NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 16, 2007
Northwest Passage
This last week, at the APEC conference in Australia, Prime Minister Harper put both feet in the global warmer. After a few introductory tips of his purely figurative hat towards something called “free trade,” he dived into the agenda-du-jour. It is what brings the sparkle to any politician’s eyes: the prospect of a vast new trough of fresh, succulent lard. For “the fight against global warming” is the plausible excuse for a huge expansion of government bureaucracies.Said Mr Harper: “The weight of scientific evidence holds that our atmosphere is getting hotter, that human activity is a significant contributor, and that there will be serious consequences for all life on earth. The physical evidence is already there for all to see. “For example, this year there is more ice-free, open water in the Northwest Passage, our Arctic waterway from the Atlantic to the Pacific, than has ever been recorded before. “And after a series of mild winters, our forests in British Columbia are being ravaged by a beetle that the cold used to contain to more southerly regions.” As someone who innocently voted for the guy, I find such statements painful. Now, rather than take my word for it, the reader might instead go to Amazon and order herself a copy of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, by the Hudson Institute’s Dennis Avery, and the climate physicist, Fred Singer. These gentlemen have assembled the results of strictly peer-reviewed studies by more than 500 fully-accredited scientific specialists, from such journals as Nature, Science, and Geophysical Review Letters. In Mr Avery’s words, they “make a mockery of recent claims that a scientific consensus blames humans as the primary cause of global temperature increases.” Among the findings: that natural climate cycles have produced more than a dozen global warmings since the last Ice Age, and shown strong links between our present one and variations in the sun's irradiance. That sea levels are not currently rising significantly, that storms and droughts have become fewer and milder, that corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well. Moreover, since cold has always killed far more people than heat, we can only look forward to a slower death rate. Unless, of course, global political machinations wreck the economic order upon which real human lives depend. When Al Gore spouts the environmentalcase rubbish for which he is notorious, we know what his constituency is. But what is it with Stephen Harper? Well, I'm sure he's lost the B.C. forest-beetle vote: they will see what's coming for them. (In point of fact, our own forestry service treats the outbreak of the mountain pine beetle as a natural phenomenon, restoring a diversity of species to our plundered forests, and therefore to be welcomed.) And as for all that open water in the Arctic this year, whoopee! We'll be able to patrol it with our home-made "slush-breakers," that need normally be confined to southern ports from early autumn, lest they encounter ice. And we’ll have more time to build new and better before the ice returns -- for as anyone familiar with navigation in the earth’s polar regions is surely aware, sea ice is something that comes and goes with alacrity. As I’ve written before, the solar cycle appears to be reaching the end of its manic phase, and we should not be surprised by the onset of rather crisp global cooling over the coming decades. But even supposing the warming trend were to continue geometrically, in obedience to doomsday rhetoric, why on earth would a Canadian Conservative be alarmed? For IF this were true, it would be Canada's lucky day. We should be gloating! The world will be starving, while we are farming the Hudson Bay lowlands. The world will be parched, while we are guzzling the fresh glacial run-off. Bring on the sun! Moreover, a quick atlas check persuades me that there is a fairly close demographic relation, both in Canada and USA, between height above sea level and the propensity to vote gliberal (i.e. Liberal and NDP, or Democrat). Such that, a sea level rise of just 50 feet would give us a Conservative majority up here, and put the Republicans back in charge of Congress down there, while guaranteeing that neither Hillary nor Chelsea Clinton ever becomes President. (The submergence of Prince Edward Island alone would cost our Liberals four seats.) And does my reader have any idea what open shipping through the Northwest Passage would mean for Canadian business? Billions, my boy, billions! David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top