Nicely Put. The Final Word on Duffy and the Immaculate Bribe

Who better to tell the tale than a former Crown counsel? The National (Vancouver) Observer's Sandy Garossino has a brilliant summation of why the Cavendish Cottager will walk on the only significant charge against him - bribery.

The Crown, Garossino writes, simply threw in the towel on a losing case.

This Year is the Hottest. Next Year's Hotter Still.

Okay, brace yourselves. This year is expected to be the warmest on record. That means this year will be warmer than last year. It's a record that's expected to last for - one year. Next year is expected to be warmer than this year when it becomes last year but it will still be warmer than the last year before it.

In other words, the three warmest years on record will be 2016 in first place, 2015, a respectable second, and 2014 holding down third spot. In case you're wondering, that's not a good thing. It's a bad thing.



2016 is set to be the warmest year ever recorded, according to a forecast issued by the UK Met Office on Thursday.

Climate change and the peaking of the El Niño weather phenomenon are expected to drive the global average temperature next year above the record now certain to be set for 2015, which itself beat a new record set in 2014.

The Met Office forecast indicates the global average temperature in 2016 will be 1.14C above pre-industrial temperatures, showing how challenging it will be to meet the 1.5C goal. The Met Office said there was just a 5% chance the global average temperature in 2016 would be below that in 2015.

“The vast majority of the warming is global warming, but the icing on the cake is the big El Niño event,” said Prof Adam Scaife, head of monthly to decadal prediction at the Met Office.

Rising temperatures driven by global warming combined with natural variability leads to a greater chance of extreme weather events, he said: “When variability adds to the underlying warming, it can give impacts that have never been seen before.”

Heatwaves have scorched China, Russia, Australia, the Middle East and parts of South America in the last two years. The recent floods in the northwest of England are estimated to have been made 40% more likely by climate change.

[Over the past decade] natural climate cycles led to more of the trapped heat being stored in the oceans. Now, according to the Met Office, all the signs are that the period of slower rises in air temperatures is over and the rate of global warming will accelerate fast in coming years. 2014 was the first year the world passed 1C of warming above pre-industrial levels.

That Thing About the Cure Being Worse Than the Disease?

Bristol, England's Neighbourhood Partnership is a compassionate, well-intentioned bunch of activists. They were incensed by anglers fishing at a pond in St. George park. Their concern was over wildlife being harmed by fishing line and hooks. They took their outrage to Bristol council.

The solution? Remove the fish and destroy them. Sort of like a "scorched pond" policy to deter anglers.

Well, that should certainly help the wildlife.

Veteran Brit Journo, Robert Fisk, Sings Praises of Young Justin

The Independent's Robert Fisk is one of Britain's all time great journos (a summary from Wiki is at the bottom of the page) and he seems to think as highly of Justin Trudeau as he describes disparagingly the guy Trudeau ousted.


Let us now praise famous men... Justin Trudeau comes to mind. “Canada is back,” the country’s new Prime Minister told the climate conference in Paris – and closed the door on the bigoted, aggressive Canada which his Conservative predecessor had been trying to create.

It’s nice to write a story that’s an “upper” rather than a “downer” – which most Middle East reports must be. I was in Canada during the election, when former Prime Minister Stephen Harper ran a campaign of such cruel mendacity against his own country’s Muslim minority that I began to wonder if Canada had lost its moral standing in the world.

Hands up, I asked a large and wealthy group of Canadian businessmen in Banff, those of you who have had to apologise abroad for the behaviour of Stephen Harper. A miserable three raised their hands. “Some weren’t exactly telling the truth,” a conference organiser privately responded. I knew that. From being a magnanimous, peacekeeping power which believed in the UN, human rights and a multicultural future, Canada was becoming a country obsessed with security, state intrusion, fear (of Muslims, of course) and conglomerate power. Harper was an economist. Trudeau used to be a schoolteacher.

...Just as in America, whoever followed George W Bush had to be better, so Trudeau is Jesus to Harper’s Old Testament darkness. He’ll screw up at times, just like Obama has. But on election night, he told Canadians that “we know in our bones that Canada was built by people from all corners of the world who worship every faith... A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” Strong stuff when we’re supposed to be living in the age of “terror”.

Follow the link to read the entire op-ed.

