A Bronx Cheer for the big guy at the end of the aughts

It is customary at the end of a year to reflect on the events of that year and what we might have learned from them, for better or for worse. The same sort of exercise applies to the end of a decade. Often media writes these reflections up as the most “newsworthy” stories, etc. Since media claims to be the gatekeeper of news, this is kind of a poor man’s Academy Award show, where industry insiders pat themselves on the back for their picks.

I am a blogger, so screw MSM. I’ll sort my way through the decade.

With respect to the past year, I would say that climate science gets the top billing.

First, we had the Copenhagen conference, two years in the planning, which was supposed to set the stage for an embryonic world government to deal with planetary resources. By any measure it completely failed. It was probably the last gasp of something Maurice Strong put in motion 30 years ago.

Many of the same sad bunch will meet in Mexico City next year, but it won’t hold a candle to the promise that was to be Copenhagen.

Second, we had the leaked or hacked e-mails from the climate science top dogs who admitted to themselves, if not to us, that the science is anything but settled. Leaving aside the career jealousies and the attempts to control the peer review process that were evident in these 2,000 pages of e-mails, they puzzled over the hiatus in warming for the past decade, had no explanation for it, admitted it did not fit the theory, and began to doubt their own analysis and the data behind it. They clearly demonstrated that they had really no idea why the world of the past warmed or cooled, having dismissed ice core samples as being imprecise and having trouble making tree ring data fit the theory as well.

I am told relentlessly by fans of AGW that the medieval warm period is irrelevant, and in any case, we don’t know enough about it, and that all that matters is the dramatic rise in the past century of CO2. This is unprecedented they tell me.

How do we know, I say, when we don’t anything reliable about the past? Logic fails here for reasons I get into later.

What also fails to knock these folks off their game is that the temperature and the CO2 have not been consistent. For periods in the past century, including the last decade, the temperature has not been inexorably rising as the AGW says it should since the CO2 has been unalterably rising.

I would say that many more people believed the AGW hypothesis than disbelieved it at the beginning of this decade and, at the end of the decade, these numbers have reversed, with more disbelieving it than believing it. This will have political consequences.

During this decade, I would say religion was the most important driver in world affairs. And by that I mean religion in its broadest sense, including the religion of global warming.

We started the decade believing a new era of reason, science and rationalism would prevail. Not more than a year passed and we saw religious zealots of Islamic persuasion carry out audacious suicide attacks on the cities of New York and Washington.

One of the fallouts from these attacks was the new stringent security rules that air travelers were subjected to before they could board airplanes. At the end of the decade, yet another in a long line of Islamic attempts at murder by aircraft in Detroit has led to even more onerous impositions on air travelers.

So, on behalf of all civilian aviation, let’s give Mohammed a big Bronx cheer.

One of the things that began to dawn on western societies during this decade was the impact of Islam, not just in Islamic countries, but in the heart of western civilization. We have not yet found a way to effectively deal with this foreign political-religio philosophy and I expect the next decade will see us increasingly absorbed by that issue.

One of the things that has become clearer near the end of the decade, however, is that, like the doubts that have begun to permeate over the certainty of climate science, the rose-coloured lenses that viewed Islam as “one of the world’s great religions” and a “religion of peace” have cracked and fallen away.

In Europe, the people are either voting with their feet, leaving for non-European western nations, or are organizing populist political parties that take aim at Islam as a menace. The political establishment in Europe is on shaky ground having spent its political capital during the decade appeasing and propping up Muslims while simultaneously suppressing nascent European nationalism. Its cupboard is nearly bare and I would expect to see the old guard swept away in future elections by those who do not wish to see the Islamification of Europe. After all, there are still many more Europeans who vote than Islamists and they know they will have to act politically soon while they still can.

The outcome will not be pretty.

Australia has shown some muscle in dealing with the issue, but Canada appears to be still very much asleep at the switch.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Americans have elected an anachronism to the highest office. Just as the rest of the world begins to march down a different path opposing Islam, President Obama runs around the planet praising the religion to the skies, misrepresenting it in the process, and promising to defend the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab, ignoring the right of Muslim women not to wear the hijab.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that his efforts are viewed by the Islamic world as weakness, and by even some of the jellyfish European politicians as foolish, and by the American public as misguided.

