Mr. Speaker, if we repeat something loud enough and often enough eventually it becomes a excepted dogma or universal truth.
I would like to begin by referring to a polemic statement written a little more than two decades ago. It indicated that it was cold fact global cooling presented humankind with the most important social, political and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for 10,000 years, and that our stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance to the survival of ourselves, our children and our species.
If one merely substitutes the word warming for cooling, the statement could readily have been made by an exponent of the doomsday scenario of human induced climatic disaster today.
This cooling statement was made during a period when the media and the public were much more skeptical and generally better informed with respect to science than they are today.
During this new ice age scare—and I am sure there are people in this room who remember it clearly—there was no expectation that humankind could favourably alter climatic events by, for example, firing up their automobiles full tilt and injecting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Proposed actions were not remedial but they were more rationally protective and adaptive. The scare died out and in due course the dogma of global warming became fashionable.
The second major difference between then and now is that informed debate about the merits of the cooling theory was possible. We did not yet have an entire generation of adults who had passed through the educational system with virtually no exposure to any type of scientific training. Today scholarly dissent is scorned. Scientists including many eminent climatologists who dare to question the popular doctrine are branded as thoughtless, uncaring enemies of the public good or tools of vested interests.
The members from Lac St. Louis and Davenport and the leader of the third party excelled themselves this evening in invective and ad hominem attacks on anyone who dared to disagree with the popular dogma. That indicates a certain weakness in their arguments. If you cannot win it with rationale arguments, you win it by shouting louder and calling the Leader of the Opposition names. It always works.
The scientific method of investigation has been almost casually rejected. Solid empirical temperature data have actually be disputed, as I mentioned a few moments ago, on the basis of mere computer modelling. The modellers have won the battle for public acceptance of their theories. Such is the state of scholarship near the end of the 20th century.
On the basis of computer generated temperature projections which reflect the preconceptions of the people making them, proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming are predicting natural disasters which would make much of this planet uninhabitable.
The minister who is technologically and scientifically challenged has yet to issue a news release predicting that the skies will turn to buttermilk, but I am expecting to hear something like that from her any day now.
Climate is a cyclical phenomenon. It always has been and always will be. Let us consider, for example, the little ice age which afflicted the northern hemisphere from about 1350 to the early 1880s. At its coldest during the late 17th century many thousands of European peasants died from exposure to the cold or starved because of crop failures brought on by this terrible climate change.
We have had since the end of the little ice age an average temperature rise of between half a degree and one degree centigrade. That is in the last 150 years. I submit that is normal, predictable and reasonable in a cyclical system. It is a rebound toward but not yet up to long term averages. Temperature measurements 150 years ago were pretty spotty, but I accept the proposition that the world is slightly warmer now than it was then.
I also accept the absolutely solid data collected by Drs. Christy and Spencer. They are not local data. They are data for the whole planet. These satellites are in different positions every second and the measurements are being taken constantly. The measurements have been checked wherever they were able to get a juxtaposition of one of their readings with a reading from a radiosonde instrument, and the checks are perfect.
This is true science. First you come up with a theory. Then you do the experiment. Then you decide if the theory is correct. The global warmers have put it backward. They came up with the theory, say that it is true, and then reject any experimental data which contradict their preconceptions.
I spoke about the cycles of climate. I would like to mention a couple of them with which I have some personal familiarity. These things have been going on forever. I have examined mining operations dating from early Islamic times in North Africa and on the Arabian peninsula. That would be 950 AD or thereabouts.
Very obviously, from the debris around these places, the people who ran the operations had abundant water and abundant timber. Now these areas are deserts. They have been deep deserts for hundreds and hundreds of years. It did not happen due to any human activity. There were not large numbers of humans on earth in those days. What they did as far as contributing emissions to the atmosphere was perhaps to build a few campfires. Yet there were these drastic climatic changes.
When the Vikings came to southern Greenland they found a climate much similar to the climate in northern Scotland right now.
They built their settlements and these settlements disappeared during the little ice age when they were overridden by the glaciers. Now the glaciers are in retreat because we do have this slight warming trend coming out of the little ice age and the old settlements, the old stone walls, are reappearing. They are an archaeological treasure.
Nothing is static on this earth and nothing that petty little man can do is going to make a major difference in the vastness of space. Sure, we can mess up the earth where we can see it, touch it and smell it. We can destroy our personal, immediate environment but we cannot destroy the climate of the earth or change the climate of the earth any more than we can do like King Canute and bid the tide not to come in.
It did not work for him and it will not work for us. This is not science. The IPCC is not, as the hon. members, now absent have, attempted to tell us, a monolithic organization. It has very large divergences of opinion within the body.
There is actually a divergence between the climatologists and environmental people on one side and the non-experts, the mathematicians, the computer wonks, the chemists, the biologists on the other side.
To be cruel, one might say perhaps the division within the IPCC is between those who are experts in this field and those who are not.