Robert Fisk (born 12 July 1946) is an English writer and journalist from Maidstone, Kent. He has been Middle East correspondent of The Independent for more than twenty years, primarily based in Beirut.[1] Fisk holds more British and international journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent and has been voted British International Journalist of the Year award seven times. He has published a number of books and reported on several wars and armed conflicts.

An Arabic speaker,[2] he is one of a few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, which he did on three occasions between 1993 and 1997.[3][4]

When Cognitive Dissonance Becomes Your Default Operating System

The Achilles' Heel of climate change is commonly known as "cognitive dissonance."  Wiki defines it as, "the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas or values, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values."

The mountain of omni-disciplinary science we've amassed over the past 20-years has given us a clear, no make that blunt, warning of just what we're facing and what we're going to have to do if we're to avoid some utterly catastrophic outcomes.

Our leaders, of all stripes, say they get it but that's when they succumb to the paralysing effects of cognitive dissonance. Petro-state Canada affords a clear example of this.

We know that mankind and our civilization are not going to get through this century in any form we would today recognize unless we leave at least 80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, untouched. We know that means we must promptly implement what the Potsdam Institute's Hans Joachim Schellnhuber calls an "induced implosion" of the world's fossil fuel industry. The only group who can induce that result are those in whose hands we have entrusted the levers of power, our political caste. This is particularly relevant to Canada which promotes the extraction and sale abroad of the world's most costly and carbon-intensive unconventional petroleum, bitumen.

Do you hear Rachel Notley, Brad Wall, Justin Trudeau, Rona Ambrose, even Elizabeth May advocating that we shut down the Tar Sands for the sake of our grandkids and all the grandkids around the world? That's cognitive dissonance. We can't do it. We won't.

What about the linked perils of over-consumption and overpopulation? Have you heard any leader in any country, China and India in particular, calling for a depopulation movement which, in the non-violence category, would mean some sort of mass sterilization? I haven't and I don't have any hope that I will.  What about advocacy for, as James Lovelock terms it "sustainable retreat," an immediate and major reduction in production and consumption, engineered negative GDP? I'm not hearing much on that score either.

Negative GDP invokes notions of recession or even another Great Depression. That's the way modern economies are organized. But market fundamentalism of the sort that prevails today is full of contradictions, falsehoods, half-truths and illogic. One of these is the delusion that today's global economy which has grown far beyond the boundaries of our planetary environment can simply and must continue to grow and that's for our benefit. Here's what that looks like in cartoon form:

You see, the environment defines the limits of our resources, especially our essential renewable resources - biomass, water and so on. Since the 70s we've been pretending that's not true. We've been consuming resources far beyond their natural recovery rate using nothing but parlour tricks. We have been defying gravity.

When we collapse a fish species, we just move to the next most desirable species and predate that. It's called "fishing down the food chain." Eventually you're left with stuff that nobody really wants to eat.

We keep our economy growing with ever more resort to groundwater, aquifers, that we're draining many times faster than their recharge rate. We're heading to "E" empty very rapidly.

We're even exhausting our farmland due to intensive agriculture dependent on ever greater applications of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides and rapacious access to already dwindling supplies of groundwater. We strip so much out of once productive soil that we transform it into desert.

We, mankind, our species alone - consume so much of the Earth's renewable resources that we've caused stocks of all other living things, plant and animal, to decline by 50% over the past 40-years.

Here's the thing. All of these excessive behaviours are unsustainable. They're all self-destructive. And yet we're pursuing all of them at ever increasing rates. It's called GDP growth. We have reached a state of absolute dependency on steadily worsening behaviours that are completely and unavoidably nihilistic.

It's been estimated that there are enough renewable resources on our planet to sustain a global population of about three billion people at 1970s levels of consumption. Instead, our per capita consumption has spiraled even as our sheer numbers have grown to 7+ billion heading to 9-billion or more. Even today we see the Earth collapsing under the weight of our feet.

In the context of these unacknowledged companion challenges - overpopulation and over-consumption, our fight against climate change becomes a well-intentioned gesture that cannot possibly succeed much less avert the end of our civilization.

