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Geoscape is the name for a long term geoscience outreach initiative led by staff of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) Vancouver office and designed to better connect people to the land they live on. Although largely focused on outreach in British Columbia, the initiative has been active across Canada and supported by a number of different GSC programs. Geoscape products, some 35 in total, include Geoscape, GeoMap, Waterscape, and climate change series posters, as well as geological highway maps and GeoTour booklets. A popular geoscience book and a national climate change poster series were inspired by Geoscape work. Begun in 1994, Geoscape has drawn dozens of Canadian geoscientists and educators into outreach efforts. This paper summarizes the accomplishments of Geoscape and some of the lessons we learned along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to popular belief, recent global warming has been caused largely by greenhouse gases, primarily CO[sub 2], accruing in the atmosphere, and man is responsible for most of the ~120 ppm increase in CO[sub 2] over the last 100 years. This article cites a number of recent peer-reviewed scientific papers, and finds that contrary arguments by a growing body of scientists are generally supported by better empirical data than those that favour the 'anthropogenic warming' hypothesis. These arguments invoke the effects of solar irradiance and ocean-atmosphere interactions, both of which have been shown to have warming effects at least as great as those claimed for CO[sub 2], and to be based on sound, well-understood scientific theory. Furthermore, the global warming models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and others have in some cases been shown to be incorrect and contrary to current temperature statistics. For these and other reasons, the CO[sub 2]-driven, anthropogenic warming hypothesis is regarded by many as suspect and lacking in empirical evidence. The difficulty of refuting this popular hypothesis is exacerbated by the IPCC's United Nations mandate to advise governments on the severity of man-made global warming, a mandate that they have followed faithfully, encouraging the emergence of a large body of funded research that supports their view. This presents a problem for global society, as the human-caused warming scenario diverts attention from other, at least equally serious environmental impacts of our industrial society. Recently, however, there appears to be a tilting of public opinion away from global warming alarmism, which may fundamentally affect the direction of the climate change debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of the global warming process are obliged to include many important small-scale processes that cannot be explicitly represented, given the low spatial and temporal resolution at which the models can be integrated. As the parameterizations of these processes, in terms of the resolved scale fields, must be tuned to permit them to enable the models to fit climate observations from the instrumental era, it is an issue as to whether such models remain robust when they are applied to the prediction of future warming trends. Geological inferences of past climate conditions provide a means by which the robustness of the models may be assessed. In this paper, two examples of such tests are described, both of which demonstrate that a state-of-the-art model is able to accurately simulate past conditions that differ radically from modern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]