Thanks to a team of US scientists we have now learned that “dark surfaces absorb sunlight while bright surfaces reflect heat”. (“Clean up your snow to fight global warming, Canada urged”, The Ottawa Citizen, June 11). We found that out the hard way back in the seventies upon returning to the vehicle after a hot day at the beach but I suppose none of these scientists ever owned a VW Rabbit with chocolate brown vinyl seats. They now want us to clean up our snow so it is a little less dark and a bit more white so it’ll help the fight against global warming. Good plan! But why stop there? There are tons of things around us that could be a bit whiter. We could all drive white cars, and outlaw that orange Lamborghini. We could paint all of our houses white, including the roofs. The roads could be white with black lines. Purolater and FedEx would be fine, but UPS would be out of business. No more black tie dinners. From now on, it’ll be stritcly white tie affairs. Get the folks at the nurseries to cultivate a new hydbrid grass that is white, or at least one that is a lighter shade of green. Our zoos would only house albino animals. Blondes would be better for the environment than brunettes. Yay Sweden! And lastly, we could slap a label “eco friendly race” on all white people, and “carbon generator” on all darker skinned races. This global waming nonsense has been going on long enough. Let’s get back to common sense.

I don’t care what my carbon footprint is. I really don’t. And I don’t care about yours, or anybody else’s. “Carbon Footprint” represents nothing more than tons of money for a select group of people. Last year over $30 BILLION dollars of Carbon Credit Trading went to China, and for it, their emissions are going up, and up, and up… There are now numerous “companies” selling Carbon Credits. For $50, $100 or $200 you can buy “Carbon Credits”. Most of these “companies” don’t even suggest to try to let you know how this DONATION will shrink your “carbon footprint”. Most of them have vague terms, like “This purchase will offset your carbon”. Whatever that means. From www.zerofootprint.net when purchasing something called “Travel Offset”:

So before the guilt of visiting Grandma overwhelms you, take heart: there is a way to be responsible. Zerofootprint Travel Offsets are an ideal way of balancing out your air travel carbon footprint. Each Travel Offset is equal to one tonne of carbon removed from the atmosphere. Just purchase as many as you need to cover the carbon your flight creates.

And further on:

In 2006, our project developed over 200,000 tonnes of carbon credits in the District of Maple Ridge over an area of approximately 83 hectares, and involved the planting of over 25,000 indigenous Douglas firs, Sitka spruces, Western red cedars, Western hemlocks and cotton woods

So, if I may recalculate: ZeroFootprint sold 200,000 tonnes worth of Carbon Credits, and for it, it planted a grand total of 25,000 trees. At $10 per tonne, Zerofootprint made $2,000,000 dollars, and planted 25,000 trees for it. Planting trees with a reputable firm will cost you around $1 per tree. Not a bad profit there: $25,000 for trees, $2,000,000 in revenues, that’s a profit of 1,975,000 or 99%. And anybody who’s ever done any treeplanting would know, you could plant over 200,000 seedlings by yourself in a planting season. They claim they planted 25,000 trees in one year, which is exactly what one planter can do in about 10 days.

This year, they suggest to be planting 100,000 trees, so in keeping with their math, they sold $8,000,000 worth of credits. Not a bad business to be in!

Last year, in Canada, there were over 600,000,000 trees planted by the forrestry industry. 99.99% of them had nothing to do with carbon credits. They would have been planted anyway. Going through Zerofootprint, you’re spending good money to have 1/8 of a seedling planted per $10. If you were to go to a treeplanting place, you could have 10 trees planted for that money, but it doesn’t give you that same guilt-alleviating satisfaction of being able to say “I offset my carbon footprint today!”

In addition:  a tree is estimated to absorb 1 tonne of carbon per year over its 80 year growth period. After that, the tree lives hardly absorbing CO2 and then dies and rot releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere. So, in other words, you’re only suspending the carbon for about 80 years. You’re not making it go away at all. In fact, you’re spending $10 per tonne to have your carbon stored in a tree for 80 years.

Your carbon output is not reduced, it is temporarily suspended.

And that is why I do not care what my carbon footprint is. I don’t go for these buzz-words that everybody uses to sound like they care. They can still fly and drive their big SUV’s mind you, because they ‘offset’ their ‘carbon usage’ by purchasing ‘carbon credits’. Sounds like a lot of hot air to me.

If you still want to know what my footprint is, you can find it up David Suzuki’s ass.

Young Charlie always had a fondness for nature. When he was a young boy he was known to be outdoors for most of his days. You see, Charlie loved animals. He loved them even more than his fellow humans.

