Chicken Little has been very busy over the last few years.
I should be on that show Survivor because I made it through Y2K just by buying a Mac. SARS didn’t catch me because I never went to visit Toronto. And this year, I didn’t get a flu shot.
So here I am in the middle of the global warming crisis and all I’ve done, so far, is trade my 1987 Ford F250 for a Toyota Tacoma.
I’ve silently watched the latest wave of global warming despair build to a crashing tsunami of potential destruction.
Global warming has been building higher and higher for years.
I didn’t pay much attention because, like all of the other Chicken Little warnings, this too shall pass.
Then came November 20th, when a hacker put about 1,000 private e-mails and about 200 documents on the internet for all to see.
This nasty hacker broke into the main computer of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in England and stole its scientist’s files.
He gave them to the British Broadcasting Corporation and expected the global news outlets to go ballistic.
An eerie silence followed.
Perhaps BBC didn’t read them. Tiger Woods’ voicemail was given world attention, but these e-mails seemed to remain top secret.
The hacker gave BBC more than a month to share this knowledge before putting the e-mails on the internet, where they soon gained the attention they deserved.
This internet-revealed scandal was dubbed Climategate, (an awful title) and, to date, more than six million curious and furious readers have Googled it.
Had BBC run it, perhaps its readership might have increased.
If you think BBC was slow reporting it, you should see the record for this side of the pond. A few dismissive articles in the Globe and Mail and other headlines suggesting the e-mails weren’t genuine. Then it was gone.
Silence! Eerie, sinister silence.
So what was in these e-mails stolen from the main university think tank, the same one connected to NASA and big American universities and that informs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?
They state they cannot prove that global warming exists.
These e-mails suggest top global warming scientists have been making up and modifying global warming data for years.
They also show there is an in group and a banned group in today’s scientific world.
Many big names of the world’s top climate change scientists are exposed in these e-mails.
Penn State’s Michael Mann, inventor of the famous hockey stick graph featured in Al Gore’s great An Inconvenient Truth, is simply another player in the changing, modifying and hiding of data.
They are all in this together, and the world ignores it.
Frustrated programmers couldn’t hide the declining temperatures no matter how they played with the numbers.
They used tricks and formulas to constantly change the raw data to say what they wanted it to say.
They were glad that England didn’t have access to information legislation and Phil Jones stated he would never hand over the raw data anyway. One e-mail said he would delete it before handing it over.
Years of collecting data, years of ice cores and tree rings - thousands of hours of work handed into this vital collection agency and they simply cook the books.
When the e-mails revealed this possible scam, the University demanded Jones hand over the goods.
I am sure you will be as surprised as I was to find that the raw/real data had been lost or deleted.
Are you ready for the “scientific” answer as to why it was deleted?
Jones said that they ran out of memory and needed the room. What a laugh.
My little Mac holds the entire lifetime collection of photos and videos that a shutter-happy family can produce in a magic box that is smaller than a pound of butter. They probably needed the memory and space in their computers for the new data they were making up.
Jones has been dismissed and is awaiting an investigation. Penn State is also launching an investigation into the allegations against Mann.
Al Gore was all ready to give the delegates in Copenhagen another chance to read his books and see his movies.
They had thousands of tickets sold and, when Gore heard about the hacked e-mails, he cancelled his trip to Denmark.
Gore didn’t want to explain why he wrote and filmed material that was based on invented data.
It was sensational and it sounded like the end of the world and it made him very very, very rich.
He got an Oscar for it.
Some suggest his Oscar should be revoked. I get skeptical when a lawyer skips a speaking engagement that sold out for $1,200 a ticket.
Speaking of money, why would Jones risk his reputation and his livelihood by cooking the books on global warming?
Go to the internet. Google Phil Jones grants.
It shows Jones, along with other academics at the university, received more than 50 separate grants with a value of £13.7 million from a number of funding bodies, including the European Union, NATO and the US Department Of Energy.
There is a huge amount of money on the global warming side.
Institutions, like the CRU, have a very large budget, but that would disappear if global warming ceased to exist.
That is huge money.
Jones makes millions making up data and Gore takes data and continues to rake in millions more.
I heard that Gore made $250,000 every time he presented An Inconvenient Truth.
While I was reading up on all this information the real money hit home. The Queen felt so guilty for England’s part in Global Warming she promised $10 billion to help developing nations fight climate change. That’s right. Ten billion! You can bet the home farm that it won’t come from the royal bank account either.
The royal subjects cannot afford that.
If the warming we are having right now is manmade, should England’s share be $10 billion to some islands that are scared of sinking into the sea sometime in the near future.
Africa also jumped on the bandwagon quickly. Internet searches show the continent’s nations asked for $67 billion.
They have been having droughts in Africa for thousands of years, but now there is a chance for the “rich nations” to pay their due. Droughts happen! Should Canada foot the bill? How much would the average Canadian have to pay for compensation? If Stephen Harper is as generous as Queen Elizabeth, if every man, woman and child in Canada coughed up $303 dollars we could alleviate our guilt.
We would need $3,030 per person to satisfy Africa. Wait until the rest of the poor climate-shattered nations hear about this windfall.
So why am I a denier? I know that the great explorer Roald Amundsen sailed a boat through the Northwest Passage in 1905.
Yep, from Greenland to Alaska with a sailboat, not a gigantic steel-hulled icebreaker.
That means it must have been warmer at one time than it is now.
I know that they grew grapes in Scotland around 800 AD when they had 500 years of great sun tanning. (Kilts were probably invented during this period).
Greenland was green, and the Vikings picked up the raiding because of ice-free seas up North.
They even took a trip to Newfoundland to celebrate the warming.
I know that at about the same time the Nile River froze over. Not just once but twice.
Closer to home, I took a course in natural history and learned that those little rounded hills at the north end of Kusawa Lake are moraines that were left there by a huge glacier that was a few thousand feet thick, and that this glacier crept up here from the south.
That means there was global cooling.
Over the last 2 million years the planet has experienced more than 20 glaciations. I have seen the coal deposits in Ross River and Carmacks.
Coal is comprised of compressed tropical plants that indicates drastic warming.
We also have in our fancy dishes cupboard, a small piece of petrified coral found at more than 1,828 metres of elevation right here in the Yukon.
All of these point to a ton of global warmings and global coolings.
And all of these happened before SUVs, Hummers and the development of the tarsands.
I do not deny global change - change happens. I just don’t believe that it is caused by man.
Huge warming and cooling has happened before carbon footprints became a catch phrase.
I do believe that we are dirty polluters and need to work on that, but I don’t believe that Canadians, that makes up .5 per cent of the world’s population should shoulder as much of this Global warming guilt as we are being forced to accept.
With all the scams and hoaxes that come out, from Balloon Boys and Nigerians that have inherited millions and need your help, I think one should always be a careful skeptic.
Madoff duped hundreds to get his $54 billion.
We should make sure that Mann and Jones and the rest of the global warming boys are not duping us by the millions.
Peter Harms is a teacher at
Hidden Valley School.