Here are some insights from Chris Hedges:

"The global elites have no intention of interfering with the profits, or ending government subsidies, for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not curtail extraction or impose hefty carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit the overconsumption that is the engine of global capitalism. They act as if the greatest contributor of greenhouse gases—the animal agriculture industry—does not exist. They siphon off trillions of dollars and employ scientific and technical expertise—expertise that should be directed toward preparing for environmental catastrophe and investing in renewable energy—to wage endless wars in the Middle East. What they airily hold out as a distant solution to the crisis—wind turbines and solar panels—is, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury. And as the elites mouth platitudes about saving the climate they are shoving still another trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), down our throats. The TPP permits corporations to ignore nonbinding climate accords made at conferences such as the one in Paris, and it allows them, in secret trade tribunals, to defy environmental regulations imposed by individual states.

"New technology—fracking, fuel-efficient vehicles or genetically modified food—is not about curbing overconsumption or conserving resources. It is about ensuring that consumption continues at unsustainable levels. Technological innovation, employed to build systems of greater and greater complexity, has fragmented society into cadres of specialists. The expertise of each of these specialists is limited to a small section of the elaborate technological, scientific and bureaucratic machinery that drives corporate capitalism forward—much as in the specialized bureaucratic machinery that defined the genocide carried out by the Nazis. These technocrats are part of the massive, unthinking hive that makes any system work, even a system of death. They lack the intellectual and moral capacity to question the doomsday machine spawned by global capitalism. And they are in control.

"Civilizations careening toward collapse create ever more complex structures, and more intricate specialization, to exploit diminishing resources. But eventually the resources are destroyed or exhausted. The systems and technologies designed to exploit these resources become useless. Economists call such a phenomenon the “Jevons paradox.” The result is systems collapse.

"...The elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs not to solve real problems but to maintain at any cost the systems of global capitalism, profit personally from the assault. They amass inconceivable sums of wealth while their victims, the underclasses around the globe, are thrust into increasing distress from global warming, poverty and societal breakdown. The apparatus of government, seized by this corporate cabal, is hostile to genuine change. It passes laws, as it did for Denton, Texas, afterresidents voted to outlaw fracking in their city, to overturn the ability of local communities to control their own resources. It persecutes dissidents, along with environmental and animal rights activists, who try to halt the insanity. The elites don’t work for us. They don’t work for the planet. They orchestrate the gaiacide. And they are well paid for it."

You didn't ask to ride this tiger, not knowingly anyway, but that doesn't change the fact that you are well and truly astride the running beast that will turn and attack you the minute you fall off. The political caste, meanwhile, will be watching the spectacle from a temporarily safe distance. The big cats will be onto them eventually.

Not a Peep About the $90,000 Cheque??? Res Ipsa Loquitor

It's over!!! The Crown has concluded its cross-examination of the Cavendish Cottager, senator Mike Duffy.

All you need to know about the cross-examination is pretty much contained in this one fact - there wasn't a single question put to the senator for Prince Edward Island about the $90,000 cheque he received from Nigel Wright.

Not one question.

And so, it seems, ends the bizarre saga of the Immaculate Bribe or, as we call it in Latin, the Immaculate Munera.

This whole case was about that bribe. That was the steak and the sizzle. The rest was so much wilted lettuce from the salad bar.

At the end of the day the prosecutor couldn't even bring himself to ask the accused about it. Now the case becomes whether the lone gunman took liberties with the petty cash box, not whether he blew a hole the size of a grapefruit in the president's head.

Res ipsa loquitor - the thing speaks for itself.

This was all about running interference for a corrupt prime minister, nothing more. It had nothing to do with justice. This is what "the Harper Government" was always about.

The Wheels of Justice Groan and Creak in the Duffy Trial

The problem with "political trials" is that they're show trials, staged events. That means the players have to go through the motions even if their hearts aren't into it.

This is about Duffy, Senator Marooned, the Cavendish Cottager.

Even former Globe luminary, Geoffrey Stevens, was calling it a "show trial" that had lost all purpose and meaning after the ouster of Shifty Steve in the last federal election. Stevens argued that Harper no longer needed the political smokescreen and the whole thing should be shut down.

Me? I wasn't so sure and thought it might be best to wait until the Crown had at Duffy on cross-examination. Now, with the reservation that news accounts of trial proceedings are hopelessly inaccurate, misleading and often biased, I scoured every print story I could find about Duffy's ordeal at the hands of the prosecutor - only to emerge with just one question, a resounding "WTF"?

