Demon Coal, Part 1 

This is a cbc broadcast at kandahar him loneliness radio drama is available on itunes itself as i him and conflict him to chaos him i is a.

I'm all kennedy and this is ideas about coal the special report first round spring helm of osha estimates of the number of mountain truck bombing a mine explosion now run from one hundred and eight to one hundred and fifty five the men are trapped at the thirty two hundred foot level and all communications with them are reported to have been cut off that cbc radio bulletin over fifty years ago was the first report of a terrible event that shadowed the history of coal in canada there were two springhill mine disaster 's just two years apart in nineteen fifty six in nineteen fifty eight and they highlighted the physical risk of mining coal is also worldwide air pollution from burning coal and now the idea of it other fossil fuels with their emissions of carbon into the atmosphere threaten the earth itself in the coal part one is by max allan ideas producer america's board member of the energy probe research foundation and longtime environmentalist mine disaster stories like springhill go on and on lasting days and weeks therefore imprinting itself on the mind back in nineteen thirty six twenty years before spring held it was another mine disaster that actually shaped the history of radio reporter j frank willis broadcast rescue operations live from the moose river mine in nova scotia every half hour for sixty nine straight hours with a single two hour break his reports were broadcast on six hundred and fifty radio stations in canada and the us and in europe to radio before that was thought to be a medium for entertainment now it became a medium for news the canadian press calls the dramatic mind broadcasts the most significant radio event in the first half of the twentieth century the server nineteen thirty six four four five four five five fff i will remember you have an right left.

To comfort him and that stuff comes from the effect of rough in rough a lot of athletes have found some stuff unless family or family lifting that i thought was time to finish my philosophy for the metaphor is like something out from behind that is not something that i'm angry and i have found is that november thing is that the conditions on the ground is molecular i think days after your own imagination another sign the thing that is what i should have seven hundred hundred jobs of dynamite it will stop muscles in an agony of the infinite.

Judy lewis nineteen thirty six when the canadian radio broadcasting commission the network that became the cbc only three men were trapped in the moose river mine too survived and moose river was a gold mine not a coal mine to grips that mind stories have on the popular imagination is the same imagine being trapped far underground buried alive in a black tomb after century ago another mine story was word worldwide it was in nineteen fifty six springhill nova scotia disaster one of the reporters was elizabeth mcdonald and him and him and him and him and him and i can talk him and him and him and him and i think it is i felt like i had a buddy.

I will i will plan that.

Provided the event that you are already happened that night one hundred and nine world gordon was directing these rescue operation mister gordon said he was not confident woman alive because he did not anticipate running into much trouble but stressed that no one really knows what is along thirty two hundred foot level of it that he had no idea of the cause of the closing with shaq mine yesterday afternoon at five oh seven yes the press not to raise the hopes of people about the men still being alive is that this is very faithful from seventy hundred and three fill several officials of the social population eight thousand thursday evening of unexplained blasts rock levels of number four william shatner is in service one hundred and eighteen men were trapped underground thirteen were killed at the service.

Is started across an unfamiliar word of canadian households.

Rescuers quit breathing apparatus affected by a german inventor 's name is right the first time it is used in the canadian rescue.

All these men are volunteers their job is to work their way smoke dust flux lines deadly gas to more than a mile from.

The rating everybody reading and hoping and praying for a miracle will bring men back to life and then there was a miracle of sorts in springhill nineteen fifty six eighty eight of the hundred and twenty seven miners were rescued than two years later in october nineteen fifty eight it happened again this time it wasn't an explosion that was like an earthquake when part of the mine collapsed far underground it was called a bump and like many families in the spring elements assessed by the morning or still offering up their menfolk made by some miracle if the front of number two economy in front of the television present newspaper reporters at spring hill expectation of america looks very much as if the death toll will spend that ninety three killed and eighty one rescue there's a lot of methane down there in the workings of thirteen thousand foot level everything seems to be fulfilled for the think good chance that anyone could have survived that terrible terrible fall.

One hundred and seventy four men were in the mind of of thirteen thousand feet my check bring your minds of the deepest in north america and among the most dangerous.

