Ants

My friend is grousing about the ants that have invaded her house in Montréal.  She picks them up and drops them in the garden, she shoos them out the door, she has even resorted to using those round tins with poisoned bait inside.

Carpenter ants have been a problem in many Canadian homes this year because of the diluvial weather in spring and summer.

I pointed out that the ants were climate refugees. "Hunh!" she snorted.  "Well, they can go right back where they came from, they're not moving into this house."

Late last night, while I was downstairs reading in blissful solitude, I heard noise in the kitchen.  Mice?

I located its provenance, the wall behind the stove.  It sounded like grésil, a pitter-patter noise that small frozen rain striking windows makes.

Uh-oh.

On a less gloomy note, before I break the bad news to my friend, I'll watch and post this trailer of _Antz_

Breaking News: Canada Becomes a Banana Republic.

Democracy has been bloodlessly subverted and Parliament prorogued, through Stevie Spiteful's tricky maneuvers.

And soon enough, thanks to Stevie's stellar performance in Copenhagen, we'll have the appropriate climate to match our government.

Short Learning Curve

Last week DAMMIT JANET! raised a number of questions about Stevie Spiteful's "low-key" performance at the UN Copenhagen climate change conference.

We learn from C. C. - About that whole "fascist" label ... how his bullies handled the spoof government website, after a prank press release highlighted the do-nothing, say-nothing strategy on climate change adopted by the ReformaTories.

Does it come as a surprise to anyone that this Conservative government has taken to emulating the authoritarianism of its new Chinese overlords so smoothly? What's next?

Harper in Copenhagen: a feat of MASSIVE diversion?

A war of words has erupted between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the premier of Quebec, with Jean Charest tearing a strip off Ottawa's environmental performance.

In 25 years in politics, Charest says, he's never seen a federal government rely so heavily on the White House before taking a position on an issue, with Ottawa now saying it will model its climate policy on Washington's.

Exactly what did Harper do in Copenhagen? Didn't in fact Stevie Passive refuse to participate actively in the discussions and negotiations, and thus tacitly supported China's strategy at the climate change conference?

China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. [...] China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait.

[Mark Lynas] saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying "no", over and over again. [...] the Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping, who denounced the Copenhagen accord as "a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries". Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China; one of a number of countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in public.

Here's what actually went on late last Friday night, as heads of state from two dozen countries met behind closed doors. Obama was at the table for several hours, sitting between Gordon Brown and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi. The Danish prime minister chaired, and on his right sat Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN. Probably only about 50 or 60 people, including the heads of state, were in the room. [...]

The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country's foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world's most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his "superiors".

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China's representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil's representative too pointed out the illogicality of China's position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and [...] Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point.

Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition. China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak "as soon as possible". The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised.

So, back to Stevie Spiteful's shameful performance in Copenhagen. Remember where Stevie traveled before he went to Denmark?

A capitalist country that's perfected a secular model of authoritarian government? A country that holds $800 billion of the U.S. debt? A country Stevie once disdained but now embraces.

Could it be that Stevie and his Harpocrites are kowtowing to their new economic overlords? And, contrary to the overt declaration from the Harper Government, Canada has now become one of China's puppets, with regard to climate change?

Another PR stink bomb for the PMO in Copenhagen to dispel - update.

There's an expression in French (Canadian). S'enfarger dans les fleurs du tapis.

This is seemingly what the ReformaTory Con jobs are doing in Copenhagen. Early in the morning, the media received a press release, "pledging that Canada will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020". They were directed to an official-looking Environment Canada website.

In short order, the communications team accompanying Jim Prentice went into MASSIVE damage control mode. A statement was issued, accusing Steven Guilbeault and his Équiterre staff of engineering the prank. When Dimitri Soudas called an impromptu press conference, Guilbeault showed up to confront the lie and a nasty shouting match ensued, according to a Radio-Canada reporter present.

Ah, those Con jobs, as always dignified under fire, never prone to lash out at real opponents or imaginary enemies, self-effacing, and unlikely to trip all over the pattern in the carpet in their scramble to get their version of truthiness out there.

Updated goodness: From bigcitylib, we learn that Kady O'Malley is on top of the story, here.

Shriek! My parents turned me into a rightwing zombie!

That seems to be the core message of Raphael Alexander's, oops, Adrian MacNair's blogpost about global warming. Notice how the title parrots Christopher Monkton's verbal defamation of the young climate change activists who challenged him in Copenhagen?