The day after the Fort Hood massacre, Obama cautioned the public not to jump to conclusions. Three days after the attempt to blow up the airplane in Detroit he has not said anything to the American public. Air travel in the United States is in complete turmoil, but not a word directly from the President. Perhaps if the news stories had been framed, not as another Muslim terrorist at it again, but as white people arresting a black man on board an airplane, he would be inclined to be more loquacious.

Unless he shifts ground within the next year, he will probably suffer the worst fate a President can endure; he will lose his moral authority to govern.

The irrelevance of Copenhagen and the relevance of the burka

If you ever wondered whether the world-wide meeting in Copenhagen this week has any relevance to the real world, this news story from Politico.com should sort that out for you pretty quickly.

COPENHAGEN –Iranian Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe plan to address negotiators at international climate talks in Copenhagen next week.


The three leaders are listed in a line-up of more than 180 government officials published in a United Nations schedule of speakers. Each head of state will have up to three minutes to address roughly 700 delegates, reporter, observers and civil society groups.


The assistant president of Sudan, Nafie Ali Nafie kicks off the speeches at noon on Wednesday.


Nafie chairs the G-77 group, a block of developing nations pushing hard for more money and stricter emissions cuts from rich countries.


Mostapha Zaher, director-general of Afghanistan's Environmental Protection Agency, is listed as the final speaker. He’ll take the podium slightly before 2 a.m. next Friday.


Other leaders addressing the conference include everyone from Saad Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon, to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.


Roughly 110 world leaders plan to attend the talks, an unprecedented number for a climate conference. Typically, only a handful of top leaders attend the negotiations. President Barack Obama is expected at the meeting on Friday.

Note that the speakers are limited to 3 minutes each. The Iranian leader was limited to 15 minutes at the United Nations and went on and on and on for 40 minutes without interference from the Chair. With Mugabe and Chavez scheduled as well, look for more CO2 to be spewed into the atmosphere than is produced in this country in one year. I would like to see any of these three limit themselves to 3 minutes.

You may be wondering why I led off with the picture. It is a woman in the U.S. midwest who is dressed to deal with the deep freeze that is currently setting new temperature lows in North America as a result of global warming. I included the picture because I have been opposed to the Burka, but I think I may have discovered a practical use for this garment in combatting the intense cold caused by global warming.

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets

I saw an interview on television last night with George Monbiot. He is a columnist in the British newspaper, The Guardian, and the author of a climate change book, Heat: How to stop the planet burning. The title pretty much tells you which side of the climate debate he is on, although he would object to that statement, since he firmly believes there is no real debate, as all the so-called deniers are just poseurs arguing bad science or non science.

I read through some of his archived columns and the Wikipedia description of him this morning and he has quite the curriculum vitae. He seems to me to be an anti-establishment activist. Monbiot is an advocate of the “consume less” society. Naturally, supporting the conventional wisdom on climate change fits that political agenda to a tee.

I was interested to see him because the news of the leaked e-mails from the British Climate Research Unit shook him up. He called for the head of that institute, Phil Jones, to step down.

But he seems to have recovered his cool, if last night’s interview was an indication. He was smooth, poised, polished and definitely in command. He was here to accomplish two things: to participate in a climate change debate and to beat up on Canada for foot -dragging on climate change and interfering with the rest of the world that is rushing to get on with the program at Copenhagen.

Of course, he was asked about the leaked e-mails and he was in full defense mode, characterizing it as maybe evidence of some bad behaviour by 3 or 4 people, but in no way derailing the accepted science of climate change. According to him there are “hundreds” of “lines” of evidence in the scientific community, from across many disciplines, which support the IPCC view of the world’s coming climate.

I found that statement interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, the usual accusation against the climate deniers is that they are not “climatologists”, even if they have other scientific credentials. This ignores the fact that there are climatologists who dispute the AGW theory, some of whom used to be “go to” people for the IPCC, who have since dissociated themselves from it. Leaving that point aside, here we have a pro-IPCC supporter flogging the fact that non climatologists support AGW as proof of the theory.

