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I'll buy what I believe is good for me. I don't like the government using my money against my choices. I assume that Canada has elections? Seems to me that the people voted for a government to hand them some economic freedom.

Here's why I don't like government enforced environmental subsidies. There was a subsidy on compact florescent lights, perhaps it's still there. I bought some of these CFLs and they sucked. They took a long time to light up, didn't last near as long as advertised, contained mercury (which is a toxic mess if it should break), was hard on the eyes, and tended to interfere with IR remotes (that drove me batty until I figured that out). Then came LED lights. They produced light immediately, often cost less than CFL even after the subsidy, didn't contain anything toxic, lasts seemingly forever (hadn't seen one fail yet in years), but sometimes still kind of "funny" in the color of the light. The government spent a lot of MY MONEY on these shitty lights that I hated and possibly poisoned many children from broken bulbs. I can't get this money back, I saw no benefit, and the open market beat the government to picking the winner in competition to the old Edison bulb.

I got to visit my sister recently and see her new house. Every light in the house is LED and the lights are awesome. My guess is that these were expensive lights but they will last a very long time and the lighting is a very natural color. They didn't need a subsidy for these energy efficient lights because they recognized the return on investment, both in the value of money and the value of comfort/convenience. The government chose poorly and I'm left paying the bill

While I agree LEDs are better than CFLs the irony is that without the subsidies people wouldn't have switched bulbs at all. The light bulb subsidy galvanized an unchanging market. People have complained for generations about light bulbs but until the subsidy the market didn't care. Even with your hyperbole (possibly poisoned many children from broken bulbs) there's more mercury in older thermometers and even when broken only a fraction is released, it would take weeks to poison a child and honestly even with the subsidy older bulbs would still be in fashion if it wasn't for the ban.

Let's examine your citations:

https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms.

So you have an industry PR site.

A site by organizations who actually operate 4th gen test reactors. A site that the U.S. Department of Energy links to for more information, http://www.energy.gov/ne/artic....

http://meteolcd.wordpress.com/...

a shitty Wordpress blog written by climate change skeptics

Interesting, google found that page and I went with it since it seemed to say nothing beyond quoting General Atomic's specs on their reactor. If you follow the link they provide to General Atomics they do indeed state that the waste of previous gen reactors is used as fuel and that the waste of the 4th gen reactors is indeed short lived and only needs hundreds of years of storage. Unfortunately they do so with terrible hover over animated graphics, http://www.ga.com/energy-multi..., so I stuck to the summary since it was plain text that could be cut and pasted. BTW, General Atomics are the people who have been building reactors for decades. So these climate deniers clearly got the science correct on this reactor. When the truth happens to be on the side of liars, liars can indeed tell the truth, which seems to be the case here. Again, this page does nothing more than quote General Atomics. Apologies for not offering the General Atomics link directly and going with this summary. I assumed readers could manage clicking on the General Atomics link themselves, did you have some difficulty doing so? Or were you only interesting in the messenger and not the message (the science)?

http://www.thesciencecouncil.c...

a motivational speaker

And the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.

The reality is that salesmen have made a lot of bold claims for gen 4 reactors, but so far they are unproven and somewhat dubious.

That's a strange characterization of organizations that the US Department of Energy refers people to for more information on 4th gen reactors, organizations who operate 4th gen test reactors and companies who will actually build 4th gen reactors and have been reactors for decades.

The word "claimed" was an appeasement to the nuclear deniers, to avoid an edit war erupting on that page.

Or was it an appeasement to nuclear lovers, to avoid an edit war erupting on that page? The whole point is that without reliable, unbiased citations it's all just your opinion.

Let's examine your citations:

https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms...
http://meteolcd.wordpress.com/...
http://www.thesciencecouncil.c...

So you have an industry PR site, a shitty Wordpress blog written by climate change sceptics and the dubiously named "Science Council" that is run by a motivational speaker.

The reality is that salesmen have made a lot of bold claims for gen 4 reactors, but so far they are unproven and somewhat dubious.

There are several motives for the media and politicians to lie to you about global warming, aside from money and control.

