NOVEMber 2008 issue
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Readers’ Forum
We welcome Readers’ Forum letters of interest to the professions. Send them to George Lee, glee@apegga.org. Keep them to 300 words or less — longer letters published at the editor’s discretion. Letters represent the opinions and not necessarily the expertise of writers. The PEGG reserves the right to edit or reject any letter.
All Climate Change Viewpoints Should be Welcome in The PEGG
Re: PEGG Criticized for Story on Al Gore Training, Readers’ Forum, The PEGG, October 2008, and Member Trains with Al Gore for Climate Change Message, The PEGG, September 2008.
The three letters in the October issue were all about Mr. Gore and contained as much unsubstantiated contrary opinion as the authors claimed was in the original article. The writers don’t appear to have had any first-hand contact with Mr. Shummoogum, P.Eng., the subject of the original article.
I recognize that the authors are entitled to their viewpoints, but Mr. Shummoogum does come with credentials and experience that others may not carry.
Having known him for some years, I can tell you that Mr. Shummoogum has owned and directed two corporations tied to the environment. One company provides scientific analysis and measurement equipment to the oil and gas service industry for environmental monitoring and protection, among other functions. The other company is involved in carbon monoxide monitoring in office buildings and parkades and is a major vendor in Western Canada.
Both companies are very successful and Mr. Shummoogum has been noted as very knowledgeable in this field by the oil and gas sector, as well as commercial businesses.
APEGGA has taken a lead in the climate change debate by featuring a number of articles in The PEGG this year. I applaud that approach and hope more discussion ensues. Having input from knowledgeable people in the environmental field, such as Mr. Shummoogum, will help the rest of us comprehend this important shift to our climate world.
Jim Benedict, P.Eng.
Calgary
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I was surprised and appalled by the intemperate and offensive tone of three letters written by APEGGA members. The letters criticize Kae Shummoogum, P. Eng., as well as Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth and The Climate Project-Canada. They also criticize APEGGA itself for publishing an article about Mr. Shummoogum.
In the article, Mr. Shummoogum volunteered to make formal presentations about The Climate Project-Canada and An Inconvenient Truth.
Mr. Shummoogum and I were part of a 30-member Alberta delegation of volunteers who attended TCP-Canada training sessions last April held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Montreal. These weekend sessions were conducted by former U.S. vice president Gore, climate expert Dr. Andrew Weaver and others qualified to speak about the global crisis of climate change. In attendance were 250 Canadian volunteers, selected from coast to coast by TCP-Canada, who were trained as official presenters of An Inconvenient Truth.
I presented a discussion of An Inconvenient Truth to the Sept. 26 meeting of the environment division of the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists. My abstract and a brief biography were published in the September 2008 issue of the CSPG Reservoir.
After my presentation, a lively discussion went into overtime. Two members of the Friends of Science challenged the climate science presented by Mr. Gore in An Inconvenient Truth. These and other comments and questions were answered and discussed productively by myself, Ed Mathison, P.Geol., and others in the audience.
In the interest of Alberta geoscience, APEGGA and the CSPG, it’s important to discuss and resolve these serious matters.
Jack Century, P.Geol.
APEGGA Life Member
Calgary
Secondary Liability Insurance Program Should be Revisited
There are significant issues related to APEGGA’s Secondary Liability Insurance Program provided through Engineers Canada requiring further review. I would suggest that the majority of members are quite unaware that the program even exists and the fact that they are paying for something which may be of little or no value to most members.
Apart from explaining the program to members, the explanation on the APEGGA website makes the case that the coverage provided is both desirable and needed.
There was sufficient concern about the actual benefits realized from the Secondary Liability Insurance Program that one of the mandates of the Insurance Review Task Force, established in mid-2007, was to review and make recommendations about APEGGA’s continued participation. The group made its report and Council endorsed its recommendation to continue in the program. The reason for this decision, as reported in the October 2007 PEGG, was that the program provided value to APEGGA members.
