Global warming causes not as certain as claimed
Perceptions by Gerry Warner
There are two sides to every story. How many times have
you heard that tired cliché? A hundred? A thousand? A million? I know I’ve lost
count. But just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true.
This was driven home to me recently when I heard an
interview on the radio with Patrick Moore. Who’s that you say? Ahh, memories
are so short. Born in BC, a scientist with a PhD in ecology from UBC and the
former president of the Greenpeace Foundation of Canada, Patrick Moore was once
one of the most famous environmentalists on earth.
How do you like those credentials? Yet today, Moore is
one of the most hated and reviled “environmentalists” in the world accused in a
Manchester Guardian article no less of
being a “Judas of the eco-warriors” spreading a gospel of doubt.” Sheesh! Can
this be the same Patrick Moore that was one of the earliest members of
Greenpeace, a protester against nuclear testing and whale hunting and was
aboard the Rainbow Warrior the day it was blown up by French spies in Auckland
Harbour?
Yep, that’s the right guy. Today, Moore is denounced
as an apologist for the forest industry, a paid shill for the nuclear power
industry and an advocate for genetically modified food. Once a passionate
critic of clear cut logging, Moore now says clear cutting “allows new trees to
grow in the sunshine.” But Chris Genovali, of the Western
Canada Wilderness Committee, says: “Each time I read something by this
megalomaniacal crackpot, I get the urge to hurl.”
Yet even these criticisms aren’t the biggest aimed at
Moore because the former Greenpeacer has committed the greatest sin in the
environmental lexicon by denouncing the scientific proponents of global warming
and climate change. That’s right. Moore is a climate change skeptic and he
doesn’t take the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) as gospel. In its 2013 report, the IPCC concluded that mankind was the
“dominant cause” of global warming and since then has argued that atmospheric
pollution, particularly carbon dioxide emissions from industry and vehicles, is
responsible for 95 per cent of global warming.
No way, says Moore. ““We do
not know if we are a small or large part of the present global warming. It is
not possible through science to determine an exact answer to this question . .
. So it is very unlikely that we (humans) are the only factor causing the present
global warming but we may be one of the factors.”
In the dominant scientific and evidence-based way of thinking
today Moore’s comments are the equivalent of saying “the emperor has no
clothes.” Scientists denounce him, environmentalists hate him and Moore has
been made an international pariah by the media. But you know something, as much
as I deplore Moore’s views on logging and many of his other views, on this one
I think it’s possible that he’s right and should at least be listened to.
Oh, oh, I can already feel the slings and arrows hurling my way
for saying this so I will now be perfectly clear about my climate change views.
I absolutely accept the evidence that the earth is warming dramatically in our
times and one only has to look at the dramatic shrinking of the world’s ice caps and glaciers, including the
glaciers of the Kootenays, to see this.
But Moore argues, and so have I long
before I was aware of Moore’s views, that solar heat fluctuations by the sun
may be at least as an important factor as air-borne carbon pollution by man as a
cause of global warming. It may even be the main cause.
There, I’ve said it and I’m not going to
take it back no matter how much scorn and abuse is directed my way. I
acknowledge that I’m not a scientist and can’t argue on scientific grounds. But
as a long-time weather nut and student of meteorology, I can say what my gut
believes and I could say more, but there’s no room now.
However, part two of this column will
come. Trust me.
Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and a skeptic on
a lot of things.
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