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The week of January 6 is scheduled as the last week of the CEC hearings regarding the Keeyask Genertion project, which included a three week extension. The final week includes some cross examination of returning experts, presentation of the answers to the set of 55 CEC questions, further questions from the CEC panel, and then closing arguments from the proponent, and the participants. Thursday, January 9 is the final day of the hearings.

The CEC will issue its recommendations regarding licensing in its report, due 120 days after the end of their Keeyask hearings. In the meantime the Public Utilities Board hearings regarding Manitoba Hydro's development plan start in March 2014. The CEC will be starting its mandated review of Lake Winnipeg Regulation in early 2014 also.

“The Arctic caught a bit of a break in 2013 from the recent string of record-breaking warmth and ice melt of the last decade,” said David M. Kennedy, NOAA’s deputy under secretary for operations, during a press briefing today at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco. “But the relatively cool year in some parts of the Arctic does little to offset the long-term trend of the last 30 years: the Arctic is warming rapidly, becoming greener and experiencing a variety of changes, affecting people, the physical environment, and marine and land ecosystems.”

The report presents preliminary results achieved through a two-year government interdepartmental project to develop experimental ecosystem accounts and the required statistical infrastructure. It provides an overview of ecosystem accounting and valuation, several measures of the quantity and quality of ecosystems and their goods and services, a case study for valuing EGS, and a research agenda for future work in this area.

Ecosystem goods and services (EGS) are fundamental to human activity. These tangible goods (e.g., fish, timber) and less tangible services (e.g., clean air, productive soil) are crucial to our lives and livelihoods, yet human activities can have impacts on the ecosystem structures and functions that produce them. Tracking the quantity, quality and value of EGS has never been more important.

The report closes on a research agenda describing some of the key issues that require further investigation, including improvement of spatial datasets, EGS indicators, the characterization of EGS for marine and coastal ecosystems, monetary and non-monetary valuation of EGS flows, and the identification and classification of the stock of natural capital assets and associated flows that should be included in a complete set of national ecosystem accounts.

Mercury can bioaccumulate in living creatures and chronic exposure can cause brain damage. Environment Canada scientists are sampling everything from snow to lichens to bird eggs as part of the federal-provincial joint oilsands monitoring program.

The scientists stress the mercury loadings around the oilsands are low compared to the contamination seen in many parts of North America including southern industrial Ontario and southern Quebec. Mercury is "the number one concern" when it comes to the metal toxins generated by oilsands operations and a major worry for aboriginal and environmental groups concerned about the oilsands' impact on fishing, hunting and important wildlife staging areas downstream of the oilsands.

Canada recently signed an international treaty pledging to reduce mercury emissions.

Notice of this appeal period arrived in our offices December 19. For others it may not arrive in the mail until after Christmas or New Years. The 30 day period should not include holidays.

The first round for responses from those who appealed the licence means work during the holidays. No resources are made available for those who appealed the licence. More serious, many of the appeals to this licence are from First Nations. Their offices close for two weeks or more starting the Friday before Christmas. Effectively they will not see their notice of the appeal period until after New Year's Day.

So far Justice Manitoba procedures are different from the Wuskwatim licences appeal to cabinet. Materials received to date do not: identify how many appeals, from who, were filed; advise of all steps and the timelines for those steps in the appeal; give reasons why this appeal was triggered.

So far it is unclear why the appeal documents ignore the Clean Environment Commission hearings, transcripts, evidence, recommendations in its report, and all the filings from Manitoba Hydro about Bipole III after the Environmental Statements were filed in 2011. The licence Minister Mackintosh issued took all of the above into consideration.

There has been no public announcement by government of this appeal. Media coverage has been nil. Perhaps Manitoba Justice would explain itself. Perhaps the hope is to have few if any responses from those who appealed the Bipole III licence.

The panel acknowledged the project is likely to hurt caribou and grizzly populations, and said a large oil spill would cause a significant environmental, societal and economic burden -- although that large spill scenario is unlikely, and the effects would not be permanent. The panel steered clear of larger First Nation concerns about constitutionally protected rights to traditional land, leaving those long-disputed issues to Ottawa.

Leaders of the First Nations Summit and Union of BC Indian Chiefs are calling on the federal government to reject the Joint Review Panel for the Northern Gateway Pipeline Project (JRP) recommendation of a conditional approval of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project.

"The Joint Review Panel decision to provide conditional approval does not alter or negate in any way, the federal government's clear legal responsibility to consult and accommodate First Nations, especially given the precedent provided by a long list of Supreme Court decisions," said Grand Chief Edward John of the First Nations Summit political executive. "The necessary consultation standard for any development project in BC, especially those with such a high potential for negative impacts, must be to seek the free, prior and informed consent of each and every First Nation whose Aboriginal title and rights will be impacted by a proposed project."

