I thought I'd mention to readers that I'm in possession of a book by Lawrence Solomon (of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute) entitled The Deniers. It's based on a collection of his articles in the National Post about the many very credible scientists who offer a wide range of opinions about the science of climate change. The book skewers the common cant that there is a "consensus of opinion" on the topic.

I've posted the full title of the book below and will offer a review once I've finished reading it. (If it's anything like the article series, my review will be highly positive.) In the meantime, you should read the article I pasted below on how the minions at Wikipedia manipulate entries in that information resource to defame people they disagree with over climate change, and put forward their own viewpoint (and in this case, self aggrandize). It's very interesting and quite frightening.

Here's the full title of the book, that you can look up on Amazon:

The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud *And those who are too fearful to do so (Hardcover)
by Lawrence Solomon

And here's the article:

The opinionator

by Lawrence Solomon

Next to Al Gore, William Connolley may be the world's most influential person in the global warming debate. He has a PhD in mathematics and worked as a climate modeller, but those accomplishments don't explain his influence – PhDs are not uncommon and, in any case, he comes from the mid-level ranks in the British Antarctic Survey, the agency for which he worked until recently.

He was the Parish Councillor for the village of Coton in the U.K., his Web site tells us, and a school governor there, too, but neither of those accomplishments are a claim to fame in the wider world. Neither are his five failed attempts to attain public office as a local candidate for South Cambridgeshire District Council and Cambridgeshire County Council as a representative for the Green Party.

But Connolley is a big shot on Wikipedia, which honours him with an extensive biography, an honour Wikipedia did not see fit to bestow on his boss at the British Antarctic Survey. Or on his boss's's boss, or on his boss's boss's boss, or on his boss's boss's boss's boss, none of whose opinions seemingly count for much, despite their impressive accomplishments. William Connolley's opinions, in contrast, count for a great deal at Wikipedia, even though some might not think them particularly worthy of note. "It is his view that there is a consensus in the scientific community about climate change topics such as global warming, and that the various reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarize this consensus," states his Wikipedia page, in the section called "Biography."

Connolley is not only a big shot on Wikipedia, he's a big shot at Wikipedia – an administrator with unusual editorial clout. Using that clout, this 40-something scientist of minor relevance gets to tear down scientists of great accomplishment. Because Wikipedia has become the single biggest reference source in the world, and global warming is one of the most sought-after subjects, the ability to control information on Wikipedia by taking down authoritative scientists is no trifling matter.

One such scientist is Fred Singer, the First Director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service, the recipient of a White House commendation for his early design of space satellites; the recipient of a NASA commendation for research on particle clouds – in short, a scientist with dazzling achievements who is everything Connolley is not. Under Connolley's supervision, Singer is relentlessly smeared, and has been for years, as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry. When a smear is inadequate, or when a fair-minded Wikipedian tries to correct a smear, Connolley and his cohorts are there to widen the smear or remove the correction, often rebuking the Wikipedian in the process.

Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, as well as a code of civility. Those rules and codes don't apply to Connolley, or to those he favours.

"Peiser's crap shouldn't be in here," Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an "edit war," as they're called. In such a war, rival sides change the content of a Wikipedia page from one competing version to another, often with bewildering speed. (Two people, landing on the same page seconds apart, might obtain entirely different information.) In the Peiser case, a Wikipedian stopped a prolonged war by freezing a continually changing page, to prevent more alterations until the dispute was settled. As occurs on such occasions, readers are alerted that Wikipedians are warring over the page, and that Wikipedia was not endorsing the version of the page that had been frozen. To Connolley's chagrin, however, the version that was frozen cast doubt on claims of a consensus on climate change. Although this was done within Wikipedia rules, Connolley intervened to revert the page and ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see.

Peiser is Benny Peiser, a distinguished U.K. scientist who had convincingly refuted a study by Naomi Oreskes that claimed to have found no scientific papers at odds with the conventional wisdom on climate change. The Oreskes study – cited by Al Gore in his film, An Inconvenient Truth – is an article of faith to many global warming doomsayers and guarded from criticism by Connolley et al. Peiser and other critics of Oreskes's study, meanwhile, get demeaned.

Connolley and his cohorts don't just edit pages of scientists actively involved in the global warming debate. Scientists who work in unrelated fields, but who have findings that indirectly bolster a critique of climate change orthodoxy, will also get smeared. So will non-scientists and organizations that he disagrees with. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia's 2.5-million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley's bidding.

Connolley no longer works as a climate modeller – he now works as a software engineer for a company called Cambridge Silicon Radio. And as an engineer of opinion at Wikipedia.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Energy Probe, and author of The Deniers.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 7:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I thought readers might enjoy this short article by Patrick Hebert of Thriftopia -- an Ontario organization that recycles e-waste. His point about economic incentives would apply to programs in jursidictions other than Ontario.

Ontario’s E-Waste Program - What’s In It For You?

Posted by Patrick Hebert under: thriftopia.com

The Ontario Electronic Stewardship plan is a lengthy document which details a system to assist the province in diverting up to 60% of e-waste from landfills for proper recycling and disposal.

Great notion – but one question remains unanswered – what’s in it for the public? In a time of ever rising fuel costs, the authors of the plan assume that the public will flock to depots to drop off their obsolete technology.

For those who are forward thinking & green minded, this assumption may prove to be correct – however as with other statistics, these people are only a portion of the bell curve of society. For those who care greatly about Earth-friendly initiatives, there are equal numbers of those who don’t. And then, there is the average person who given a convenient option may or may not choose to participate in ecological efforts.

What’s lacking in the OES plan – and all other provincial e-waste diversion initiatives – is consideration of “What’s In It For Me” from the consumer’s perspective. Nowhere in the plan is there consideration for the consumer’s gasoline, time, or labour in moving heavy and awkward items to places for proper disposal.

Also missing from the plan are details about who will police solid waste sent to transfer stations, who will intercept and separate e-waste from other forms of trash, and what such labour would cost.

Of course, one should not criticize if they are unwilling or unable to suggest an alternative. Finding a better program is well within reach though – a trip to The Beer Store reveals how passionate consumers are about participating in recycling programs – when there’s something to be gained.

By collecting a $0.10 bottle deposit, Brewer’s Retail has been able to collect and reuse 99% of industry standard beer bottles 12 to 15 times each. And they’ve been able to collect and transport 100,000 tonnes of beer packaging each year from over 17,500 establishments. Surely, if Ontario beer consumers will make the trip to The Beer Store to get $2.40 back per case of beer, there is something to be learned and applied to the e-waste crisis.

While e-waste is certainly more sophisticated and concerning than simple beer bottles, the principle of deposit and refund is not something that should be ignored.

Proposed “Advance Disposal Fees” charged on the sale of new technology vary from $2 to $13 depending on the component but there is still no incentive for consumers to comply with the program once the fee is paid. Without convenient collection or adequate incentives, this may just be another “Sin Tax.”

By increasing the proposed fees to encompass a deposit & refund program, the 60% target could not only be achieved but likely surpassed.

The notion is not entirely new – Sims Metals California operations now pay $0.05 per pound to California residents who recycle TVs and computer monitors.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 6:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's the link to a recent episode of CBC's The Current radio talk show.

If you listen to Part Two, there's an excellent segment in which host Anna Maria Tremonti interviews conservative MP Bob Mills (Red Deer, AB) -- a gasification proponent -- and then waste reduction consultant (and a contributing editor to our magazine) Clarissa Morawski who puts forward the waste diversion and Zero Waste point of view, very effectively I would say. I consider this is a "must" listen to anyone interesting in hearing cogent arguments for and against waste-to-energy and Zero Waste.

Here is the link, and Clarissa's contact info is below (for your records).

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2008/200804/20080402.html

Clarissa Morawski
CM Consulting
315 Pearl Ave.
Peterborough, Ontario
K9J 5G4

office (digital voice): (416) 682-8984
mobile: (705) 760-5332
fax: (705) 745-5810

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)

I highly recommend that anyone interested in waste diversion and information/discussion about leading-edge product stewardship or extended producer responsibility (EPR) issues visit and bookmark the website of an organization called the Product Policy Institute. The website is here:

http://www.productpolicy.org/

You'll want to visit the "resources" area and download some of the interesting documents posted there.