This matter-of-fact cool mining in our part of the world is on average no more dangerous than construction work but when mining disasters hit the stick in the mind like airplane crashes because the deaths come all at once today there are no underground mines left in canada and nova scotia were twenty five thousand miners used to work there still a bit of surface mining but most canadian coal comes from aboveground mines in alberta with some from saskatchewan and british columbia in countries like china and india mining can be exceptionally dangerous and the health effects of coal generally are serious as well cold burned indoors especially low-grade coal for heating and cooking is deadly with its poisonous fumes and inhaled sort and it affects hundreds of millions of people even outdoors coal fumes and sort of associated gases can cause disasters in nineteen forty eight and opaque yellow four-day smog get the nora pennsylvania the air was full of poisonous gases chlorine and sulfur dioxide from a coal-fired zinc smelter among others twenty people immediately died of the smog and seven thousand others half the town 's population fell ill it was a warning then four years later in nineteen fifty two a terrible smog mostly from coal struck london walking outdoors you could hardly see an arms length ahead the london smog to went on for four days until the weather changed it killed right away some four thousand people and probably eight thousand more in the long run these two great smog send the nora in london offered statistical evidence of the acute health effects of pollution the snobs resulted in legislation in both england and the united states that went after airborne pollution and resulted in regulations that have drastically reduced smokestack and vehicle emissions from all kinds of fossil fuel burning oil and natural gas as well as coal what's left coming out of the smokestacks and tailpipes and what's today's demon is carbon dioxide unlike sort carbon dioxide is a gas that's created when oil and natural gas burn carbon dioxide is not black like smoke it has no color odorless and tasteless in other words it's invisible which makes it even more ominous clients thrive on it and it's not a direct threat to human health but perhaps it's something worse a threat to the earth as we know it and thus to all of humanity.

Here's why the atmosphere is usually called a blanket but it's really more like a sieve letting some things through and blocking others visible light from the sun comes through easily and heats the earth invisible heat from the earth also radiates upward and outward but how much gets out depends on what's in the atmospheric sieve as the composition of the sith changes radiation in and out changes and so does the earth 's overall temperature if there's a lot of carbon dioxide in the sieve light still comes through and heats the earth but less heat goes back out and so the earth warms this is a delicate balance although just how delicate is unknown about one three thousandths of the atmosphere of the earth is carbon dioxide seo have a box with three thousand marbles one of them is carbon dioxide the concern is that if two of them were carbon dioxide there would be measurable effects if four of them were carbon dioxide there might be big trouble so these are the main issues involving coal the hazards of minds the effects on us as we breathe and ultimately the fate of the earth.