The questioning seemed inane, pointless. There was no slashing attack, no rapier thrust, none of that. It was the prosecutorial equivalent of erectile dysfunction or at least so it seemed to me from parsing Kady and Christie and the rest of those miserable scribes.

How could this be? This trial has gone on longer than it took Noah to hammer together that Ark thingee and yet here was the Crown dwelling on irrelevancies such as Duffy's smear job of Stephane Dion. That's got bugger all to do with these charges - nada, zip, zilch.

Urgent phone call to Ottawa to an old buddy who has sat in on most of the proceedings. A veteran lawyer and former judge. Turns out he was there for the cross-examination. I popped the question.

Old Friend volunteered that he spent a good deal of time observing the prosecutor's body language (it's a 'judge thing') and, to him, it seemed to confirm what he was hearing - the Crown is padding, marking time. It's filler. You can't go this long without at least putting in a couple of days, maybe three,  of cross-examination lest people start talking about what was really going on.  So you fling out a few things to give the scribblers something to file, to keep them distracted, and then you close.

Now Old Friend added that other Crown attorneys had mentioned that Duffy's prosecutor didn't like this case from the get-go. They all had the sense that this was a show trial orchestrated from Parliament Hill, A-Division and some accommodating folks at Queen's Park. The Crown is like a WWI infantry captain in the trenches. When the whistle blows it's up the ladder and over the top.

The Crown called the obligatory witnesses and Duffy's lawyer, sitting behind his Maxim gun, mowed'em down.

Old Friend also mentioned conversations he's had in recent months with some senior RCMP types who are fuming at the way their current commish, Bob Paulson, allowed his strings to be pulled by Harper's minions. With Ralph Goodale now at the helm as public safety minister, watch for Paulson to get the hook real soon.

Old Friend says it's all over, everyone including the judge is utterly exhausted with this nonsense. He says it's conceivable Duffy could be found guilty on two or three of the really minor charges but, then again, so could most of his fellow senators.

I asked whether the Crown might be holding something up his sleeve - rebuttal witnesses such as senators LeBreton, Tkachuk and Stewart-Olsen to refute Duffy's otherwise uncontradicted evidence? Old Friend says the Crown knows what Don Bayne has waiting for those jokers if they ever get on the stand and at this point nobody wants to have to clean up the blood.

Oh, There IS a Santa!! And He Showed Up a Week Early!

You might remember this smug prick, Martin Shkreli. He's the Grinch whose claim to fame rests with pharmaceutical price-gouging. Well the FBI wiped a whole lot of that smug off Martin's face when agents showed up with their own Christmas gift - an arrest warrant.


Shkreli, 32, sparked national outrage in the US earlier this year after his pharmaceutical company, Turing Pharmaceuticals Inc, hiked the price of the drug Daraprim, a common anti-parasitic drug, to $750 a tablet from $13.50 immediately after acquiring it. Shkreli staunchly defended his decision, responding "lol" to Hillary Clinton on Twitter after she criticized him.

Shkreli's arrest Thursday comes after a fraud investigation stemming from his time as manager of hedge fund MSMB Capital Management and CEO of biopharmaceutical company Retrophin Inc, a person familiar with the matter said.

Reuters witnessed law enforcement agents arresting a hoodie-clad Shkreli at the Murray Hill Tower Apartments and escorting him into a car in midtown Manhattan today. A spokesperson for the FBI confirmed Shkreli's arrest.

Shrekli is expected to be charged today for illegally using assets from Retrophin to pay off debts after his hedge fund lost millions of dollars, the source said.

In addition to angering pharmaceutical executives and consumers alike, Shkreli has also managed to piss off hip-hop fans too. He recently bought the sole copy of Wu-Tang Clan's latest album, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, for $2 million after the rap group agreed to sell it to the highest bidder. He then threatened to destroy the CD.

Oooh, Martin, I so hope they find that one very special little jail cell for you. It's almost got your name all over it.

Toss the Little Bugger in Jail and Throw Away the Key - Affluenza My Arse

Remember young Ethan Couch?  He's the juvi drunk driver who ploughed into a crowd of pedestrians in Fort Worth in 2013, killing four of them.

Ethan's rich parents hired a team of crack lawyers who got the judge to believe the punk was suffering from "affluenza." They said his affluent upbringing was largely responsible for this crash and he should be let off lightly. They argued that he was so spoiled that he couldn't tell wrong from right and, in any case, he was much too spoiled to be tossed in jail. The judge agreed, sentencing Ethan to treatment for alcohol abuse and 10-years probation.

