongering actions. And yet, Bradley's Bootlickers in the press - a decade later - still haven't bothered to ask, either; whatever crap came out of Bradley's Liberal yap, was considered sacrosanct; whatever Liberal Jim Bradley spewed was unquestioningly considered as "it's all-settled" green gospel from Ole Jimmy, Ontario's Holy Greenness, Gaia's Protector, and Canada's Environmentalist's Saint.
The Bradley Bootlickers STILL are not asking, even though Jim Bradley is Ontario's environment minister again; and not one report has emerged from the local Niagara press compiling and investigating Bradley's so-called "scientific evidence" which influenced Bradley's GreenFear bolshevism.
Let's go back even further than 2002; let's go back to 1991; the local Niagara press has never bothered to question [let alone report!] Jim Bradley's "beliefs" as reported in a July 21, 1991 Ottawa Citizen story:
Jim Bradley was Ontario's environment minister from 1985 to 1990, when the province cleaned up much of its acid rain and started enforcing pollution laws to the letter. The Liberal MPP for St. Catharines lists overpopulation, global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, discharge of persistent toxins, and deforestation of tropical and temperate forests.
In 1991, Jim Bradley listed overpopulation, global warming, deforestation, etc; are these still his priorities today, in 2011? Why hasn't anyone for Niagara - and as far as I can tell, anyone in Ontario [!] - specifically asked him?
No-one really knows what retro-environment-minister Jim Bradley's specific motivations and justifications are - or were.
The local press in his own city of St.Catharines and Niagara region has avoided asking Jim Bradley to justify his Malthusian "over population" fears and his global warming fear-mongering.
*Where; who; what specifically; which specific scientific "evidence", did Jim Bradley actually cite as justification for his "beliefs" in 1991?
*Where was Jim Bradley's publicly-cited specific scientific "evidence" for AGW in 2002??
*Where is Bradley's AGW evidence (obviously, the same evidence which Bradley must have [albeit, secretly!] already had in 1991!) today, in 2011???
When will Niagara's media moguls Wendy Metcalfe or Mike Williscraft bother to actually ask Jim Bradley - now McGuinty's environment minister in 2011 - specific questions about Bradley's decades of global warming deceptions?
Research and talk about climate change are no longer enough, said Deborah Harford, executive director of Adaptation to Climate Change (ACT) at Simon Fraser University. She said costs that business and service providers will face include increased effects on health, energy production, food services and population movements due to rising sea levels.
And as the effects increase, she said, insurance companies will probably start raising rates if infrastructure has not been planned and developed to adapt to climate change.
Bob Purdy of the Fraser Basin Council said issues such as climate change are complex but actions can be taken, such as reducing emissions on transportation fleets, which also saves costs.
Harford said most British Columbians probably do not understand adaptation to climate change.
"They would say, 'Do we need this?'" she said of expenditures that would meet impending changes.
Local governments are already adapting by undertaking long-term measures, she said, citing some of the initiatives at the City of Vancouver.
Peter Judd, general manager of Vancouver's engineering services, said the city has already implemented programs, like the downtown bicycle lanes, that are responses to climate change. Strategies are also underway to adapt to climateinduced changes to the city's water supply, which will likely be affected by drier summers.
Judd said drinking water will be more expensive. In a later interview, he expanded on the water issue, saying the city is prepared to require new residential housing to have water meters installed beginning Jan. 1, 2012. All that's needed is city council's final approval.
There will also be a rate structure to encourage residents to reduce their water use, he said, but added that ultimately, the need to conserve will mean water rates are going to go up.
"The thing that we have an opportunity to do here is to actually reduce the long-term costs. If we can reduce the amount of water we are using, we can put off or eliminate major expenses like raising the dams in the region," he said.
"One of the challenges that we have is that we expect to be facing hotter, drier summers and more intense storms in the winter. The response to some of those things, like water conservation and droughtresistant plants, are the kinds of responses that you need to address," said Judd.
He said the prospect of rising sea levels is one of the biggest challenges the city is struggling with now.
And the city's controversial downtown bike lanes, he said, are part of the city's climatechange strategy. They are aimed not only at today's bike commuters, but also at the next generation.
"We have to make sure there are alternatives for people who haven't started driving yet."
Judd said the city is adapting to more severe and more frequent storms by increasing the size of the storm-sewer pipes.
The primary need is to replace the old system where storm drains and sewage were combined in a single pipe, but at the same time the city is installing wider pipes dedicated solely to storm run-off, he said.
Already, the city has recorded an increase in rainfall along with more severe rainstorms."
*
Scared yet of the man-made GreenFear phoniness?!
Think the above greenshevism isn't enough - how about this piece of GreenFear by Ray Grigg, Special to the Courier-Islander,
"Responsibility for reducing carbon dioxide emissions is falling to cities, municipalities and regional districts because wider efforts during the last 30 years to ameliorate the threat of global climate change are not working. Multiple negotiations sponsored by the United Nation's have been unsuccessful. Developing nations such as
The situation is moving from serious to critical, according to the International Energy Agency that monitors global CO2 emissions. Emissions in 2010 broke a dubious record - 30.6 billion tonnes (Gt or gigatonnes) or 1.6 Gt over 2009's 29.0 Gt. The 5.52 per cent increase was also unprecedented, representing a nearly unbroken succession of yearly rises - the so-called "Great Recession" cut 2008's 29.3 Gt to 29.0 Gt in 2009 (Guardian Weekly, June 3/11).
