Survivor Ellesmere

The government of Canada currently has this to say about climate change. And here's the scary article it came from, which luckily points out that Prof. Tim Ball, the "Mr. Cool" in question, is funded by oil and gas companies. Highlights:

Gaining momentum, he declares that Environment Canada and other agencies fabricated the climate-change scare in order to attract funding for propaganda and expensive attempts to model climate change using supercomputers.

"Environment Canada can't even predict the weather!" he bellows. "How can you tell me that they have any idea what its going to be like 100 years from now if they can't tell me what the weather is going to be like in four months, or even next week?"

Annemarie's note: predicting the weather and predicting climate are two completely different problems. It's akin to predicting what you'll have for dinner tonight vs. if you'll have dinner tonight.

In fact, Prof. Ball says, the real danger for Canada is not warming, but cooling: "It's like Y2K," he concludes. "We all just need to calm down."

As my brother can attest, Y2K ended up not being a problem because hundreds of thousands of people spent years going over computer code line-by-line to add the extra two digits for the year. See, when you fix problems they often get resolved. There's a lesson here, but I don't think it's the one Prof. Ball is going for.

Few in the audience have any idea that Prof. Ball hasn't published on climate science in any peer-reviewed scientific journal in more than 14 years. They do not know that he has been paid to speak to federal MPs by a public-relations company that works for energy firms. Nor are they aware that his travel expenses are covered by a group supported by donors from the Alberta oil patch.

I'll let you draw your on conclusions on that one. The scariest bit is at the end (Friends of Science is an anti-climate change group out of Calgary):

The proof, for Friends of Science founder Albert Jacobs, is in the policy.

"Our success is very recent, and our success is tied to the Conservative government," Mr. Jacobs says. "Rona Ambrose, she has been tearing down that Kyoto building."

The next big challenge, he says, is to reach children. The Friends of Science is now lobbying to have its message included in the grade-school curriculum.