Murphy’s madness

Re: What’s in a name?; Rex Murphy, Nov. 19

Rex Murphy makes me laugh. Laughter is good for the soul. But it’s dark humour when he jokes about climate change.

His narrative proceeded to repeatedly misuse ‘climate change’ referring to weather. It’s not the same thing. And snow in winter doesn’t disprove global warming … like, duh!

Climate is the statistics of weather, like the average over 30 years. That’s what’s changing due to global warming. That fact is documented in thousands of observations in over a dozen different lines of evidence — from air temperature, to heat content of the ocean, to melting of ice, to species moving their ranges and more.

He says “climate change is merely a phrase that describes all weather as it has always been and always will be.” Again, he confuses climate with weather and claims to know what the future holds.

But he clearly doesn’t know what he could have learned, if he didn’t think he already knew everything, which is that while climate has changed drastically over the course of millions of years, in fact, a stable climate for the past 10,000 years enabled human civilization to flourish.

For the past 100 years, we have been changing the climate 50 times faster than it changed coming out of the last glacial period.

Murphy would make a wonderful villain for a new work to outdo Orwell. Obeisance to Big Oil in joker’s garb, as deceitful and manipulative as Big Brother. John Stephenson, Toronto