What needs to be done and it's not just call it's everything in the energy production mix that's up in the air the international institute for sustainable development is a think tank in winnipeg ottawa and geneva david sawyer is their director of energy and climate change and so david sawyer is cold demon number one you know globally a lot of coal is used in canada were not using a lot of coal over not mining a lot of calling canada yet we use our daily lives is a canadian for example i will cook over thirty euros a threat that's right but if you look the united states you are not blessed with our vast hydra resources you know newfoundland manitoba and british columbia and québec they are not so fortunate so they burn a lot of coal electricity sector just to give you an idea of scale relative to canada their electricity sector emits about twenty seven times more on an annual basis more gh cheese than all our oil and gas development ghd 's being greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide but that doesn't excuse us because of course a global problem is related to all kinds of fossil fuel burning land-use commissions like farming you know gas that we put in our cars etc. etc. if you them got your information about the climate and the various fossil fuels from the newspapers and television over the past couple of months the big story has been that coal is worse than the oilsands are exact and unable to carefully and you discover that what this is about as burning all the coal in the world that you could possibly get asked versus the oil sands and of course gold is worse but the comparison seems wrong to me yet i think this year or mentality either either either/or mentality is not that helpful in canada we look at industry who say well that dirty industry but we don't look now at eric our energy use and sale of households we admit as much she achieves inner households yet we blame oil and gas for our woes and a guiding globally the same can be said if you if you paint one villain you ignore a whole other series can you say villains but contributors issued in sayville and support use a language that you know if you've if you could yet he burned everything you have a big problem we are burning everything sustaining one unit one fuel is worse another is necessarily helpful but is helpful well the question for canada really is how to assertive achieve an orderly and responsible development path and i think the discussions over the brawling around around the northern gateway pipeline and keep the proposal and keystone xl really through masks a bit of a risk that we have in the country which is no sermon economics first development paradigm were not really sort of keeping a global view and what's going on and what's put on globally is that the world is transition to a low carbon future and may lease recognize it's important so if you let your china and india come up almost immediately and that's that's the easy way out to say of well trying their burning burning all this you know him in a month they met more than you know canada doesn't in a year and and certainly that's true but china is moving towards a whole series of policies aimed at reducing their reliance on fossil fuels for economic reasons and also for a think global citizen type reasons so yes these are scale of their missions are large but they are they are moving forward with reducing emission intensity of their economy meaning in the gh ethernet per unit of economic output so what's your canadian prescription for the ghq 's three-year greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide you want subsidies to support good things were penalties which are usually taxes to discourage bad things in others there is a whole is a whole debate that's going on around the policy levers that one should use to change in a technology talk choice to say there is but i will let me pose this question how pervasive is that our fossil fuels how pervasive is our energy use in in what parts of our life does this fossil energy touch everything do i ever do i pass the test yeah yeah and if you if you go back a hundred years hundred fifty years when our energy came from the winds where you came from watermarking from the sun and from the sweats of her back we live in a very different world so energy you know our ability to harness fossil energies of service very very well it's just that it's it's gotten out of hand and it it it needs to be sort of tempered with the more you know started gentler softer even nominating development past so so when you when you think in those terms you think of a broad suite of of policy levers and individual actions that need to tackle the problem some exclusive focus on oil sands for example were coal mining for example or coal electricity it really doesn't get out of out at the heart of the problem and its messiest complex is brought up an interesting point here that a hundred years ago energy was sweat wind and son and i thought you said that was you mean by wind something that windmills