Now, just a few years later, Ethan has skipped his mandatory meetings with his probation officer. Authorities have been unable to locate him or his mother. They've been looking for the probationer due to a recent video posted to the internet in which he appears to be drinking again.

A judge has issued a "directive to apprehend" - the juvi equivalent of an arrest warrant.

Coast Guard Station to Re-Open ASAP

Canada's major west coast port and boaters' paradise will soon be again under the protection of the Canadian Coast Guard.

The federal government has announced that CCG Kitsilano will re-open as soon as possible.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson called today's announcement great news.

"There was massive local outcry about the closure, given that we saw this base responding to over 300 calls each year," he said.

"It was a mistake that it was closed at all," said B.C. Premier Christy Clark. "So many people use this harbour, not just commercial shipping, so many citizens."

Robertson said the Kitsilano closure "made things worse" this past summer when close to 3,000 litres of bunker fuel leaked from the MV Marathassa into English Bay, soiling local beaches and sparking a two-week cleanup.

The oil spill happened a kilometre away from the closed Kitsilano station. Coast guard response from the nearest open base in Richmond was criticized as slow.

The station was closed in 2013 by the boneheaded diktat of Stephen Harper.

OMG - Americans Now Oppose Ban on Assault Rifles

For 20-years the American public has supported a ban on the sale of assault weapons. Now an ABC News/Washington Post poll suggests that a majority of Americans now oppose such a ban.

What? We're Selling Canadian Air to China?

It was only supposed to be a joke. It's not a joke any more.

A couple of enterprising Canadians, Troy Paquette and Moses Lam, have found there's a market in Beijing for clean, Canadian mountain air.  This stuff:

"The way we capture the air now is a bit of a trade secret," Paquette, who goes down to Banff and Lake Louise from Edmonton, Alberta to fill giant cans with air through clean compression, and brings it home to bottle it, told VICE News.

"As much as it started out as a novelty idea, with the really bad smog they've had in Beijing, we're finding people are buying it as more than just a novelty, but for everyday use" he says. "There's been quite a demand."

The canisters have a cap mask attached to it and contain about 150 1-second sprays.

Single and twin packs of cans are being sold from $16 to $46. Aside from China, interest has also come from places like Iran and Afghanistan, said Paquette.

Paquette says it took a while for the product to gain any traction, but since the smog alert issued in Beijing last week, demand has skyrocketed.

Lam told the Telegraph their first shipment of 500 bottles was sold in four days, and a crate containing 4,000 more is on its way to China.

And Paquette said distributors in China have expressed interest in carrying Vitality Air in stores.

The Beginning of the End? Duffy Gets Grilled by the Prosecution. Even Stephane Dion is on the Crown's Agenda.

Mike Duffy's "innocent victim" schtick is under attack by the Crown. In a trial full of curious irrelevancies even Duffy's smear job on Stephane Dion has surfaced:

Why are you telling me this story? 

You asked me about Dion, Duffy said. 

Did you think it was fair to rebroadcast the interview Dion did with Murphy? 

Absolutely it was already on the public record. And by the way the decision was made by the president of CTV news. But I agreed. 

You wouldn't rebroadcast it now, would you? 

Yes I would, Duffy says. 

But that's not what the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council said is it, Holmes said. 

Duffy said 'it wasn't a dirty trick.' 

Holmes says they found that you, Duffy behaved unfairly. You'd do it again after hearing that? 

Yes I would.

There, that should kill off any latent sympathy you might be holding for the Cavendish Cottager.

Trump Wars, Scottish Style

His mother was a Gaelic-speaking lass from Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis but that hasn't endeared the Mouth that Roared, Donald Trump, with the Scottish people or their governments.

America's Bellicose Blowhard-in-Chief has popped a fuse over losing an appeal over the Scottish government's decision to allow an offshore wind farm near Trump's luxury Scottish golf resort facility. Trump reckons those whirly-gigs will fuck up the view.

Lawyers for Mr Trump, whose call last week to deny Muslims entry to the United States provoked widespread criticism in Britain, had argued at the UK's top court that the Scottish government's decision to approve the scheme was flawed.

