Friday, February 26, 2010

Canadian Politico Denies Global Warming, Says it is Nothing More than Alarmism

A former Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister in one brief open letter to a Quebec-based newspaper has publicly discounted the entire environmental movement, saying it is nothing more than being politically correct, leading to alarmism.

Conservative federal Member of Parliament Maxime Bernier made the comments in a letter published in La Presse newspaper last Wednesday, arguing that there is no scientific consensus on global warming, and thanking his former boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper for not rushing into policies to cut greenhouse gases.

"The debate over climate change, stifled for years by political correctness, has finally broken out in the media," he wrote in his letter. "The numerous recent revelations on errors by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have supplemented the alternative theories put forward for many years.

"We can now see that it's possible to be a 'skeptic,' or in any case to keep an open mind, on just about all the main aspects of warming theory."

Bernier was dropped from the Prime Minister’s cabinet in 2008 after he admitted he had forgotten secret documents at a girlfriend’s house with links to criminal bikers. Since his dismissal from cabinet, he’s been considered a radical, outspoken backbencher.

Dismissing the entire green movement is certainly being outspoken. And linking that anti-green sediment to the Prime Minister’s lack of action on climate change is just sour grapes stemming from Bernier’s own ineptitude with classified materials – which ultimately cost him his job as a federal minister.

Sour grapes or not, Bernier is right in his observations about a lack of action on the part Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government when climate change, and other environmental initiatives are concerned.

In 2002, Prime Minister Harper referred to the Kyoto Climate Change Accord as “a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations.” He continued his anti-environmental leanings by calling the scientific research supporting climate change as “tentative and contradictory.”

Canada – a country known for its vast hardwood forests, rugged snow-capped Rocky Mountains, and home to the world’s largest sources of fresh water – is being led by a man who in 2006 again expressed his denial of global warming: “We have difficulties in predicting the weather in one week, or even tomorrow. Imagine in a few decades,” said Prime Minister Harper.

Most recently, the Prime Minister has set his government’s target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, but the Canadian government has not taken any measures to begin that reduction.

Congratulating Prime Minister Harper on his slow environmental approach, Bernier wrote in his letter to La Presse: “It would certainly be irresponsible to spend billions of dollars and impose exaggeratedly severe regulations to solve a problem whose gravity we're still far from discerning."

There are two issues here – one a former employee saying nasty things about his former boss, the other far more serious – the denial by Canadian leaders of the existence of global warming.

Bernier is just a pompous fool using the environment to forward his own personal attacks on the Prime Minister and anyone that supports the Prime Minister.
People that publicly dump their current or past employer will soon find it hard to find work – would you want to hire someone who said something bad about their boss? Just imagine what that person might one day say about you?

Denying global warming on the other hand is a far more serious problem which both Bernier and our Prime Minister unfortunately appear to share.

Yes, there is much debate in the scientific community about global warming – but that’s what scientists do to scientifically prove the existence of anything. The debate is just part of the scientific method – it isn’t a debate as to whether or not global warming is or isn’t occurring.

Anyone denying the increase in our planet’s temperatures must be smoking something pretty strong, because those hard and fast facts have been well documented. Scientists have found that our planet has a history of periods of global warming and global cooling, due in large part to our rotation around the Sun.

The Earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a perfect circle, it is elliptical. So, there are periods when our orbit brings us closer to the sun, meaning more of the Sun’s light and heat reaches us so our global temperatures increase. Then, the orbit is slightly further away from the Sun, so our planet cools off.

This natural lifecycle of planet Earth continued for millions of years unchanged until the industrial revolution of the 1900’s, when we human beings started burning more and more fossil fuels to power our climate controlled lifestyles and create the creature comforts we enjoy today.

The burning of fossil fuels changed the carbon footprint of our planet, eventually leading to holes in the Ozone Layer which protect us from the Sun’s ultraviolet spectrum, creating thick layers of carbon-based smog, which allow the Sun’s heat to reach us, but like the clouds, trap that heat, warming our planet.

Naturally occurring cloud tops blow away in the winds, or dissipate as precipitation is released. But human-made smog’s chemical composition makes the “clouds” of smog too heavy to just blow away, often lasting days or weeks in a stinky and stagnant layer high above our heads. The rain which falls from these clouds of smog is so acidic, it kills off trees, creates acidic water bodies, and over time combines with the added heat and light from our Sun to artificially warm our planet.

Climate change is not a myth being debated in scientific circles. Climate change is the natural lifecycle of our home, planet Earth. The real debate is just how much of an impact we human beings have had on that natural lifecycle, and how to use human ingenuity to fix the natural lifecycle which we broke – if it isn’t too late.



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