Hmmm.

A little hypocrisy at play there.

Secondly, it is more than 3 or 4 scientists at the heart of this initial scandal. As well, similar accusations have cropped up in Australia and New Zealand regarding the accuracy of the temperature records around the globe.

What Monbiot didn’t say is as important as what he did say. These so-called “3 or 4” that he went to lengths to dismiss as irrelevant are not your backroom, white-coated lab geeks, with plastic pocket protectors and Scotch Tape holding their outsized eyeglasses together. These scientists are the rock stars of the IPCC and the face of the public shilling for AGW. It would be like collusion amongst Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, Bobby Hull, or any other high scoring hockey players who might have played at the same time, to limit their goal output to influence the outcome of the games their teams play.

Monbiot failed to address the most distressing point of all (which the interviewer should have asked him). The CRU lost all the original temperature data records, so nobody can be sure what the base measurements were. It is also clear from the e-mails that the data base they do have, which was manipulated and massaged from the original data, is seriously corrupted to the point that the complier gave up in frustration trying to make sense of it.

Now you can say what you like, as Monbiot did, that biology, chemistry, physics, etc., all support the AGW theory, but in the end, it is the temperature that matters. If you can’t rely on a verifiable base of accurate temperature, how can you predict how that has changed? You have built a theory on sand, not concrete.

Monbiot dismissed the idea of a world-wide conspiracy to fabricate global warming, indicating that not only would thousands of competitive scientists have to stop being competitive to make it happen, but also politicians and media.

Yes, but only if you think of conspiracy as a planning exercise, like a bunch of crooks getting together to plan a break into a bank vault after hours.

There is another sense of conspiracy in the form of the Zeitgeist (spirit of the time). It is not planned, it is simply embraced. It is a mass movement, not unlike a religious movement. In one of his columns on his blog, Monbiot dismisses climate deniers as belonging to a religious movement.

But the same could be said for AGW supporters.

Climate “science” is based on computer algorithms, which depend for their reliability on a good base of information (which we have just discovered through these e-mails that we do not have) and the ability to compute huge swaths of measureable data accurately. The climate models all fail in one fashion or another to take account of all the chaotic nature of the relevant climate inputs. In short, their reliability as accurate predictors is suspect.

In the normal course, one would have to say this is a stupid basis on which to reorganize our global societies.

So what accounts for Copenhagen, if it is not reason?

The answer is simply that it is a mass movement, not really any different from the South Sea Bubble or the Tulip Bubble or any of the other historical parallels where multitudes of people bought into the theory of the rising tide and jumped on board before the ship sailed and stranded them on shore. People want to believe that they can change the planet to something better. It is utopia in all its glory at play.

Here is a paragraph from Eric Hoffer’s excellent little book on mass movements, The True Believer:

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and the potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking.

George Monbiot’s personal history reveals a person who is a malcontent and wants to change the world. His pathology is shared by millions in the developed world who feel guilty about the consumerism and waste they have embraced, the unsustainable globe. The AGW theory is just the wedge they need to bring about the utopian world of which they dream.

And here is what Hoffer had to say about that:

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them.

Nothing to see here, move along

Since we live in a busy world and there is only so much time a person can devote to the “news of the day”, it behooves us to ration our time carefully. Many people, in my opinion, glance at headlines and the first paragraph in a newspaper, form their opinions from that, and move on. Similarly, many people still get their impressions of the world from television news, a highly manipulative medium, which assaults us, simultaneously, with pictures (some of which are merely archived video), speech and headlines crawling across the bottom of the screen. I do not understand why anybody would subject themselves to this barrage – it produces shell shock in me. At the end of a broadcast I am never certain what I have learned or how I feel about it.

My preference is to search for news sources and opinion makers I generally trust on-line on the Internet. They could be found in on-line newspapers or blogs or occasionally broadcast outlets. You can take as much time as you need or is available to you. You can drill down to get the depth of material needed to understand a story and you can quickly link to other sites to give more background or different perspectives. You can bookmark them for easy access and you can save their output for future reference.

The difference between lazy reporting and thoughtful journalism shows up in today’s Toronto Sun.