It was the giant orange muff's third and final attempt to fight the wind farm in court. He reacted to his third consecutive loss by denouncing the Scottish government in a statement as "foolish, parochial and small-minded."

Update:

The photo above made me think of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.

Wouldn't it be great if the producers did a segment in which Burns gets a Donald Trump combover/pompadour?

Guardian Readers Skewer the COP21 Climate Deal

Here are some sobering comments from letters received by the Guardian responding to the COP 21 climate summit deal inked in Paris last week.


Frank Jackson, former co-chair of the World Disarmament Campaign, writes:

"Apart from the question of actual implementation of even the agreed measures (themselves expected to achieve only a 2.7C limit) there are many factors not taken into account. Barack Obama says the deal will create “more jobs and economic growth”. But growth, even “green growth”, is precisely the problem. We live on a finite planet with finite resources which we are already exploiting to the limit and beyond. The aim must be to achieve a steady-state economy, with resources fairly shared, but that is incompatible with capitalism’s growth imperative."


Dr. Robin Russell-Jones writes:

"...the atmosphere does not respond to political craft and strategic compromise, it only responds to the laws of physics which are uncompromising and potentially lethal for most species on Earth, including our own.

"All of the really tough decisions – such as carbon taxes, country-specific limits and financial penalties – have been shelved, which will allow countries such as India, China and even the UK to carry on burning fossil fuels while paying lip-service to the need to reduce emissions. Instead the goal of 1.5C and even 2C will now rely on unproven and currently non-existent technologies such as nuclear fusion, carbon capture with storage or carbon negative technologies. I pray these will come in time but how many people would get on a flight in the hope that someone can defuse the bomb before it blows up?"

David Humphries writes:

"The Paris climate talks followed a pattern that is familiar in international environmental negotiations. At the start of the conference tough commitments and ambitious targets were proposed, including on forest conservation and the transfer of environmentally clean technology to developing countries. Over the next two weeks many of these were weakened with caveats and, in some cases, quietly abandoned as delegates edged towards a politically acceptable compromise. This is the so-called convoy principle: everyone stays together, but all move at the speed of the slowest. Most disappointing of all is the failure to agree legally binding greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments. Without this, the pledge to limit the global temperature rise to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels remains purely aspirational."

More Grim Records for the Arctic.

The 2015 "Arctic Report Card" has been released by NOAA, America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In case you haven't guessed the gist of the report, here are a few highlights:

Not only is the ice winnowing away, it is becoming younger – Noaa’s analysis of satellite data shows that 70% of the ice pack in March was composed of first-year ice, with just 3% of the ice older than four years. This means the amount of new, thinner ice has doubled since the 1980s and is more vulnerable to melting.

The report card – compiled by 72 scientists from 11 countries – noted sharp variations in conditions in the northern part of the Arctic compared to its southern portion. The melting season was 30-40 days longer than the long-term average in the north but slightly below average in the south, suggesting that changes to the jet stream, causing colder air to whip across the southern part of the Arctic, are having an impact.

Noaa said warming in the Arctic is occurring at twice the rate of anywhere else in the world – a 2.9C (5.2F) average increase over the past century – and that it is certain climate change, driven by the release of greenhouse gases, is the cause.

“There is a close association between air temperature and the amount of sea ice we see, so if we reduce the temperature globally it looks like it will stabilize the Arctic,” said Dr James Overland, oceanographer at Noaa.
If you're interested in charts and photographic depictions of the year that was in the high Arctic, you can find them here. Sorry, I couldn't bring myself to post another picture of a forlorn polar bear marooned on an ice floe.

This Sounds Like a First - the Sahara Reaches Britain

For some time now dust storms from the Sahara Desert have crossed the Mediterranean to reach the southernmost parts of Europe. That's one thing but Britain, surely not?

A Saharan dust cloud is expected to settle over parts of the UK on Thursday, prompting health experts to issue warnings to elderly people and those who suffer from breathing problems.

High levels of pollution are expected over southern and central England, with Lincolnshire bearing the brunt of the cloud.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued alerts for most of England and Wales, warning that older people, asthma sufferers and those with breathing difficulties are most at risk. People are advised to avoid exercise if they notice problems.

Defra said: “Adults and children with lung problems, and adults with heart problems, should reduce strenuous physical exertion, particularly outdoors, and particularly if they experience symptoms.

