Author Topic: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments  (Read 1345 times)

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Offline Queefer Sutherland

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #15 on: February 18, 2019, 09:19:50 pm »
Similar to what tobacco companies.  How many millions died from their lies & lobbying?

Read it and weep folks. Politics, including office politics, even follows its way into science.  I assume this has been around forever though:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/second-opinion-scientists-data-fudging-1.4861556
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Offline Omni

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #16 on: February 18, 2019, 09:24:07 pm »
"The trend today is to Dumaurier"

Offline kimmy

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #17 on: February 18, 2019, 09:25:17 pm »
Do you think these oil companies wanted to use the best science available in their pre-drilling environmental assessments?

They might well not.  The basis of Mr Ford's complaint is the lack of standardization in requirements for these studies.  There aren't sufficient rules to follow, to set forth what "the best science available" even means when putting these impact studies together. That's what Mr Ford is calling for.

 -k
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Offline Queefer Sutherland

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #18 on: February 18, 2019, 09:51:59 pm »
I have for years no longer read news articles about climate change, because i don't know who is writing the article, what their agenda is, or what the agenda of the scientist(s) and journals in question are etc., if any.  This comes from all sides of the spectrum. It's so easy for a journalist or news outlet to cherry pick a particular study or scientist to advance a certain narrative.  This is the sad state of the climate issue.

The only thing closest to what i can say I can logically trust is looking at what a very broad and strong consensus of the large majority of climate scientists think.

I certainly would never believe anything coming from a tar sands company or any energy company, nor most environmental groups for that matter.
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Offline TimG

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #19 on: February 18, 2019, 10:33:13 pm »
The only thing closest to what i can say I can logically trust is looking at what a very broad and strong consensus of the large majority of climate scientists think.
Forget about consensus. In any field worthy of being called science there will no consensus as scientists stake out different ideas for explaining the observations. The only time consensus may matter is when you have repeatable studies such as double blind medical trials which provide independent confirmation of theories. We don't have those in climate science.
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Offline Queefer Sutherland

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #20 on: February 18, 2019, 11:07:23 pm »
Forget about consensus. In any field worthy of being called science there will no consensus as scientists stake out different ideas for explaining the observations. The only time consensus may matter is when you have repeatable studies such as double blind medical trials which provide independent confirmation of theories. We don't have those in climate science.

But logically we as a society need to take a stance on climate change. Either acting or not acting is a choice, and it needs to be made and it needs to be based on something. 

There will be no consensus of all scientists, climate involves far too many variables for people to all agree on the impact of all these variables. But if most of them are doing any kind of proper job we should be able to see where most of them think we're roughly headed.
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Offline Omni

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #21 on: February 18, 2019, 11:12:37 pm »
But logically we as a society need to take a stance on climate change. Either acting or not acting is a choice, and it needs to be made and it needs to be based on something. 

There will be no consensus of all scientists, climate involves far too many variables for people to all agree on the impact of all these variables. But if most of them are doing any kind of proper job we should be able to see where most of them think we're roughly headed.
97% of peer reviewed climate scientists agree. That's pretrty close to a consensus don't ya think?
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Offline Queefer Sutherland

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #22 on: February 18, 2019, 11:23:18 pm »
97% of peer reviewed climate scientists agree. That's pretrty close to a consensus don't ya think?

Isn't it 97% of peer-reviewed papers, not scientists?

Quote
Several studies of the consensus have been undertaken.[1] Among the most-cited is a 2013 study of nearly 12,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed papers on climate science published since 1990, of which just over 4,000 papers expressed an opinion on the cause of recent global warming. Of these, 97% agree, explicitly or implicitly, that global warming is happening and is human-caused.[2][3] It is "extremely likely"[4] that this warming arises from "... human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases ..."[4] in the atmosphere.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change#Scientific_consensus

But ok then you have to look at how much warming, the impact of the warming, not just the warming itself, and costs/benefits of all options.
« Last Edit: February 18, 2019, 11:24:54 pm by Poonlight Graham »
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Offline TimG

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #23 on: February 18, 2019, 11:29:15 pm »
But logically we as a society need to take a stance on climate change. Either acting or not acting is a choice, and it needs to be made and it needs to be based on something.
I could not disagree more since "acting" by wasting resources on showy gestures that accomplish nothing is worse that doing nothing. What we need is a rational approach to policy that is driven by what is economically and technically feasible. The trouble is rational action means change that is slow and deliberate while people addicted to alarm scream about how we are not doing enough. Rational action also requires the use of technologies which are available such as nuclear. People who claim to care about CO2 but reject nuclear are no different from people who say we should expand the of coal even when economically viable alternatives such as natural gas exist.
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Offline TimG

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #24 on: February 18, 2019, 11:32:43 pm »
Isn't it 97% of peer-reviewed papers, not scientists?
Stats like this are bait and switch propaganda are useless when it comes to understanding what is known and what is not known. You will get 97% of scientists agreeing that CO2 is a GHG and so do most skeptics but if you ask a more relevant question such as whether CO2 is serious concern the percentage drops to 80% - still a majority but 20% is a significant number who think it is not a serious concern.

