Thoughts on BC Politics and More

  This year's coast-to-coast wildfires in Canada have already emitted an estimated one-and-a-half billion tonnes of CO2 . That's triple the annual climate pollution from burning fossil fuels in Canada. It's more than the combined emissions from 100 nations. And there are still months of fire season looming ahead.   As extreme as this year's wildfire emissions have been, they are just the latest escalation in a multi-decade flood of CO2 pouring out of Canada's "managed" forests and forestry. (Note: Canada only reports emissions from the parts of the forest it "manages." This is around two-thirds. Some managed forest areas are managed for logging, while others are managed for non-timber uses like recreation, water, wildlife and fire protection. See the endnotes for a map and more details.)   To illustrate the scale and pace of our metastasizing forest carbon crisis, I turned to data in Canada's official national greenhouse gas inventory...

NATIONAL POST:   The centrepiece of Canada’s innovation strategy is the $950-million “supercluster” initiative. The goal, according to the federal government, is for companies of all sizes, academia and the non-profit sector to collaborate on new technologies, to spur economic growth and create jobs. There are doubts about if the artificial intelligence supercluster will work and who it will serve. “I don’t know how it’s going to work. But I think the mission that Minister (Navdeep) Bains has given us is to make Canada more competitive in the innovation sector,” the chief executive of Optel Group said in an interview at the end of November. “I don’t have the answer, and I’m stressed about that, but I’m OK to jump in and try. The federal government is ready too, having finalized an agreement in December to give Scale AI $230 million of the $950 million earmarked for its supercluster program.” CLICK HERE to read the full story : A governme...

Yesterday, Aaron Gunn pointed out a news story which alleged that Canada is warming at twice the rate of other counties (see below).   It even stated this was ‘effectively irreversible’.   I don’t know about you, but it seems odd that given the winds that blow around the globe, the cooling effect of three oceans (Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic), it seems that somehow, viciously, out temperate is double that of other countries in the world. With tens of thousands of forested acres covering our country, many would state Canada is doing more than its part in reducing CO2 Canada warming twice as fast — 'effectively irreversible' — as rest of the world: scientific report The Canadian Press ~~ Updated: April 2, 2019 By the middle of this century most marine regions in the Canadian North could be ice-free for at least a month at a time.   At stake is just how bad that warming gets, said several scientists presenting the Canada’s Changing Cli...