AN OPEN LETTER TO DR. ANDREW WEAVER, UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA

Dr. Andrew Weaver

University of Victoria, via email

Dear Dr. Weaver,

An astute reader of mine happened to inform me that you appeared on ‘The Bill Good Show” the other day.  I was unable to catch the show, in its entirety (as I am one of the growing thousands who no longer can stand to listen to Bill’s show), however the CKNW archives proved useful, but troubling, as I listened to your performance.

Let me state at the outset that I am a skeptic, though my journey didn’t start that way.  When I first heard of global warming and listened to the now revealed, propaganda, I was sold.  After all, who wouldn’t want to save the planet from climate Armageddon?

Who would think that any component of such a serious issue could be at all concocted?

Nevertheless, after thorough personal research, albeit from a layman’s perspective, I do not believe in anthropogenically-driven global warming and not because there isn’t (some) evidence to suggest that it might one day manifestly affect the earth, but because the evidence thus far, just isn’t there—it doesn’t exist.  You will, of course, scoff at such a suggestion, since you are a storied climate scientist that believes in the likelihood of global warming doom, and I, am just a mere scribe.  But I urge you to read on.  Not that I will change your mind, or that you would admit to it even if I could, but because the manner with which you are spreading doom and gloom is not only irresponsible, it’s disgraceful, and beneath what I would like to see from any professor, who benefits from the extremely hard-earned tax dollars of, at least, vulnerable families in this province.  Frankly, I urge you to read on, because no one has ever taken you to task for many of the statements you have made, nor the hypocrisy to which you have markedly committed.

Is an overabundance of greenhouse gases good for the planet?  I think not.  But the current eco-theocracy, of which you are not only a believer, but a Cardinal as well, has far too many inconsistencies as part of the shrill, desperate narrative to accept the prophecies of cataclysm and catastrophe; the kind that had poor beleaguered Noah counting by twos.

I am not a scientist, but university graduated, and educated in Canada and the United States, as well as the UK.  My degrees are in political science, philosophy and business, but I remember, all too well that an education is never wasted, as it provides one with the tools for even rudimentary analytical thinking.  I realize, too, that there are many educated derelicts, but I’m not one of them.

As I listened to your offensive tone in dealing with callers the other day; callers whose opinions were, sadly, unprotected by Bill Good (in favour of your sanctimony), I was struck not only by the hypocrisy of your words, but indeed, by the high-handed tone with which you obstreperously, almost belligerently, dismissed legitimate questions by concerned citizens.

Were you already having a bad day by only half past nine in the morning?  Was your chair uncomfortable?  Are you getting enough fibre in your diet? Was your belt on too tightly?  Are you dating Pamela Anderson?

Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to you (I’m certain it’s lost on Bill Good) that the environment is rapidly dropping in the priorities list of Canadians for precisely the following reason:  That professionals like you, who are supposed to be tolerant of others in the process of dispensing your expertise, cannot possibly expect the public to be receptive to your teachings, particularly when you use methods which ridicule those whom you consider not as informed as you.  Suggesting, as you did, that those who question global warming hysteria“…must be living on Mars”, and then, shockingly, laughing about it, is the height of disrespect for those who are seeking, no less than some basic semblance of truth (a commodity not in much supply on ‘The Bill Good Show’).

I found it remarkable that a scientist, who is utterly consumed with sounding the alarm signaling the end of the earth, as we know it, would not take the time to educate listeners.  One of the callers you tried to embarrass is one of my regular readers.  It was painful for me to listen to someone with your credentials, lower himself into the depths of such intolerance—an intellectual sewer that I cannot entertain.

I do not believe that you understood the sentiment being expressed.  Therefore, allow me to help you in this regard.

No one can fundamentally object to wanting to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs), if we can, without destroying our economy and placing in jeopardy the lives of the underprivileged and most needy.  But this nouveau eco-theocracy of hysteria is NOT based on reasonable assumptions of measured, attainable carbon reduction, but rather, reactionary, in fact, highly improbable outcomes based on climate change cataclysm, the likes of which, had our aforementioned Noah landing upon Ararat.

