by Rex Murphy
So, Toronto takes its bylaws very seriously. And so does the Ontario government. When a minister scolds a widescreen demigod, you know it’s serious. The environment is a big issue in this province, as I hope this comparative study illustrates. Those Scots may be slackers, but Ontario is the dour jurisdiction when it comes to its air.
Just as it’s big on global warming. Or so I thought. This is a province in love with blue boxes and a house of great crusaders against the tobacco menace—which no less an authority than Al Gore has recently linked to the global warming phenomenon itself. Except when it comes to areas larger than a pop star’s studied show of trivial rebellion, or something a little more drastic than parking the liquor empties in the right-coloured bin.
Consider the statement this week of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.
Rona Ambrose, the federal environment minister, has been talking of imposing fuel-emission standards on automobile manufacturers. Here’s Mr. McGuinty: “The one thing we will not abide is any effort on the part of the national government to unduly impose greenhouse-gas emission reductions on the province of Ontario at the expense of the auto sector.”
This is the same premier who recently welcomed the news that government-subsidized GM plants would soon be the home for the manufacture of the new “muscle car,” the gas-guzzling Camaro.
Fine a hotel for one star-lit cigarette, but welcome the manufacture of thousands of environmentally retrograde muscle cars. And promise not to “abide” any effort to “unduly impose greenhouse-gas reductions.” This is a parable of the entire global-warming debate. Those who accept the science of the climate-change projections, who profess to be most anxious over the “greatest crisis” of our times, will say every right word, and pursue the most trivial acts of symbolic environmentalism. But when it comes to action that has any real cost—political or personal—they are as hard-line an opponent to any change in the status quo as the most relentless climate skeptic.
It really is time for those who say they accept the crisis represented by climate change to live up to their professions.
The skeptics can always retire to Glasgow. And contemplate the Scottish understanding of an enclosed space. While having, if it pleases them, a smoke.
NUMBERS GAME | November 4, 2006
The Stern Review on Global Warming was released this week, and once I’d had the chance to catch a few of the headlines it inspired, I thought immediately of Joey Smallwood.
Mr. Smallwood liked big numbers. Especially big numbers preceded by dollar signs. If a road somewhere on the South Coast was about to be paved, a new trades school built, or a new industrial project launched, Joey would wind himself up and find a microphone. “This new road/school/industry is going to cost NOT 10 million dollars, NOT 20 million dollars, but FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS!”
He could find nearly infinite rhetorical variations on a simple number (breaking it down into its constituent “hundreds of thousands”; pluralizing—50 millions of dollars—etc., etc. and etc.). The trick was to bludgeon Newfoundlanders, not accustomed even to the sound (never mind the actual possession) of great amounts of cash, into a state of catatonic awe at the nearly inconceivable heaps of money this project or that was going to cost.
The trick grew stale. After a while, being told how many twenties were in a stack of 50 million dollars became tedious, and the long tease of “not 10, not 20, not 30 but … X millions of dollars” became a risible bore. Another failing of the technique was the fading power of the word “million.” By the end of his fractious reign, the campaign speeches rang with allusion to hitherto unapproached altitudes of “billions of dollars.”
When arithmetic is rhetoric, each new speech must have a bigger number. Let us call it Smallwood’s Law.
The Stern report on climate change illustrates Smallwood’s Law in a way that would make the old conjuror proud. It projects a cost to the world, if measures are not taken to mitigate or halt global warming, of seven trillion dollars. Even in these days of Enron-scale frauds and income trust cancellations, a trillion dollars is an astronomical number. Seven trillion summons the galaxies and all their wheeling stars.
I look at that number more as an instrument to arrest attention than as a real figure. If Sir Nicholas Stern had said nine trillion or six trillion, would he have been pounced on by accountants and academics the next day saying, “He’s up by two trillion, or down by one?” I don’t think so.
When we enter the area of projecting costs in the trillions of dollars, based on the wild variables of planetary weather patterns over the next forty-five years or so, and speculations on the industrial growth of 162 nations over the same period—a marriage, let it be noted, of two roulette tables: weather forecasting and the stock market—any claim of exactitude is at best a mirage, at worst a carny’s bark.
I know that skepticism over global warming—or, as it has been more tactically rebranded, “climate change”—is less and less a popular stance. In some quarters, it even approaches being socially unacceptable. On the not-so-far fringes of Gaia-consciousness, to mark such disapprobation, the phrase “climate change denial” is being tested out.
It is a worrisome development. The ardent advocates of climate change are more than a little imperious in their certitudes. Every counterargument or qualification to their view of things is discounted as being “paid for” by the oil industry. Or, it is labelled as being a denial of “the science.” They cast yesterday’s hurricane as “evidence” of extreme weather brought on by greenhouse gas emissions in the full knowledge that what we now call one “weather event” is, or can be, proof of nothing.
In my view, it cannot be emphasized sufficiently that the climate-change movement is at least as much a subcategory of rhetoric—the art of persuasion—as it is a branch of science. It is at least as much a partisan exercise (partisan in the sense of supporting a cause) as a harvest of neutral experiment and observation.
