Science has been hijacked
Dear Editor: Canada’s environment minister dismissively repeats that climate science being settled, but science is never settled. Science requires continuous inquiry to improve our knowledge base.
It’s no heresy to question what government says about climate or anything else. We’ve seen enough distortions, incompetence and wrong-headed ideology from governments to warrant a degree of skepticism.
Climate science has been hijacked by activists, and has been politicized to the extent that it’s masking a bigger issue which affects the human condition. That’s the old question of population growth. Human related climate impact is a symptom of this.
We can agree that the climate is changing, and that human activities do have an incremental effect on naturally occurring climate change. But, the open issues are why and to what extent.
The current scientific consensus on climate change is reflected in the “hockey stick” graph which depicts fairly consistent temperatures over the past 1,000 years with the upturned “blade” portraying a spike in temperatures since the industrial age.
Climate science is an arcane business which attempts to capture temperatures over the past millennium through analysis of tree rings, lake sediments and ice cores with hefty doses of laboratory modeling and assumptions thrown in. It uses climate data from the last 150 years or so, but that’s nothing in earth history. Who knows with certainty what global temperatures were in 1865, let alone 1065?
The primary proponent of the “hockey stick” has been sued over his unwillingness to produce the data which supports his conclusions. There should be sufficient confidence in the data to release it with alacrity.
Rampaging population growth, and the associated demand for resources, are the biggest contributors to human-induced climate change. This has created enormous social and environmental impacts including urbanization, wars, famine, political anarchy, population migration, deforestation, and depletion of land and water.
Unsurprisingly, population growth tracks with temperature increases along the hockey stick during the 20th century.
But, the Paris Climate Conference was silent on this.
World population has exploded from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.6 billion today. Last year, the Liberals committed $640 million to global reproductive rights under the feminism label. In doing so, they unwittingly did more to curb climate change than they did by dumping $2.65 billion into the UN climate fund. It’s past time to include sociologists and anthropologists in the climate debate. John Thompson
Kaleden