Articulation Of Articles

In preparation for next week's discussion of "current events" or rather the story behind the story, I decided to do some research in the local right-wing conservative business papers (instead of the local left-wing conservationist activist papers).  In doing so I came across two very interesting viewpoints are topics that we have touched upon.  

The first is all about Triple Bottom Line businesses; People, Planet, Profit (Catchy like the 3 R's).  Basically he is talking about how Profit should not be the only indicator of success or even the primary indicator; Employee and customer relations with the company is much more important (this will directly affect the profit) and since the environment directly effects the viability of doing business, any kind of business it is also important.  This lines up with our world-view pretty nicely.  It is a book review but I dont think you need to bother reading the book, Vern Loewen sums up all the important stuff in his article anyway (actually just read the "noteworthy" box and you'll really have a concise understanding of the concept).

The second article is a about the "inconvenience" of the provincial carbon-tax for businesses and the general public.  Unfortunately, I think he missed the whole point of the carbon tax, it is meant to be an inconvenience.  Obviously it will increase the cost of doing business (and life) and hopefully it will!  To the point where people start considering other options.... Ok that doesnt sound very nice....  but in order to take action against the negative anthropogenic activities we need funding and I think taxing one of the worst problems is the best way to get the money.  Wait a minute Mr. Macdonald (the Publisher/Editor of this fine paper) doesnt actually believe in climate change and apparently he has solid scientific evidence to back it up.

But he doesnt.... he actually has someone's blog... (like this one... so dont believe everything I tell you! But do read the commentary/arguments going on in the blog). someone who read something off of the http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/  National Snow And Ice Data Centre Website and came to his own conclusions about what the data meant.  If he done a little more thorough research he would have seen that it was a cooler than expected spring that meant more first year (newly formed ice) survived into summer.  Ice over land continued to decrease and calve into the ocean (creating more sea ice) this is 4,000 year old ice that we are losing and that kind of ice can not be regenerated in one exceptionally cold winter or even 100 of them.

He makes it sound as though the increase was in August but we actually had a significant decline in August less than 2007 (thank goodness) but 2007 was record year and we dont like record melt years.

If the blogger had read the  NSIDC  analysis of the data he would have seen we did not actually have an increase in the amount of ice coverage in the arctic, we only loss less than we did last year.   Here is a nice graph that makes it really easy to understand why he was right, with the wrong conclusion.