The science is not complete. The models are not perfect. The projections, economic or meteorological, over the next fifty to two hundred years are most unobligingly and massively complex. Prediction on this scale is necessarily wildly fallible.
Journalistic skepticism on climate change is a rare orchid indeed. Too many journalists are advocates, and that—whatever the cause—is a fatal mixing of mutually exclusive categories.
Most pernicious in this context is the attempt to declare, “The debate is over.” It isn’t over. That declaration is unsupported assertion. It is rhetoric’s oldest trick. Just as declaring the arguments of those who see things differently as being corrupted by other interests is not a counterargument but a commonplace ad hominem evasion.
It is in this same territory that I place the Stern review’s $7 trillion warning. It is not a number. It is just a gorgeous and late-blooming illustration of Smallwood’s Law. How Joe would have worked it—a seven and then that whole mile of zeros.
I can, alas, hear him now.
DESPICABLE MASK FOR A WEAK ARGUMENT | May 2, 2007
It’s not just the planet that’s warming, it’s the rhetoric on the subject of the planet’s warming.
Elizabeth May, the Green leader, in a sermon preached this past weekend in London, Ontario, invoked the words of an activist British journalist who has likened the governments of Tony Blair, George Bush and Stephen Harper and their respective responses to global warming as worse than Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis. May cited his words, but now claims on the Green website she did not compare Nazi government and the Holocaust to any current issue.
In a purely literal sense, perhaps she did not, but if you are preaching a sermon in a church and global warming is its theme, you are not chatting loosely with friends in a coffee shop. Furthermore, invoking Chamberlain and appeasement in reference to those who do not share your views makes it fairly clear you also wish to invoke the unqualified moral authority of what followed appeasement, the Holocaust, on your side of the rhetorical ledger.
Another noted
environmentalist, Prince Charles, has been standing on this same tricky ledge. The Prince has claimed that urgent action is needed on climate change and likened the struggle to do something about it to Britain’s battle against the Nazis in World War II. These are not the only occasions. The more fervent advocates of global warming are also far too fond of calling those who disagree with them “deniers,” trying to colour a policy difference with the brush of Holocaust denial.
It is a despicable tactic. There are a number of problems with injecting the Holocaust or its shadow into the current political debate on global warming, and the separate debate on what to do about it. For the West, the Holocaust is the absolute standard of evil. It was—maybe the reminder is necessary—the deliberate, conscious torture and inhuman murder of six million people, men, women and children, by the Nazi government because those people were Jews. It is also a historical fact, something that dreadfully has really and already happened. Aside from the most pathetic anti-Semites, no one can or does dispute it.
Political policy on global warming is a choice, from a range of possibilities about what to do in the face of some very serious arguments that mankind is influencing the global climate. Advocates on either side may be claiming absolute certainty for their positions, but precisely because we are dealing with the future, approximated by models and estimates, neither side can possess such certainty. Invoking the Holocaust is wrong first on logical grounds. It has happened. We know it. Global warming policy is an attempt to meet a future contingency. The tactic is also wrong on a much higher level, for it is an attempt to claim, or associate with, the absolute moral authority that belongs to the Holocaust and all who were victims of its torments, and to transfer that absolute authority to the advocacy of a current and contentious issue.
Extreme rhetoric is often a mask for weak argument. It is also very often an attempt to override discussion in favour of a stampede to predetermined and unexamined policies. Surely, with all the science that Kyoto and its advocates have lined up on their side of the debate, dipping into the history of appeasement and the Holocaust is, at the very best, unnecessary.
Too many people, I among them, have noted the overlap, sometimes tending to perfect symmetry, between environmentalism and the more rigid varieties of religious adherence.
For all the most ardent environmentalist’s loud prattle about the “science,” they show precious little respect for any contest over their views. Scientists don’t invoke the Holocaust when there is a quarrel over a line of research, or a dispute in some of the arcane understandings of quantum physics. They do not see quarrels as a form of heresy, or seek to argue down their opponents by questioning their motives and associations.
The most strident of the global warming enthusiasts—and they are many—demonstrate a willingness to be very nasty indeed when it comes to “debating” those who hold a different view from them. And of all their miserable tactics the attempt to picture their opponents as in the same moral domain as Holocaust deniers is the most desperate and despicable. Some scientists.
THE NEW INQUISITION | February 16. 2008
David Suzuki has stirred a minor controversy, recently, by some remarks he made in a speech to six hundred students at McGill University. A report in the McGill Daily tells us “he urged today’s youth to speak out against politicians complicit in climate change.”
“Complicit” is the damning word there. People are complicit only in dark and pernicious undertakings. He went on to suggest the students “look for a legal way to throw our current political leaders in jail for ignoring science,” those comments drawing rounds of cheering and applause.
Well, this is a turnaround of some proportions. In the old days, the really old days, it was the foes of science, the enemies of what we have come to call the Enlightenment, who used to call for the rack, the stake and the dungeon to treat those who challenged religion’s pre-eminent authority to both speak and know the truth.
