Perceptions by Gerry Warner

Climate change and global warming may be a fact as far as climate scientists are concerned, but so far this winter you could have fooled me as I enjoyed two glorious days skating this week on ice as clear as glass on Elizabeth Lake, which has been frozen since mid-November.

Last Sunday, there were only four of us on the lake, but by Wednesday there were dozens gliding around the bull rushes, practicing pirouettes, playing a bit of shinny and just reveling in a classic Canadian idyll.

Mid-November is a bit early for that, but thanks to an untimely cold snap we were given the opportunity to prove why we never made it to the NHL or became Olympic figure skaters and we enjoyed every second of it and let the climate scientists be damned! Oh, if only it was that simple.

It isn’t, of course. One early cold spell doesn’t upset the global warming model developed by a gazillion scientists and heavy thinkers like Al Gore. But I also think it’s important to keep in mind that the warming model developed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is only a “model” and not a proven fact. The same scientists that are absolute believers in global warming will readily acknowledge that the Earth’s climate is always changing and there were periods of global warming millions of years before mankind started to pump all that nasty pollution and carbon dioxide into the air.

So who do you believe? The climate scientists with their models and computers with umpteen terabytes of memory that are never wrong, or so they would have us believe. Or do you believe the climate change deniers who have theories of their own, but rely heavily on religion and act as apologists for carbon-emitting industry. Personally, I have reservations with both.

To me, the strongest evidence of global warming is right here in plain sight in the Kootenays where photographic evidence and human memory demonstrate the dramatic recession of our glaciers, which is also a world-wide phenomenon. The same also applies to the rapid disappearance of ice in the Northwest Passage and Antarctica. Pretty hard to argue against that evidence.

But a recent article by Prof. Robert Carter in Global Research, a centre for globalization research based at James Cook University in Australia, makes some strong claims against the global warming model. In it, Carter posits that “climate change is a non-linear (chaotic) process, some parts of which are only dimly or not at all understood. No deterministic computer model will ever be able to make an accurate prediction of climate 100 years into the future.”

Carter also claims “the IPCC has acted as the main scaremonger for the global warming lobby that led to the Kyoto Protocol” and maintains that “the  IPCC is a political and not a scientific, body.”

Phew! That’s strong stuff and I have to say I think there is more than a little bit of truth in Carter’s assertions. For instance, petrified redwood trees, an almost subtropical species, have been found in the Canadian high arctic along with thousands of dinosaur bones, another subtropical species.

The only explanation for this is that the world’s climate was much warmer in the past long before the Industrial Revolution started pumping all that dirty carbon dioxide into the air. Another point to consider is that in the Secular Age we live in now many people tend to think of scientists as gods and scientific “evidence” as infallible. But scientists disagree all the time and there have been many scientific hoaxes perpetrated over the years. Remember Piltdown Man? He never existed.

So where does this leave us? Personally, I’m not ready to jump on the global warming bandwagon yet. In fact, I’d far rather take advantage of this early cold snap and go skating on Elizabeth Lake while the climate is still cold enough to do it.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and Cranbrook City Councillor. His opinions, as bizarre as they me be, are his own. Lead image also by Gerry Warner

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