but you mean sailing ships don't you win absolutely wind causing transportation to be possible the movement of goods and services globally and in all that wealth and privilege that brought you yes wind and sun setting your house heating your house growing your crops if so what you want to do is go back to the future we want to go back to the things that we used to do but the inlet technologically advanced way sharon maintain or improve our quality of life david sawyer at the international institute for sustainable development in ottawa it turns out that david sawyer 's reasonable ideas are not easy to put into practice fossil fuels make the world go round coal plants produce about half the world 's electricity and economic progress depends to a striking extent on low-cost electricity especially in poor countries replacing coal with sustainable fuels like wind and the sun is expensive and at least for now unreliable so that raises the question of why do it at all most of the argument against cold today for its demonization in other words is about the carbon dioxide that's created when coal is burned carbon dioxide effects not us but the atmosphere in other words people by their use of fossil fuels especially cold are killing the earth out cold is been around for a very long time it's three hundred million years old more or less and consists of plant material that was buried subjected to enormous geologic pressures and heat and hardened to various degrees i'll are similar in that both consist of very old dead things of oil is mostly dead algae and other microscopic creatures in both these very old that things were compressed and baked eons ago is even been called fossilized sunlight the term applies in fact all fuels that were once alive cold gas oil and wood where solar energy in the form of sunlight was originally captured and held by photosynthesis that solar energy is released in the form of heat when the fuels are burned that's what burning is fundamentally the release of stored solar energy and then the heat of its release can be used to make steam to power turbines that make electricity the so-called sustainable energies eliminate all those intermediate steps and convert present-day sunlight directly into electricity of course energy efficiency is a good idea all on its own whether the threat of global warming is the motivation for it or not and as you may know a number of highly regarded climate experts think that global warming caused by carbon dioxide from coal and other fossil fuels is not a threat either because the warming is minor and cyclical and this happened before or because the standard climate models predicting trouble are in adequate what climate models do is to try to make sense of an enormously complicated situation some models point to carbon dioxide as the climate demon others point elsewhere the public debate on these matters is so noisy and full of what david sawyer called brawling that it's hard to sort out the ideas from the insults so the senate standing committee on energy and the environment and natural resources has been trying to do just that and it's a good place to look at the issue of scientific uncertainty by the way you can access all the committee 's hearings online it's a great resource is a very small sample from one of their hearings in december but scherer is senator david angus in ottawa we are back here with her head spinning with all kinds of wonderful new data information things that we learned this from the alberta to schedule manitoba last two weeks this morning colleagues were going to them have a slightly different perspective on the climate change issue as you know we've all heard many things about climate change we've heard that many people saying that we need to price on carbon we've had some lonely voices in the west saying maybe we shouldn't have a price on carbon and this morning i've invited her we've invited these distinguished professors who have that expertise in climate then in geology and paleontology of the first-person the committee heard was ross mckitrick from the university of guelph whose specialty is environmental economics global warming issues often described with emphatic claims science is settled the situation is urgent and the necessary actions are obvious reality is that there are deep disagreements about underlying scientific issues there is reason to believe the problem is been exaggerated and most policy proposal simply do not pass objective cost-benefit test amidst the disputes and controversies of the past few years i believe two points have emerged with clarity first under current and foreseeable technologies the greenhouse gas policies that we can afford to undertake would have such small climatic impacts as to be pointless policymakers around the world have not been able to cut co2 emissions while pursuing economic growth when a policy is proposed that is too costly to implement and yield benefits that are too small to measure you would expect reasonable people to see it is a bad idea.

