I read with interest the article regarding `Weather Extremes Becoming The New Normal` in the July 3 edition of the Trail Times and the article prompted me to offer a few thoughts that have concerned me regarding man made climate change (AGW). As a disclaimer, I am a climate change skeptic and not a scientist but I do read a fair bit and try to make some sense of it. However let me offer this ……..
The earth has been warming up since the late 1800s, coming out of a little ice age. For the first 80 odd years of the recovery it managed to warm nicely without our industrial CO2 emissions. But today scientists using computer modelling are trying to tell us that those industrial CO2 emissions are going to put an end to life as we know it by warming up the climate.
And as I see it, it is only the results of these computer models that the scientists can reasonably use to provide the proof that runaway global warming can be attributed to us humans. Looking at this argument, I ask myself what kind of computer program could be developed to model something as complex as the earth’s climate and then make projections out from 10 to 100 years? Having a passing association with computer modelling, I cannot see any reasonable probability that climate models can be written to produce the results being claimed. But we are being asked to believe that these programs are accurate and further can forecast climate out 100s of years.
Computer modelling has been applied to economics, the stock market, and many other complex situations without a great deal of success. But we are being asked “to have faith.” I notice the Canadian government’s difficulties, after a $1billion plus investment, in getting a much simpler program to work that will pay our civil servants. One of the major difficulties of climate modelling is that there is no way of confirming the claims they are making so again, “have faith”. Given some of the complexities that the climate science modellers are ignoring and parameters they have had to incorporate to make the models appear to work, makes their modelling even more difficult to accept.
In order to distract from examining the “proof” being offered by the climate modelling, we are being threaten with catastrophes in various forms that the climate scientists are saying are now showing up and bigger ones that are about to. But irrespective of what the mainstream media and the climate scientists say, there is considerable debate around those issues, how fast global temperatures are and will rise, how fast the glaciers are melting, how fast the ocean is heating up, how fast the polar bears are dying off. Some of these debates center around a warming earth but none of them provide ANY proof that they are mainly caused by human CO2 emissions. Again, the only proof being offered comes from the climate models. As stated, I do not believe it is possible to adequately model the global climate and then attribute catastrophe to human CO2 emissions.
If I do not believe that humans are causing runaway warming and I do not believe that the minor warming that is occurring will cause the catastrophes being proposed, I cannot possibly support the commitment of vast sums of money to the AGW cause our politicians are in the process of making. It is well worth remembering the global cooling scare that occurred back in the 1970s. At that time the popular narrative was telling us that scientists were convinced that we were all going to be wiped out by an oncoming ice age. Today the narrative would have us believe those same scientists are convinced that we are all going to die in a runaway heating of the climate. Back in the 70’s, a ton of money was made on the global cooling scare, with study grants, books, movies, lectures etc. Today even more money is being made on global warming. And were is that money mainly coming from?
Most politicians (local, provincial, federal and at the United Nations), have decided that we all have to start paying for our sins through taxation on our CO2 emissions with the expectation that this will induce us to reduce those emissions. For a start, this leads me to start taking bets on how many in B.C. even know that they are presently paying in the order of $200 - $400 per year through natural gas and gasoline taxes. and how many of those that do know are taking any action to reduce those costs? And how many know that this number will about double when Trudeau implements his CO2 tax increase from the present $30 per ton to $50 per ton?
And I further wonder how many are aware that Trudeau’s Liberals are in the process of sending $2.65 billion of our tax dollars to the UN’s Green Climate Fund? And I wonder how many are aware that the UN is expecting contributions of at least $100billion per year and are already asking for more? If the politicians and the supporters of the AGW narrative are patting themselves on the back about how we are saving the world for our grandchildren, can I point out that, as per the Paris Climate Treaty, developing nations (including China and India) who make up 65 per cent of global CO2 emissions do not have to make any efforts to reduce their emissions. Further, the US, which makes up another 10%, has decided that they are not going to get sucked into this scam so are not prepared to make any further commitments of either cash support or emission reductions. Consequently, any taxes we pay and consequent reductions we make will do virtually NOTHING to help reduce global CO2 emissions. If you can justify this cost because it makes you feel better and think that you are contributing to saving the earth, good for you the impacts that you might think you are making are simply not happening.
Finally, I don’t believe that politicians are willing to promote an honest debate between the two sides of this question because, along with being politically incorrect, they might ultimately be shown to have backed the wrong horse (as they did with global cooling). I don’t believe that scientists supporting AGW are interested in an honest debate as they might be at risk of losing their funding and might have to find something else to study. And finally, I don’t believe the media is interested in an honest debate as they might lose an attentive audience who buy the apocalyptic stories. It certainly would be nice if they all got together and proved me wrong. Maurice Strong may have died but his ideas are alive and strong in the land of the bureaucrats.
Robin Siddall
Trail