Climate Change Deniers Are Going Berserk - Again

Yes, it's true.  What with the Paris climate change meeting last fall, the new Canadian PM meeting with the premiers to discuss climate change, a federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change (and a woman, no less), the NDP in power in Alberta (and a woman, no less), Saskatchewan's Brad Wall in full pre-election mode.... the climate change denial trolls are out in force.

The "debating points" haven't changed.  All of them have been noted and addressed on the pages of Skeptical Science.

A few favourite "points" have reappeared, like this one: The earth was much warmer in the past and the climate has always been changing.

Very true, as the following chart shows (note the varying horizontal scale of years).

While it's very true to say that the earth has been warmer in the past, it's also irrelevant.

Here's the problem.  Until the last little bit at the right-hand side of the chart, we humans weren't here.  Neither were our crops, our coastal cities and 7 billion of us.  The concern is the very rapid increase on the far right.  It's unprecedented in the earth's history and certainly during all of human history.  Now, all of a sudden (geologically speaking) addition of CO2 is forcing a rapid change.  Are we ready for this?  I don't think so.

Some deniers, apparently those without access to Google, wonder how we even know what the earth's temperature was "back then".  Now, we could be talking about what temperatures were 6000 years ago (Stockwell Day's age of the earth) or a few billion years ago, which is the real age of the earth, according to science.  But I digress.  How do "they" know?  This is how.

Everyone in Alberta and Saskatchewan is all wound up over possible new pipelines.  With Keystone XL mired in American politics and Northern Gateway unlikely to ever happen, focus has shifted to Energy East.  A couple of points:

Oil shipped to any coast, such as New Brunswick, is destined for export, not for Canadian use.  The numbers explain why.  Refinery capacity in St John is about 300K bbl/day.  A pipeline would deliver about 1M bbl/day.  Can you imagine what that excess would do once it got to the coast?  You have 3 guesses.

Little discussion has revolved around whether or not we should even be encouraging more fossil fuel use by building another pipeline.  Rather than spend $35B on a pipeline, imagine what we might have if we spent $35B on alternative energy sources.

The pipeline, however, makes little economic sense, as this article points out.

And the price on carbon....  Conservatives are literally frothing at the mouth over yet another tax grab that, in their words, won't achieve anything.

They need to look to BC to see what is possible.

Update - April 25, 2016, an article by Bill Nye - "Climate Deniers: It's Time to Stop Denying"