Both items refer to the current scandal that has been dubbed "Climategate".

In a news story, a reporter tries to tell us that the leaked e-mails from the CRU are essentially irrelevant in the matter of climate debate. He quotes one global warming skeptic, a climatologist, with the Friends of Science organization, who thinks they are important because they show that the data on which the whole edifice of global warming is based may be false or distorted, and then immediately dismisses that person’s opinion with this sentence:

But most mainstream media and serious science groups have dismissed this interpretation of the e-mails as mischief.

Full points for identifying the MSM as a protector of the conventional wisdom, but “serious science groups”, who would they be? This reporter seems to think they include the Sierra Club and the Pembina Institute, because he cites quotations from their spokespeople. These are not scientific organizations, they are environmental advocacy groups.

What are we getting from this reporter? Is he displaying his bias by putting down the skeptics in favour of the pro global warming crowd? Or is he just ignorant?

One clue that he might not know what he is writing about is this sentence:

The e-mails, between top climate change scientists, appear to reveal top scientists were suppressing information that contradicted the widely held theory, backed up by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, that climate change is man-made.

Wrong, Mr. Reporter. It is the work of these climate scientists that back up IPCC report, not the other way around.

This is why it is dangerous to rely solely on headlines and reporters for reliable information.

Much better, in the same newspaper, to go to a regular columnist like Lorrie Goldstein who has immersed himself in the climate change file for the better part of the past year and has written numerous columns on the subject. He thinks this e-mail disclosure is far from being merely mischievous.

He has examined a set of exchanges that I have not seen covered in other media that shows the entire data base of weather information used by CRU was corrupted beyond repair. That is no small thing.

Who are the deniers now?

PROFESSOR ROSS McKITRICK

UPDATE: Here are a couple of the more interesting takes on this scandal, one from the Wall Street Journal which agrees with my view that the most serious charge to be laid against Jones and Mann, et al. is the manipulation of the peer review process to deny an opportunity for contrary research to be published, and one from a statistician in the National Post who plows the same soil previously tilled by McKitrick and thinks that the only international agreement that is required from Cophenhagen is an agreement that compels scientists to reveal their data for review by others.

The reverberations from the disclosure of e-mails obtained by a hacker and published on the Internet of the doings of the top AGW climate scientists still continue to reverberate around the globe.

The allegation that they cooked the global warming data to fit the AGW theory is not new and doesn’t require confirmation from these e-mails. It was first exposed about six years ago in the book: Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming by Ross McKitrick and Christopher Essex. That exposé was followed up by official investigations and other research that confirmed the conclusions of McKitrick and Essex.

The real devastation to the catastrophic climate change side comes in under the rubric of “integrity”.

I once made a statement to a friend who is a robust advocate for drastic measures to combat climate change and a committed believer in human caused global warming that environmentalists (i.e., people like him) can do harm. He was astonished that anyone would think that a “right-minded, altruistic” environmentalist could cause harm.

Right now, over a 100 countries are meeting in Denmark to plot a course that will ultimately result in shocks to the economies of many developed countries. This is all based on a 15-year successful campaign by global warm mongers to scare the snot out of politicians and to mobilize public opinion to further cause them angst.

Other scientists and researchers have been casting doubt on the entire premise on which this is based; i.e. that humans are largely responsible for climate change. Those dissenters have been vilified as dishonest because they are allegedly being paid off by energy industries who want to derail public policy based on global warming, and they are characterized as being irrelevant for the sin of being retired, and, in the final insult, they are dismissed as unimportant because they have not contributed research papers to respected scientific journals to be “peer reviewed”. In short, unlike the pro global warming crowd, the others lack integrity.

I am always suspicious of people whose first, and seemingly only, line of defence is ad hominem attacks on their critics.

There is a special label the AGW crowd has attached to the dissenting group, which, in normal science parlance (i.e. science unpolluted by politics) would be called skeptics. They are called deniers in the hope that the opprobrium that attaches to Holocaust deniers will trickle down and discredit these people. Consistent with that below the belt tactic are statements made by a number of AGWers that such deniers should receive criminal consequences and jail terms.

