Dear Fellow Canadians,
RE: COVID Lessons Learned to be Applied to Climate Change – Politicians Can’t Stop Climate Change
In comments to the media following the recent federal election, some politicians have indicated that they intend to apply lessons learned from the COVID crisis to the climate emergency.
The COVID lessons to be applied to climate change should be that of Hans Rosling’s advice from his book “Factfulness” – that “fear plus urgency leads to stupid, drastic decisions with unpredictable side effects”. Rosling was a Swedish medical doctor and international public health expert who had worked on the front lines of Ebola. He was very honest in his book about how one of his lockdowns, while desperately trying to save lives, had led to the unfortunate deaths of many innocent people – just as the global COVID lockdown, in trying to save lives, has harmed, or led to the deaths of so many people through isolation, overdose, suicide, deferred therapeutic/diagnostic treatments, and cancelled surgeries.
Professor Douglas Allen shows the harm and costs of mass lockdowns (versus selected protections of vulnerable populations) are up to 282 times the alleged benefit.
As many people are aware, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its AR6 report just days before the writ was dropped. While media made much of the press release issued by UN Sec-Gen Antonio Guterres which claimed there was a ‘Code Red’ for humanity, inciting fear and demanding urgent climate action, the actual scientific report says something completely different. In the full 3,949-page AR6 the terms “climate crisis” and “climate emergency” appear only once, on page 1-35 during a discussion about media coverage of climate change. It does not see humanity’s future as an unlivable Hades; the source of the fear of a climate emergency rested upon projections based on a scenario known as Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP 8.5). In this report, this RCP8.5 temperature range is no longer seen as our likely future.
The climate emergency is also based on a set of global climate models [computer simulations] that are far too sensitive to greenhouse gas increases as evidenced by the growing discrepancy between their simulations and actual measurements of air temperatures. For example, the Canadian climate model simulates the global average surface air temperature increasing at 2.9 times the measured air temperatures over the period 1970 to 2020. The technical paper Mitchell et al (2020) finds that the Canadian climate model simulates the greatest warming in the upper-troposphere, roughly 7 times larger than the observed trends. This implies that future warming will be far slower than projected by alarmist groups like the IPCC.
This is good news as it means the climate emergency is over. We DO have time.
COVID lockdowns must never be transferred into climate lockdowns, as some activists have proposed. There is no need to implement a War Measures Act to address the alleged climate emergency, nor is there a need for a personal carbon ration.
As researchers Roger Pielke, Jr. and Justin Ritchie have found, countless scientific research papers on climate are based on the unrealistic RCP8.5 scenario, which is now deemed to be implausible, and indeed, these scenarios were never meant to be used for policymaking. This has distorted our view of humanity’s climate future. As Pielke, Jr., points out, this kind of colossal error has also been made in the world of medicine in the past.
It will take strong climate leadership by Canada’s climate team to take this message that the climate emergency is over to our international colleagues at the upcoming 26th UN Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, but it will be well worth it. Imagine how relieved and joyful people will be to realize that the climate emergency is over! Canada can be the bearer of this good news. And, just in time.
As we have recently observed in the UK, energy prices are skyrocketing, power curtailments or blackouts are possible. Essential food items cannot be processed due to a lack of critical supply of carbon dioxide (CO2) for food processing, their power generation system is near collapse as the price of natural gas skyrockets, supply is limited, industry is collapsing due to costs and, and the interconnect power line to French nuclear power has been damaged. Fortunately for us, this is a concrete example of the disastrous implications of an urgent drive toward NetZero2030/2050 targets. Britain was far ahead on the climate path and had widely adopted wind farm renewables – but the wind stopped for ~35 days. Without properly planned residual capacity by reliable power like coal or sufficient long-term storage of natural gas in the power generation system, Britain is hitting a wall.
It is likely that their medical services will suffer too. In the research paper “Power Outages, Extreme Events and Health: A Systematic Review of the Literature from 2011-2012” electricity was recognized by the UK Department of Health as ‘the most vital’ of infrastructure services because ‘without it, most other services will not function’. 100% renewables would make modern medicine impossible.
Now that we see what destructive implications there are to making radical moves toward NetZero, it is good to realize the climate emergency is over, and that we DO have time to develop reliable, affordable alternative forms of energy slowly and methodically rather than turning the world upside down.
We can stop right now and drop the NetZero commitment as it is clearly not in the public interest. It would not afford Canadians the peace, order, and good government that we all expect.
Likewise, going into the election, Canadians had not been provided with any reasonable cost estimate of decarbonization/NetZero by our government. Former public servant and diplomat Robert Lyman had done a ballpark estimate that Canadians would have to forego at least $250,000 per person in income, or $1 million per family of 4. That did not include the additional tax burden of building out new multi-billion-dollar infrastructure for additional power generation and all the high voltage power lines that would have to crisscross Canada for kilometers.
But now we do have time for the new government to do a thorough cost-benefit analysis of proposed climate and energy policies and properly gain public approval or rejection of these proposals. The fact that the climate emergency is over also renders the need for a carbon tax irrelevant and the Climate Accountability Act (Bill C-12) is also no longer necessary.
In closing, we invite Canadians, and people worldwide, to join our free on-line Friends of Science Society 18th Annual Event – featuring two free presentations on the theme of “Politicians Can’t Stop Climate Change”.
The first event is on Oct. 2, 2021, at 10am MDT, with Dr. Guus Berkhout of CLINTEL, the international group of over 900 scientists and scholars who affirm that the climate emergency is over. Dr. Berkhout will address “Climate Science: Let the Data Speak”.
The second event will be on Oct. 6, 2021, at 7pm MDT with author Marc Morano addressing “Green New Deal: The Great Regret”.
We have been providing insights on climate science and related energy policies since the days of the Kyoto Accord; as we now see, the Paris Agreement suffers from the same faulty climate science premises and disastrous economics. For more concise insights on the science and economics, please review our new report “Fighting Climate Change: Can We Humans Regulate Earth’s Climate?”, sponsored by Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy.
Step up Canada and tell our global colleagues the truth about climate change – the climate emergency is over. We DO have time.
Sincerely,
Michelle Stirling
Communications Manager
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