Tuesday, February 28, 2012

And I Thought Harper Could Only Blow Hot Air

It seems Steve can blow cold air too.  He's quick to talk big about his commitment to the Arctic but talk is cheap, even big talk.  It's when it comes to things like climate change and money that Harpo's true colours come through.

Take, for example, Canada's most northerly research station, the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory at Eureka, Ellesmere Island.  That is being shut down on April 30th because Harper won't fund it.

"When you run out of money, there's no alternative but to close the lab," Jim Drummond, a Dalhousie University researcher who is the principal investigator for PEARL, said Tuesday.


Drummond said the network has since applied for various government funding programs and has been turned down for all of them, despite the government's frequent assertion that the Arctic is a priority for Canada.

PEARL is the biggest lab in Canada's High Arctic and, at 80 degrees north latitude, one of the closest in the world to the North Pole.

"Shutting it down causes a big gap in the measurements," Drummond said. "We're losing the ability to know what's going on up there."

Shuttering Canada's window on the far north comes at the very time when the link has been made connecting recent severe winter storm events in Europe and eastern North America to changing air currents in the Arctic due to, you guessed it, climate change and the retreat of polar ice caps.

2 comments:

sassy said...

Let's see if Harper finds the $$ to put military up there.

CuJoYYC said...

I say give Harper and his acolytes military fatigues and some supplies and airlift them to the Arctic. They can keep an eye on Russian incursions into our northern land and oceans (frozen or not) and make weather observations for all of us until at least the next federal election.