Now we find that the AGW group conspired to try to prevent research that did not conform to their published views from being “peer reviewed” in scientific journals.

They have become the deniers and perhaps they should be the ones looking at criminal consequences. Their integrity is shot, even if the science of climate change muddles on.

NATO dhimmis -- time to go home

The traditional relationship between Muslims, when they controlled a territory, and the non-Muslims, was that the latter could continue to live and go about their business provided they openly acknowledged their dhimmi status (second class citizenship) and they paid protection money to the Muslims for the privilege of being permitted to stay alive.

If you were any doubt about the waste of time that has become the war in Afghanistan it has to be the news that has surfaced that money is being paid to the Taliban not to kill NATO troops. Canada has denied it does this, as do the French and the Italians. But the British are doing it and it appears the Americans may be doing it also. Here and here and here and here.

Paying Muslims so they won’t kill you. How Islamic can it get?

Time to get out.

Tipping points and climate confusion

What is a “tipping point”?

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a best-selling book with that title. He says it is the point at which something takes off and becomes a runaway phenomenon whose growth is exponential. He gives examples of everything from Paul Revere’s famous ride, to the spread of STDs, to the popularity of Hush Puppies.

I suspect Harry Potter would fit that category. It started out as a book that was rejected by every publisher in the U.K. but one. Eventually, people began talking about it and news of it spread. That is how I first heard about it, a friend raved about it over lunch. By the time I got around to reading it, everybody was into it.

That brings us to the use of the expression tipping point in the climate change debate.

James Hansen, the leading Chicken Little in the global warm-mongering camp, uses the term quite often. He says it is the point at which climate changes cannot be controlled by man, that nature’s feedback mechanisms take off and become like a shark feeding frenzy.

Think about that statement for a minute. It implies that we can manage climate. Not that there is any historical precedent for such a conceit. In fact, it is probably the most monumentally foolish idea of the 21st century.

We can have an impact on the climate, for sure, but we cannot manage something we barely understand.

For about 800,000 years the CO2 level has been about 280 ppm, sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower, but that is the order of magnitude. In the past century it has climbed to around 380 ppm; hence the alarm. It is generally agreed amongst the Hansenites that most of the cause of this climb in CO2 is related to the release of carbon into the atmosphere by humans. The real debate is that not all scientists buy into the idea that CO2 is the main driver of climate change.

To add further confusion, there is now a contradiction around the concept of tipping point that needs clarification if one wants to persist in claiming CO2 as the key.

Hansen claims that the maximum CO2 level that would preserve the status quo is 350 ppm. He says that at 380+ ppm we have already past the tipping point, and points to high Arctic and glacier ice melting as proof. This means that even if we substantially reduce our carbon contribution it is too late, nature is now in a runaway mode to much higher global temperatures that will see all the ice melt and the oceans rise. He also claims that 450 ppm is probably the maximum safe level.

However, in a just released study, a team of scientists from the U.K. and the U.S. have determined that declining CO2 in the atmosphere led to ice forming over the continent of Antarctica about 34 million years ago, a continent that had previously experienced a tropical climate. On its face, that result would not seem to contradict anything James Hansen says; except when you start talking about tipping points.

The new CO2 study determined that 34 million years ago the CO2 level dipped to 760 ppm. This was considered the tipping point for ice formation.

So which is the real tipping point: 350+ ppm when ice melts or 760 ppm when ice forms?

And what about the claim that CO2 levels are unsafe after 450 ppm? All kinds of new life forms emerged on other continents in an atmosphere of 760+ ppm.

This is far from a “settled science”.

What's this war for?

In a recent column by Tarek Fatah in The National Post, he says we have lost the war in Afghanistan, we should acknowledge defeat and we should bring home our troops now before any more of them are killed.

I don’t agree with him.

I normally have a lot of time for Fatah. He is one of a handful of Muslims who calls for the reform of the religion. For his efforts, he and his family have been threatened with death by other Muslims.

Fatah is the author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, a book that has been reasonably well-received by the public and was a runner-up in the 2009 Donner Prize for the best books on Canadian public policy. The book discredits the notion of a world-wide Caliphate from an historical perspective.