The Product Policy Institute (PPI) is led by Bill Sheehan -- formerly of the GrassRoots Recycling Network (www.grrn.org) -- a consumer-focused organization. While it still speaks to the "grassroots," the PPI is a bit more professionalized and its content has more academic bench strength. The website is poised to become a "must visit" resource for anyone interested in environmental protection, waste reduction and sustainable development (i.e., the link between consumer culture, waste generation and the related ecological footprint). The PPI is now, effectively, "Ground Zero" for the Zero Waste movement.

On its home page, the PPI states that it is "addressing the challenge of sustainable production and consumption by seeking out innovative thinkers and experts from business, government, academic and NGO communities to chart a new relationship between government and business in the service of achieving sustainable life styles."

An interesting mission statement!

It goes on: "The dialogue builds on a core of shared values: that government has a duty to protect public assets (variously called the 'commons' and 'public trust'); that government is needed to define and enforce performance standards in the public interest; but then government should give industry the freedom to do what industry does best -- innovate to achieve the desired outcomes."

I really like this, and find the PPI's stated goals refreshing and inspiring. The PPI then outlines its Mission, Vision and Strategy:

"Our Mission is to develop and communicate a strong framework for product-focused environmental policies that advance sustainable production and consumption and good governance. Our Vision is a vibrant, sustainable consumer economy in which government takes a leadership role in protecting human and environmental health through policies that reward green businesses providing 'cradle to cradle' management of their products.

"Our Strategy is to connect innovative thinkers and diverse stakeholders to develop a big-picture framework for sustainable production and consumption for a North American audience; to provide problem-centered input and solutions to high impact problems in the arena of product production, consumption and disposal; and to communicate policy solutions effectively."

Having pointed readers in the PPI's direction, I trust they'll realize its importance for themselves and get involved.

To that, I'd like to add a few sentiments of my own.

A few years ago -- when he was dying from cancer -- I asked my friend, environmentalist Gary Gallon, out for lunch. He and I both knew, without stating it, that this might be the last time we saw one another (which it was). The premise of the lunch was an interview for a profile article I would write that eventually appeared as a cover story for HazMat Management magazine. It was unusual for the trade magazine to profile an environmentalist on its cover, but in addition to being my tribute to Gary, it was an excuse to celebrate the evolution of environmentalism and sustainable development into a phenomenon that's gradually becoming part of corporate culture, not an exterior enemy. In that regard, Gary (who was taken from us at the young age of 54) was a transitional figure, having made the shift from hippy-ish ecologist to environment industry professional. (I got to know Gary well when he rented office space from us in our old magazine digs in downtown Toronto. He was executive director of what is now ONEIA -- the Ontario Environment Industry Association.)

At the lunch I asked Gary what advise he had for young people who want to protect the environment. Should they become environmentalists and join groups like GreenPeace (of which Gary was a co-founder)? I asked.

"No," Gary replied. "In my time we were on the outside throwing stones. Then some of us joined government so we could directly access power and make regulatory changes. [Gary was a policy advisor to former Ontario environment minister Jim Bradley, who introduced far-reaching environmental legislation during his term of office.] But now what's needed is young people to go into the corporate world and change companies from within."

Since then I've noted that, while there are still GreenPeace-style activists on the outside "throwing stones" (and I believe we need them) there's another breed of environmentalist that I think represents a more mature phase of the movement -- a phase that's crucial for where we're headed (or need to head) in any journey to toward sustainability. These environmentalists may not even think of nor describe themselves as such. They're a sophisticated group of deep thinkers and organizers who are tackling updated challenges, and they include people like Amory Lovins (the Rocky Mountain Institute), Toronto-based Lawrence Solomon of the Urban Renaissance Institute and Zero Waste advocate Helen Spiegelman (of Vancouver, also on the Product Policy Institute board), and Orangeville, Ontario-based Usman Valiante, among others.

People like these offer a refreshing perspective because they're independent thinkers and have gone beyond traditional adversarial activism that reduces the world into "good" environmentalists and "bad" corporations motiivated by greed. Let's face it, back in Gary Gallon's youth (and mine), factory and chemical plant smokestacks and pipes directly spewed untreated toxic wastes directly into the air and waterways. It was the era of leaded gasoline, worry-free smoking, and "living better through electricity." Although much work remains to be done, the "low hanging fruit" has been picked, in terms of the installation of primary and sometimes secondary treatment equipment at these plants. We're now at the "industrial ecology" stage, where the energy use, natural resource consumption and environmental impacts of a product over the course of its entire lifecycle have to be examined, and changes made. (These include not producing certain items in the first place.)

Among the many interesting observations and ideas from the "new environmentalists" is that the problem is not the "market" or "capitalism." They recognize that everything is a "market" and that to oppose markets is like opposing gravity or ocean tides. Instead, they recognize that market forces are neither virtuous or evil, and can be harnessed for all kinds of public and private good. But markets can also have problems that need correction. One of these (maybe the biggest) is subsidies.

The subsidies are, in fact, non-market (or even anti-market) government gifts to companies and sometimes whole industries that may include money (grants, forgiveable loans, etc.) and also what Valiante calls "useful regulatory instruments." The latter can take many different forms. One example is regulations that on the surface appear to be prohibitions against pollution, but are in fact licenses to pollute within a prescribed limit. Another is exemption from certain regulations, or certificates of approval to build, expand and/or operate a facility granted by politicians against the wishes of local opponents who are dismissed as "NIMBYs."

A great example of a useful regulatory instrument "purchased" by a powerful industry lobby was the exemption of the soft drink industry in the United States from the anti-trust and combines legislation there, that allowed the major soft drink companies to dismantle the established bottle refilling and deposit-refund system and replace it with a system of one-way "throwaway" beverage containers. The companies at the time even managed to convince most U.S. lawmakers (though not all) that their special exemption was for the greater cause of environmental protection (to protect their bottle refilling system) when it was in fact the very opposite. Insidiously, the companies managed to corrupt and control the agenda -- by partially funding the startup of curbside collection programs -- and re-branding their throwaway packaging "recyclable" to the extent that policymakers are now reduced to negotiating whether used beverage containers should be collected for recycling on deposit, or not, which neatly sidesteps the larger and more important debate of whether the recyclabe/throwaway containers should be allowed in the first place. The companies avoid mention of the high-speed super-efficient refilling systems in places like Germany where most soft drinks are sold (by the very same companies) in refillable containers. In other words, the 3Rs hierarchy has been overturned, and not by accident.

Corporate representatives nowadays sit on the boards of various Industry Funding Organizations (IFOs) that formulate strategies and oversee the development of various emerging product stewardship programs. It's not their fault at all that they participate in the IFOs -- in most cases they're legally required to do so. And there's nothing nefarious in the fact that they (rationally and predictably) pursue policies that reflect their commercial interests.

The problem is that, time and again, governments allow and even encourage the development of programs that give the appearance of being environmentally progressive when, in fact, they are simplistic programs that stick an advance disposal fee onto a consumer item and allow "business as usual" for producers and consumers. True, the product stewardship programs (if properly designed and independently audited) may succeed in diverting certain wastes from landfill disposal. That may be desireable but is really the "right answer to the wrong question." Zero Waste proponents like the folks at the Product Policy Institute would likely say that the better question is "what is the most eco-efficient product and packaging, over a product's entire lifecycle." Ask that question and you start generating EPR answers that include design for environment (DfE), and not simply waste diversion solutions.

From this perspective, the entire Blue Box curbside recycling system is the right answer to the wrong question. In fact, it represents a mostly "business as usual" scenario for producers, who continue to externalize their costs onto the environment, and ratepayers. One of the PPI's central ideas is that municipalities have been duped in the past half century into becoming "enablers" to co-dependent industry, carting off an ever-increasing tide of "product waste" at no cost to industry. These days, more and more of the items (which increasingly include short lifespan electronic products like computers, MP3 players and cellphones that are obsolete almost from the moment they're sold) contribute to a growing amount of waste. there's no "feedback loop" connecting upstream manufacturers to the upstream and downstream environmental impacts of their products and wastes. End the subsidies (at each stage of production, and the carting away of wastes), the Zero Waste proponents will argue, and much of that feedback loop will come into effect.

