Maybe the truth will come out

Vincent J. Curtis

31 Aug 23

RE: Customer of slain Port Dover gunsmith suing Toronto police for $2.6M.  News item by J.P. Antonacci.  The Hamilton Spectator 31 Aug 23.

Perhaps this lawsuit will force into the public consciousness that Toronto police murdered a man in Port Dover.  The SIU investigation produced an utter whitewash.  At the very least, the grotesque tactical handling of this planned arrest ought to have been severely criticized.  Heads ought to have rolled.  People ought to have been re-assigned.  But no; Rodger Kotanko was recklessly and needlessly killed by Toronto police.

The arrest team dispatched from Toronto on a Sunday to arrest a man outside of their jurisdiction and without informing the local OPP detachment that they would be operating in their area.  The Toronto police hit team had Kotanko’s workshop staked out in the hour before he arrived.  They burst in, guns drawn, and from, the testimony of the witness C.W., needlessly shot Kotanko four times, until he was dead.  This shooting was needless because the officers could have been (and probably were) wearing vests; they had the drop on him; and an officer could quickly have taken the empty gun from Kotanko as another covered him, then slapped on the handcuffs.

The police should have known that the gun in Kotenko’s hand was empty because that’s how the gun laws in Canada work.  The innocent customer, C.W., wouldn’t be taking a loaded gun to Kotanko’s shop; he’d need an ATT for that, and police have access to that information.

I’m hoping C.W.’s civil suit will finally bring justice to this wanton and reckless killing by police.

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A sign of decay

Vincent J. Curtis

29 Aug 23

RE: B.C. farmers at forefront of climate change reality.  CP story by Amanda Stephenson.  The Hamilton Spectator 29 Aug 23.

One of the signs of decay in today’s media is the prevalence of editorials passed off as news items.  These require little investigative work, and a few quotes suffice to pass off the article as “news.”  The CP story “B.C. farmers at forefront of climate change reality” is one example of this abomination of news reporting.

The purpose of the story is, in the face of growing skepticism, to exemplify and endorse the fashionable “climate change” by the use of quotes from farmers to portray the disasters of today as the reality of tomorrow.  One problem in the story is that the farmers are complaining about the weather, as farmers often do; and weather isn’t climate.  Another problem is that you’d think forest fires and other natural disasters had never occurred before; or, if they had, were of a different order from those today and those expected in future.

Through a tone of panic, the reader isn’t supposed to notice this philosophical abomination contained in ‘climate change reality.’  If it’s reality, then the change is over, the potentiality of change is complete, and nothing but actuality, i.e. the real, is left.

Climate is always changing; next near may bring rains instead of drought: we don’t know.  The reality of climate change is that we don’t know with exactitude what weather next year will bring; but the farmers will still be farming.

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Whenever environmentalists talk, grab your wallet.

Vincent J. Curtis

28 Aug 23

RE: Natural gas expansion in Ontario moving in wrong direction.  Op-ed by Keith Brooks, program director for Environmental Defence.  The Hamilton Spectator 28 Aug 23.

Whenever an avowed environmentalist starts talking about affordable energy, hold onto your wallet.  Environmental Defense wants Ontario to get off Alberta natural gas and switch to the Chinese unreliables, wind and solar.  What the author doesn’t know, or isn’t saying, is that behind every windmill and solar panel is a natural gas electrical generator ready to power up whenever the unreliables cease delivering.  Ross McKittrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph, calculated over a decade ago that it requires 7 MW of nameplate wind power to replace 1 MW of conventional generation in Ontario.

The Chinese unreliables are no bargain, and they present ongoing engineering problems to those who are responsible for maintaining a stable electrical grid.  You can’t get rid of natural gas generation because it is needed as backup.  You also need natural gas generation for periods of high demand, exceeding baseload supply.  Natural gas generators can be quickly spun up, or down, in response to varying power demands; whereas you have to take wind power whenever it comes, making it effectively an unreliable base load supply.

Environmental Defense seems to know none of this.  They fail to acknowledge that if Canada disappeared tomorrow, it would make no difference to global temperature in 2100.  They don’t seem to know that the magical 1.5℃ was famously exceeded in July, and the global climate didn’t collapse as often forecasted.  They don’t seem to know that, by one measure, the global temperature rises and falls 4.5℃ every year, and has for decades.

The environmentalists have their cause; they will say anything to support their aims, and suppress contra-indicating facts.

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Smug Torstar stupidity

Vincent J. Curtis

27 Aug 23

RE: Bad news: Big Oil is feeling frisky again.  Opinion piece by Torstar columnist Linda McQuaig.  The Hamilton Spectator 26 Aug 23.

The folk wisdom, “get woke, go broke,” hasn’t penetrated the sanctum of Torstar editorial yet, and consequently opinion writer Linda McQuaig expresses annoyance, to the point of hinting at vengeance, against Suncor for the company’s upholding its fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders, and sticking to it knitting.  McQuaig thinks Suncor should get into the green energy business, like Shell did several years ago.  Shell’s stock price suffered for it.  Meanwhile, ExxonMobil stuck to the oil & gas business, and that company’s stock price gained nearly 50 percent in value over the last five years.