I was quite disappointed with this conclusion and the claimed value of the program. There are a number of considerations which argue strongly against continuing it. If there is a benefit, it accrues to only a small portion of the membership.
First, how can APEGGA require compulsory secondary liability insurance but not insist on primary liability insurance? Arguments have been made that the secondary liability insurance program is about “protection of the public.” Yet the public protection afforded by primary liability insurance is much greater, and APEGGA hasn’t made it compulsory. Therefore, justifying compulsory secondary liability insurance on this basis makes no sense.
Second, why should APEGGA be concerned about protecting members from liabilities arising from so-called moonlighting work, be it pro bono or fee for service, outside a member’s normal employment? Members who choose to moonlight have a responsibility to make sure that they have managed their liability. They should not be subsidized in this regard by the forced participation of all members in a secondary liability insurance program.
Third, the issue of liability for work done with an uninsured previous employer or a company that no longer exists really relates to members who have been or are working in the engineering consulting business. The majority of APEGGA members are not involved in this business. In any case, the claim history nationally and with APEGGA members indicates that incidents fitting these criteria are almost non-existent. So again, the majority of members who have little or no liability of this kind are subsidizing the minority.
An article in the November 2007 PEGG provided by Engineers Canada extols the benefits of this program and provides several examples. However, it neglects to mention that over the first four years of the program the number of claims made and actually paid were quite small, 64 and 37 respectively. Of those paid 12 involved “moonlighting” activities. In all but a very few cases, the payment, including legal fees, was small.
Only one APEGGA member made a claim and it was denied. The largest provincial association, in Ontario, has chosen not to participate.
Until APEGGA undertook its recent review of the secondary liability insurance program, the assessment per member had been about $10, which is included in the membership fee. During the review, the insurance company agreed to drop the rate to about $7 per member.
Given the number of APEGGA members, this is about a quarter million dollars per year that the insurance company receives from APEGGA on behalf of its members. While $7 is an insignificant amount of money to any given member, the total amount APEGGA pays is not. APEGGA does receive a small rebate from the insurer on an annual basis but this is insignificant in relation to the total paid.
Members who wish to have such coverage could acquire it independently or through some voluntary version of the Engineers Canada program. The cost would undoubtedly be significantly higher than $7 per year but this does not justify requiring the majority of members who have no need for the program to pay the $7.
I am not suggesting that APEGGA roll back its membership fees by this amount. It seems to me that APEGGA could utilize the quarter million dollars currently sent to the insurance company in any number of ways with greater value to the membership as a whole.
The contract with the insurer allows APEGGA to opt out of the program by giving notice early in any calendar year. Without APEGGA’s participation, the viability and cost of this program for the remaining associations would likely change significantly, but this should not be a factor in making the right decision for APEGGA members.
Given this background, I would urge Council to reconsider this matter. If it chooses to reconfirm its earlier decision, so be it, but at a minimum it should respond to the concerns I’ve outlined.
Dr. K. C. Porteous, P.Eng.
Edmonton
Editor’s Note: The program is described on the APEGGA website, www.apegga.org. Go to Fast Find, Member Benefits, National Secondary Professional Liability Insurance. The referenced Engineers Canada article appears in the November 2007 PEGG Online, headlined Program Offers Extra Degree of Protection. And an earlier article, in the What’s In It For Me? feature, appears in the October 2006 PEGG Online.
Laboucane Articles
On Aboriginal Issues
Don’t Belong in PEGG
Re: A History of Violence, by Robert Laboucane, The PEGG, October 2008.
I can’t help wondering what place the writings of Mr. Laboucane have on the pages of the official newspaper for the APEGGA professions. Are we, as professionals or as citizens, liable for the actions of our distant predecessors who conquered this land?
Or, from a practical standpoint, do we feel we should get entrapped in years of standoff and legal battles, pending approval by a local tribe’s chief for every land development project we contemplate?