• The media sells more papers, magazines, and television ratings soar when their audience is scared of some imminent catastrophe that your respective service is reporting on. Although, they can't decide whether we're going to burn to death, freeze to death, or drown. http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id=263759
• Environmental organizations and some scientists will lie to you because their funding depends on it. If theres no crisis to work through, then they start losing funding. This is well documented. http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/von_Storch/staged_angst/a_climate_of_staged_angst.html
• Foreign countries are lying to us (by means of the IPCC) because they wish to throw a monkey wrench into the inner workings of western economies, which are the strongest in the world. If our economy slows down, the economic standing of other countries improves because we will no longer dominate the markets.
• Development and industrialization of third world countries will be stamped out, along with hundreds of millions of lives, all under the guise of "saving the planet from climate change". It's absolutely sickening. So, who's really on the "immoral" side? Us or the alarmists?
• Wanna talk about new taxes and restricted freedoms? Try carbon taxes on everything and strict regulations for everyone....all coming soon by convincing you that CO2 & greenhouse gases are somehow evil and you must pay to emit them. Too bad they can't tax the oceans since they are the cause of 96.5% of all greenhouse emissions, naturally, eh! Also too bad they can't go back in time and tax the dinosaurs since CO2 levels were MUCH higher back then and it must have been their fault.

The motives for deception are there. Do your part to fight alarmism!

CO2 is NOT a pollutant!

Educate yourself!

Antarctica is getting colder and thicker: http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/12/05/sea-level-rise-not-from-antarctic-melting/), and we know that any fluctuating warming/cooling is due to natural occurrences, and not human activity.

MUST READ LINKS:
http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264777
"http://globalwarminghoax.wordpress.com/2008/03/
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20061121_gore.pdf
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
http://www.junkscience.com/challenge.htm
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmFiZDAyMWFhMGIxNTgwNGIyMjVkZjQ4OGFiZjFlNjc
http://www.cei.org/pdf/5331.pdf
http://www.research.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/spot_sunclimate.html
http://www.research.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/images/sunclimate_3b.gif
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030321075236.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/56456.stm

Note that ice cores, dendrochronology, etc are proxies for temperature, not actual temperature records. Not that they are useless, but it makes it problematic when some papers claim that these proxies are more accurate than historical events and dispute the MWP for instance. When said papers also magnify bristlecone pine data, which the NAS reccomends avoiding, and which have caused issues with the reliability of reconstructions based upon them, it's hard to claim we have detailed temperature records.

This damned global warming has almost prevented me from putting a jacket on today. I recently read that the ozone holes near the north pole are getting smaller.

For every environmentalist bullhorning about the environment, there are just as many with the opposing viewpoint. Not everyone agrees that the environment is in bad shape. There is a majority that think the war is bad, and those same people don't want anything to do with Iran either. This whole environment thing is like a screaming monkey designed to avert our attention from the more important topics. The election, the war, the law, the real news suffers when useful information is replaced by fluff.

LOOK AT THE MONKEY! LOOK AT THE MONKEY!

This report is simply the conference notes for the Met Office/IPCC scarefest last year. It contains no new science (although lots of climate models, which aren't science but look like it) and lots of scary rhetoric.

See this eyewitness report on what this "scientific conference" was really about

In the 1970s exactly the same fun mix of lower crop yields, desertification, drought, plague, famine, pestilence and war was confidently predicted for "global cooling". Then, warming was seen as a good thing.

Plus ça change...

Posting this as newsworthy less than a week after it was published in a journal is silly. Research takes time, debunking research takes more time.

The authors of the original paper have posted their rebutal already (as linked to by Millionth Monkey. At the moment its still a virtual mud-fight, each side calling the others' data and method wrong.

The abstract from this paper reads like a shotgun attack on the original paper, if your going to critique another author's work it helps not call their data obselete and their method poor, at least not in the abstract. You have a better chance of cooperation and admission of error then.

Both authors of this paper also seem to be first time authors in the field (not that the data should be discounted on that fact alone), McIntyre has no apparent affiliation with a university and McKitrick is an Economist (who has published before, albeit in book form).

For further backup of their theory, more sources are needed (they don't appear to include any supportive references). For example, we have John Daly's account of the hockey stick. There's also Massan's critique, showing essentially the same thing (medieval warm period being ignored by Mann et al.) This data seems to have been sourced from The Greening Earth Society, which, conveniently, is a Oil lobbying organisation.

We can find even more Oil funded rebutals to the original Mann paper, 1,2 (a tenuous link to the Greening Earth Society and General Motors...)

Citing a paper, published in the last week, submitted by an Anonymous Reader (to Slashdot), using the National Post and USA Today as supporting material isn't the proper way to do serious science. The USA Today article opens with " An important new paper in the journal Energy & Environment". The paper is a week old!

Anyway, at least I have some fun reading tonight, ooh, and some data to play with.