However, this column is the most defeatist I have ever read. If he had written this kind of thing in 1942 about the war with the Axis Powers, he probably would have been locked up for sedition.

Fatah says:

We have lost the war. The Islamist jihadis have won it. We must acknowledge defeat and bring our troops home.

In a war between those who desire death and those who treasure their RRSPs and IRAs, the outcome is predictable. Canadian soldiers are professional, but mission-less armies have never fared well on the battlefield. American soldiers, who enlist primarily with the objective of obtaining a college degree, will never be able to defeat their counterparts, who view their freshman year as starting in paradise on the banks of rivers of milk and honey surrounded by 72 virgins.

This is hyperbole, of course, because there are many Americans who did not enlist for a free ride into college, but to avenge 9/11 and to do what the American military exists to do; i.e., keep the country secure.

We are told that we are involved in an “asymmetrical” war and that different strategies and tactics need to be employed if we are to “win” it. Asymmetrical is just a fancy name for guerrilla warfare and guerilla wars have been won; the British in South Africa, Kenya and Malaya, as examples. The more recent one is the defeat of the Tamil Tigers by the government of Sri Lanka.

However, those conflicts were carried out in confined geographical territories, where the combatants on the other side did not have easy access to outside material support, or had little room to maneuver, and where the victorious party could effectively bottle them up in less and less defendable territory.

The problem with the war against radical Islam is that it recruits its “soldiers” from everywhere, including our own country, and it can supply them from a bottomless armory of small arms and explosives, available mainly through the helpful manufacturing and distribution by the very governments who send their armies to fight these zealots.

So, just as the military needs to think differently about how it combats non-state agents of a death cult, we, the people, need to consider redefining what we mean by defeat and victory. Sometimes a victory is merely keeping somebody at bay.

Did we experience a victory over the Soviet Union like we did over Germany and Japan? Clearly not. But we defeated it just the same. We contained its expansion and it eventually imploded.

That is how we need to think about victory with respect to radical Islam. Keep it off balance, bottle it up, interdict it wherever it appears, and discredit it at all times. As long as Islam lives, the death cult will never go away, but it can be contained and its harmful effects minimized.

I agree with Fatah that we should bring home the troops, but only when our commitment to Afghanistan ends in 2011. The Islamists will crow about it, but we accomplished what we set out to do which was to disrupt al Qaeda and chase away the Taliban government.

In the future, we should not set ourselves lofty goals of bringing democracy to these backwater Islamic states. We should just interfere enough to derail any emerging threats and then let them sort out their own messes. The strategy is containment and successful containment is a victory. Had we identified this goal early on, we would have withdrawn from Afghanistan long ago and not found ourselves in the current quagmire of endless warfare.

Israel employs such a strategy with its neighbours. It fights them when necessary, inflicts a military beating, without complete conquest, and then goes back to the status quo. It is instructive that Lebanon’s belligerent Nasrallah declared war on Israel in 2006 in support of Hamas’s dustup with the Jewish state and got such a bloody nose from that encounter that he stayed well away from its re-run in 2008.

Although I disagree with Fatah about claiming a defeat and running home now, I do agree with this sentiment.

In the U. S., a bumbling President who knows the threat of Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood ideology very well still bends over backwards and welcomes the bearers of this doctrine into his inner circle.

Imagine fighting the U. S. S. R. without confronting the ideology of Stalinism. Could we have won? Not a chance. Today we are fighting Islamist jihad-ism, yet neither Obama nor the British PM nor Harper or Ignatieff dare utter one word against the ideology that attacked us all on 9/11. So what is this war for?

We have to have a clearer idea of the enemy we are fighting and who our real friends and allies are in the Islamic world.

Trooper Marc Diab travels the Highway of Heroes

Yesterday afternoon I had an experience that I will not likely forget for a long time. I was leaving to drive east on the 401 expressway into Toronto to an appointment. As I approached the ramp leading onto the highway I noticed flashing lights, a mob of people and many waving Canadian flags on the eastern side of the bridge over the highway. At the bottom of the ramp were about 6 or 7 Royal Canadian Mounted Police in their splendid scarlet dress uniforms.