Climatologists warn that we cannot exceed 2.0 C without invoking "dangerous climate change". To maintain any reasonable measure of safety, they estimate that 32.0 Gt of carbon dioxide is the maximum we can emit by 2020. However, if present trends continue, we will reach this threshold nine years early, "making it all but impossible to hold warming to a manageable degree" (Ibid.). The end of this century, therefore, could see average temperature increases of 4.0 C or more, about six times the temperature increase from the Industrial Revolution to the present. (Climatologists calculate that 32.0 Gt per year is not a safe level of emissions but the maximum before they must gradually be reduced to zero. Even during this transition we risk inducing serious climate change and destroying the marine ecology with fatal acidification.)
CO2 emissions are the key environmental force affecting almost every other corrective environmental action we undertake. We cannot restore wild salmon runs if rivers are too hot for fish and oceans are too acetic for marine life. We cannot protect endangered ecologies if temperatures rise above levels species can tolerate. We cannot sustain agriculture if the weather is too extreme for crops. We cannot cope with displaced people if hundreds of millions are fleeing rising oceans, drought, floods and unprecedented storms.
Unlike the federal and provincial governments that have been incapable of reducing CO2 emissions, cities, municipalities and regional districts are closer to the grassroots of communities. Their smaller size allows them to be more responsive and manoeuvrable, better able to initiate the many incremental reductions that can have a huge cumulative effect on total greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, this is what many of them have already done. And given the overall severity of the emissions challenge, this should be the primary guiding principle of all local planning and development.
Several helpful options exist. First is to increase population density downtown. This concentration of people has multiple advantages, all of which are efficiencies that directly or indirectly lower CO2 emissions. Walking, biking or using public transit reduces the need for cars, long commutes from the suburbs, and the costly matter of building roads and servicing dispersed properties. As collateral benefits, city centres become more vibrant, social, interesting, healthy and safe. Public services such as schools, hospitals, libraries, water, sewage and law enforcement are easier and cheaper to provide. Think medieval towns and cities. Their efficiency has been tested and proven during the centuries before we had the energizing power of fossil fuels.
Garbage is a topical problem these days as landfill sites fill and methane escapes from existing dumps - methane is a greenhouse gas about 20-times more powerful than CO2. Burning is probably the worst option for garbage disposal because it emits CO2 and innumerable toxins. Expensive incinerators also commit communities to long-term agreements and eliminate better options as they come available. The best option is careful household streaming of garbage that can then be composted, recycled or stored. Sophisticated technologies such as anaerobic digesters and thermal depolymerization can process waste into reusable materials, thus creating useful heat, oil, gases and solids that can substitute for non-renewable resources.
The two communities of
Climatologists warn that we are reaching a critical tipping point in our misadventure with fossil fuels. If senior governments are not capable of curbing greenhouse emissions, then the responsibility for corrective measures falls to local communities and individuals. Given the evidence of all other failures, this is the place where important change must begin."
*
Scared yet?!
The above kind of GreenFear crap is the same kind of GreenFear crap which Liberal Jim Bradley and his Ontario Liberals also most assuredly believe in.
We've heard this same kind of climate-change / global-warming-fear spread in Niagara, as well, by the Jim Bradleys, by the Brian McMullans, the Walt Lastewkas, the Jim Diodatis, the Stephane Dions, the Iggy Poops, the Gary Burroughes'... the same global warming fear-mongering, inevitably and predictably coupled with the same bolshevik GreenFear thuggery which is then offered - sorry, FORCED - upon the population as a supposed green "cure".
In St.Catharines, Liberal Jim Bradley has been babbling about global warming for years. The local newspapers have NEVER demanded any specific evidence from Jim Bradley to justify his "solutions" to the "problems" of "man-made global warming".
Wendy Metcalfe, the St.Catharines Standard boss, and Mike Williscraft, the Niagara This Week chief, can maybe check their files, going back... ohh... I dunno - how about, say... twenty years (is that long enough?) - and recount for readers exactly how many interviews they have had regarding Jim Bradley and the issue of climate change /global warming; and how many times Jim Bradley had ever been publicly asked by the press to actually cite the specific AGW evidence which he (supposedly!) had, and which he has since used to justify his Liberal greenshevism.
They'll find nothing; if anything, the local Niagara press has fawned over and supported - mostly with little-to-no serious criticism - Bradley's GreenFear policies, from the beginning.
Now, in Oct.2011, that Jim Bradley, the Liberal GreenFear kyodiot, has become McGuinty's environment minister, do you think that the St.Catharines Standard's Wendy Metcalfe, or Niagara This Week's Mike Williscraft, will dare ask Jim Bradley about his specific evidence of AGW / man-made climate-change / global-warming, or whatever Jim's calling his GreenSocialism these days? Or will the Metcalfe/Williscraft gang continue to kiss Jim Bradley's Liberal ass, without question?
