Tansey's chasing smoke if he thinks ongoing attempts to undermine Doyle and his report is somehow going to save PCT. Right now its fate lies with the public and the NDP. And both have given it the Roman thumbs down.

This is an interesting story...I hope we find out the truth behind it eventually.

Unfortunately, the fight against climate change is once again taking a back-seat to the political fight between NDP and BCLibs over public-vs-private.

I think the public-v-private issue is a reasonable issue for political parties to battle over. As someone worried about the rapidly emerging climate impacts however I wish climate change was given a higher priority that kept it from being a pawn in the other battle.

We've seen both political parties toss climate reality under the bus when it conflicted with their public-v-private primary battle: Carbon Tax, renewable energy and carbon-neutral government to name a few.

I think NDP would be against PCT -- because public money goes to private companies -- even if an honest accounting showed it was a valid climate tool. And I think BCLibs would be against a valid climate neutral alternative that kept all the money in the public realm.

Too bad the laws of physics don't care about how we cut climate pollution...they just react to how much we put out.

Van Kooten may be a crank regarding Global Warming. That doesn't mean that he hasn't been able to justly criticise the Darkwoods offsetting scheme.

Examples abound of people widely regarded as competent in one area, and quite silly in others, e.g. Linus Pauling, Luc Montagnier.

It's important to evaluate an argument on its merits. It doesn't reflect well upon the prominent environmental economists, researchers and other public personas that it's been staunch critics of climate change who seem to be motivated enough to actually dig deeper into evaluating whether offsets are useful, or just greenwashing.

Reflective greens need to be their own harshest critics, or risk having their favoured policies shown wanting.

The only laws of physics being ignored are by the people advocating the alarmist view of global warming.
No warming for 15 years, as per virtually every data base on the subject; despite rising CO2 levels. Not one of the so called climate models predicted this result. So instead of saying there is something wrong with the theory the Green Machine continues to crank out the old tired refrain the science is settled.
Most of the models rely on garbage in and lead to garbage out results but are still quoted as gospel by the believers of the religion.
As to weather the enormous costs in social and economic pain of switching to a low carbon economy are justified it seems clear they are not. Look to Europe and see the results of their efforts.

Interesting piece. I've also been working my way through the AG's report -- or at least the parts related to Darkwoode -- and so far nothing in it is really standing up. Here is the latest: http://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/pages/dynamic/article.page.php?page_...

John McGeough - I think your information is way out of date. Check out the story in The Guardian (UK) on March 27th, which gives references to the latest data that shows the model DID predict the temperature increase in the last 15 years. It is the exact opposite of what you just stated. Sorry but you're just plain wrong.

@Alan Layton...
You really need to ignore the crap commentary written in the likes of the Guardian. If you can find something about it on RealClimate blog and then read a skeptical analysis on Watts Up With That, and if you are lucky, Climate Audit, then you are able to digest them all, you might then get an idea of how poor the quality of the Guardian truly is on climate commentary due to bias. You might be invested in the idea that climate is well modelled by this one single program, but thare are dozens of models whose results do not agree with this one or with the real data which currently describes a pause in warming since about 1997. This, by the way, is about the length of time we have been hearing increasingly alarming predictions about global warming, yet all this while the warming had stopped. It doesnt mean warming wont resume or that things the models are missing might not be more important than previously thought. What it DOES mean is that at least for now, warming has stopped. It is not 'accelerating', it isnt doing anything and it hasnt been since 1997 and what it does mean is that the alarm you read about in the Guardian and other rags is unfounded. For now.

To the idiot climate change deniers on this article...

Where exactly did you guys get your Science Ph. D's from? A Cereal Box?

How many Nobel Science Winners are among you Climate change denying Idiots?

Oh and by the way Climate Change is not only about warming when Co2 levels continue to increase and get absorbed by the Oceans it forms what?

For idiots - it forms Carbonic Acid killing Ocean life...

A lesser-known consequence of having a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air is the acidification of water. Oceans naturally absorb the greenhouse gas; in fact, they take in roughly one third of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activities. When CO2 dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid, the same substance found in carbonated beverages. New research now suggests that seawater might be growing acidic more quickly than climate change models have predicted.

Marine ecologist J. Timothy Wootton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues spent eight years compiling measurements of acidity, salinity, temperature and other data from Tatoosh Island off the northwestern tip of Washington State. They found that the average acidity rose more than 10 times faster than predicted by climate simulations.

Highly acidic water can wreak havoc on marine life. For instance, it can dissolve the calcium carbonate in seashells and coral reefs [see “The Dangers of Ocean Acidification,” by Scott C. Doney; Scientific American, March 2006]. In their study, published in the December 2 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Wootton and his team discovered that the balance of ecosystems shifted: populations of large-shelled animals such as mussels and stalked barnacles dropped, whereas smaller-shelled species and noncalcareous algae (species that lack calcium-based skeletons) became more abundant. “I see it as a harbinger of the trends we might expect to occur in the future,” says oceanographer Scott C. Doney of the Woods Hole Ocean­ographic Institution, who did not participate in this study.

Source...http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ocean-acidification

Also...Ocean Acidification...

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification

Climate Change Deniers = the Idiot Loony Fringe...:)

@skeptic . . . if a warming world , due to increasing CO2, causes the oceans to warm they will surely give up CO2 thus becoming more alkaline. You, however, seem to think that the oceans would absorb more CO2 thus becoming less alkaline.

That surely leads to cognitive dissonance in your head.

Regarding the models. They have failed. They did not predict the rapid loss of Arctic ice as they were expecting much longer time scales. They did not predict the extensive period of low to no warming lasting for 16 years now.

They did not predict the continuing rise in atmospheric CO2 despite the USA producing less now than she did in 1995.

All in all I would say that the AGW models need an upgrade that would bring them back into line with reality.