Let's assume that in the next few years the stated goal of governments across North America will be reached. Let's imagine that something like 60 per cent (or higher) of our "garbage" is "diverted from landfill." Let's imagine that about a third of the total waste stream is recycled through Blue Box-style programs, and another third is composted through various organics "Green Bin" programs. Let's also imagine that a considerable amount of products are kept out of the waste stream entirely via various product stewardship programs. One day, there will be a program for scrap tires, used oil, household hazardous waste (batteries, pesticides, etc.), fluorescent bulbs, used electronics ("e-waste"), and so on. Oh happy day! But, what will we have acheived?

Only a small part of what the Zero Waste proponents argue we need. While it's true that recycling offsets the upstream energy inputs and environmental externalities of natural resource extraction, this is only a small part of what's required for sustainability -- the business of getting us to the place where everyone on this planet can live a reasonably comfortable life without the five planets that would be required if everyone lived as Americans (and Canadians) do. With the growth of consumerism and markets in China and India, we need to worry about this, urgently.

Curbside recycling and product stewardship programs are desirable for certain materials, to be sure, and they are important tools in our sustainability toolbox. But using them while ignoring the 3Rs hierarchy (reduction, reuse) is like a carpenter attempting to build a house with only the screw driver and rasp, and not also using the hammer, saw and pliers (etc.). So, even as the municipal-industrial dream of a content covered in recyclng and composting plants comes to fruition in the next decade or so, we will still need more landfills and waste-to-energy plants (and probably another two or three Earths!) unless the producer responsibility and true product stewardship issues are addressed, and that will require nothing less than fundamental changes in the consumer society.

A few years ago I would have doubted this kind of change was possible. My suspicion now, however, is that a "sleeping giant" is wakening, and a grassroots movement of people concerned about climate change, peak oil, and ecosystems under stress from numerous factors, will gather momentum. It will not be led by corporations, although some progressive companies will get onside (and see some commercial benefits from doing so). It will not be led by municipalities, that will continue to struggle with the tide of waste coming at them, and continue to be preoccupied with building their recycling and composting mini-empires.

It will be led (I think) by a collection of different groups bound by a common interest. Chief among these will be aging Baby Boomers -- a "grey power" army of modern "village elders" who will increasingly have both the time and the interest in bringing social change, now that the most consumerist phase of their lives is over (families, larger houses, cars, etc.). They will join with the new generation of idealistic and concerned young people growing up with entrenched environmental values and, let's face it, $100 (and higher) per barrel gasoline. The catalyst will be the intellectuals and organizers of the updated environmental movement, personafied by the board of the Product Policy Institute and similar organizations, who will develop new models and fresh insights into how to change the system and harness market forces for various public and environmental goods. Their ideas wille eventually overtake the simply "waste diversion" philosophy and its technologies. The companies that position themselves at the forefront of this emerging trend will prosper; those that ignore it will slowly fade. Things are changing, and the Zero Waste proponents time has come.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My work has got me very involved in understanding the Zero Waste movement lately -- and the zero carbon footprint dimension -- and I've begun to feel that -- with certain qualifications -- it offers the philosophical underpinning to solve many of society's (and the world's) problems. We are the ones who will have to change our ways, and our value system. I'm beginning to understand that certain forms of pollution, poverty, war and demagoguery are not accidental, but the inevitable consequence of our consumer culture and the imperial projection of our power around the world extracting and exploiting human and natural resources on terms that are favorable to us, backed up by military force.

To break the cycle, we first have to understand the system upon which we stand, which is largely out of sight and therefore out of mind, and we then need solutions -- because it quickly becomes depressing and people will simply "tune out" if the bad news isn't delivered almost hand-in-hand with information about what we can do to make positive change.

To that end, if you click on the two links below, you'll find a very thought provoking presentation of the issue of externalities and the environmental and human impacts of the hyper-consumer culture and economy, and also a talk by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute about how we can "win the oil end game." Watch them when you have about 15 minutes to view each.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/51

(If the second link doesn't work for you, visit TED.com and search "Lovins." This is Amory Lovins on "We must win the oil end game.")

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 7:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This may count as my most frivolous Blog entry ever, but I imagine that quite a few of our readers are engineers or at least people with enthusiasm for various kinds of technology. And what I'm about to write may be useful to more than a few of you at some point as I know of at least one company that has advertised with us that sells hand-held gas detection devices that look quite a bit like the gizmos featured in the Star Trek TV series, and I learned in talking to their designers that this was no coincidence and that, in fact, they were serious Trekkies who modelled their equipment on "phaser" guns and so on from that program.

Anyway, there's a new term floating around called "steampunk" that refers to a new trend in which people take modern electronic devices (laptops, computer monitors, electric guitars) and decorate them -- or even rebuild them -- to look like weird 19th Century-type inventions (i.e., with brass fittings and decorative hinges and so on) reminiscent of the steam locomotive era; hence the term "steampunk."

I have pasted some URLs below of some websites that celebrate this interesting trend. Take a peek and you'll instantly see what I mean. I really like this stuff, especially the first website with the "brass" computer monitor. I also think the ladies' laptop is amazing.

Steampunk is a take-off on "cyberpunk" -- the techno-dystopian genre with cybernetics and so forth epitomized in the Matrix film trilogy. Steampunk is characterized by the Wellsian aesthetic of 19th-century technology deployed in crazy, modern ways. There are novels and so forth written like this, and even a game puckishly called Space: 1889.

If you want to see this concept taken to the ultimate level, go see the excellent new movie, The Golden Compass. The whole film is populated with this kind of retro-futuristic equipment, from the compass itself -- called an "alethiometer" to fanciful dirigibles and so on. Even if you don't see the movie, check out the official website and you'll get a sense of how it all looks.

http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/

I have a very modern condo and yet I also have various 19th-century-style brass instruments like an astrolabe or sextant and so on that I got at the Bombay Company store. Makes me think I should keep them and display after all.

I think steampunk speaks to our contemporary relationship with technology and the desire for a human connection with the machines with which we interact. Just think of how many hours in a day each of us interacts with machines: computers, cars, kitchen appliances, Blackberry or iPod-type devices.

In the 19th century you could physically see and even touch the various gears and components of a machine, or open it up and see its inner workings, even if you didn't completely understand them. Think of a watch or a steam locomotive.

The gasoline engine made things more complicated but technology was still accessible to ordinary people. From the Model T to a 1980s Camero, a mecahnically inclined person could still work "under the hood" of their car, change the oil, or even rebuild and supercharge the engine. Nowadays you need special instruments to read the computerized monitoring equipment in a car. Topping up or changing fluids is still realtively easy, but most of a car's inner workings are impenetrable and it's going to get more complicated as more and more parts of a car become computerized and electronic (including soon-to-be electric motors that will be emissions free and silent).

The next electronic revolution, followed almost right away by the digital computer age, moved technology further and further away from intuitive comprehension. Devices, as everyone knows, have become smaller and thinner, running on microchips whose inner workings are only visible under a microscope. The iPod and the new iPhone best embody the latest developments -- thin, wireless and, for all intents and purposes -- completely magical in terms of how they work. A DVD or thumb drive mysteriously holds all the contents of an encyclopedia, or all the color and sound and drama of a feature movie.

At the same time as all this nano-wirelessness made new devices "cool" (to the extent that they're now wearable fashion objects, and even fetish objects of a kind) it was quite predictable that people would feel nostalgia for the days when they could relate to machines and tools -- a time when the craftsmanship that went into building a device was evident.

It may be that this is the genesis of steampunk, which could become a major trend. Just as electronic and computerized devices are becoming wrist-watch-sized and credit-card thin, a sizable market could erupt to take these same items -- or at least their essential components and flat monitors, etc. -- and integrate them inside deliberately large, heavy, ornate and seemingly hand-crafted housings.

My guess is that if someone opened up a storefront on a fashionable street selling hand-crafted, one of a kind computer accessories they'd make a fortune! Another business might be to supply easy-to-install retrofit kits for people to customize their laptops, Blackberries, iPhones, etc.

Watch for it. (And if you work for a company that designs or builds special equipment, mayube it's time to dump the sleek plastic look of an iPod Nano and replace it with an aesthetic that might find a place in, say, a Jules Verne novel.)