MacNair also blames his parents for forcing him to attend anti-nuclear weapons demos and consequently turning him into an individual repelled by progressive values.

During the fifties, on television and in schools across the country, Diefenbaker's government used graphic visuals - mushroom clouds, skin and flesh melting to reveal the skullbones beneath - to impress the public with the urgency of war preparedness. It instilled in my parents a life-long need to keep an overstocked pantry but I can't say it traumatized me to the point I now run screaming from the supermarket whenever I see shelves crammed full of canned goods.

MacNair singles out the evulness of this particular video. He appears absolutely enraged - ENRAGED! - that innocent children could be exploited thus and on their behalf, mothers are challenging the premise of an economy based on the complete depletion of our planet's resources.

I know how he feels. It turns my stomach whenever I see MacNair's hero, Stevie Spiteful using babies in his election photos and video propaganda opportunities.



With any luck, MacNair's children will likely reject their father's rank and rabid, passive-agressive, rightwing socon politics as he rejected his parents political activism.

Unlikely - some would say unholy - alliances.

Matt Frei has an interesting perspective about an unlikely ally in the environmental movement's efforts to halt global warming.

The evangelical movement is split between those conservative Christians who suspect that climate change is an evil secular plot, concocted by the devil, Al Gore and "the global government crowd" [...] and those who passionately believe that good Christians need to be good custodians of the planet.

Two years ago I went to Liberty University in Virginia, the home of the late Jerry Falwell and asked a lecture room full of students if they believed in the threat of global warming. Not a single hand went up.

I travelled up the road to the Eastern Mennonite College at Harrisonburg and asked a similar number of Christian students the same question. Almost every hand shot up.

Frei observes that the possibility of calm, rational scientific-fact-based discussion regarding climate change has been sabotaged by the "poison of partisan politics and the culture wars".

In the past, ecological activists have made strategic alliances with groups who do not share any common political ground, identifying particular goals such as the protection of wetlands threatened by urban sprawl and working with Ducks Unlimited, for example.

It will be interesting to see how sane conservative christians who are not christofascists, teabaggers or other types of rightwing zealots navigate the divide.

Hoaxing the humour-deprived.

Ha! via Canadian Cynic: You keep using that word "attack" ... we learn of a brilliant piece of political theatre, à la parti Rhinocéros, and of the humour-deprived 'Secrets of Vancouver'.

The Yes Men are famous for their hoaxes, usually through their impersonations of corporate executives, and BeyondTalk calls for nonviolent resistance to the drivers of climate change.

Shows how far they fgo in the name of Global Warming, and if it were real, why would you need deceptive tactics like this?

If it were real? Oh, I get it. One of your 'secrets' is that you don't believe in science.

Deceptive tactics? You mean like the glurge and the glossy spreads of fetal remains that abortion-criminalizers like to wave around as though the sight of their anti-choice will drive onlookers to their knees and force them to breed against their will?

As I've mentioned before, with respect to the howls of outrage produced by the dimmer bulbs of the rightwing neocon religious fundamentalists and assorted nutz, SOV's would be testerically funny if it were a parody. Since SOV's shrieeeking appears to be 'real', according to SOV's self-defined reality, it is retarded (as in regressive) and pathetic.

Not a Sea of Love but a Sea of Acid.

Ha! You thought this post was about Blob Blogging Wingnut, didn't you? Not quite, though HER obsessive focus on the pre-born rather than our children who are living with the consequences of our wasteful habits is part and parcel of the problem of global warming.

Sigourney Weaver has produced a documentary about the effect of carbon dioxide pollution on our oceans.

Scientists have known for decades that when carbon dioxide mixes with ocean water it creates an acid, but only recently did they begin to realize what this growing quantity of acid would mean for ocean life.

As you can see in the film, this new understanding has some of the world's leading ocean scientists quite freaked out. What they can say with assurance is that if we continue burning fossil fuels as we are now, we will double the ocean's natural acidity by the end of the century. What's less clear is how damaging that will be for ocean life.

Scientists believe many organisms may not survive so radical a shift in chemistry. And some of those organisms -- plankton and corals, for instance -- form the foundation of the ocean food web.

If they perish, what happens to the hundreds of thousands of species further up the chain?

One could imagine that the oceans of this planet are the amniotic fluid, essential for the development of all the species on Earth. When they become toxic, what will happen to all living creatures?