The notion that global catastrophe is peeking from around the corner is enough for any informed person to reasonably ask, “Why?”  How else do you explain the rapidly growing attention paid to credible, legitimate scientists currently showing that the earth has cooled in the last several years?  Why is their opinion less legitimate than that of NASA?  Copernicus was by himself in pointing out that the earth was not flat, but round.  Paul Revere rode in the night—alone.  Is this lost on a scientist of your giddy stature that you reject the natural curiosity of intelligent people, who might not share your view? Where were you trained?  Cuba? Venezuela? Iran? I have very close friends who are scientists and professors at Oxford, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the London School of Economics and Stanford.  None of them would ever react so cavalierly.  Not one of them would be so offensive.  Is it not the primary focus of a researcher to constantly seek the truth?  Dismissing the scholarship of respected scientists isn’t acceptable even for someone as willfully ignorant as Bill Good—but for you, it is truly unforgivable.

Mocking a layman, who only wants to know “Why?” richly demonstrates a prejudice, which, not only does not belong in science, but in any place of learning be it a schoolhouse, roadhouse or studio.

Parenthetically, I must state how two statements during the show, one by you and the other by Bill Good were stunners.  The fact that Bill Good admitted that he has no idea who Dr. Phil Jones is (this was brought up by a caller) showcases why he should be carted off in the retirement buggy.  (Dr. Jones is the researcher who headed the CRU at East Anglia and resigned last week as he is being investigated. His emails were absolutely incendiary and deeply damaging.)  And your statement that you do not accept skeptics because they are simply wrong is tragic.  Can you not, at least, provide reasons why?

More to the point…

Tell me, Dr. Weaver, since when does fear-mongering replace calm deliberation from sustained, even-handed knowledge?  The Armageddon predicted by you, simply does not fit with a scientist’s presumed (inherent) ability to deduce from exhaustive query.  Selectively, often arbitrarily, choosing which data to view or reason from is, surely, to posit that a contrarian view is never necessary to prove out a hypothesis into theory—just a subjective consensus.  If this was the case Nicolaus Copernicus would have died a relatively unknown man, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would have never been exonerated and Nelson Mandela would still be rotting in a prison cell.

Why do you not respect other opinions, which clearly refute the increasingly heightening sense of absurd panic that the seas will exponentially rise and the continents will almost instantaneously convert to desert?  There is significant evidence by respected international climatologists that, not without irony, for the ten years you and Vice-President Gore and Dr. Suzuki have been sounding a now fading alarm, the earth may have cooled.  I know you rely on climate models to prove we are warming, but is it also lost on you that many other scientists do not believe that climate models can behave like live weather patterns?

An excellent example of this is the phenomena of hurricanes.  2004 and 2005 were quite troubling, but then the predictions of subsequent hurricane devastation never materialized.  2006, according to the recently discredited scientists of East Anglia University, in that year, “would kill hundreds of thousands of people.” Even though the last four years have been insignificant as hurricane years go. This year, after dire predictions the previous year by your lobby, no hurricane season worthy of mention is apparent either.  None.  Notwithstanding that your High Priest, Al Gore, continues to claim that Hurricane Katrina was a result of global warming and that the Indonesian tsunami of 2004 is “a direct result of increased carbon in our atmosphere.” Why have you not sent your friend Mr. Gore a note, explaining that the earth’s crust and metal are unaffected by C02?  Why is this still an example used by people you wholeheartedly support?

You are failing the very public you claim you want to protect.

Are these issues not valid as discussion points?  Do you not want the public to understand?  What happened to your need to debate, as any legitimate scientist would, on the battlefield of ideas?

One of Bill Good’s callers appropriately upbraided you for not providing specific answers to many of these issues.  I suppose my aim is no different here.

Though, it is impossible to take any rebuttal you might offer seriously since you have crossed the line from objective reasoning to active campaigning.