Now here are those URLs:

http://steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml

http://jakeofalltrades.wordpress.com/2007/01/23/test/

http://jakeofalltrades.wordpress.com/2007/01/25/tick-tock-a-steampunk-clock/

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/lady-steampunk/mod-your-laptop-into-a-portable-typewriter-and-adding-machine-275541.php

http://steampunkworkshop.com/steampunk-strat.shtml

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a note to let everyone know I will be at the Canadian Waste & Recycling Expo in Vancouver this week. Come see me and Publisher Brad O'Brien at our booth. If I'm out walking the show floor, leave a note at the booth with your cell phone number and I'll track you down!

Here are the details about the Canadian Waste & Recycling Expo

Dates: November 28-29 2007
City: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Location: Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre
Contact Name: Arnie Gess
Local Phone: 403-638.4410
Toll-free Phone: 877-534-7285
Fax: 403-638-4413
Email: arnie.gess@cwre.ca
Website: www.cwre.ca

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our contributing editor Usman Valiante -- along with contributing editor Clarissa Morawski -- recently had the opportunity to appear on TV Ontario’s program "The Agenda with Steve Paikin" to discuss “The Calculus of Going Green.” The show focused on the complexities of environmental decision-making (the topics of discussion focused on assessing the relative environmental merits of eating locally produced food, using compact fluorescent bulbs and driving hybrid gasoline-electric cars).

The show opened with an interview with Mr. Bjorn Lomborg – “The Skeptical Environmentalist” as he calls himself. Whatever your thoughts regarding the merits of Mr. Lomborg’s arguments there is no denying that his delivery is highly effective in questioning our priorities in addressing climate change and the flaws in the Kyoto Protocol approach.

Here is the link to the episode page so you can view the interview with Bjorn Lomborg:

http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda/index.cfm?page_id=7&bpn=779042&ts=2007-10-16%2020:00:15.0

(If it does not open when you click on the link please copy and paste it into the address line on your web browser). You can watch the episode by choosing video on the right menu on the episode page.

After that interview our contributing editors appeared with other panelists in a moderated discussion. You can watch that segment here:

http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/tvoutils/globalfiles/VideoPop.cfm?spot_id=3203&sitefolder=theagenda

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's another recent entry from Lawrence Solomon in the FP Comment section of the Financial Post section of Canada's National Post newspaper. I have to say that I just can't get enough of this stuff -- Larry is doing such a great job on this article series, and I hope I puts it together as a book, with each article a page or chapter. Even if you are true believer in the received wisdom of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- in fact, especially if you are such a person -- you have a duty to read these articles and challenge yourself. This is an especially interesting article on Antarctica; it turns out that, contrary to media reports about the Larson B ice shelf collapsing, etc. -- there is no fingerprint of human-induced cliamte change to be discerned in Antarctica, no temperature increase and so on, which flies in the face of the computer models.

Enjoy.

You still need your parka in Antarctica

LAWRENCE SOLOMON
Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Antarctica — a vast territory whose sea-ice growth in winter effectively doubles its size to envelop an area three times that of Canada — is the world’s coldest continent by far, its permanent ice sheet regulating the Antarctic atmosphere. It is also the world’s windiest and driest continent by far, and its highest by far, with a mean elevation of 2,300 metres.

It is also the world’s most remote continent, its least explored and least understood.

Not until 1998, with the advent of new technologies and improved scientific understanding, did human knowledge “allow the question of the global relevance of Antarctica to be explored in detail for the first time,” stated David Bromwich of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University. A decade ago, Dr. Bromwich was embarking on a major research project for the National Science Foundation to begin to understand this frozen continent, which is the primary heat sink in the global climate system, and “plays a central role in global climate variability and change.”

His mission, in part, dealt with the science of global warming, which could not be settled until Antarctica gave up its mysteries. “The validity of global change scenarios remains controversial,” he said at the time.

A decade later, despite accumulating research, the validity of climate change scenarios continues to be controversial, and the unknowns surrounding the role of Antarctica continue to overwhelm the little that’s known. As Dr. Bromwich reported earlier this year at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco, “It’s hard to see a global-warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now.”

Dr. Bromwich presented his findings shortly after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with new findings in February that pointed to catastrophic consequences if mankind didn’t change its ways. The science is settled, the IPCC indicated, its global models reliable.

Yet Dr. Bromwich found that the global models that the IPCC relies on are at odds with his own findings. Antarctica’s temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as global climate models predicted.

“The best we can say right now is that the climate models are somewhat inconsistent with the evidence that we have for the last 50 years from continental Antarctica,” he stated, adding that “We’re looking for a small signal that represents the impact of human activity and it is hard to find it at the moment.”

A 2006 study by Dr. Bromwich and others, published in the journal Science, again found the accepted climate-change models to be wrong. According to those models, snowfall in Antarctica should have been increasing. Instead, the study found, there has been no statistically significant increase in the snowfall trend over the past 50 years. Instead, snowfall patterns in Antarctica varied widely from year to year and decade to decade. Dr. Bromwich’s findings — considered to be the most precise record of Antarctic snowfall yet — also point to the need for decades of more data from satellites to determine Antarctica’s patterns.

Complex computer modelling is notoriously unreliable, yet there are exceptions. One is the model that helped save the life of Ronald Shemenski, a physician stationed at the U.S. South Pole Station in April, 2001. Dr. Shemenski, who had developed a life-threatening pancreatic infection, needed to be airlifted in a season of high winds, extreme cold and near 24-hour darkness, when plane travel doesn’t normally occur. The unprecedented rescue effort succeeded, thanks to the aircrew of Canada’s Kenn Borek Air Ltd., who flew a Twin Otter in and out of the South Pole, and Dr. Bromwich’s model, which helped predict the best time for the perilous rescue effort.

“The forecast model used to predict aircraft-landing conditions at the South Pole for the rescue was optimized specifically for Antarctic conditions,” Dr. Bromwich explains. “The model was only run for short periods, about two days at a time,” to approximate the time required for the rescue mission.

The optimization for Antarctic conditions also succeeds where global models fail. “Global climate models that are having some trouble at predicting the long-term behaviour [over decades] of Antarctic near-surface temperatures are not optimized for the unique atmospheric conditions over Antarctica, probably the most pristine place on Earth,” he elaborates. “The primary reason is connected with cloud formation. The global models treat the clouds like those in mid-latitudes, whereas they are very different in reality.”

That global models fare poorly in remote parts of the world doesn’t surprise him. “These are global models and shouldn’t be expected to be equally exact for all locations,” he explains, adding that “until the global models get the polar regions right, they won’t get the global climate right either.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute.
www.urban-renaissance.org

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I thought I'd just make a quick entry to explain to readers how subscriptions work at our magazine. I've spoken to a few people recently who seemed confused by the fact that they currently receive the magazine for free, but are sometimes asked to buy a paid-for subscription.

Here's how it works:

We are primarily a "controlled circulation" magazine, meaning our magazine is sent out free of charge to qualified professionals (e.g., municipal waste managers, property managers, commercial waste generators, key people at recycling companies, etc.). When we launched the magazine years ago, most of our readership was gleaned from directories and lists (such as those offered by our affliate Scotts' Directories).

Over the years, more and more people read our magazine and found out about it at conferences and trade shows, etc. Eventually, we enticed almost all our readers to fill in and sign a special card requesting the magazine (for free). This is important as our circulation list is audited independently each year by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). We send the ABC audit statement to our advertisers to prove to them that our claims are true about who is reading our magazine (their prospective customers in different industry sectors and various provinces).

So, you should at least fill in the reader qualification card each year in order to remain on our mailing list. We like to have virtually all our readers "first year written request" and we routinely delete old names and records.

That being said, you might ask, "Why should I pay for a subscription?" The answer is that being a qualified reader doesn't guarantee that you will keep receiving the magazine. We frequently add and delete unpaid subscribers in order to improve the quality of our distribution. (For instance, we might decide one month that we're a bit light on property managers and too heavy on construction and demolition sector readers, and simply drop a couple of hundred names here and add a couple of hundred there.)

