Global Scamming and Climate Plug Nickels?

UPDATE: The paper reviewed in this article has now been published.

Wow! I've had a sneak preview of a paper soon to be published by University of Ottawa physicist Denis Rancourt, and I have to say it is the clearest presentation on the subject of climate change that I have yet seen. It also blows a humungus hole in prevailing global warming theory.

It's not surprising that Prof. Rancourt would have a different take on this issue from that of the mainstream. He's a maverick teacher whose Activism Course is a thorn in the side of the university's administration. He thinks a university ought to inspire rather than inculcate, and should enlighten the whole community instead of just one segment of it.

Predictably, the administration and some of his more staid colleagues think otherwise and, as part of an effort to maintain the status quo, two excellent students, arbitrarily deemed incapable of absorbing university level material, were recently expelled. The students, twins of elementary school age, are fighting back with a law suit. Prof. Rancourt has been accused of egging them on, but he makes an excellent case that he has not, in fact could not because of the very premises upon which the Activism Course is based.

Personally, I attended as many classes as I could and had no problem with any of the content regarding war and occupation, human and animal rights, aboriginal self-determination, free market and monetary issues. But when it came to the environment, like most others I hadn't the technical knowledge to be able to draw my own conclusions, except that, like most Canadians, I thought Kyoto couldn't be a bad thing.

Prime Minister Harper expressed surprise that the environment has suddenly become an issue for Canadians. In doing so he revealed an abysmal lack of insight. The Kyoto accord allowed us to rest in the illusion that everything climate related was well in hand. His ditching it woke us up again. Presumably that's since been explained to him because he is now offering to "respect" the Kyoto accord - even though he thinks it's meaningless. After all, he wants to be re-elected with a majority.

Meanwhile I became intrigued by Prof. Rancourt's essay on Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" inserted into his lecture entitled: Social Analysis of Activism: Hippies, Militants, Liberals, and Fascists. If you haven't time to read the whole lecture, click here to go directly to the section entitled: "An Inconvenient Truth Is Too Convenient".

I saw the film and came away perplexed. I admit that I've always suspected Gore of being "one of them" for having walked away too quickly in 2000, allowing Bush to steal the election. But his whole global warming show is much too slick to be credible. The most bothersome thing is how he used swift visuals to create impressions that could be quite false.

The most blatant example was the huge chart with animated lines showing the increase in CO2. Gore's dire prediction of how much higher it is destined to quickly go was dramatically emphasized by his riding on a pneumatic lift to reach up to the point where he said it soared "off the chart". The thing is, one couldn't tell whether the units of measure were minuscule or massive.

Denis Rancourt, on the other hand, says the effect of increased CO2 could perhaps raise the mean temperature by 1 or 2 degrees, which he says would scarcely be noticed by humans. In fact, he argues three surprising things:

(1) that global warming (climate change, climate chaos, etc.) will not become humankind’s greatest threat until the sun has its next hiccup in a billion years or more (in the very unlikely scenario that we are still around), (2) that global warming is presently nowhere near being the planet’s most deadly environmental scourge, and (3) that government action and political will cannot measurably or significantly ameliorate global climate in the present world.

Wow again. Rancourt goes on to say that the very methods used to measure the effects of CO2 still require research and have not yet been proven valid, mainly because the data have not been released to other scientists for re-examination. At best, he says, they should be treated as suggestions, not directives.

Just as astronomers are aghast at how their asteroid predictions have been distorted by the fear-mongering media, so are some reputable scientists leery of research that fingers CO2 as the prime culprit for what ails our future.

With regard to weather anomalies, Rancourt says that: "Every year weather events occur and will always occur that have never occurred before in recorded history." and also that: "... none of the recent reports of weather events step outside of the statistical samples gathered by climatologists ..."

Rancourt reminds us also that today's media warn us only of things that don't threaten the power structure - a good thing to remember when trying to assess the importance of an issue.

He cites plenty of reasons besides greenhouse gases for such phenomena as forest fires (bad forest management), lives affected by flooding (more people living in flood plains), falling water tables (deforestation and watershed management practices), and so on. Solutions to such issues will not be found in the reduction of CO2, nor their causes in the annals of the mainstream.

Al Gore's simplistic demonstration has an equally simplistic solution - placing the onus on individuals to reduce their fossil fuel consumption. Of course he knows most people aren't likely to do that until they absolutely have to. Much like the huge polluting corporate congomerates on whom nobody seems prepared to exert any meaningful pressure because, as our Prime Minister says, it would harm the economy. Whose economy, theirs or ours?

It always comes down to the dollar, for both the individual who is showing scant interest in hybrid cars and the corporation who'd rather pay a fine than spend money to re-tool. Does the word "economy" really mean "shareholder profit"? Does a bear yewnowhut in the bush?

"Peru's glacier vanishing", screams one of this week's headlines. Is that because of CO2? Or could it be part of a syndrome that includes, for instance, Peru's rampant, illegal logging and its mining industry that pollutes the streams and kills off wildlife? Prof. Rancourt's paper suggests that the latter is more likely.

Can a reduction in fossil fuel consumption make any difference at all? "There is not a simple relation between fossil fuel burning and atmospheric CO2 ...," Rancourt asserts. But we will have to wait until his paper is published to learn the science behind that comment. In the meantime, he cites many other factors at work.

Factory farming, deforestation, solar radiation incidents, and even soot deposits on the snow that covers a glacier, all affect temperature, according to Rancourt. It's certainly a given that the ground is warmer underneath our parking lots, roads, sidewalks, and tiled patios, due to concrete absorbing the sun's rays rather than reflecting them. Peru has lots of concrete too. It also has a massive fishmeal industry that is doing great damage to wildlife and human health, and it has 5000 parrot breeding factories.

In other words, Peru is dying. And Peru is only one example of death by terminal big business that does little or nothing for the poverty level but is heartily endorsed by the U.S.A. - while the mainstream media focus on the melting glacier.

In these days when politicians are backed by weapons manufacturers, physicians receive perks from and own shares in big pharm, and scientists and free market advocates such as the Fraser Institute are funded by big oil, blaming CO2 for the problems of Mother Earth does seem a bit myopic. In the meantime, no serious plans for coping with the ultimate impact of the unabated rape of Earth's resources, the artificial creation of demands that never before existed for consumer products, a bizarre sort of capitalism that frantically strives for higher and higher industry growth through crass exploitation, financial chicanery, and sweat shop labour, and media that serve to distract rather than inform.

It's not nearly so simple as recycling, using energy saving light bulbs, and walking instead of riding. Denis Rancourt won't let us off so lightly. What's needed is "organized confrontation". We need to literally straightjacket the psychopathic military/industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against, we need to develop a foresightedness beyond today's stock prices, we need to cease destroying our fellow humans' infrastructure through war, and learn mutual cooperation instead, and we need to be sensibly prepared for all sorts of changes that have little or nothing to do with CO2.

Our governments are not going to take care of it for us, at least not without a very big push.

Part II - "... Nor any drop to drink"