BTW - I have explained this distinction many times but Omni keeps posting this meaningless stat over and over like a bot. It is a good illustration why it is so difficult to have a rational discussion on this topic.
« Last Edit: February 18, 2019, 11:36:45 pm by TimG »

Offline waldo

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #25 on: February 19, 2019, 12:15:39 am »
Stats like this are bait and switch propaganda are useless when it comes to understanding what is known and what is not known. You will get 97% of scientists agreeing that CO2 is a GHG and so do most skeptics but if you ask a more relevant question such as whether CO2 is serious concern the percentage drops to 80% - still a majority but 20% is a significant number who think it is not a serious concern.

BTW - I have explained this distinction many times but Omni keeps posting this meaningless stat over and over like a bot. It is a good illustration why it is so difficult to have a rational discussion on this topic.

no - respective study percentages vary between 90%-100%; a key determiner is (should be) climate science expertise based on active publishing... and 'agreement' is certainly more than your trivialized "CO2 is a GHG". The real agreement aligns with an acceptance of IPCC tenets of Anthropogenic Climate Change. You know, that lil' thingee the waldo forever reminds you of... that lil' thingee you won't accept - that makes you a denier! Specifically, an acceptance that, "anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for “most” of the “unequivocal” warming of the Earth's average global temperature over the second half of the 20th century".

remind the waldo again: the study that speaks to your referenced 20% of 'scientists' stating they think CO2 is not a serious concern - thanks in advance...
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Offline Omni

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #26 on: February 19, 2019, 12:42:05 am »
Stats like this are bait and switch propaganda are useless when it comes to understanding what is known and what is not known. You will get 97% of scientists agreeing that CO2 is a GHG and so do most skeptics but if you ask a more relevant question such as whether CO2 is serious concern the percentage drops to 80% - still a majority but 20% is a significant number who think it is not a serious concern.

BTW - I have explained this distinction many times but Omni keeps posting this meaningless stat over and over like a bot. It is a good illustration why it is so difficult to have a rational discussion on this topic.

So even if we assume for as moment your stat is verifiable, you would somehow claim some sort of victory on this discussion if only 80% of scientists say you wrong? That's funny.

Offline cybercoma

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #27 on: February 19, 2019, 07:50:28 am »
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/oilsands-environmental-impact-studies-flawed-inconsistent-science-edmonton-1.5023488
Oil companies covering up the true environmental costs of the tar sands...   what a shocker.   

They should be charged criminally for fudging these reports.
Private revenues, public expenses. The entire energy sector should be made public, since we're paying the costs of their operations anyway. We might as well be reaping the profits too.

Offline cybercoma

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #28 on: February 19, 2019, 07:54:17 am »
Mr Ford isn't alleging any fudging, cover-up, or criminal activity.  He is criticizing a lack of uniform methodology in these impact studies.

 -k
That's fine, but can he articulate the problems with the different methods? Just the fact that they're different isn't enough to throw them away. Understanding what those differences mean is more important.

Offline kimmy

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Re: Tar Sands Companies Fudge Environmental Assessments
« Reply #29 on: February 19, 2019, 10:24:40 am »
That's fine, but can he articulate the problems with the different methods? Just the fact that they're different isn't enough to throw them away. Understanding what those differences mean is more important.

I don't think he's arguing that anything be thrown away.  He's calling for a more standardized approach. It looks to me like the main thrust of his argument is that they very wildly, which suggests that the regulatory bodies that evaluate these studies don't appear to have clear standards in deciding what's good or not good. Maybe they just put the report on a desk and measure how thick it is. I don't think he's saying that any particular methodology is crap, just that there doesn't seem to be any way of telling which reports are crap and which are not.  There might not be settled science on these issues yet. And maybe going forward one can look at all these reports with these different methodologies and find which ones were better than others.

 -k
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