Having a paid subscription prevents you from getting deleted and guarantees that you will receive the magazine. And, since our magazine only comes out six times per year, you might not notice for many months that you've stopped receiving the magazine, and you could miss some useful stories and information.

Also, paid subscribers receive other benefits, including email-based topic alerts and our electronic weekly newsletter (if you want to receive that). And only paid subscribers can access the archived articles from past editions on the website (under the Print Edition button). That's a very useful, searchable database of information that is great for research or brushing up on any topic related to waste disposal, recycling, composting and so on.

So there you have it -- a short description of why you should purchase a paid subscription to our magazine. To learn more and to get one, just click on Subscriber Services at the upper left side of our website's home page. And if you need to contact our circulation manager directly, her name is Mary Garufi, and she can be reached at 416-442-5600, ext. 3545 or via email at mgarufi@bizinfogroup.ca

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just last week I passed the minimum $2,000 level in my fundraising effort that will allow me to walk in The Weekend to End Breast Cancer (September 8-9). Thanks to all of you who have contributed -- the vast majority of donors are people I know from the waste management and environmental services industry. I'm now walking between five and 15 kilometres daily as preparation for the weekend walk, in which I have to walk a marathon on each day back to back Saturday and Sunday.

The topic of breast cancer became very relevant when my mother-in-law developed breast cancer and underwent a masectomy this year. The wife of one of our regular magazine columnists -- who is much younger than my mother-in-law -- has also undergone treatment. Cancer has taken away several friends and acquaintances of mine in recent years, too. Sometimes the outcomes are good -- the spouse of one of my industry friends beat lung cancer, which is quite unusual. Other times the news is more grim: I just found out last week that the sister of my stepfather has colon cancer. She's in her seventies but very fit and active, playing tennis all the time and involved in various causes. I hope her outcome is good also, but one never knows.

I have no doubt that every reader knows someone with cancer or who has passed away from it. For some time I've read "Alicia's Story" in the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle. The past diary-like entries are still posted there, but Alicia is taking a break from the column to fight the disease, which appears to be taking over now. A very sad story about cancer interrupting the life of a lovely woman who is only in her early twenties.

Anyway, all of this leads me to want to share an interesting piece of information. I'll tell you an interesting story in a moment, but first let me provide some context.

There's a debate among experts as to whether cancer is caused by innate factors or the external environment (i.e., pollution).

On the one hand, I've read some interesting articles and viewed TV programs in recent years that suggest that cancer is to a large extent natural -- a disease of aging. Simply put, we are seeing more cancers (according to some doctors and researchers) because people are living longer. In previous generations, people died of other causes before they had a chance to get cancer.

Along this line of thought, the system via which the body regenerates itself (wherein all our cells are replaced every eight years) has the consequence that sometimes cells grow out of control. We're all getting cancer all the time, but our immune system kills off these out-of-control cells before they get a foothold. The thinking is that if we become immuno-suppressed, the cancer takes root. In this school of thought, we need to keep ourselves fit, minimize stress and eat vitamins -- all to boost immunity and keep cancer at bay.

Also along this line of thought, as we age the cancer eventually gets us (if we don't succumb to somthing else like heart disease), but progresses slowly in older people, since the metabolic rate has slowed down also. One of the proofs for this theory is that, in mice at least, when researchers turn off the genes of aging, the mice quickly develop tumors. Like a dark Darwinian joke, somehow the genes that allow us to age also suppress cancer, so you can't have eternal youth without also getting sick.

On the other hand, there's a school of thought that cancer is caused by environmental factors, such as various pollutants that we inhale and also imbibe in our water and (especially) our food. This concept is supported by growing rates of certain cancer among young people, especially breast cancer among women in their thirties and so on. We wouldn't expect this if cancer was only a disease of aging. I also wonder if two other factors apply. First, the fact that there are more women in the workforce, such that the stress impacts them by a certain age. And second, by increasing fat and obesity. Women have more body fat than men, and people are getting fatter, and maybe a stressed out overweight population is more susceptible to cancer.

Or maybe that's not the reason at all, and environmental factors really are the cause. At this point in time, I believe that both interpretations are true: i.e., that cancer is indeed a disease of aging, and also that environmental pollutants are causing additional cancers among younger people. I haven't even mentioned smoking, which accounts for something like 30 per cent of all cancers.

Now to the tidbit of information that's most interesting. My apologies for the long build-up, but I think this story needs the context above.

I was talking about this topic with a professional colleague the other day, and he referred to a book he read recently, a diary written by a surgeon from the American Civil War. One day the surgeon performed an autopsy on the body of a young soldier and discovered that the young man had died of cancer (not battlefield injuries). He had the body packed in ice and shipped back to his hometown university because it might be the only opportunity his medical students would ever have to witness cancer.

In other words, cancer was so rare in the 19th Century that a doctor shipped a soldier's body home to his students for a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime view of it. Maybe this anecdote points up that doctor's simply didn't detect cancer very often back then, and that surely accounts for some of it. But the story is arresting, and suggests that perhaps modern pollution really does play a significant role in cancer generation.

If so, we'll have to redouble our efforts not just to "find a cure" but to prevent cancer in the first place, by removing the cause: pollution in our environment, our air, water and food. Something I'll be thinking about as I walk in the fundraising marathon in September.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I remind readers of the interesting article series by Lawrence Solomon that appears regularly on the FP Comment page of the National Post newspaper. I've taken the liberty of reproducing the most recent (30th) installment below. Remember, you can access the whole series at Larry's website here:

www.urban-renaissance.org

THE DENIERS — PAR T XXX

What global warming, Australian skeptic asks

LAWRENCE SOLOMON
Financial Post

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Bob Carter, a professor at James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide (South Australia), is a paleontologist, a stratigrapher, and a marine geologist.

He has been chair of the National Marine Science and Technologies Committee, director of the Australian Office of the Ocean Drilling Program, and chair of the Earth Sciences Discipline Panel of the Australian Research Council. He is Cambridge educated. And he is an outspoken global-warming skeptic.

Most global-warming skeptics criticize the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on limited grounds — they might view the science put forth by the IPCC to be at odds with science in their particular discipline, for example, or they might object to the IPCC’s secrecy, or they might object to the IPCC’s failure to observe standard peerreview practices. Moreover, when they object they generally do so quietly, often without naming names and only in private.

Prof. Carter objects on multiple grounds and in multiple arenas; he names names and he will set the record straight, even when those he believes to be in the wrong are fellow skeptics.

NASA chief Michael Griffin, for example, is a skeptic because he thinks that global warming may be beneficial, that it is not worth worrying about, and that, in any case, we wouldn’t be able to stop it, even if we wanted to. But Dr. Griffin also thinks that a global-warming trend is certainly underway, and to this Prof. Carter takes objection.

Dr. Griffin’s “opinion is unsupported by the evidence,” Prof. Carter wrote in rebuttal. “The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4%) in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

“Second, lower-atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17%).”

Moreover, Prof. Carter adds, credible scientists predict global cooling. How then can Dr. Griffin boldly assert that humans are causing global warming?

One of the most contentious areas of climate-change science involves computer General Circulation Models (GCMs), the predictive tool that generate most of the scary scenarios that arouse public alarm. Prof. Carter has long been a critic of these models, which claim to project for us what the climate will be in the year 2100.

In the past, Prof. Carter has drawn the ire of global-warming proponents with his GCM critiques. Now, to his satisfaction, he has support in his critique from an unlikely source — Kevin Trenberth, whom he thinks of as “one of the advisory high priests of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

As Dr. Trenberth recently acknowledged to Nature journal’s Climate Feedback blog, IPCC models cannot predict future climate because they don’t reflect reality: “None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate,” he stated.

“Moreover, the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors. I postulate that regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialized.”

While these statements warrant Prof. Carter’s approval , others do not, such as Dr. Trenberth’s claim that people have mistakenly believed that the IPCC makes predictions: “In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been,” claims Dr. Trenberth.

To which Prof. Carter notes an audit at the 27th International Symposium on Forecasting presented earlier this month. It found that “in apparent contradiction to claims by some climate experts that the IPCC provides ‘projections’ and not ‘forecasts’, the word ‘forecast’ and its derivatives occurred 37 times, and ‘predict’ and its derivatives occur 90 times” in a chapter from the IPCC’s latest report.

