An Alternative View On Canada’s Senate Killing The Climate Change Bill

Niagara At Large has posted a number of news and commentary pieces on the matter of climate change.

One of the most recent posts by NAL publisher Doug Draper, available for viewing on http://www.niagaraatlarge.com, slams Canada’s un-elected, Conservative-dominated Senate for killing a bill for a plan for reducing greenhouse gases that had previously received the support of a majority of duly elected members of the country’s parliament.

Niagara At Large has made it clear from its inception 11 months ago that this is a site that welcomes views that may run counter to those of its publisher and contributors. We don’t want to be an echo chamber that preaches to choir. We want to be venue for diverse views and for stimulating discussion and debate.

In that spirit, we are posting below a piece by Tom Harris, executive director of the Ottawa-based International Climate Science Coalition that questions that applauds the Senate for voting down that same climate bill.  It is a column that was recently published in the Montreal Gazette and one Harris agreed to share with NAL.

As always, we encourage you to share your views in the comment boxes below this piece. Remember always to keep those views civil and attached to your own name in keeping with NAL’s comment policy, which you can visit with a click at the top of our front page. Thank you, Doug Draper

Canada’s  Senate  Right To Kill Cimate Bill – “Sober, second thought” trumps political correctness on climate change

By Tom Harris

On the surface, NDP Leader Jack Layton’s outrage appears justified. It is certainly unusual that an un-elected Senate would kill a bill passed by the majority of the elected Members of Parliament.

Tom Harris, executive director of International Climate Science Coalition

It is even more extraordinary that this was done after only five days of relatively brief debate by Senators. Yet the Senate did the right thing. Bill C-311, “An Act to ensure Canada assumes its responsibilities in preventing dangerous climate change”, set, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “irresponsible targets” that would have led to “throwing hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people out of work.”

But Harper missed the opportunity to tell Canadians that the bill was a disaster also because it would accomplish essentially nothing with respect to global climate even if we did meet its draconian targets. It would not have even set a good example to the world’s leading emitters of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases supposedly responsible for “dangerous climate change.”

Indeed, even it were possible to ensure “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere”, as stated in the Purpose of C-311, climate would still change. As Professor Tim Patterson of Carleton University’s Department of Earth Sciences testified before the House of Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development in 2005, “…it’s obvious that climate is and always has been variable. In fact, the only constant about climate is change; …. We certainly have no chance of stopping this natural phenomenon.”

The concept expressed in C-311 that somehow we can “prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human-caused] interference with the climate system” is vastly premature.

We simply do not know if there is any significant anthropogenic global climate change happening now, or whether it will happen in the foreseeable future, let alone whether or not it may be “dangerous.” We cannot forecast climate decades in the future any better than we can forecast the weather two weeks from now. The system is simply too complex and our understanding of the basic science too primitive.

Dr. Chris Essex, Professor of Applied Mathematics at The University of Western Ontario explains, “Climate is one of the most challenging open problems in modern science. Some knowledgeable scientists believe that the climate problem can never be solved.” Not only are today’s computerized climate models (the primary basis of the alarm) not known to properly represent the climate system, they cannot be programmed to do so since we do not know the underlying science well enough to know what to program the computers to compute. Many scientists who work with the UN’s climate science body know this. They even state in their Third Assessment Report (Section 14.2.2.2, page 774): “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” Table 2.11 of their latest Assessment Report lists 16 forces associated with radioactive heat transfer and shows that the level of scientific understanding of 13 of them is below medium.

The common belief that we understand the impact of human greenhouse gas emissions on climate is simply wrong. International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) Chief Science Advisor Dr. Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia writes in his book Climate: The Counter Consensus, “science provides no unambiguous evidence that dangerous global warming or even measurable human-caused global warming is occurring … despite the expenditure since 1990 of many tens of billions of dollars searching for it.”

Many leading experts in the field agree with Essex, Carter and Patterson and 139 of them from 22 countries have been brave enough to endorse ICSC’s Climate Scientists’ Register which asserts, “We, the undersigned, having assessed the relevant scientific evidence, do not find convincing support for the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing, or will in the foreseeable future cause, dangerous global warming.”

 It is understandable that Alberta Liberal Senator Grant Mitchell, the sponsor of the bill in the Senate, would say that Canadians “had a right to have this bill debated properly.” But that should have included, before it was even voted on in the House of Commons, a full and open debate on the current state of climate science with testimony from experts on both sides of the issue.

The Prime Minister must now promote a proper examination of climate science by the Commons environment committee. The process started in a minor way during the Paul Martin regime when a very small number of skeptical scientists, Patterson being one of them, were permitted to testify. But this stopped as soon as the Conservatives took power. Harper must also allow Conservative MPs to echo the sentiments of their constituents – many, if not most Canadians, from across the political spectrum, simply do not believe the climate scare.

The Senate deserves our thanks for providing “sober, second thought” and making a politically difficult, but scientifically correct, decision. ________________________________________________________________

Tom Harris is Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition (http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/). He teaches a second year course on climate science in the department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa.

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