To be brutally frank, I thought your performance earlier this week was about as nutty as a squirrel turd.

The extreme of this is that, at least on its surface, you have fashioned solutions to fictitious problems (like negatively impacting working families with punitive measures such as support of the inefficient Carbon Tax).  You will, invariably, destroy the lives of hard-working Canadians with such folly.  Is the probability that foreign to you?  Do you care so little?  Pity.

The current hype over global warming catastrophe reminds me of Rachel Carson’s tome, ‘A Silent Spring” in which her concerns about the use of DDT were prostituted by then alarmists, later costing millions of Africans their lives from malaria.

There was no debate then over that controversy, and for all the reasons that were ignored at that time; there should be one now over the rumpus created by you and your battalion of doomsterists.

The dramatic pictures of large breaks of ice calving off of glaciers is enough to have some people hiding under their kitchen tables perhaps.  But in the absence of rational explanations, the taxes, levies and associated damages against the livelihoods of those folks may have that kitchen table sold just to pay the rent, never mind the dearth of groceries or resources.  Do you not see this?

Further, your notion that we are living on a feeble earth is nonsense—we’d have been obliterated millions of years long ago.

In fact, I have discovered through careful study that this movement towards hype and histrionics is, in large part, a political movement that is just as much about lining the pockets of Al Gore as it is about that great Marxist hobby-horse, the redistribution of wealth.  But to stop precisely what?  Man’s ability to advance technologically and better the planet?

Then again, I shouldn’t even be asking these questions since Bill Good, that exemplar of sanity and prudence believes that only a climate related science degree is what’s necessary to be engaging you.  Then why allow callers on-line?  Has he ever asked his producers how they arrived at the door of global warming hyper-promotion without being trained scientists?  Why are you and Bill so often praising non-scientists like Al Gore?  Or other well-known scientists like Leonardo DiCaprio, Sheryl Crow or Barbra Streisand?  Honestly, it is to laugh:  Local PR guru and warming hysteric James Hoggan has no science degree but has smeared legitimate scientists globally with the contrived slander that “most are funded by Big Oil.” Dr. Suzuki, a fruit fly biologist, who some years ago traveled the country by bus to bring attention to the planet in peril, pulled a bicycle from the back of said diesel-spewing bus, to ride the last mile of his tour, only because the media were spotted front and centre and he is a big believer in “clean” coal.  I wonder how such a product moves from one country to another?  Could it be by tanker?  The same tankers Dr. Suzuki rails against.  Pathetic.

Dr. Weaver, your story is unraveling as swiftly as the thousands of emails recently revealing subterfuge, lying, cheating, obfuscation and deceit.  This incident isn’t about the scientists responsible.  They actually produced some of the statistics and data that you and others quoted from liberally, for the last ten years.  The data predicting wild swings in weather cannot be trusted just as anything else from the CRU (Climate Research Unit) at East Anglia.

Mind, wild swings in weather have been happening for centuries, but not because of GHGs.  Why do you ignore the Medieval warm period?  What about the fact that while Bill Good considers the last decade the warmest in the last hundred years, the fact is that the hottest decade in the last century was the 1930s?  I note for the record that Cadillac hadn’t quite invented the Escalade then, nor had GM delivered the Hummer.

The propaganda you are spewing is extraordinary considering your position.  You mentioned rapidly rising sea levels on ‘The Bill Good Show’ but failed to say the in the last 12,000 years the sea levels have risen almost 450 feet, but that the majority of that rise took place in the first 1000 years of that period.  In the last one hundred years, sea levels have risen a negligible amount and will impossibly take over Manhattan or sink Florida, as Mr. Gore claims.  By the way, in that first 1000 years, just how much man-made industrialization can you point to?  It’s a little tough, you’ll agree, to be running a coal-burning plant when you’ve got berries to pick, the inside of caves to doodle on and knuckles to drag.

Similar fiction to yours is being promoted about polar bears eating their young.  You will excuse their table manners, but this is a phenomenon that unfortunately has been previously observable with polar bears according to biologists in the media, just today.  But this is too much to report by the mainstream drive-by media.