“There is no predictive value in the current generation of computer GCMs and therefore the alarmist IPCC statements about human-caused global warming are unjustified,” he concludes. Until others conclude so too, expect Prof. Carter to continue his critiques without fear or favour.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our contributing editor Clarissa Morawski sent me this article from the weekend edition of the Globe & Mail newspaper. This is the latest in a series that columnist John Barber has written about (and against) waste incineration proposals in the Greater Toronto Area based on information first reported in our magazine in the cover story by Clarissa of the April/May 2007 edition, plus further information she's dug up. Enjoy.

INCINERATION: THE NUMBERS GAME

It's hard to see the truth through all the smoke?

The Globe and Mail

Sat 23 June 2007

JOHN BARBER

There's nothing like a good, clean hit to enliven either a hockey game or a public debate, and Peterborough consultant Clarissa Morawski landed a beauty this spring when she looked at the emissions data for the necklace of large garbage incinerators our suburban neighbours plan to build around Toronto.

The data, supplied by the vendors of incinerators and published as an appendix to the environmental assessment of the plant that Hamilton and Niagara Region hope to build, showed an entirely different picture from the rosy propaganda the vendors and their agents had spun about their wondrous technology.

Unlike the old incinerators that were once considered safe - until they weren't - the new ones are said to be advanced "energy-to-waste" facilities that turn household waste into clean energy. But the data submitted by the vendors themselves showed that this new technology was one of the dirtiest imaginable ways to produce power - far worse even than coal-fired power plants in terms of heavy-metal and greenhouse-gas emissions.

"I was absolutely shocked that incineration is still under consideration, given the pollution profile alone," Ms. Morawski said at the time. So were a lot of people when she published her findings in Solid Waste Magazine. In the time since then, concerns about the huge costs and potential hazards of incineration have led Halton Region to cancel plans to build a facility, while Niagara and York are slipping free of the partnerships they once entered to do the same.

But Hamilton and Durham still appear determined to go it alone with their big burners, doubling down on what their counterparts considered a losing bet. They do have one new advantage: The inconvenient facts that helped deter the others no longer exist.

Within weeks of Ms. Morawski's critique, the "comparative emission study" she relied on disappeared from the website documenting the Hamilton-Niagara environmental assessment. Within months of the date one of the facilities is scheduled to be built - thanks to the McGuinty government's recent decision to fast- track incinerator projects - there is no agreed-upon data about what will come out of their stacks.

The reason, according to the consultant who advised that the data be "taken down," is that they were incorrect. "We've found more recent information that corrects it," said David Merriman of Genivar Inc., the firm advising both the Hamilton and the Durham teams on their projects. The Niagara document, which was posted for more than a year, was only a draft, according to Mr. Merriman.

"We found, having posted it, there were some incorrect things," he said. "We removed it and we're now working on a corrected version that we will be presenting in September."

Mr. Merriman wouldn't say when he discovered the data was incorrect, but acknowledged the review was inspired in part by incinerator vendors "who told us the emissions coming out of the new technologies are lower than they have been historically."

So they get to supply new numbers, based on their fondest hopes for the very latest technology, to update the image of facilities that were once considered state-of-the-art, low-emission power plants - until they weren't, sometime last week, at which point they reverted to being dirty old mass-burn incinerators.

Technology advances - and so does the tricky business of calculating greenhouse-gas emissions, which represent another image problem for the nasty old incinerators that were so clean and modern last week. Thus the consultants also plan to introduce new, radically downgraded estimates about their carbon-dioxide emissions to replace the ugly numbers that disappeared.

The change is necessary not because there is new technology that reduces carbon emissions from garbage burners, according to Mr. Merriman, but because there is new thinking about how to count them. The actual emissions will stay the same, but the numbers reported in September will likely be halved.

Incinerator vendors have long supported such an approach, which is used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to calculate national carbon inventories - and assumes, among many other things, that all the paper and wood burned as garbage will come from renewable sources. But applying such factors to emissions from actual burners with real smokestacks is highly controversial.

"It's totally inappropriate that anyone would apply IPCC guidelines when measuring emissions from thermal stations," Ms. Morawski said. "We just want to know what comes out of the stack."

But we no longer do - and likely never will, if the new arithmetic prevails and reported carbon emissions fall dramatically this September. In the meantime, numbers swirl headily behind the scenes.

What a spectacle. It's enough to make you realize why the McGuinty government exempted garbage incinerators from the Environmental Assessment Act. Learning the truth about them is such a confusing business.

jbarber@globeandmail.com

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I thought readers would appreciate this sobering evaluation of the peer review process, which (like so many other things) isn't quite the model process some think. This interesting article is from the Financial Post, FP Comment section, Friday, June 22, 2007.

Lessons of figure skating

Peer review is a crucial part of science funding, but scientists could learn from the skating world that more than two opinions are needed for a good judgment

REINHOLD VIETH

Financial Post

Scientific peer reviewers are the best specialists that editors can find to read the manuscripts they receive. Peer reviewers usually serve as unpaid, hardworking experts. In essence, journal peer reviewers stand on guard for society as a whole, to ensure that only scientifically credible articles get published.

But long before any journal peer review, the research needs to be financed, so a different kind of peer review takes place. To apply to publicly supported granting agencies, researchers need to describe why an idea needs investigation and how they would conduct their experiments. Instead of a worldwide pool of experts, funding agencies usually must rely on committees, or groups of scientists from various fields. Those who serve as peer reviewers for funding agencies are also volunteers, giving of their time in the often thankless task of reading many applications for funding. The goal of their peer review is to provide a score that agencies will use to rank who gets funding. In theory, peer reviews applicable to grant applications ensure that limited research dollars support the best science.

The peer review of research-grant applications is a huge problem for all concerned. Not counting the thinking and the groundwork, a typical medical researcher spends an absolute minimum of a month of full-time work writing a grant application. After that, according to the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), our federal government’s largest medical and health funding agency, the odds of funding success are about one out of six. If the grant application aims to fund brand-new research, the odds of success are even worse. Peer review should ensure that good research stands a better chance of success than a roll of the dice.

Almost five years ago, Warren Thorngate, a statistician from Carleton University, examined the statistics about the peer-review process at CIHR. His “Thorngate report” paints a very sad picture. He shows that the scoring of scientific grant applications is no different from other situations in which humans need to “score” something, whether it is judging figure skaters, or choosing a paint colour. Any two people can agree or disagree, just by the luck of the draw of which two people are selected to judge. I have long wondered how many people who apply for research funding have read the Thorngate report with care.

Basically, every grant application is given to two members of a committee to read, each assigning a score out of five. That score is a judgment based on quality guidelines about the possible importance of the research to the health of Canadians, the quality of the experiment proposed, etc. The result, according to Thorngate, is that “perceived differences in the quality of the applications accounted for less than 25% of the variance of internal reviewers’ ratings. Individual differences among the internal reviewers seemed to account for the rest.”

This means that 75% of what compares your score with everybody else’s is just plain randomness. Everyone who has applied repeatedly for research grant money knows this, and it applies to just about any peer-review system, not just CIHR. For example, I sent exactly the same grant proposal to two funding agencies at the same time. Agency A scored the proposal so badly it was not even worth discussing. Agency B scored the proposal as the best of the 20 it considered. When I complained to Agency A about this discrepancy, it replied that its low score simply reflected a difference of opinion.

For researchers who need support, the random gamble of the way applications are scored and ranked is a huge problem. Researchers now accept that peer review is junk science, because it is not science at all. Applicants for grants know that, despite the sincere efforts of peer reviewers (all of whom have also been applicants), the opinion-based judgments of peer reviews do end up functioning like a lottery. And just like any lottery, the only way to be sure of winning is to keep on buying a ticket.

For funding agencies, the randomness of peer review has created an ever-growing problem. As applicants keep recycling grant applications into the lottery, the number of applications climbs and the success rate drops. New research ideas entering the pool are quickly watered down into a sea of applications. The burden of dealing with applications that need reviewing increases. With that, the mental capacity of peer reviewers becomes ever more strained. It becomes difficult for them to do justice to every application, they are overworked, and they become quick to toss proposals out of competition.

