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The Canadian government, on the provincial and federal level, needs to tag team on tar sands public relations, according to an internal Canadian Embassy document reported on by Mike De Souza yesterday in the Financial Post. The newly released document, obtained by Environmental Defense Canada through an access to information request, details the outcome of a 2010 overseas trip taken by Alberta’s former Environment Minister Rob Renner. According to the Embassy staff who prepared the report, international investors and stakeholders feel Canada’s lack of unified tar sands advocacy leaves the world’s dirtiest source of energy vulnerable to attack.

During a week long visit to the United Kingdom, Renner heard the concerns of invested parties who suggested Alberta take the lead in a nationwide and government-directed public relations campaign to “temper negative coverage” of the tar sands. 

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An international team of climate scientists led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has confirmed that climate change is “undeniable” and clearly driven by the “human fingerprints” of greenhouse gas emissions.  The findings are based on new data that was not reviewed during the most recent 2007 report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

The Financial Times reported today that the NOAA study drew on 11 different indicators of climate, and “found that each one pointed to a world that was warming owing to the influence of greenhouse gases.”

The scientists confirmed that seven of the indicators are rising, including air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, marine air temperature, sea level, ocean heat, humidity, and tropospheric temperature in the “active-weather” layer of the atmosphere closest to the earth’s surface. Four other indicators were declining: Arctic sea ice, glaciers, spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere, and stratospheric temperatures.

The Financial Times quotes Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office, stating:

“The whole of the climate system is acting in a way consistent with the effects of greenhouse gases. The fingerprints are clear. The glaringly obvious explanation for this is warming from greenhouse gases.”

Glaringly obvious, unless you are a climate skeptic who denies the facts in favor of touting manufactured scandals like “Climategate” - a mythical tale ginned up by the climate denial machine to further confuse the public about the real dangers of climate change. 

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The Disingenuous Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg has once again celebrated a public epiphany on climate change, bringing him. once again, to the conclusion that the globe is warming, that humans are to blame and that we - especially we rich people - shouldn’t do anything about it.

In Lomborg’s latest feint, he suckered some reporter at London’s Financial Times into reporting that he has broken common cause with the “climate sceptics” and called for an a global agreement on climate change in this December’s Kyoto negotiations in Copenhagen.

But if you read the details, his position is the same as ever: that it would be a “mistake” to try to get rich countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Lomborg’s choice is to concentrate on every other thing - and especially to think about ignoring the problem in the short term, putting our energies into adaptation and “weighing up whether emission cuts are cheaper to do now or later.”

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel has joined UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and EU commission president Jose Manuel Barroso in urging Europe to take the lead in the fight against climate change at this week’s European Union summit. As a first step, EU leaders are expected to endorse a 20 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels.

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Four years of double-digit growth have heightened fears of greenhouse-gas pollution enveloping cities and degradation of scarce water supplies.