Environmental groups commented immediately. See links below.

Columbia University's James Hansen, a well-known activist and climate scientist, recently led a study, then published a paper, addressing this debatable limit, stating that 2 degrees of global warming would "subject young people, future generations and nature to irreparable harm". Such harm would include consequences such as widespread sea-level rise, mass extinction, and a change in cloud cover of the planet.

Researchers from a range of fields contributed to this study, making it more widely received and understood by the general public, and giving it a different feel from the typical climate science paper. Inputs from economists and policy-makers are included, as well as a statement claiming that humans currently have a moral obligation to slow and possibly reverse current warming trends for future generations' wellbeing.

In reference to probable flooding of coastal cities in the future, Hansen bluntly stated, "We can't accept that. If we have any love for our children and grandchildren, we can't accept that."

Since the beginning of the industrial era, humankind has added roughly 370 gigatons of carbon (GtC) into the atmosphere, with rates accelerating as populations continue to rise and coal continues to be consumed in large countries such as China. This trend is reflected in what Hansen said, "It seems like we're just charging ahead, burning any and every fossil fuel. There seems to be no real effort to get off that business-as-usual path".

One over-arching message resounds throughout Hansen's study – if reductions in fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in an aggressive and immediate manner, there is no feasible way in which the 2 degree increase in global temperatures will be avoided by the year 2100.

In recent years, federal funding has been cut from many prominent scientific organizations, causing them to severely downsize and in many cases, shut down. Pertinent examples of this unfortunate trend include the defunding of the Experimental Lakes Area, the transformation of the National Research Council to being business and industry-based, and shutting down the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

"The culture of science [in Canada] is being poisoned," stated NDP's Kennedy Stewart when explaining the bill for a science officer, "This is an effort to get things back on track."

The Environment Act licence for Bipole III was issued in August 2013, with an appeal period of 30 days. Numerous appeals were filed, including from multiple Manitoba First Nations. Each appellant will soon start to receive materials with deadlines to respond in writing for each stage of the appeal to cabinet. It is unclear how those times stages will work given how many appellants are outside Winnipeg.

The Bipole III appeal to cabinet will be a paper process for appellants, like the appeal to cabinet regarding the Wuskwatim Generation and Transmission appeal to cabinet.

The allegations stem from a submission filed with the CEC in 2010 by two non-governmental organizations – Environmental Defence Canada and the Natural resources Defense Council – and three individuals. The claim is that the government of Canada has not been properly enforcing the section of the Fisheries Act, which deals with pollution prevention and establishes a prohibition against depositing harmful substances into water bodies inhabited by fish.

The CEC move sends a signal that the concerns have merit and casts doubt on Canada's ability to manage the environmental impacts of the oilsands, said Gillian McEachern, with Environmental Defence.

"The federal government has been hard at work to convince the U.S. government that it's doing its job and this is another example that it's just simply not," she said in an interview. "This is yet one more serious example of why the U.S. shouldn't buy the line coming from Canada that things are under control when it comes to the environmental impacts of the industry."

Over 7,000 times more powerful at warming the Earth than carbon dioxide, PFTBA is also dangerously long-lived in the atmosphere - with a life cycle of roughly 500 years. Additionally worrisome is the fact that this manmade chemical, originating from the electrical industry of the 20th century, cannot be naturally absorbed into sinks such as oceans and forests.

"We claim that PFTBA has the highest radiative efficiency of any molecule detected in the atmosphere to date", claims Angela Hong, one of the U of T chemists and authors of the new scientific publication that brought PFTBA to the public eye.

Although concentration is currently low enough that it is not noticeably affecting climate change, Hong has her reservations when looking to the future.

"It is so much less than carbon dioxide, but the important thing is on a per molecule basis, it is very very effective in interacting with heat from the Earth. Individually each molecule is able to affect the climate potentially and because its lifetime is so long it also has a long-lasting effect."

Although monarch butterfly populations have fluctuated, the trend over the past decade has been one of a steady and alarming decline. 2012's record low numbers of roughly 60 million migrant butterflies has been shattered by the pitiful three million that made it to Mexico this year.

The dramatic drop in monarch numbers unfortunately reflects similar trends in other insect populations, most notably the wild bee. Bee declines have been linked to use of pesticides containing neonicotinoids, a chemical that greatly weakens bees' immune systems. However, many experts say that this is but one of many overarching, widespread problems, such as mass habitat loss, the use of many destructive chemicals, and disease.

Native plants and trees play irreplaceable roles in North American insects' life cycles. A wildflower such as the toxic milkweed is crucial in the larval stage of the monarch butterfly. Studies have shown that adult monarchs carrying parasites will seek out particularly poisonous plants to kill off their unwanted companions. However, milkweed populations have taken a big hit due to mass agricultural production and pesticides such as Roundup.