To outsiders, peer review is a mysterious scientific system that serves as our ultimate way to determine research quality. Warren Thorngate tells us with evidence that the quality of judgment in peer review is no more reliable than for any other kind of judgment call.

In the field of figure skating, performances are scored and averaged from several judges, with the highest and lowest scores tossed out. The scoring system for figure skating is more scientific, because ranking for a given performance is designed to be reproducible. Figure skating has minimized the lottery effect. The problem for those of us who apply for medical research funding is that, with only two reviewers to score applications, the scoring system that compares each applicant with the competition is just too noisy. I am by no means criticizing peer review of research grants because there really is no better alternative. But we need to make the system less of a crapshoot for applicants.

In science, the usual way to make things less random is to average more inputs. This means to average scores from more than the usual two peer reviewers who sit on committees. However, according to Thorngate, even though our CIHR sends proposals to outside experts for peer review, their opinions “matter little in the adjudication process” and “the usefulness of external reviews remains a mystery.” In other words, to a statistician, it looks like the extra peer reviews available are wasted because there is no evidence that they count toward the ranking for funding. This is not good science.

Counting the input from a greater number of judges in the average score works for figure skating. Those responsible for designing the way research grant applications are ranked need to borrow a page from the world of sports and make the system as reliable as it would be if an audience were watching.

Reinhold Vieth is Professor, Department of Nutritional Sciences and Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto, and Director, Bone and Mineral Laboratory Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I thought readers would be interested in John Barber's recent column that's critical of incineration plans in regions that ring the Greater Toronto Area. I also invite waste management professionals who live in Southern Ontario to consider attending next week's MWIN conference and, especially, the panel on thermal treatment that I'm chairing on the final day (Thursday, June 14 in Cobourg). You can get the details and register at www.mwin.org

The evidence is in: Halton's incinerator folly is toast

The Globe And Mail -- Wednesday, June 6, 2007

JOHN BARBER

Once again, on behalf of all Torontonians, allow me to extend sincere gratitude to the suburban municipalities now flirting seriously with incineration and similar "thermal treatments" of household wastes. Every step forward they take reconfirms the folly of their path.

But the department headed by Bob Nosal, medical officer of health for Halton Region, deserves special credit for offering the most important public service so far: a scarlet-red flag warning the easily deceived that building any such device, despite prevailing happy talk about "acceptable" levels of pollution, will hurt people - or, to use the phrase preferred by Halton bureaucrats, "be associated with some increase in adverse health impacts."

Until now, the folly of incineration has emerged in the form of inconvenient truths popping out of the environmental assessments of impending new incinerators in Durham and Niagara - hard evidence about emissions, costs and alternatives to replace the easy assurances heard earlier on the sales floor.

Dr. Nosal's intervention is the first rebellion to emerge from within the ranks of the promoters.

It takes the benign form of a peer review of "Step 4a" of the region's plan to build an incinerator, in which it purported to identify and describe the prospective facility's "potential health and environmental effects." Written by medical scientist David Pengelly, recent recipient of a City of Toronto Green award for his work on air quality, the review gently but thoroughly demolishes official assurances that modern incinerators are benign.

"I'm a scientist," Dr. Pengelly said in an interview. "I'm not convinced by assertions, I'm convinced by evidence." The Halton report, he added, offered no evidence to support the contention that modern incinerators, despite being cleaner than their predecessors, are in fact safe. They emit the same dangerous pollutants as earlier incinerators, albeit less of them. But how much is that? Step 4a doesn't say.

"I'm prepared to accept that things are better than they were," he said. "My problem was that there wasn't very specific scientific evidence brought out to show how much better they are."

Dr. Nosal, the official who commissioned the review, is already advocating strict abatement of existing pollution in Halton's already "taxed" airshed - a position unlikely to herald approval of new sources of dangerous pollution. He and his crew deserve "a great deal of credit for taking an active role in making sure that these health issues are addressed right from the very beginning," Dr. Pengelly said. "I can tell you that's not happening in other municipalities."

Leaving aside its welcome expose of incineration's health hazards, the Halton report includes more than enough latent ammunition to destroy any hope a burner might soon be built there. The idea is absurd on its face: Halton's existing landfill is big enough to last until 2030, long before which it could easily be expanded to take garbage until the last person alive today is gone.

Mercifully, the bureaucrats have abandoned their nutty idea that Halton should "take a leadership role" by building a giant incinerator to compete with facilities throughout the province. Unlike some of their colleagues elsewhere, they acknowledge that recent developments - especially the sudden appearance of 50 million tonnes of new landfill capacity in Southern Ontario - have destroyed the viability of such schemes. Faced with the disappointing fact that Halton has no need for an incinerator, they are reduced to recommending a teeny tiny one.

This ongoing retreat is a fascinating event for which suburban taxpayers - and everybody who breathes - should be grateful.

Stripped of its rationale, its hazards exposed, the current push to incinerate is revealed as a kind of infrastructure adventurism, led by a tunnel-visioned cadre of engineers and consultants, that can be brought to a halt with no negative consequences.

jbarber@globeandmail.com

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At the beginning of May I moved into a condo along the waterfront in Collingwood, in a 20-year-old development known as Rupert's Landing.

I have sworn in the past that I would never live in a gated community, but once again my life fulfills Satre's comment that "we become what we resist." However, the gate appears to be broken and therefore left open most of the time, so that may not be important.

One of the most wonderful and somewhat unexpected benefits of living here is my new proximity to nature. My condo is on two storeys, facing south (so I get the sunlight all day) with a partial view of the bay toward the east. I have birch trees and red maples and a very green lawn (at the moment) to look out upon. The water level has dropped in Georgian Bay about six feet in recent years, so what was once a wave-lapped beach outside my doorstep now touches upon a reedy marsh. I would prefer proper lake water, but there's an "enviro" dimension to having this wetland nearby, and it is the presence of all kinds of birds and animals, especially migratory birds and frogs. I wake up every morning to a cacaphony from the former and go to sleep to the calls of the latter.

I have finally found a dwelling that is the perfect synthesis of home and cottage. When I barbeque on my lower balcony (which is allowed here, and yes, there is an upper balcony replete with Adirondack chairs for morning coffee or late night scotch) I'm drinking in the full-on Georgian Bay cottage lifestyle. Well, up to a point. There's still a bit more "home" feel than "away."

Actually, my new digs are very similar to the timeshare resorts to which I've been taking my kids for about a decade. The three-storey condo buildings, with their patios and balconies, are very similar to those favored in timeshare resorts. Rupert's Landing has tennis courts, a shuffle board deck and basketball hoop, an indoor pool and hot tub, a sauna, games room (with ping pong table), a squash court, a weight room with walking and cycling machines, etc., and a large adults-only rec room with big-screen TV and pool table, where drinks are served on late Saturday afternoons and where movies are screened regularly for residents. So it's more like a resort than a cottage.

I mention all this mostly because of the bird song and the proximity to nature. I can see storms developing from my large picture windows and, because I neither have nor desire air conditioning, I'm often opening windows to create a cross-breeze through the apartment. When I lived in the city I used to complain that I spent a lot of time writing and editing articles to protect nature, but I didn't spend much time experiencing it. Now I'm surrounded by it, and that inspires me when writing and editing topics on pollution prevention, waste minimization and all aspects of municipal and industrial ecology.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I enjoyed Peter Foster's editorial "The madness of eco-crowds" on the Comment page of the Financial Post section of the National Post today (May 23, 2007). I have excerpted it below. Personally, I support people taking steps to protect the environment, including the relatively "easy" climate mitigation stuff (as a precaurionary measure, and besides, some of it makes sense from an energy efficiency standpoint). But I share Foster's loathing of the self-righteous busybodies keeping an eye on one another in the English town described below. Very amusing.

Here's the excerpt:

One of my favourite books has always been Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Written more than 150 years ago by a gentleman named Charles Mackay, it provides a necessary reminder of mankind’s periodic tendency to go collectively off its rocker.

I was reminded of the book while listening to a CBC report that featured some earnest soul suggesting that the recent plummeting of a piece of marble from Toronto’s First Canadian Place might be due to climate change. Such a belief would surely fit into Mackay’s category of “the most remarkable instances of … moral epidemics [that] show … how imitative and gregarious men are.”