Second problem according to professor mckitrick is that not only were the kyoto emission targets impractical but they were based on science that was filtered through the famous united nations body called the intergovernmental panel on climate change the ip cc cc is not a neutral observer of the scientific process instead it has a party line it is controlled by relatively small bureau in geneva consisting of a small core surrounded by a network of supportive academics and government officials the bureau pics lead authors who share their views they are routinely placed in the position of reviewing their own work and that of their critics and are free to rule in their own favor lead authors are also free to reject reviewer comments override review editors and even rewrite text after the close of the peer review process the combination of bureau control over the selection of lead authors and toothless peer-reviewed process means that i pcc assessments are guaranteed merely to repeat and reinforce a set of foregone conclusions that make up the party line the party line is that human activities are largely responsible for global warming and that it's an emergency my published research has led me to believe that the ip cc has overstated the global warming issue i've also shown the climate models predict significantly more warming over the past thirty years in the tropical troposphere than is observed in satellite or weather balloon records in other words the models have been in an accurate.

Your listening to ideas in canada on cbc radio one across north america on sirius satellite channel one fifty nine and around the world on cbc i'm paul kennedy this is the first of two programs from ideas called demon coal use nextel backed out of the senate standing committee on energy and the environment and natural resources next up in clark from the department of earth sciences at the university of ottawa with an account of the historic record of the relationship between temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will start with the last hundred and fifty years in this period of time is characterized by a cold spell that we refer to as the little ice age and that it ended about nineteen hundred and that started what we call the twentieth century warming trend ends with had about a hundred years of warming and if we look at the past five years we see that that through the seventies temperatures are quite low at and then they start to rise the eighties and nineties up towards the year the last decade that examining the last decade shows that temperatures really have flattened and that's we haven't seen any global warming for the both the past ten years some say since the nineteen ninety eight el niño and this is in stark contrast with the ipc see forecast of an increase of some zero two degrees per decade that should have occurred during this period but of course there is evidence that warming has happened in the twentieth century is this twentieth century warming than usual will we go back to a thousand years before present and we see warm she called the medieval warm period which occurred has centered on a thousand years ago blessed with two hundred years well documented by agricultural records during that we didn't see any effect of co2 co2 was flat during this time thus something else must've caused the medieval warming and remember it's because of greenhouse gases that the world is livable at all but which greenhouse gases planet without what we called me has gases would just add transparent atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen would be a vote at thirty two degrees colder than today we have a planet would be unlivable be frozen thanks to one greenhouse gas which is water vapor in the water vapor does in the atmosphere is it absorbs the outgoing radiation when the warm the planet with solar radiation during the day it admits that radiation throughout the day and and through the night the planet cools if we try that of going radiation to heat is retained in the atmosphere and warm surface of the earth surface we we retain a planet which is now fourteen degrees above zero and habitable co2 represents a couple percent of that greenhouse gas effect it's a very minor repairs that water does all the work out that carbon dioxide doesn't matter at all but water vapor is the big blanket as i described earlier the big atmospheric sip of water vapor matters a lot and so does the behavior of the sun which goes through cycles of increasing and decreasing intensity that intensity affects earth 's climate which in turn affects how organisms grow timothy patterson is a professor of geology at carleton university my research team collected and analyzed core samples from the bottom of the coastal british cultish fjords and we collected more than five thousand euros worth of annually deposited my players for these basins and i was giving us one of the highest-quality climate records available anywhere today in that record we discovered repeated cycles bring productivity correlate very well with cycles in the brightness of the sun and this was not unique hundreds of other studies have shown exactly the same thing that the sun and not variations in carbon dioxide and other gases most targeted by canada's national climate change campaigns appears to be the most important driver of climate change is that so what's happening with the sun now solar scientist predicts that by later in this decade the sun will be starting into its weakest solar cycle of the past two centuries and this will likely lead to unusually cool conditions on earth which may persist for decades and planning for adaptation to such a cool should be a primary of position for governments and its global cooling not warming others major climate threat to the world this is particularly true for canada of such a high latitude nation as we have our agriculture is is agreed at the age of where we confirm is any of this credible yes it's not unusual for people working from the same data to come up with different analyses and predictions perhaps depending on what part of the data they looking at it's like the three blind men and the elephant it depends on which part of the elephant there feeling what they think it is his ear is getting warmer yes and no yes in medieval times and gradually through most of the twentieth century but not in the last fifteen years is year is getting colder while in europe along up to the late nineteenth century has been called a little ice age when famously the winters were so cold that the river thames froze over and maybe now with solar radiation going into a natural dampening cycle it will happen again i asked judith curry for some help with all this she's head of the school of earth and atmospheric sciences at the georgia institute of technology that's georgia tech her specialty is the thermodynamics of atmospheres and oceans and she's known for her work on climate change and hurricanes she recently gave a presentation on climate modeling at the department of energy in washington how did you come to understand that the global climate models were imperfect climate of recent selves agree that the models are imperfect and they're constantly