Thousands at the climate change trough
I write in response to the Michael Slade epistle published in a recent edition presenting a somewhat humourous opinion on climate change.
The essence of the letter is that one must trust expert opinions when making judgments regarding matters of potentially dire impact. Unfortunately, his reference to the science supporting the potential for disastrous climate change, draws upon the views of a great many scientists who base their claims of cataclysmic climate disaster upon modelling.
I say unfortunately as his references to scientific authorities are limited to those resulting from modelling and not from replicable scientific testing. Modelling is a computerized form of guesstimating outcomes and, in the matter of climate change requires hundreds, if not thousands, of data to be entered into the equation to provide a result. However, if even one datum is incorrect the results would be skewed and if more than one of the hundreds of data were wrong the skewing would be exponentially worse. Stephen Hawkings wrote in A Brief History of Time words to the effect that it was interesting that much ‘scientific’ work supported desired outcomes.
Now, take this thought and consider it in the context that the IPCC was initially funded by Margaret Thatcher in an attempt to divert Britain from coal and oil fueling to nuclear energy. That initial IPCC funding has mushroomed into a multi-billion dollar industry thus encouraging thousands to join at the climate change trough.
Interestingly, in Canada, the pursuit of climate change activism has taken an unusual form — one in which the funding of much anti-oil and gas production activity is provided by American oil and gas interests. Their success in preventing adequate pipeline access to the West Coast has had the effect of allowing these U.S. interests to buy Canadian product at discounted prices, access it through existing pipelines to the U.S. and then ship it overseas at much inflated prices.
As a final thought, everyone knows — or should know — that Earth’s climate has been changing back and forth over a period of 4.5 billion years. Having said this, there certainly is a humanogenic effect on climate change, however, it is not, de facto, in the use of petroleum and its by-products but in the exponential increase in the number of humans alive and consuming. The cure: perhaps Mao’s one child rule wasn’t so bad after all.
Pat Mulcahy
Saltair