That is, we tend to think in herds, and the herd frequently launches itself off a cliff. “In reading the history of nations,” writes Mackay, “We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly.”

Extraordinary Delusions is filled with accounts of great public manias, from the South Sea Bubble and Tulipomania to widespread belief in witches and apocalyptic prophesies. Which brings us to current apocalyptic environmental forecasts and the almost universal call for centrally directed global mobilization to “do something.” Now.

It is not that climate change is not a fact of life, or that humans may not be having a marginal impact upon it. It is not even that the science is far more uncertain than radicals claim. It is that these beliefs have come to be considered an all-consuming “truth.” Everything is suddenly seen through a climate change prism. This perspective warps the view from the highest levels of government to the smallest of local communities.

With regards the latter, another report on the CBC last week focused on a small rural English village, Ashton Hayes, which is attempting to become “carbon neutral” to fight climate change. When I heard the report, my mind went to another British reference, this time the recent British comedy Hot Fuzz. In the movie, a hotshot policeman — who is so good at his job that he makes his colleagues look bad — is dispatched for that reason to an allegedly sleepy, crime-free village that does, however, have an extraordinary number of “accidents.”

It emerges that a cabal of influential villagers — obsessed with winning the award for prettiest village in England — are not above murdering anybody who might threaten their village’s picturesque status!

Similarly, Ashton Hayes — which has become a point of pilgrimage for eco-warriers/worriers (and described by the Financial Times of London as being like a “green-tinged Lourdes”) — doesn’t sound admirable so much as creepy, with roaming teams of eco-auditors, and the application of social pressures to stop such wasteful practices as sending individual Christmas cards.

Again according to the Financial Times: “Refuse recycling rates have replaced village cricket as the jealously fought competitive sport between rival villages.” When it comes to real sport, meanwhile, the village has a carbonneutral soccer team.

Sounds like a nightmare to me, although organizers claim that there is no “finger pointing” at anybody who refuses to sign on to the eco-moralization of virtually every form of activity, from leaving on the coffee machine to taking holiday flights.

Apparently, more than 30 other British communities have joined Ashton Hayes on the Via Dolorosa to carbon neutrality. One would love to hear what the half of the village that hasn’t signed on to this mania thinks of it, and what kind of pressures they feel from their puritan neighbours.

There have been myriad examples of manias and delusions since Mackay’s book. Marxism-Leninism was perhaps the bloodiest delusion in history. It came strapped to the recurring belief that capitalism was always about to self-destruct (which makes it, not coincidentally, analogous to current apocalyptic environmental theories).

Similarly, Malthusian delusions of resource depletion and widespread starvation have raised their head with astonishing regularity in the past century and a half. Not long after Mackay wrote, there was concern that the Industrial Revolution might grind to a halt for want of coal. Petroleum has been confidently predicted to be on the point of exhaustion virtually since its first discovery. Meanwhile there have always been seers and charlatans around to point the way to salvation. Significantly, however, some of the most truly apocalyptic events of the past 150 years have been linked to following their advice.

Although believing that climate change is causing pieces of marble to fall off buildings is perhaps at the outer limits of mania, global warming is widely believed to be behind every extreme weather event, from Parisian heat waves to Hurricane Katrina.

“Men, it has been well said,” wrote Mackay, “think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

We have been here before.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've previously pointed readers toward the excellent article series by Lawrence Solomon entitled "The Deniers" and I've taken the liberty of copying and pasting the latest column below. You really should take a few minutes and read it.

The article is the 23rd in the series, each of which profiles a top highly-credentialed scientist who has doubts about the conventional wisdom about global warming and the role of human-related greenhouse gases. The title of the series is deliberately ironic, an off-hand reference to the tendency of "true believers" to dismiss skeptics as "deniers" (along the lines of Holocaust deniers).

One of the things that makes these articles so damaging to propagandists for extreme climate change scenarios is the credibility of the author. I've known Larry for quite some time, and wrote several articles for his now-defunct The Next City magazine, where I found him to be a demanding editor and a very rigorous thinker. Larry is that rare creature -- an environmentalist who also believes in free markets and recognizes the downside of many well-intentioned government programs. He's what I think of as a "next generation" environmentalist (i.e., Al Gore is the past generation, and his approach is out of date). The brilliance of these columns is that the author is not just a skeptical crank (like me!) adding to the litany of "for and against" diatribes. Instead, he's carefully reporting the facts from eminent scientists to defend the notion that the science isn't "settled" on climate change, despite what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would have you believe.

As an aside, Larry does his work under the auspices of a philanthropic entity entitled the Urban Renaissance Institute, which describes itself as "dedicated to helping cities and their regions flourish by removing the many impediments to their proper functioning." It's a division of Energy Probe, and you can read all of Solomon's writings at its website here:

http://www.urban-renaissance.org/urbanren/index.cfm

Sometimes I wish I could clone myself in order to create the time to research and write about different things that interest or move me. From time to time I encounter writers for whom I'm thankful in that regard, in that they sort of "cover off" an area that I think deserves attention, in a similar way to which I would do it, if I had the time. "The Deniers" fits that category very nicely and I've now taken to simply directing folks to these articles rather than debate them on some of the fine details of climate change.

This article takes on Sir Nicholas Stern, who's report calls for dramatic action now to prevent economic disruption from climate change. The article below presents a highly lucid refutation of this idea, and mentions that Stern relied on improbable and inflated worst-case scenarios to concoct the need for his drastic solutions. I agree completely with the last paragraph of this article. Enjoy.

THE DENIERS — PA R T XXIII

Discounting logic

LAWRENCE SOLOMON
Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

If you’re the type of person who sets aside money today for the university education of your great-great-great grandchildren, even if it means that you may not be able to afford university tuition for your own children, you may think it sensible for society to invest now in major measures to stop global warming.

If you’re not this type — and who in his right mind is — you should forget about Kyoto-like greenhouse-gas reduction targets and the crash programs that would be required to meet them. Doing so would not only be economically prudent, it would be — by almost any measure — the ethical thing to do.

So argues celebrated economist William Nordhaus, author of pathbreaking books and studies on global warming, and generally considered the most authoritative economist in the climate change field. His verdict on global warming alarmism, as exemplified by the UK’s Stern review, which demanded drastic measures now to avert climate change calamity later: “Completely absurd.”

The Stern review, released last year to banner headlines, argues that the cost of inaction greatly exceeds the cost of action. It has been much criticized for its selective use of data — Sir Nicholas Stern piles one worst-case scenario upon another to arrive at his fantastical costs, and Dr. Nordhaus is among those who note this failing. In fact, Sir Nicholas uses Nordhaus as a source for global-warming costs that could present themselves well after the year 2100, although Nordhaus characterized that data as particularly unreliable.

But a series of unreliable, worst-case scenarios centuries off, by themselves, still would not warrant the extreme greenhousegas prevention investments that the Stern review recommends. To make an economic case for immediate action, Sir Nicholas adjusted his model to have us paying now for potential damage that could be happening hundreds of years from now.

Sir Nicholas estimates the potential costs of climate change to be so great as to force on us a “20% cut in per-capita consumption, now and forever.” Yet his data showed low damages from climate change in the next two centuries. To overcome his data, he applied to his model what economists call a “near-zero social discount rate.” Doing so brings forward future expenses — in the Stern review’s case, expenses that might occur in the 23rd and 24th centuries. The Stern review then presents us with a tab that includes these far-out costs, and the invoice is eye-popping indeed.

But the Stern review approach defies logic, as Dr. Nordhaus illustrates by demonstrating just where zero social-discount-rate thinking leads. “Suppose that scientists discover that a wrinkle in the climatic system will cause damages equal to 0.01% of output starting in 2200 and continuing at that rate thereafter,” he explains. “How large a onetime investment would be justified today to remove the wrinkle starting after two centuries? The answer is that a payment of 15% of world consumption today (approximately US$7-trillion) would pass the review’s costbenefit test. This seems completely absurd. The bizarre result arises because the value of the future consumption stream is so high with near-zero discounting that we would trade off a large fraction of today’s income to increase a far-future income stream by a very tiny fraction.”

Moreover, who should be asked to forgo that consumption? It hardly seems fair to keep back poor countries, yet, if paid