I immigrated to Canada from Russia and my ancestors took no part in this genocide. It is certainly tragic, and I by no means support or advocate it.
However, I come from a region where every piece of the land was at some point owned by someone other than its present owner. There is no end to claims to return this piece of land to its “rightful and historic owners.”
I have come to learn that no victory in history is final and at a different turn of it, the once-defeated raise their heads again and call for revenge — which of course means more fighting, more hatred and more blood. The media are instrumental in stirring up this pot of mutual aggression.
Whatever the intentions, calls to rewrite history are disruptive to the established economic and social order in this country, and the consequences of this disruption no one can fully embrace.
Before you jump to call these past actions crimes, please realize that they come from a totally different time with different laws, different views and different values. We cannot properly judge them by today’s standards.
What we honestly feel is right and honourable today may be regarded as disgusting and inhumane by our distant successors. How should we know — and why should we care?
I join my voice to those who call for the stop of Mr. Laboucane’s opinion pieces in The PEGG, as both provocative and irrelevant.
Konstantin Ashkinadze, P.Eng.
Edmonton
Attitudinal Gulf
Separates Items
About Transportation
Re: Doing Business, The PEGG,
September 2008.
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ROADS AND MORE ROADS |
This feature is often interesting for revealing the gulfs between stated or implied objectives of public policy and actual facts on the ground. For instance, consider two items published on the mentioned date.
The first says that the City of Edmonton has released a plan to spend $100 million over 10 years on 500 kilometres of new bicycle routes. The second says that the Government of Alberta has signed a $1.42-billion contract for a partnership for 21 km of ring road around Edmonton, to cover design, construction over three years, and maintenance for 30 years.
Let’s do some arithmetic. A mere 21 km of ring road will cost about 14 times more than 500 km of bike paths. The cost per km of ring road will be about 350 times greater that of a bike path.
The bike paths are only a plan but the ring road is a contract. So where is the evidence for any serious commitment on the part of our city and provincial governments to move towards sustainability and greenery? Where’s the commitment to reduce our addiction to more, bigger and faster roads and highways? It’s an addiction that’s leading to a vicious circle of more urban sprawl, more dependence on long-distance commuting, more traffic congestion and pollution, and more demand for more roads.
Let’s face it. Our cities and towns are going all out on housing and transportation solutions that were all the rage in the 1960s but are hopelessly outdated in the present, not to mention the near-future of tight economies with high-cost fuels and vehicles.
As engineers, we should be injecting forward vision and common sense into transportation planning, rather than passively accepting policies that other communities in North America and Europe are increasingly rejecting as unsustainable.
Charles R. Neill, P.Eng.
Edmonton
Cloud Cover
Has Big Role
In Complex System
One of the least considered but most influential components in our very complex climate system is clouds. The world’s cloud cover can vary from 63 per cent to 70 per cent over a period of 15 to 20 years.
Clouds have a negative forcing effect during the day because they reflect the sun’s energy before it reaches Earth’s surface. But at night they absorb outgoing radiation and reradiate it back, producing a positive forcing effect.
The positive and negative influences of cloud cover vary significantly with density and thickness. It’s not enough to know just the extent. The effective albedo of the cover must be known and factored into any equation when we attempt to evaluate the overall impact on global temperatures.
The location on the globe and time of day will have a significant impact on the amount of radiation reflected or reradiated. This makes calculations even more complicated.
To factor one number into simple climate models, therefore, for the average global albedo is a gross oversimplification, particularly when this number is held constant for many years. In the more complex models, which are a form of finite element analysis, a given element is a 200 square kilometres. Clearly, an accurate evaluation of the effects of clouds requires a considerably smaller element and a much greater understanding of their formation, dissipation and effect on our climate in general.
This is one of the many flaws in the analyses from the general circulation models that render them unreliable and inaccurate. In spite of this, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies heavily on them to produce the IPCC’s “solid scientific proof.”
Historical data on cloud cover are limited to a period dating from the beginning of satellite scans of the global surface. Compared to the time spans of our climate cycles, that’s not very long.
