The rationale for carbon tax is failing, which is good news for B. C.

Afew centuries ago, the prevailing wisdom said the Earth was the centre of the universe and the planets revolved around it. Scientists such as Galileo, who argued otherwise, were branded as heretics and derided, arrested and imprisoned. Today, there is a new orthodoxy that says the Earth is at a tipping point and man- made carbon emissions are going to raise the temperature dramatically. Scientists who argue against it are derided, defunded and described as “deniers.”

Well, I have some good news: The tide of scientific opinion is changing and is about to swamp the proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

First, it’s important to understand that the provincial government’s rationale for imposing a carbon tax is based on one thing: the November, 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC), which said that “Earth’s climate is changing because of human activities” and that “The effects will continue to worsen if no action is taken.”

This report, in turn, was largely based on the work of a small group of scientists in the United States and Britain, notably Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University, and on one set of observations of tree rings in Russia. This had been presented by the IPCC in 2001 as a chart resembling a hockey stick that showed world temperature flat for centuries and then turning sharply upwards.

For many Canadians, that’s where the story ends but for three in particular, that’s where it began. Two were mining consultant Steve McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, who started analyzing the same data Mann used and found much of it extremely dubious. The correlation of temperature and rings wasn’t conclusive and the number of trees sampled was ridiculously small.

There was something else odd about the “hockey stick.” It failed to note the Medieval Warm Period ( MWP). This had already been established, beyond dispute, by direct observations made by the French social historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. The MWP period was even warmer than the world is today despite the fact the Industrial Revolution hadn’t even started. How could man- caused CO2 be responsible for the warming if there wasn’t any?

The third skeptical Canadian was Toronto researcher Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconcensus. org, who began a lengthy study, not of the climate, but of the IPCC, the organization that claimed to represent thousands of top- ranking climate scientists. What she found was that many of the authors of the report it produced were graduate students, environmental activists and gender appointees ( I’m not kidding), most of whom had a very large axe to grind and very little interest in the scientific method.

While this was happening, and before the Climategate emails came out, something else was stirring in the scientific community. A Danish researcher, climate physicist Henrik Svensmark, showed cosmic rays could be responsible for climate change when they ionized the earth’s atmosphere, causing clouds. Since the number of rays hitting earth is controlled by the sun’s magnetic activity, the sun ultimately is responsible for Earth’s temperature.

Recently, a group of 16 noted scientists and engineers delivered a signed letter to the Wall Street Journal saying to politicians around the world:

Candidates should understand that the oft- repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

Here’s where we come back to B. C. The provincial carbon tax is a “drastic action” that was based on a single questionable study promoted by a small group of climate activists.

The sooner the provincial government puts aside this dogma and embraces a more scientific understanding of the global climate, the sooner it can abolish the carbon tax and get on with developing this province, the job it was elected to do.