“People with asthma may find they need to use their reliever inhaler more often. Older people should also reduce physical exertion.”

Vlad Walks the Walk Only It's the "KGB Stomp"

This is really weird. Vladimir Putin's rise to the top began with a career in the Soviet Union's dreaded KGB where he reached the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Scientists who've been looking at the curious way Putin walks think he's showing that old habits die hard. When he walks his left arm swings normally. His right arm doesn't. He also seems to lead with his left side.

So what's with the right arm?


The study, published on Tuesday by the British Medical Journal, notes that Putin has shown a “clearly reduced right-sided arm swing”, possibly related to weapons training he received when he was part of the Soviet KGB.

Citing a KGB training manual they obtained, the researchers suggest that his style of walking is linked to training he underwent in the feared security agency, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel before retiring at the twilight of the Soviet Union.

“According to this manual, KGB operatives were instructed to keep their weapon in their right hand close to their chest and to move forward with one side, usually the left, presumably allowing subjects to draw the gun as quickly as possible when confronted with a foe,” the researchers, based in Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands, wrote.

The Big Climate Change Counter-Offensive Has Begun. Care to "Ride to the Guns?"

There's no guarantee that it's not already too late or that it will, in the end, succeed but there are signs that 2015 may just be the year that the battle to arrest climate change tilted in favour of the good guys, i.e. you, your kids and your grandkids.

The fight begins by defeating the fossil fuel industry's rearguard action, a battle waged with denialism and doubt. This is a fight they knew they couldn't win. They know the scientific truth of global warming. They've done their own scientific research. They've done the math. But their fight was never about winning. It was always about postponing defeat, extending the era of fossil fuels for just as long as possible. They simply adopted the template created decades earlier by the tobacco industry.

This time it's different. The victims aren't smokers or those exposed to second-hand smoke. The victim this time is mankind, civilization and the devastation is of a degree that utterly eclipses the tobacco catastrophe. The counter-attack may see the battleground shift from the media to the courtroom.



On November 5 New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman opened an investigation against ExxonMobil for potentially lying to the public and investors about the risks of climate change. The next day, the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the Canadian tar sands to refineries near Houston, was rejected by Pres. Barack Obama and effectively killed. Then only two days later, Peabody Energy announced that a two-year investigation by Schneiderman had come to a close, forcing the company to disclose any financial risks it faces from future government policies and regulations related to climate change.

It is tempting to take the rush of recent events optimistically, especially if you have been waiting to see more concerted action against human causes of climate change. In addition to McKibben, several activists, scientists and environmental lawyers agree the world is shifting from one doused in denial to one that might take big steps in the right direction. Such news, however, begs the question: What’s behind this change of heart? “The science is strong and getting stronger,” says Richard Alley, a geoscientist at The Pennsylvania State University. “And despite great efforts by clever people over decades, no one has succeeded in finding any real problems with the science or in generating any serious competing ideas.” But what’s more likely to change public opinion, many climate scientists point out, is the extreme weather prevalent today. Whether it is California’s record-breaking drought or the fact that 2015, like the year before it, will set yet another first for the hottest year on record, people are now seeing the impacts that likely arise from climate change in their own backyards. It is no longer a threat relegated to the future and faraway places.

Not only is the public beginning to accept climate change as a real danger, they’re realizing that fighting it is a viable option. Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann points to “the remarkable growth of renewable energy” as adding to the sense that public perception is at a tipping point. Cleaner energy sources are surging so much that 2014 marked the first time in 40 years that global carbon dioxide emissions stalled, and even dropped during a time of economic growth. With the tie between economic growth and lower carbon emissions severed, the public has begun to see renewable energy as a viable alternative. Indeed, a recent Pew Research Center survey showed a clear global consensus on a need to tackle climate change. Across all 40 nations polled, roughly 78 percent of residents supported the idea that their countries should limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The perceived turning point from climate denialism to action does not appear to be a scientist’s pipe dream, either. Lawyers who work at the forefront of climate policy agree that strong science and the ability to tackle climate change are changing people’s minds. But several legal turns have also taken place. “I actually think there is a trend in public conversations and even in private conversations toward thinking about liability for major energy companies for climate harm in a way we haven't seen in many years,” says Cara Horowitz, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. And proving companies [liable] might just be the next step toward a renewable future.