McQuaig blames Big Oil for climate change, which is rather like blaming your supplier for your drug habit.  Never mind that climate “change” is one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the world; McQuaid is smugly convinced of it.

It would waste time ironing out all her errors and logical fallacies, so let’s stick to this one.  Canada is responsible for 1.5 percent of global CO2 emissions; Russia, China, and India together account for 50 percent of global emissions.  If Canada disappeared tomorrow, there would be no detectable impact on global temperature in 2100.  Canada’s forest fires added more CO2 to the atmosphere that all that was saved by the carbon tax.

California, meanwhile, broke a ten year drought, and had the lowest season of burn acreage in decades.  It’s drought, a weather event, that decides susceptibility to fire, not climate change.

Smugness isn’t wisdom.

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Global means global

Vincent J. Curtis

21 Aug 23

RE: Out of options on climate change.  Op-ed b y Torstar co.umnist Heather Mallick.  The Hamilton Spectator 21 Aug 23.

The significant term in the expression “global warming” is the word “global.”  Local heatwaves and local storms prove nothing.  They are normal abnormalities, and we expect them.  And all we ever hear about are the local disasters, never about the wide swaths of compensating subnormalities.

You don’t hear that the US had a summer of generally below normal temperatures; non-events aren’t newsworthy; and besides, such a report would vitiate the disaster narrative.  You don’t hear, as BC and the NWT burns, that California has had its lowest year of burn acreage in decades.  You don’t hear about boiling oceans anymore, after the scandal of how that alleged phenomenon was created was revealed.  You used to hear about ice not forming around Antarctica, until the satellite photos of its extent around the continent were released.  The column by Heather Mallick is typical of the smug, comfortable, and poorly uninformed media elites blessing us with their perspective of conventional opinion, spiced with a heaping helping of contempt for Alberta’s premier, as you'd expect from a Torstar columnist.

None of the climate crazies forecasted this summer of weather events; no, and they all engaged in the fallacy of affirming the consequent.

The dominance of climate craziness will continue so long a people aren’t confronted with the costs of believing it.

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Lesson from Yellowknife

Vincent J. Curtis

17 Aug 23

It’s 1450 km from Yellowknife, NT, to Edmonton, AB, the closest place that can accommodate the 22,000 evacuees from the capital city of the Northwest Territories.  There’s one highway, and it’s not a particularly good one, and there’s little in the way of amenities along the way.  The people of Yellowknife have been told to self-rescue along this highway to Alberta, if possible.

Luckily, most people of Yellowknife have access to a vehicle that’s gasoline or diesel powered.  These vehicles can go 500 to 700 km without refuelling, and the process of refuelling takes less than five minutes.  The one gas station between Yellowknife and the Alberta border has fuel, and gasoline tankers and tow trucks are being stationed along the way to make sure the evacuation convoy proceeds smoothly.

The plan to abolish the sale of fossil fueled vehicles and have an all EV passenger fleet would make this evacuation impossible.  EVs will forever lack the range and the rapidity or refueling or recharging that gas- and diesel- powered vehicles have.  In addition, there simply isn’t the electric power along the route to recharge thousands of vehicles all at once, and there never will be.  The world outside of Ottawa and Toronto is nothing likfe Ottawa or Toronto.

The Yellowknife evacuation demonstrates the folly of abolishing the sale of gas and diesel powered private motor vehicles.

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Where are the scare quotes?

Vincent J. Curtis

16 Aug 23

RE: Alberta rejects plan for clean energy.  News item Bloomberg News.  The Hamilton Spectator 16 Aug 23.

Alberta rejects “plan” for “clean” energy?  Where are the scare quotes in the headline?  Minister of Climate Craziness Steven Guilbeault offered no plan for the Alberta grid: he proposed regulations; the planning he left up to Alberta.  So, there should be scare quotes around ‘plan.’

Alberta’s energy grid is 90+ percent based on clean-burning natural gas.  There’s no air pollution; there’s only CO2 and H2O in the exhaust.  So, where are the scare quotes around ‘clean.’  Just because Guilbeault deems the combustion products of natural gas unclean doesn’t make it so.

What goes unsaid is that there’s no need to force the Chinese unreliables on Albertans, as Guilbeault is trying to do.  SNC-Lavalin, the famous Quebec-based engineering firm, is licensed to build the CANDU SMR, a 300 MW descendent of the famously dependable CANDU reactor.  But, strangely, Guilbeault is not pushing for this Quebec-based Canadian company; he’s pushing unreliable technology from overseas.  Why?

Does the fact that he is an advisor to the Chinese government on climate change have anything to do with it?  He’s certainly acting like the sales agent for the CCP in Canada, with the power to coerce his customers.  How deep does the Chinese scandal go in the Trudeau government?

There’s no proof Canada is causing global warming, and Guilbeault has yet to say by how much his net zero plan will reduce global temperature by 2100.

It’s time for the Canadian media to wake up and start asking questions, not merely republishing Canadian government press releases essentially verbatim.

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