Since Jim Bradley was thrown out of the House in Queen's Park in October 2002, back when he was GreenFear-mongering about Kyoto, will Metcalfe or Williscraft now - in October 2011 - ask their local Niagara Liberal MPP Jim Bradley to publicly provide the SPECIFIC evidence which Bradley had at the time, extant in 2002, to support his GreenFear-mongering?
Jim Bradley has never actually provided any evidence to support his Green Fear-mongering actions. And yet, Bradley's Bootlickers in the press - a decade later - still haven't bothered to ask, either; whatever crap came out of Bradley's Liberal yap, was considered sacrosanct; whatever Liberal Jim Bradley spewed was unquestioningly considered as "it's all-settled" green gospel from Ole Jimmy, Ontario's Holy Greenness, Gaia's Protector, and Canada's Environmentalist's Saint.
The Bradley Bootlickers STILL are not asking, even though Jim Bradley is Ontario's environment minister again; and not one report has emerged from the local Niagara press compiling and investigating Bradley's so-called "scientific evidence" which influenced Bradley's GreenFear bolshevism.
Let's go back even further than 2002; let's go back to 1991; the local Niagara press has never bothered to question [let alone report!] Jim Bradley's "beliefs" as reported in a July 21, 1991 Ottawa Citizen story:
Jim Bradley was Ontario's environment minister from 1985 to 1990, when the province cleaned up much of its acid rain and started enforcing pollution laws to the letter. The Liberal MPP for St. Catharines lists overpopulation, global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, discharge of persistent toxins, and deforestation of tropical and temperate forests.
In 1991, Jim Bradley listed overpopulation, global warming, deforestation, etc; are these still his priorities today, in 2011? Why hasn't anyone for Niagara - and as far as I can tell, anyone in Ontario [!] - specifically asked him?
No-one really knows what retro-environment-minister Jim Bradley's specific motivations and justifications are - or were.
The local press in his own city of St.Catharines and Niagara region has avoided asking Jim Bradley to justify his Malthusian "over population" fears and his global warming fear-mongering.
*Where; who; what specifically; which specific scientific "evidence", did Jim Bradley actually cite as justification for his "beliefs" in 1991?
*Where was Jim Bradley's publicly-cited specific scientific "evidence" for AGW in 2002??
*Where is Bradley's AGW evidence (obviously, the same evidence which Bradley must have [albeit, secretly!] already had in 1991!) today, in 2011???
When will Niagara's media moguls Wendy Metcalfe or Mike Williscraft bother to actually ask Jim Bradley - now McGuinty's environment minister in 2011 - specific questions about Bradley's decades of global warming deceptions?
Perhaps - in light of the above; in context to the above; and in context to McGuinty's appointment of Jim Bradley as Ontario's new environment minister - Niagara's press barons Metcalfe and Williscraft can bother themselves ever-so-briefly to read...
- Peter Foster's Oct.22, 2011 National Post story "A thoroughly political body",
- and Donna Laframboise's Oct.22, 2011 National Post story "Conspiracy of silence",
- as well as Laframboise's Oct.25, 2011 National Post story "IPCC's activist 'experts' " (both articles excerpts from Laframboise's new book "The Delinquent Teenager")
...and then examine how Liberal MPP Jim Bradley has managed to skate his way through two+ decades of his GreenFear peddling, without any scrutiny.
- Peter Foster's Oct.22, 2011 National Post story "A thoroughly political body",
- and Donna Laframboise's Oct.22, 2011 National Post story "Conspiracy of silence",
- as well as Laframboise's Oct.25, 2011 National Post story "IPCC's activist 'experts' " (both articles excerpts from Laframboise's new book "The Delinquent Teenager")
...and then examine how Liberal MPP Jim Bradley has managed to skate his way through two+ decades of his GreenFear peddling, without any scrutiny.
Talk about a 'conspiracy of silence' at the IPCC; the same thing happened here with Jim Bradley!
There was a similar conspiracy of silence/acceptance/acquiescence right in Niagara as well; for years, Liberal Jim Bradley was aided and abetted by a fawning local press which acted more like a defense line on Bradley's team, than an inquisitive, impartial press. For years, there was never any real examination locally in Niagara regarding what Bradley was saying; what Bradley was doing; what, if any, evidence he had... whatever Bradley said about AGW was essentially left unquestioned and politely accepted as gospel.
There was a similar conspiracy of silence/acceptance/acquiescence right in Niagara as well; for years, Liberal Jim Bradley was aided and abetted by a fawning local press which acted more like a defense line on Bradley's team, than an inquisitive, impartial press. For years, there was never any real examination locally in Niagara regarding what Bradley was saying; what Bradley was doing; what, if any, evidence he had... whatever Bradley said about AGW was essentially left unquestioned and politely accepted as gospel.
It appears that the same scenario remains in Niagara in 2011 - even though Bradley is (again) now Ontario's secretive, toxic Liberal environment minister.
*
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