...A crucial event occurred in 2013 when researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute calculated that only 90 companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, were largely responsible for the climate crisis. “So relatively few companies really are proportionally responsible for a pretty large share of the climate change problem in a way that allows lawyers and others to start thinking about causality in a legal sense,” Horowitz says.

Fuel was added to the fire earlier this year when an InsideClimate Newsinvestigation revealed that Exxon was aware of climate change as early as 1977 (before the oil giant merged with Mobil). The news group claimed that despite the information, the company spent decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change, arguing the science was still highly uncertain. It even promoted climate misinformation—in 1989 the company helped create the Global Climate Coalition to question the scientific basis of climate change concerns and dissuade the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol to control greenhouse gas emissions. Had Exxon been immediately transparent about its own research, the world might have begun developing clean energy decades earlier. As such, many experts have likened these actions to the deceit spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking.

The key word, “deceit,” has opened up a new legal pathway to investigate these companies—New York State’s 1921 Martin Act. Because of the state’s rich history of publicly traded financial markets, the law confers on its attorney general broad powers to investigate financial fraud. “There's no law quite like the Martin Act,” says Patrick Parenteau, former director of Vermont Law School’s Environmental Law Center and the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic, “[It’s] the strongest law in the country.”

Although the law is nearly a century old, it has never been used in the fight against climate change. Using it against ExxonMobil will not be based on claims of injuries wrought by global warming (like the cases in the mid-2000s) but rather on failure to disclose information that investors need to know. If more companies have to accurately disclose any risks to their bottom line, like Peabody Energy now has to do, they might no longer stand on firm financial ground. They may lose investors and customers, helping shift investment from fossil fuel companies and toward those promoting clean energy. “It's kind of a back door to influencing the behavior of some of the largest oil and gas companies for the sake of climate change,” Horowitz says.

Hey, the feds got Capone not for bootlegging or bribery or murder. They nailed Scarface for tax evasion and they sent him away long enough to put an end to his life of crime.

Legal action could become the pin that bursts the "carbon bubble." When that happens it could rapidly erase many trillions of dollars of notional wealth from global stock markets. We know that at least 80% of known (i.e. proven) fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground, untouched. What will be the ramifications of writing off that much asset value? What of the pension funds heavily invested in fossil fuels? What of the deceit? Imagine the claims for liability against brokerages and funds for lack of due diligence, negligence or even deceit.  What of the knock-on claims, the general cascade effects?

Like it or no, the way our economies are organized leaves them without nearly as much resilience as we might like to imagine. In some ways they are a House of Cards that we've chosen to ignore so long as the cash was flowing so easily.

And in 21st century, petro-state Canada, what should our governments be doing to prepare our economy and our people to meet a potential carbon bubble collapse? What is at stake for us, for our governments municipal, provincial and federal? Have we been duped, have we been wronged? Whom should we hold accountable?

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Slight change of topic. If we decide to survive, here's what the carbon budget looks like for our future generation. Pretty slim pickings.

Duffy and the "Born Again Christian" Defence

Mike Duffy's problem? Why, of course, it was having to deal with all those Born Again Christians, i.e. Harper and his entourage.

Duffy said he had insisted he had done nothing wrong by claiming these expenses — and that members of the Prime Minister's Office agreed with him, but they wanted the controversy quashed.

He said he was begging Harper's top aide Ray Novak that he not be forced to admit a mistake and repay the expenses, just five minutes before he eventually went public.

"I'm not a cheat, I'm not a thief. I don't break the rules and I was not going to embrace this kind of process," he said.

"I was pleading with all these born-again Christians."

Well, that's it then. Why didn't you say so? "Not Guilty" by reason of Born Again Christianity.

In other testimony, Duffy gave a chilling account of his confrontation with Shifty Steve. 

Duffy said he had a conversation with Harper and told him that he was being lynched and railroaded. He said he told Harper it was unfair that members of the PMO were forcing him to admit he made a mistake by claiming housing allowances for his Ottawa residence and that he would repay the amount.

The P.E.I. senator said he also complained that the PMO said he didn't spend enough time in his province.

Duffy testified that Harper said, "Well, you only spend 66 days" there.

Duffy testified that he said that that was "a lie," that he spent more time in the province, and that he was also on the "rubber chicken circuit" on behalf of the prime minister.

Duffy said Harper just "looked at me with a blank look."