Asking the right questions about climate change

By Tom Harris,
Natural Resources Stewardship Project & Dr. Ian Clark

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Adherents to the hypothesis of human-caused climate catastrophe were given a free ride from a public relations perspective in 2006. Despite the truly apocalyptic visions of Al Gore, David Suzuki and the Sierra Club, doomsters were rarely challenged to back up their claims with hard science. Everything from sea level rise to droughts, melting ice caps and drowning polar bears were blamed on global warming brought on by man's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Alternative climate science viewpoints were carefully screened out of government pronouncements and few in the public seemed to even notice. Oprah Winfrey summed up society's general naiveté about climate change when she concluded her December 5th interview of Gore, gushing, "Thank you for being our Noah!"

However exciting such an approach may be, it is time for Canadians to get real. Climate change is not a religion, or at least it shouldn't be – it is science and like all science is subject to questioning and constant revision based on what scientists actually discover. And what is being discovered is taking us further away from any sort of consensus that human-produced CO2 is a major cause of global climate change.

Full article at CFP