We generally look upon it as a backward moment when the Catholic Church put the bridle on Galileo, subjected him to house arrest and the tender rebukes of the Inquisition. So it’s at least mildly disconcerting to hear of a celebrated son of the Enlightenment, in the person of one of Canada’s star communicators, urging a university audience, no less, to seek to “jail” those whom he perceives as “ignoring science.” I think it’s fairly clear he doesn’t really mean science in general here, but rather a very particular subset of that great endeavour, the contentious and agenda-riven field of global warming.
I am under no illusion about the force of the global warming consensus. It is the grand orthodoxy of our day. Among right-thinking people, the idea of expressing any doubts on some of its more cataclysmic projections, to speak in tones other than those of veneration about its high priests, such as David Suzuki or Al Gore, is to stir a response uncomfortably close to what, in previous and less rational times, was reserved for blasphemers, heretics and atheists.
But wherever we are on global warming, and on the models and theories supporting it, it is not yet the Truth, nor is it yet Science (with a capital S) as such. And to put a stay on our full consent to its more clamorous and particular alarms is not, pace Dr. Suzuki, either “ignoring science” or “complicity” in criminal endeavour. Nor is reasoned dissent or dispute on some or all of the policy recommendations that global warming advocates insist flow, as night follows day, from their science.
It’s worth pausing on this point. What global warming is, what portion of it is man-made, is one set of questions properly within the circle of rational inquiry we call science. What to do about it—shut down the oil sands, impose a carbon tax, sign on to Kyoto, mandate efficient light bulbs or hybrid cars—are choices within a range of public policy options that have to be made outside any laboratory whatsoever.
Global warming’s more fulminating spokespeople are apt to finesse that great chasm between the science and the politics. They are further apt to imply a continuum between the unassailable authority of real and neutral science and their own particular policy prescriptions. (I notice late in the week that something called Environmental Defence has hailed the Alberta oil sands as “the most destructive project on Earth.” It goes on to say that “your desire to tackle global warming is being held hostage by the Tar Sands.” I’m not sure how they latched on to that “your” there. Is Environmental Defence elected? But let that pass; it is the tactic that is familiar.)
Global warming is the truth. So, shutting down the oil sands is also the truth. If global warming is primarily a “man-made” phenomenon, then what to do about it is a political discussion before it is anything else at all. If Environmental Defence or Dr. Suzuki thinks shutting down the oil sands is not a political choice, I advise both the group and the man to visit Alberta and acquaint themselves, while they are at it, with the history of the National Energy Program, and what its consequences were for the West and Confederation. Shutting down the oil sands would make the storm over the NEP feel like a soft rain on a sultry day by comparison. It would break the Confederation.
So, far from jailing our politicians if they continue to debate what should be done, I’m in favour of leaving them where they are for now. If that’s a soft stance, all I can say is that I favour discussion over imprisonment. Dr. Suzuki will surely agree that truth, like science, is not under the ownership of either any one group or any one man. To argue that those who question a prevailing orthodoxy should, even metaphorically, be tossed in jail is radically inconsistent with the essence and spirit of science itself, the essence and spirit that Dr. Suzuki, in his better moments, so clearly reveres.
We may decorate reports with graphs and charts and huge numbers, and conjure pages of the most exquisite and arcane equations, but the very best we can offer on climate a hundred years from now is a series of sophisticated and ever-ramifying probabilities that are themselves subject to a myriad of unforeseeable contingencies.
Who will undertake the difficult task of sifting the real science
from the alarmist advocacy? Who will draw the boundaries between climate activism and cold analysis? Who will present a statement of the case, as close as reason and science today can make it, to what we actually know, and can reasonably project on the basis of what we know?
CANADIAN IDENTITY
WITHOUT HOCKEY | November 20, 2004
We are being tested as a nation. Winter has made its first strikes in a number of regions.
Poor Nova Scotia got belted early, and then Newfoundland got its first real smack. I know down home the weather in any season is a kind of test, but winter assaults mind and body with an almost conscious fury. A Newfoundland winter is an extended torment, mainly, I think, because Newfoundlanders never know when it begins or ends.
Snow on the 24th of May, the great mid-spring holiday weekend, is so regular as to be preordained. We have to wait for sunshine and warmth in Newfoundland.
And while we wait and grumble, elsewhere in what was once the great Dominion, flowers whose names I will never know are in blossom. Joggers are in their short pants for months, the Vancouverites—who are climate snobs—are out on the sidewalks, sipping decaf in March, the various chinooks have given Albertans a stay against the long frost, but poor Newfoundland can be up to its (metaphorical, of course) ears in slush, with another blizzard lying in wait—in June.
Some of the weariness of winter, both at home and all over this frigid country, is dissipated by the defences we have built against it. Newfoundlanders of an earlier time were much given to the manufacture of their own diversions. I suspect that half the really good folk songs and all the great stories of my place had their origins by the heat of a kitchen stove, under the glow of a kerosene lamp, as singer or storyteller broke the siege of the winter months by spinning a yarn or honing a melody.