HE SAID: Climate change bill catastrophic
By Rob Leggett
Leave it to the NDP to introduce a Private Members Bill that I believe will not only be devastating to the Canadian economy but also one that is seemingly based on inconclusive science.
Bill C-311 requires the Canadian federal government to set regulations to attain a midterm target to bring green house gas emissions 25 per cent below 1990 levels and a long term target to bring emissions 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.
If this new bill passes through the Senate, the government will have to force industries to somehow limit their CO2 output more than they currently are capable of doing. This will create an unnecessary financial burden on companies already facing an uncertain economy, and may even lead to the unfortunate closures of industries unable to meet these unrealistic requirements while maintaining competitive in the world market.
While our own industry will be struggling with complying with the eventual new emission caps, countries such as China and India whose environmental laws are already not as strict, will continue to spew out CO2 at a rate, which even if the western world completely shut down the amount of CO2 would continue to increase.
This one of the fundamental reasons that makes talks of what Canada can do about man-made climate change – if it even exists – intellectually dishonest.
Any agreements to do anything about controlling man-made CO2 are useless unless China and India are also committing to massive reductions. However, the world response seems to be to continue to allow them to continue spewing out great streams of pollutants, because they are still only developing and need to be forgiven of their own CO2 outputs.
But this aside, this Bill is focusing on a science that is at best inconclusive and at worst politically and financially motivated. Despite what a handful of scientists would have us believe the debate on this science is not settled (please refer to Heidelberg Appeal that has been signed by 4,000 prominent scientist and 72 Nobel Prize winners).
The fact that so many studies on climate change don’t bother to endorse the consensus position is significant because scientists have largely moved from endorsing climate change, in fact in current studies, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, reanalyzed atmospheric CO2 and emissions data since 1850 and found that the airborne fraction of CO2 has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades, and that most of the CO2 emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is absorbed in the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems.
The truth here is that throughout history temperatures and CO2 levels have been higher, sometimes as much as ten times higher, and we are actually living in a carbon deficient atmosphere.
Now, it seems, global temperatures have not risen significantly for fifteen years and have actually been dropping for nine years.
It was even revealed that the scientists at the CRU (Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University) expressed dismay at this data that contradicts their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was a “travesty”. And Instead of admitting their mistake, they instead opted to use “a trick to conceal the decline” in temperatures when looking at the data.
I could write a book about the varying “consensus” on climate change, but it is better said by Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Studies at MIT, who wrote: “The notion a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth or any planet with a fluid envelope. Such hysteria over global warming simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public and the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth.”
I just do not believe that the science is believable enough to take as drastic of actions as the NDP would like us to and I wish we would wait for more conclusive, unbiased research before we destroy the Canadian economy and our standard of living.
We need truth and evidence before hysteria and faulty models, otherwise we won’t even know what we are fighting.
