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Update: Mea Culpa Below

If Canadian Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver is looking for ideologues and "foreign special interest groups" who are trying to interfere with the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline hearings, he need look no farther than the Board of Directors of pipeline proponent Enbridge Inc.

Oliver got his lapels all flecked with foam last week over pipeline criticism from Canadian environmental groups such as the David Suzuki Foundation or the Pembina Institute, organizations which, in a good year, might get almost 10 per cent of their funding from U.S. sources. These, he said, were clearly "radical groups" that were "driven by an ideological imperative" - and they were meddling inappropriately in Canadian affairs.

But according to a secret source (okay: it's the company website), Enbridge Chair David Arledge and six of the 12 Enbridge directors are (everyone get ready to gasp in unison): AMERICANS!

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It's Christmastime in Canada - when all self-satisfied ideologues take a moment to lift the finger of blame and point it at somebody else.

"Credit" for outstanding performance in this regard must go to National Citizens Coalition President andf CEO Peter Coleman. In ringing defence of the former NCC president (and now Canadian Prime Minister) Stephen Harper, Coleman offers a cheery Christmas message that celebrates Canada's reneging on its legal commitment to the Kyoto Accord and dodges Canadian responsibility for contributing to the climate crisis.

Specifically, Coleman talks about appearing before a group of University of Windsor law students, who asked him about Kyoto:

When I responded that Canada emits 2% of the world's greenhouse gases they were surprised to hear that it is that low. When I told them that Alberta's oil sands contribute just 5% of Canada's total greenhouse gas emissions they were again surprised as they expected it would be a lot more.

Coleman is actually wrong on the numbers. The latest tally (2008) puts Canada's GHG emissions at "only" 1.8 per cent, which is swell as long as you don't think about Canada's population amounting to just 0.004 per cent of the world's total. That makes Canada the fourth worst polluter per capita. It also makes our 34 million inhabitants the seventh largest source of CO2 among all the countries in the world - that's seventh from a list of 216 countries and jurisdictions.

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The heretofore anonymous blogger Tom Nelson REVEALED today that even the DeSmogBlog has been caught in the talons of the DenierMobsters who are responsible for stealing the Climategate emails (two years ago) and retreading the bumptious "scandal" this year.

The (partial) quote now making the rounds (see also Mark Morano's fantasymill at Climate Depot), is from an email I sent to Michael Mann in 2007. It goes like this:

I'm a DeSmogBlog writer [Richard LIttlemore] (I got your email from Kevin Grandia) and I am trying to fend off the latest announcement that global warming has not actually occurred in the 20th century.

It looks to me like Gerd Burger is trying to deny climate change by "smoothing," "correcting" or otherwise rounding off the temperatures that we know for a flat fact have been recorded since the 1970s, but I am out of my depth (as I am sure you have noticed: we're all about PR here, not much about science) so I wonder if you guys have done anything or are going to do anything with Burger's intervention in Science.

I'd like to confirm that this quote is accurate - that Gerd Burger WAS playing fast and loose with his analysis, that I am NOT a scientist and that, accordingly, I check my facts with people who are reputable, knowledgeable and widely respected in the scientific community (thank you Mike).

I'd also like to say that getting so fleeting a mention in the Climategate emails ranks down there with the deepest-discount cheap thrills. I cherish the moment … seriously. (Okay, not.)

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Even as the Harper government works overtime to represent the oil industry (and humiliate Canadians) at climate talks in Durban, South Africa, the tireless and ridiculously optimistic Franke James tries again to make her point: that tying the Canadian economy - and the world's future - to dirty oil is "fuelish."

Click and enjoy:

Banned on the Hill (and in Europe!) from Franke James on Vimeo.

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Steal More; Reveal Less

The Climagegate hackers appear to be at it again, spraying the internet with dozens of out-of-context quotes from a new batch of stolen emails - in a transparent attempt to disrupt the climate talks starting next week in Durban, South Africa.

The emails, from a source that denierblogger Tallbloke identifies as "Our old friend 'FOIA'," appeared with the same serendipitous timing - and in the same devious way - as last year's more-devastating tranche: accordig to the Guardian, they were "leaked" on a Russian server and then sprinkled into the denieresphere through the usual suspects: Wattsupwiththat, ClimateAudit, AirVent and the already mentioned Tallbloke. We can undoubtedly expect a fresh round of breathless "mainstream media" coverage from the Murdoch empire.

These emails are even more ridiculous than the batch released in 2009. First, the hackers didn't have the decency to release the emails in context - rather they just pulled the quotes they thought would be effective in casting doubt. Second, the thieves, who have had two whole years to sift through what appears to be the same source material have mined only 5,000 of more than 220,000 emails, implying that there may be more "dirt" buried in the remainder. This strains credulity: if there was anything in the remaining emails that was even vaguely incriminating, you can bet they would have found and released it. Third, the "best stuff" that they actually released is worse than trivial:

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Richard Muller not a Koch lackey after all …

During all the bad days when people were coughing up chunks of lung while the TV still touted Camels, it was never news when the Surgeon General drew the link between smoking and cancer. But it would have been BIG news if Philip Morris had funded and publicized a major study confirming the carcinogenic nature of its product.

That's pretty much what's happened - except with a climate twist - with the publication of a paper with the snappy title: Influence of Urban Heating on the Global Temperature Land Average Using Rural Sites Identified from MODIS Classifications (attached below).

The paper was partly funded by the Koch brothers, famous for the pollution their industries spew and for the money they spend funding everything from climate change denial to the founding of the Tea Party. "Leading scientists" involved in the paper included people such as Richard Muller and Judith Curry, a man apparently out of his depth in climate science and a woman dangerously in love with her growing reputation as a contrarian. Many people took one look at the funder and the guest list and concluded that anything produced by their Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) group was going to be tainted fodder for the denier hoards.

We were wrong.