I realized right away that this was all in honour of the return of the body of Trooper Marc Diab, who died in Afghanistan last Sunday from a roadside bomb attack. He was the 112th soldier carried in such a miltary procession along this road and it has now been dubbed the Highway of Heroes.

I turned on my radio and heard traffic reports giving regular updates on the progress of the military convoy. I discovered I was perhaps a couple of kilometers ahead of it. As I drove east, every overpass was crowed with people who stood in very chilly weather to show respect for Trooper Diab. Among the flags draped over the railing was a home made one showing an evergreen tree bordered by the red stripes of the Canadian flag. It was supposed to represent the cedars of Lebanon. Trooper Diab is an immigrant from Lebanon who died serving Canada.

I had heard of this ritual but never before witnessed it. You cannot help but be moved by it.

I hope there are no more soldiers coming home this way, but if there are, I will be standing on the overpass at the bottom of my street with my neighbours.

Morally Relative Capitalists

For my three or four readers, my sincerest apologies for not blogging for these many months. I will make more effort to keep it up and make it interesting. To wit:

There are a number of Canadians who are anti-capitalist, western civilization loathing types. Their dislike of capitalism shows up in many contexts.

One that has always amused me is the dismissal by these folks of the opinion of scientists who dissent from the global warming hysteria of environmentalists like Al Gore and David Suzuki. The argument usually runs like this: Gore should be believed because he is trying to "save the planet", whereas these skeptics work for public policy organizations that accept money from rapacious capitalistic companies like Exxon and their opinions should be dismissed without consideration on their merits for that reason alone.

When you look at the financial reports of some of these public policy organizations you find that Exxon's contributions are very small potatoes in the overall budget of the organizations. In fact, Greepeace has a website devoted to exposing Exxon's "secret" donations, totally some $3.5 million annually distributed amongst 49 "front" organizations. It is difficult to understand how an internationally publicly traded company can have such secrets, but thank heavens Greepeace was there to "out" them.

One of these terrible public policy institutes that was fingered by Greenpeace, for example, the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, according to its 2004 Annual Report (see page 41 of the document) had a budget of approximately $4.1 million and received $45,000 from Exxon in 2003. This amounted to 1% of its overall budget and only 9% of all corporate donations received by the PRI that year. In other years the PRI was getting sums from Exxon of $15k to $95k. Is it credible to assume that these paltry sums are enough to discredit the objectivity of such an organization?

It is clear that Exxon, by only spending a miserly $3.5 million a year is losing the war of warming discreditation. One wonders why, if discrediting global warming science is an important objective of this oil company, as alleged by Greenpeace, it would not have spent more money doing so. After all, in 2007, Exxon's profits were $39.5 billion dollars. It's expenditure on the "secret" fight against global warming amounts to just 9/1000th of 1% of its profits. Could it be that Greepeace is mistaken? Could it be that Exxon doesn't really care one way or another about the global warming controversy?

I never really understood the Exxon versus global warming argument anyway, since any extra costs imposed on Exxon and other fossil fuel companies to combat so-called global warming will simply get passed on to consumers. So why would they care that much about discrediting global warming science?

On the other hand, there are people who care very deeply about whipping up the public fright on climate change. Al Gore is making millions selling something called "carbon credits". I have often referred to him as a snakeoil salesman for this very reason. Now it appears, from this story in the International Herald Tribune, that other billionaires are following Gore's pioneering and are plotting to cash in on the climate hysteria.

I guess as long as capitalists are profiting from "saving the planet" they are morally superior to capitalists who are profiting from warming our homes in the winter and cooling them in the summer and providing fuel for our transportation to our jobs and vacation destinations.

Now for something completely different

Here is a refreshing site. This is a greeny organization whose executive director, Lawrence Solomon, has written a series of articles profiling global warming dissenters (I prefer that term to Al Gore's "deniers" -- it sounds more democratic). Some of these dissenters are actually scientists who were asked to be part of the IPCC process, and who have distanced themselves from it.

Is Canada Ready?

If you would like a little relief from the Al Gore version of what global warming means, take a look at a site called "Is Canada Ready". There are some nifty charts and graphics and the cyclical theory of ice ages is simply explained here.