What’s your excuse?

It’s easy to sit and pontificate about other respected scientists being funded by Big Oil, but truth be told, there are many of your political movement, who receive large funds as well.

James Hansen, chief alarmist at NASA and Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, received research grants from the MacArthur Foundation of $250,000 in 2004.  The cheque was delivered by Teresa Heinz Kerry.  It was a coincidence then that Dr. Hansen was prominent in his endorsement of John Kerry in his (thankfully) failed bid to become President of the United States of America.  Mr. Kerry, of note, is a major stockholder in several oil companies.

But this is a brazenly hypocritical position that is certainly not lost on you either.

The current provincial government of Premier Gordon Campbell has been instrumental in lobbying the federal government to continue to richly fund your research among other financial support.  I guess it’s also a coincidence then that, earlier this year, you were caught endorsing, in a prerecorded message, the Victoria-Beacon Hill candidate for the Liberals.  But that wasn’t what caught my attention most.  It was your quote to Monday Magazine, when they asked you about your strange position.

“I think it was my moral and ethical responsibility to point out that, on an issue where I have some expertise—which is the long-term consequences of climate change—that I have said in every public lecture I have ever given, that the single most important thing an individual can do is to support those who are trying to make the right decisions today because they are doing so not for their own political lifetime, but for inter-generational equity and for long term thinking. I would be a hypocrite not to stand up and live up to my own words.”

Really, Dr. Weaver?  I’d love to see your ethical compass.

Gordon Campbell is a complete failure as being an environmentally accomplished Premier.  His government allows lumber firms to log to the edge of sensitive streams; permits the disruption of eco-systems along river banks, through the falsely environmentally-sensitive IPPs (Independent Power Projects), which  rape our rivers; will not insist on closed pen salmon farming; brought about the Carbon tax, which takes food from the table of needy families and has facilitated the potential future tanker travel along the coast of British Columbia.

These are the initiatives you are endorsing, Doctor?  Shame.  Your degrees are worthless.

The scientists you denigrate, in general, as being bought by Big Oil, might as well be funded by Big Mascara.  The vast majority of them have never taken a dollar from BigOil or industry.

Even the logic of this smear makes no sense:  If those with ties to BigOil cannot be trusted and only those whose methods are pure can be correct, then I, too, as someone who has never taken a penny from BigOil, must be correct in being skeptical of global warming.

But what about Dr. Suzuki?  He (and Vice-President Gore) is supported by those that move towards carbon credits—a complete fraud.  The money available is massive and it’s the same people funding political parties that support such false advancements.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how hard you are trying to manipulate the discussion:  The science is far from settled.  People like Dr. Patrick Moore (co-founder of Greenpeace), Dr. Will Happer, Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. Bjorn Lomborg don’t collect from anyone and are skeptical of warming alarmism.  There are, of course, thousands of others, but you will deny them, too, their right to freedom of speech—just as you did the callers earlier this week, who would not accept your piffle.

The incongruity of claiming that you want to save the planet and synchronously ignoring hard evidence by other respected scientists (like Dr. Jaap Damste who refutes Mr. Gore’s Kilimanjaro claims as “part of a natural process of wet and dry period”) is more than academically schizophrenic—it’s dangerous.  Additionally, your dismissiveness of those seeking some balance is what should be alarming.

In closing, I would like to leave you with two quotes, which I’ll bet you’ve never seen.

“Some experts believe that mankind is on the threshold of a new pattern of adverse global climate, for which it is ill-prepared”

And…

“Climate change patterns will force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale…climatologists are pessimistic that world leaders will take any positive change or action to compensate for climate change or allay its effects”

The former quote is from a NY Times editorial from November 1973, and the latter quote is from an October 1975 Newsweek article citing a U.S. National Academy of Sciences Report.

Both quotes pertain to fears in the seventies of global cooling.

Sincerely,

A. G. (Alex) Tsakumis

alexgtsakumis.com