SHE SAID: Climate change debunkers need reality check

To oppose Bill C-311, a climate change legislation passed in the House of Commons on May 5, you must first reject the concept of climate change... so let's start there, shall we?

Can you find scientists to debunk the current modern reality that is climate change?

Sure you can!

You can also find scientists who'll tell you the government is injecting nano-tech mind-control chips into your blood stream through immunizations, others who will show you 'proof' the U.N. is run by alien cyborgs, and still others who will attest that O.J. really was innocent.

That doesn't mean you should believe them.

As a colleague of mine said yesterday, “The only people who still don't believe in climate change simply don't want to believe in it.”

Okay, fair enough, I can understand that.

It's a notion that threatens our current lifestyles, leaves us afraid for our kids, demands sacrifice on all our parts ...hardly comfortable territory for any of us, especially those of us who live the indulgent lifestyles of conspicuous consumption accorded us in the northern hemisphere.

Most of us are willing to recycle, maybe car pool a bit, but the kind of dramatic, wholesale revolution in the way we live that current climate change predictions demand ... that's just too much for most of us to contemplate.

So we don't.

That's just on a personal level, not even touching on the global economic realities. Many think countries like the U.S. have the most to lose in adopting stringent carbon reduction targets, since they have the most weath and the greatest consumption-based economies ... but any Canadian economist will tell you we're just as threatened, economically, as our nothern neighbours... if not more so.

We're already struggling to compete with a country boasting a similar resource base, but an exponentially greater population base to extract and market those resources.We're not competing for G-8 supremacy – we're competing to make sure we get to stay in the G-8 at all, and a bill like C-311 could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Another good reason to listen to the scientists who say climate change is nonsense.

Or is it?

First, take a minute to look out your window and compare what you see with what you saw 20 years ago. Has it changed? Next, watch the weather network – or any news network for that matter – has anything changed in terms of global weather extremes, in your memory? I'm betting it has.

But you and I aren't experts, so we can't take the evidence of our own senses; our anecdotal observations; as the whole story.

Let's now go back, shall we, to that pool of scientific experts and see if we can find one or two who believe in the reality of climate change.

Wow!

Turns out, there's more than just a couple of them! Turns out, in fact, they're very much in the majority!

Who knew?

Well, the United Nations knows, for starters ...as the United Nations Secretary General said in June 2009, “it (climate change) is the major, overriding environmental issue of our time, and the single greatest challenge facing environmental regulators. It is a growing crisis with economic, health and safety, food production, security, and other dimensions.”

Now, I can quote hundreds more just like this, but what would be the point? In a war of expert opinions, the ammunition is endless and we could find ourselves buried under a hail of pithy opinions for the rest of our lives, with no end in sight.

Which is exactly what climate-change detractors want.

Suffice it to say, for every member of the scientific community who debunks climate change, you can find two or more who support it.

So why are we still debating what should have been a moot point a decade ago?

Simple – indecision allows us the luxury of inaction.Those uncomfortable lifestyle changes, that discomfitting fear we talked about earlier – it all goes on the back burner while we wait for the controversy to be resolved. We don't have to sacrifice, we don't have to risk economic blow-back ... all the yucky stuff just goes away.

For now.

The downside of that approach, of course, can be found in the tremendous health, economic, security and enivronmental consequences that the bulk of the scientific community assures us are looming should we continue our current practices unchecked.

That's not good leadership. That's not good governance.

Bill C-311 is both.

What do you think?