working to develop improve sound okay and there's a sense that there never ever going to be perfect and the reason they're not going to be perfect is because they're so complicated their so-called located but that there's some kind says even with a lot of extra research and improvements some of the uncertainties are never going to go away very irreducible just related to the chaotic nature of the atmosphere and ocean systems that were never going to have the perfect predictions are perfect models so that that the challenge is then to use the models in sensible ways and sometimes they get over interpreted by people who want to make decisions or want to push an agenda or whatever so i don't think i'm in any way unique and saying you know that the climate models are imperfect and they don't really make valid predictions of the 21st-century neo- what the climate is going to be either there's just too many uncertainties about what the sons going to do what volcanoes are going to do and we still don't really understand how to model very well abuse century scale large oscillations of the ocean so by typing most people active in the climate community would agree with that that said what gets translated to the hot leg you know it is in the debate is a consensus that we know is going to happen on them that people who challenge the consensus or are deniers or something like that and that that is basically stymied the kind of scientific debate not to mention discussion of policy options that i think we need to have in a situation of uncertainty like this where the stakes are big isn't it best to be very cautious weld an event that's what the precautionary principle would suggest him on the one hand it could turn out that the climate change could be worse and warming could be worse than anything we've anticipated them whatever we do with the missions is going to make much difference that's the kind of thing that kyoto tried to do this say about carbon dioxide no more enough exactly on the other side of the coin it's possible that warming may not be bad at all and we would've done all this essentially for not so i would argue that anti- emissions stabilization approach is not a robust policy solution because there is given the uncertainties we don't know whether what we're proposing is too little or too much at too great a cost we don't either way this is what is technically known as a wicked problem yes yes a wicked problem is one that's associated with incomplete knowledge and changing requirements and whereby the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems and then i read my mind you know climate change is the mother of wicked problems really because it touches everything that we do and it impacts so many things and it's all it's a lot of complicated things all entertained with one another exactly what do you do with a wicked problem selecting picture not have to acknowledge that there is no single silver bullet solution okay that different communities nation sectors are going to try different things and have different values and different motor abilities and whatever's going to happen should all allow communities and nations to do things that are in their own know best interest that word is out that you were at the un treaty supposed to involve everybody that attempts to enforce a un treaty haven't been terribly successful on this original hope i think is that we would have known this would follow the same path at the montréal protocol dead for the ozone problem and in banning the chlorofluorocarbons that this is a much more complex problem and the proposed solution is a lot less palatable the montréal protocol is a good example because it came about because of the concern that those only which is important in the upper layers of the atmosphere was being destroyed by something that we were doing and what we were doing was quite easy to stop doing but the carbon dioxide problem is not easy to deal with the montréal protocol says you got a stop using a particular chemical in refrigeration or in aerosol propellants there was an alternative to it is to those of chemicals and an agreed international agreement was put in place that solve the problem the troubled carbon dioxide is that it's not like that yes agreed that the carbon dioxide problem is much more complex it has very complex impact on the atmosphere and ocean and the overall verse climate and we don't quite understand exactly what that impact is for the magnitude of that impact is relative to natural climate variability on the other thing is is we don't vendor 's argument about whether warm or cold is dangerous or beneficial offer some location as and for some ecosystems & sectors it's arguably beneficial for some locations it can be dangerous so that the whole issue of what's dangerous versus beneficial has never really been sufficiently articulated and clarified for the carbon dioxide problem it was much more clear for the ozone problem is that true that it hasn't been clear fine for carbon dioxide if you read the newspapers it's perfectly clear that global warming is a nightmare lol on a lot of people done except that & don't think the case has been very well made him the ip cc working group to which addresses impacts of climate change i think is generally regarded to be the weakest part of the ip cc arguments and i think in the fifth assessment report that is forthcoming in a few years i understand networking group to is taking a different approach and one can hope that there will be more realistic assessment of the dangers as well as the benefits of climate change on it it it year in canada or russia or northern china on the prospects of a longer growing season and will bit more warmth might seem beneficial and some ecosystems do better with higher carbon dioxide and warmer temperatures together the biggest problem may be sea level rise that understanding what ill a few feet of sea level rise needs to be done in the context of each city on the coast because some cities are rising our sink into two geologic factors or local land-use practices and those changes in sea level may swamp what we might expect from global warming so at least in the near-term so in these issues are really simple or straightforward or really been adequately investigated are documented on it it seems like people just pick up the dangerous piece in one dangerous piece and then hike that without really providing a context that i get to give you one example let's take south asia where almost half the world 's population live the population is rapidly growing and they're concerned about water shortage so if global warming is going to give them thirty percent more rainfall and they're running short of water and the populations increasing mightn't they say will bring on global warming we need more water and that's half the population of the world it also so how do you wait that kind of thing against the small atoll islands who think they are going to be sinking and the despairing of sea level rise and it ha ha you balance all that and and try to really understand all the different issues involved and it it it really has to be done regionally in the context of regional boulder abilities.