But as young boys always do, Charlie grew up into a man. And his love for animals made way for his first love affair with Rose. Rose just wandered into his life on somebody else’s wedding. He was smitten from the start. Sure, she had a facial hair problem, but Charlie didn’t care. After all, she had a balcony, and he needed to put up his antenna.

When the relationship turned more serious, and there was talk of a marriage, neighbours told him: “This is a mistake, she’s a slob. She eats everything in sight. She’s milking you!” But that didn’t deter young Charlie. After they were caught having pre-marital sexual relations, he had to defend her honours and they soon got married and moved to the country. During the time of their short marriage, she let her self go even more: apart from over-eating, she grew a beard, let her toenails grow and stopped taking care of her teeth. Many a day she was found on the streets scrounging for food. But Charlie gladly put up with it. He udderly loved her, after all. And at least she kept the lawn neatly trimmed and took care of the garbage.

And just as news spread across the world of his wonderful marriage, it all came to an end when Rose suddenly died after eating a discarded plastic bag. For Rose, you see, wasn’t what she appeared to be. Rose, Charles Tombe’s wife and love of his life, was a mere… common goat. And now you know, the rest of the story.

 Rose is survived by her son, Billy.

The Sun. Our own personal star. The energy output of this giant is not constant. It is variable. The Sun is in a constant state of flux. The Sun goes around in cycles, the smallest of which is about 11 years, and some larger ones are as long as 8000 years. Energy output during these cycles can severely change. Not only that, but our planet is constantly moving towards and away from it, in various angles and speeds. Just the angle and distance of us to the Sun creates the temperature differences between summer and winter. The way we face the sun influences the temperature difference between day and night.

It has been shown that the temperature changes in Earth’s history closely follow the Sun’s cycles. When the Sun has a long interval of relatively large energy output, the Earth experiences global warming.  When the energy output by the Sun is low for an extended interval, the Earth cools off.  If such a quiet interval lasts for a very long time, the Earth experiences an ice age.

One of the main parties interested in making a living of the man-made-global-warming hoax are governments.  They love “global-warming” because the public’s acceptance of the hype constantly provides new means to collect new taxes and to ram through its agenda for socialization and world-income equalization, until we all are at the same level of poverty, or until the economy collapses in ruins, whichever comes first.

> better than > ???

Why environmentalists insist dumping ton after ton of potentially toxic materials into a big hole in the ground is somehow better for the environment than using plasma gasification to produce heat and electricity is beyond me. You would think, since it reduces CO2 output due to less reliance on coal-burning plants, the environmentalists would welcome such a plan. The City of Ottawa, in partnership with the Plasco Energy Group (http://www.plascoenergygroup.com) are about two weeks away from starting up their new Plasma Gasification plant to convert MSW (Municipal Solid Waste) into Plasma gas to drive turbines to generate electricity. Their unique process has NO EMISSIONS.

For every tonne of solid waste they generate 150 kg of slag which can be used for paving, 1400 KwH of electricity, and 5 kg of saleable sulfur. Nothing else.

It is this, versus a 10 story deep hole in the ground with God knows how many tons of toxic waste just eating through the liner every day seeping into groundwater, and polluting the air with bad odours and methane. What seems less polluting to you?

Next Survivor is to be filmed in China. What, they are going to make all the candidates pactise Falum Gong in public, and then we’ll get to see who will survive? Or maybe they’ll send them grocery shopping and show them the shortcut through Tiananmen Square. How about converting them all to Buddhists and have them visit the Dalai Lama for tea and scones? Surviving in China, that should be fun.

I am in a conundrum: I loathe hypocrisy, yet I may have to do something that is so hypocritical it makes me sick. I am ecstatic that my favourite band, Genesis, is going to tour again, not for the money, but for the fun (yeah, right). Got my ticket for Ottawa, dished out my 200 dollars (where’s the fun?), everything is honky-dory. However, now I learn Genesis is going to open, with a 20 minute set, the London Live Earth concert in July. If you know me at all, you’ll know that puts me in a very difficult position: I would like to watch it on TV, record it, and play it over and over again, but since it is organized by Al Gore, Cameron Diaz, and whoever else wants to jump on the bandwagon, and concerns the notion that humans are responsible for the incredibly minute 0.6 degree warming of the earth in the past 125 years, I’ll have to boycot. But I don’t know if I can.