From the data we do have, however, there appears to be some interesting correlation. The excellent website climate4you.com is updated daily with current data.
The site details how cloud cover can vary from 63.5 per cent to 70 per cent, with a corresponding temperature variation of 0.43 C. From mid-1986 to mid-2000, there was a linear decrease in cloud cover from 68.6 per cent to 64.5 per cent, which corresponds to a temperature increase of 0.27 C. From satellite temperature data from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the increase in average global temperature from mid-1986 to mid-2000 was 0.24 C.
Thus all the forcing effects on the climate including carbon dioxide had a -0.03 C effect. Using the IPCC formula and Mauna Loa volcano data, the C02 alone should have produced a 0.26 C increase in that time period. Instead we had a 0.03 decrease.
During that period there were two significant volcanic eruptions, which decrease temperatures, and a super El Nino, which elevated temperatures. So these unusual factors balanced themselves out.
This example is just one of the many factors not fully considered or included by the intergovernmental panel. Its assessment reports contain a vast amount of statistical data, some of which has been extensively manipulated and has been proven to be seriously flawed by Steve McIntyre et al. Two complete chapters out of 11 and endless references are devoted to computer simulations as worthless as their unsubstantiated assumptions and claims.
“Correlation does not prove causation” has been said over and over again. It is a basic principal of all science. But correlation is all the panel has and even its correlation comes from flawed data. Attempting to validate a hypothesis by using it to program computers, then claiming the computer outputs are the proof, is circular logic. In my opinion, that’s fraudulent.
It has been proven many times that the computer forecasts of 1998 have been totally and utterly wrong, as demonstrated by all the climate data accumulated since then. Thus the IPCC has absolutely no validation for its general circulation models or its hypothesis. To even consider wasting tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on the strength of such a flimsy and discredited concept is unacceptable.
Barry Moore, P.Eng.
Calgary
A New Voice
And a Reading Suggestion
The member newspaper continually contains opinions on the current state of global warming and I am prompted to add my voice.
Many engineers have espoused their beliefs on the matter based upon their sources of information that at times may be suspect and open to question. International bodies have and continue to produce voluminous reports that the press and others with their own agenda have dramatized to interpret beyond reason.
Complex theories and inscrutable computer programs tend to lend credibility to the authors’ efforts and contrary views are rejected — “the science is settled,” some say, and policies with serious financial implications are set.
Engineers are an enquiring lot (or should be) and will welcome some clear thinking that is set forth in a recent publication, An Appeal to Reason — A Cool Look at Global Warming, by Nigel Lawson, published by the Overlook Press.
This small book costs about $22 and contains 149 pages, of which 43 are bibliography. Any reader will be well rewarded and be more confident having the knowledge so succinctly set forth. Take it as continuing education.
E. C. B. Macnabb, P.Eng.
Vancouver
Editor’s Note: For more about the mentioned book, visit www.overlookpress.com.
Thanks For
The Food,
APEGGA Staff
Your donation of 27.5 kilograms of food is truly appreciated. Please pass on our appreciation to all who made it possible.
Edmonton’s Food Bank is a central warehouse that collects, sorts, stores, repackages and distributes food to over 160 agencies, churches and food depots. In other words, by donating to Edmonton’s Food Bank, you are enabling these groups to provide food to people in need. Some of these programs include the Salvation Army, Mustard Seed, Operation Friendship, Crystal Kids and the Elves Child Development Centre.
We assist about 11,000 people with emergency food hampers each month and provide food for over 250,000 meals and snacks. A hamper is a package of food that an individual or family can take home and prepare.
While demand does fluctuate from month to month, we are always in need of high-protein, non-perishable food items. Although statistics are compelling, the work of the food bank is about the people.
Again, thank you for your kind support of Edmonton’s Food Bank.
Marjorie Bencz
Executive Director
Editor’s Note: At their APEGGA social events, staff members donate food to the food bank.
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