The trouble with looking at regional issues is that the atmosphere is worldwide it isn't regional you can't pick where the effects occur by framing the climate change problem and its impacts as you reduce oblique global i think has brought us to this policy impasse with the un where the only solution is something global again climate varies naturally all the time and some places are going to be warmer someplace is going to be cooler for example where i live in the southeast us government hasn't really been any warming at all on the last down fifty years we then have a slight cooling trend so some places get cooler some places get warmer a lot of this is natural variability arguably at least some of that is associated with human caused warming carbon dioxide and so so-so trying to say that global war human clause global warming is going to be uniformly bad for everybody i think is a mistaken assumption or if it's bad for a few people that the whole world has to do something to deal with the problems of a few and then again that's a very complex geopolitical issue so that i think we've run into a rock and a hard place by assuming that both the problem and the solution is a reducible to global.

From let's talk about the global climate models which is been critical of you say that they're very difficult to validate and verify the is you have to wait as long as a century to evaluate their accuracy computer models used to you've written this computer models are often impenetrable and chaotic none of the models are much help in thinking about regional climate variations you talked about the south asian situation in the sea level rise and finally most of the models are focused on carbon dioxide not son so how did all that happened most seller scientists are predicting that were going to enter into a cooler phase associated with the sons activities and the magnitude of how that's going to impact our climate is hotly debated and pretty much ignored in the future scenarios being produced by the ipc see so we need to know what if it is a cool or at least for some decades to me we should at least factor that into our scenarios are one of its thinking and then in terms of you know that halts the options i think we need to put a broader range of policy options on the table to start talking about and him getting away from the emissions stabilization targets as the primary thing to do not that we shouldn't try to reduce our carbon dioxide we should but not in ways that jeopardize countries to economic development and some examples and and i like the idea of the low regrets policy options and these are policy options that are robust even if the future dangers from climate change him are not materialized is a wonderful idea from emory loved ones who's been doing energy research for ever that he says that you can solve the global warming problem even if you don't believe it exists as to say they're all sorts of ways of energy can be used more efficiently and cheaply and they always saw to be done on its own merits but exactly most people don't disagree with the need for some sort of better energy policy that some people feel like the idea of clean green energy in decreasing air pollution and things like that so that's that they like the idea of lower prices of energy they like the idea of not fighting wars in the middle east because of energy supply issues so that it is lots of checking support for doing sensible about energy but when you tied to climate change in that particular stabilization policy then you get a lot of political resistance particularly in the us am at and you know one of these sort of low regrets policy options is to increase energy efficiency of buildings appliance and transportation systems this is a no-brainer which we use less resources and we spend less money candidates and economically sensible thing to do separating the global warming problem from the energy efficiency problem seems to me to view an excellent idea but global warming is this stick that used to whack the donkey on the nose to get the donkey 's attention to the problem that the energy efficiency technology is designed to solve without the scare tactics i would anything get done i think the scare tactics are having a backlash at this point because i think people 's anger a lot of people 's anger with the way the whole global warming debate has played out you have had a backlash on.

Sense in doing something sensible in a regarding energy policy and in the us president obama is not talking about climate change publicly because i think he sees it seems the first people to see this and he's trying to find other is company and talking about other arguments for dealing with energy policy energy security economics public health and i think that's at least in the us i think that's politically morphed for way to go at this point what do you call a backlash other people would call simple stupid denial.

In the outlook once people start talking about denial and anti- science mean you know that things have sort of gone off the rails were not talking about science anymore.

Science at least the visible parts of it are different today than they were thirty years ago before the internet there's a phenomenon called post- peer review used to be that scientific technical papers were peer-reviewed that is by people who knew what the subject was new territory not before publication and then after publication there was a pause while people figured out what was good or bad about the particular application and then they published responses to it and the original authors responded that now what happens is the twenty minutes after an idea appears in public there is an avalanche of peer review some of the tears our tears and some of them aren't and the discussion of whatever the idea of technical papers goes at a very fast rate was an enormous amount of input from all over the place.

I a could understand the argument that this is ruined science but we're stuck with it and what you think will happen personally i think it's wonderful but the internet has done for science and i think the extended pure communities that have developed our to the great benefit of science particularly when you're talking about policy relevant science like climate changes you need to engage with the public i'm a big fan of the open knowledge movement forgetting all data models being publicly accessible all having a journal articles and freely accessible i preferred the discussion journals were you have open where the reviewers comments are made publicly available and the author 's response and people from the public are also allowed to comment so i'm a big fan of the open knowledge movement and we need to improve the overall public accountability of our data are models are arguments.

Even though it's quite messy and acrimonious.

But you know him in the old days at any people say well people think it's more acrimonious now but tell the stories the answer isaac newton who was no pussycat that and all of the intrigues you know that went on back then and there there've been academic intrigues and debates and nastiness in a pretty much forever and i think putting it all out the open for the public and to engage in i think it's overall a good thing and it has the potential to really reduce some of the polarization in.

Colleagues baited scientific topics that have policy relevance can you sum this up about what happens when science and policy are interwoven like this and people debate about what really is science and what isn't the science is uncertain that there's a lot of things that we don't understand the impacts have never really been adequately assessed in terms of pros and cons and we've never really looked at the full range of possible policy options and donna careful cost-benefit analysis in trying to anticipate unintended consequences for each of these policies so that we been so locked into this framing of the whole problem by the ip cc and leave not really been looking at the broader issues that we need to look at judith curry head of the school of atmospheric and earth sciences at georgia tech now if global climate models are inadequate what to do what would be a good investment and what's been the effect of the money that's already being spent on climate change is there a place for coal in the future as next week i maxon this has been the first of two programs on ideas about demon coal by max out the production team was headed by sarah walch to find out about upcoming ideas programs and podcasts go to our website at cbc.

Ideas and follow the links there's also a reference list bearer of background material the executive producer of ideas is bernie looked at i and paul kennedy stay tuned now for the hourly news on cbc radio one and on sirius satellite radio