Live Eath is billed as: The concerts for a climate in crisis, 7 Concerts across 7 countries in 1 day. First of all, I didn’t know the climate is really in crisis. I mean, a rise in temperature of 0.6 degrees in 125 years is not exactly what I would call a ‘crisis’. Apparently, forests will be on fire within the next 20 years. How hot does it have to be for a tree to spontaneously combust? 3000 degrees? At the current rate of temperature rise, that makes…. 3000 divided by 0.6 times 125… 625,000 years. Whoop-de-doo. I’d better run and turn off a light or two.

And last but not least: 7 concerts, with about 20 bands each, about 80,000 people each watching it live. Recording it, transmitting it. Billions of TV’s displaying it. How much are these concerts contributing in CO2? 140 bands flying in private jets, 560,000 people driving and idling to the venues. High power consumption for the music, recording, beaming up to satellite, beaming down, running cable stations, TV’s etc. etc. I think the combined CO2 emission number will closely resemble Al Gore’s energy consumption at his four mansions, it may even eclipse it. Oh, but that’s all right: he’ll plant some trees, and send some money to China. Thanks, that’ll save us.

You know what? I will boycot it. There. And I am extremely disappointed my favourite band fell into the Global Warming scare trap. Shame on you.

Okay, okay, I admit it. I love Knut. He’s cute, he’s cuddly, he’s adorable. When he first became popular, animal activists wanted him destroyed, because being raised by humans isn’t a polar bear thing to do. I suppose being euthanized is. Anyway, he survived that attempt on his life, and led a happy few little weeks, being his sweet and adorable self. But unfortunately, Knut has gotten himself in some hot waters recently. First he was suspected of killing his next door neighbour Yan Yan, the lethargic panda. Seems like Knut generated some long line-ups, and bored people at the end of the line decided to visit Yan Yan instead, who promptly died from all the attention. It appears that Pandas can’t take camera flashes. Go figure. So now, after delightful little Knut survived that character assassination, I just spotted him on the evening news as the poster boy for Global Warming. What an orphaned son of a zoo raised polar bear has to do with global warming, I don’t know. But there he was, amongst melting icecaps, and burning forests, there was Knut, jumping off his little floe into a little pond. Making a cute little splash. And back to flooded streets, and desiccated deserts, fleeing people.

Born in a zoo in Berlin. Shunned by his mother, accused of murdering his neighbour, now he’s rooting for David Suzuki. I think he would have been better off dead.

So, me and my wife were outside our place of business pickin’ some weeds (that time of year again), when Stu Whatshisname drove up in his CBC van. He jumped out, said ‘Hi’ and answered a cell phonecall (what are we, chopped liver?). After he hung up, he explained to us that he was doing a feature on the new Garbage Gasification plant near our business. He had just interviewed Rod Bryden and was now cruisin’ the neighbourhood for some local peasants’ perspectives on the whole operation. Since I had done some research on my own, and I follow Lowell Green’s 24 hour rant on the Carp Mountain, I threw in some comments regarding Plasmafication, Gasification and the whole garbage burning thing. He asked me if he could interview me on camera and I said ‘sure’. After an awkward ‘interview’ wherein I could have said much, much more than I actually did (it was more like: how short can you make your answers?), he asked me if he could film me pulling weeds. ‘Sure’, I said again (man of many words), and pulled some weeds. Great action shots. After this pathetic display, he packed up his camera and made his way to his van. ‘Hopefully, this will be on the news tonight’, he said.

Six o’clock comes around, we’re all ready to laugh our heads off at my tongue-tied, uncomfortable presentation, and what do we see? An awkward interview with Rod Bryden (I was almost better!) and then a quick ‘back to the studio’. No little old me on this national channel, which is watched by literally tens of people. My almost 5 minutes of fame ended up on the cutting room floor.

Given my performance, I think it was for the better.

I was eagerly awaiting the 6 o’clock news yesterday. I was waiting for Jack Layton to come on again. I saw him on that very same news show on January 12ish, when it was a nice and balmy 10 degrees out. He was sitting on his Toronto rooftop patio in his summer jacket, and he said “I am here outside, in the middle of January, with my summer jacket on. Clearly, there’s something wrong here. This is a global catastrophe!”. So, since yesterday was the coldest March 6th EVER in eastern Ontario, with Pembroke going down to -32 overnight, I thought I’d see Jacky on his Toronto rooftop again, with sixteen winter coats on, freezing his ass off, saying “It’s March 6th! I’m freezing my ass off! Clearly there’s something wrong here!” But alas, Jacky did not show. There was no segment on the cold weather. Jacky had gone into hiding. He will emerge, no doubt, when the next global catastrophe occurs. To fight it… for the people.