Richard Zurawski

I have been away from my routine blogging for a while because, in addition to my regular Maritime forecasting for Rogers, I have been teaching at Mount Saint Vincent University, taken on forecast duties for our Ottawa sister station, 1310News and have been putting the finishing touches on my next book “Media Mediocrity – Waging War Against Science”. The semester is winding down and the book is all but complete and ready for the shelves in March 2011. This lets me get back to blogging, especially making a few comments about the latest weather and climate we have been experiencing.

Let’s go over the past 12 months and take stock, given that another climate summit is coming up and so far in spite of all the efforts of some very good people, very little or no headway has been made in mitigating carbon dioxide. This summer 15,000 Moscovites died in an unprecedented heat wave that lasted an entire month, one quarter of the entire population of Pakistan had to be evacuated because of massive, precedent setting floods, Arctic ice melted to its third lowest level in area and probably its lowest volume in recorded history, massive coral bleaching in the Caribbean because of record high water temperatures, another way above normal active Atlantic hurricane season and the warmest 14 months of combined water and land temperatures ever recorded.And closer to home, the rain, the unbelievable downpours that have washed out roads, bridges and people’s homes.

How do we respond? Well here in Canada, the federal government increased the muzzling on government and government funded scientists, adding new rules designed to keep them from speaking out and telling the public about the science they are studying and researching. Why? Just to keep the loose cannons in the science community from misleading the public. Oh Yah? How about the loose cannons and government flack artists whose agendas, hidden and none hidden, give us pearls like Stockwell Day’s building of prisons for “unreported criminals”! This made up to counter the real science which tells us that violent crime is way down and that in fact all crime is down, but runs against the federal government vested interest of scaring the population about crime.Give me a “loose cannon” who is a scientist, who can parse the information and who is actually doing the research and the understands what is going on, any day!!

So back to AGW. The campaign of disinformation and obfuscation has been so successful that we as a country now mirror and mimic the awful nonsense occurring south of the border. We bang away at the “economy canard” and allow vested interests to have their way so that more and more CO2 is pumped into the atmosphere while we put AGW on the back burner.It is so bad that our environment minister steps out and runs for cover into the private sector.

We point the finger at emerging economies and complain about their “dirty” coal, meanwhile insisting that our Tar Sands are pristine and necessary, while stifling any support, investment and development in potential green economies that could be our salvation.

Whistling past the graveyard, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic….