Time Immortal

I’m a day or two behind in writing about Rob Nicholson — the Minister of Justice in Stephen Harper’s Conservative government — and the legal brief his office released in favour of keeping Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act intact. Ezra Levant has a pretty handy fisking of the document itself, which is rife with all manner of historical errors and poor logic.

My favourite example:

…history teems with examples of times when lies, distortions and propaganda empowered groups like the Nazis to repress speech…

Read that again. The government is arguing that we should limit speech because we’ve seen how the Nazis could limit speech. Huh?

Setting that aside for a moment, though, what has emerged as the big controversy concerning the brief is that it draws heavily upon the scholarship of one man:

So who is this nut the government keeps quoting?

His name is Alexander Tsesis, a professor at a middling U.S. law school. Tsesis has two political clients: the Canadian Justice Department, and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachussets, tied with [Barack Hussein Obama] as the most left-wing senator in America. Tsesis is a left wing kook — but the Canadian government hangs on his every word.

On that basis alone, it’s not much of a surprise that the government, acting on Tsesis’ scholarship, has come out in favour of Censorship. Most left-wing types seem to be in favour of censoring those with whom they disagree, as I am sure that Tsiesis certainly is, without ever realizing it that once those powers have been granted to government agencies, they cannot reliably be expected to remain…shall we say…pointed in the same direction. The laws that today are being used against the likes of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant may tomorrow be used against the likes of David Suzuki.
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Mark Steyn links to an article that explains, in brief, the full implications of what a “guilty” ruling by either of the human rights commissions that Maclean’s magazine has yet to face:

Take a look at s. 37(2) of the BC Human Rights Code, where it says:

(2)If the member or panel determines that the complaint is justified, the member or panel
(a) must order the person that contravened this Code to cease the contravention and to refrain from committing the same or a similar contravention,

That is a mandatory injunction. An obligatory ‘cease and desist’ order. If the complainants win, the Tribunal has to order Maclean’s to stop running ‘Islamophobic’ articles. Not just articles by Mark Steyn, mind you; they have to stop running those articles period. Goodbye Barbara Amiel. Now, you might respond that Steyn wouldn’t be silenced, he would just have to pick his words more carefully. But think about it; the CIC is not just complaining about the excerpt from America Alone, but about a whole sheaf of Steyn’s articles. It’s pretty safe to assume that whatever Steyn has written about Islam in the last seven or so years would be considered offensive by the CIC. In the face of an injunction, then, he would either have to stop writing about Islam or stop obeying the dictates of his conscience as a writer.

The students may say they don’t want to silence Mark Steyn or anyone else. Their complaint, if successful, will do just that. It can do no other.

Just so. I’ve tried to make that point in interviews. The BC tribunal’s ruling will mean that I can no longer write for Maclean’s, and that Maclean’s itself will be highly circumscribed in what it can publish about the relationship between Islam and the west. In other words, on one of the central questions facing the world today, the editorial decisions of Canada’s largest news weekly will be determined by a British Columbia “court”.

My career in Canada will be formally ended next month.

These human rights complaints — in fact, virtually every human rights complaint filed under Section 13 of human rights law in Canada (and its provincial equivalents) — are about censorship, and nothing more. They can have no other outcome (and given the nearly 100% conviction rate of the HRCs, one could almost surely say that they will have no other outcome).

And in this great debate, that’s the line in the sand, on one (and only one) side of which each of us must fall. Either we oppose censorship in any and every circumstance, or we acknowledge that it is sometimes/often/commonly necessary. If we place ourselves with the former camp, we are on the side of freedom (which, unfortunately but necessarily, we must share with some less-than-savoury characters; but who said freedom was free from being, occasionally, ugly?). If we place ourselves with the latter camp, we abdicate any and all moral authority with which to complain, in the future, should someone else end up facing the prospect of being legally silenced by the CHRC or one of its provincial parallels.

Perhaps it will be a rock star whose music is much loved. Perhaps it will be, as someone else I read this morning suggested, a public figure such as David Suzuki. Whomever it is, let it be understood that the power of the HRCs, and their continued corruption and abuse of power, will not end when the Mark Steyns, Marc Lemires, and Ezra Levants of the world have been duly dispatched — the field of targets will not have been narrowed then; it will only find need to shift leftward.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Mike Brock has an interesting analysis of changes in average global temperature relative to changes in solar activity. While a lot of people still attempt to downplay the role of the Sun in changes in Earth’s climate (sidetracking the discussion into things like CO2 and methane), the best evidence we have still seems to suggest, in no uncertain terms, that all the gases humanity can pump into the air count for almost nothing compared to the effect that the Sun has on Earth’s climate.

Indeed, since the ending of the last solar cycle, since which time no new sunspots — a good indicator of an active star — have been observed, the Earth’s global average temperature has reversed almost all of the 0.6 C rise above “average” that was observed at about this time last year.

That’s not to say that humanity should just pump industrial and agricultural emissions into the atmosphere all willy-nilly — that would be stupid, because some of those emissions have other harmful effects not related to global warming (although others are mostly harmless). We should do our best to curb the emission of substances which cause, for example, cancers or respiratory maladies. But there is no point in trying our damndest to break otherwise healthy, functioning Western economies in pursuit of a phantom goal of “reversing” a trend over which we have no control anyhow.

It might have seemed timely that in New York an array of leading climatologists and other experts should have gathered for the most high-powered international conference yet to question the “consensus” on global warming. After three days of what the chairman called “the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp”, the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would “markedly diminish further prosperity” while having “no appreciable impact” on the Earth’s warming.

This inevitably attracted the kind of hysterical abuse that has become so familiar from warmist fanatics, tellingly contrasting with the measured arguments put forward by the scientists present. One was Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who last year famously forced NASA’s Goddard Institute to correct a fundamental error in its data on US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.

On his website, Watts Up With That, he is currently posting a corrected version of the global temperature graph, combining satellite and surface data from all four main official sources. A measure of his scrupulous reporting is that although this shows a recent dramatic dip in temperatures, he cautiously explains that it is not yet conclusive evidence that the world has entered a new cooling phase (as he points out, there was temporarily an even sharper drop after the “peak” El Niño year 1998).

But can we doubt that, if the data showed the opposite, the media would be rushing to report this as yet further “proof” that the planet is heating out of control? The fact is that, for all their caveats that this drop in temperatures can be explained by the cooling effect of La Niña, the official orthodoxy that “more CO2 means more warming” is facing its most serious challenge yet. In light of the colossal price we are all in so many ways being asked to pay for it, the data in coming years will be more than interesting.

One cannot, hopefully, have failed to notice that the climate change alarmism movement has become a moneymaking enterprise for some, while for others it has become a vehicle through which policies of massive state intervention in industry — that is, socialism — is demanded and advocated for. The science upon which the movement is based is shoddy and uncertain at best (if not outright an outright fallacy in many respects), and the outcomes of the changes that folks like Al Gore and David Suzuki are demanding would be crippling and disastrous.

It’s a good thing, then, that more and more evidence is now coming to light demonstrating just what kind of lies are being told to us, the Western public.

Count Roland writes in some commentary with regards to this article about global warming, climate change, and CO2’s negligible effect on changes in the average global temperature.

Well, CO2 may not be as big a force as once thought.

However, I remember seeing at least a hypothesis that human activity has stopped the next ice age for another reason, and a reason with much more powerful greenhouse gases involved. The increased methane production from thousands of years of domesticated animals and from rice and other water/organic material intensive farming, not to mention systematic transformation of forest into farmland has had a much greater impact - in slowing a temperature drop over the past several thousand years. If I remember correctly, the hypothesis tracked global temperatures (from ice cores and others) and indicators of caqrbon, methane, sunlight and found that sunlight and temperature and the rest tracked together and should have us living on ice right now if not for human activity.

We may be alive only because of human global warming (aside from God’s grace). But, the big ball of fusing hydrogen and things like galactic and atmospheric dust [does] have a much bigger impact (witness the ‘year without summer’ after a rather large volcanic eruption in the 1800’s) than our cars. Now, we should, perhaps, limit our comsumption of materials for other stewardship related reasons such as sustainability…

I distinctly remember a radio show some years ago, in which David Suzuki was giving an interview in regard to methane production from agriculture in North America. His assertion rather matched Roland’s assertion, that human livestock farming and its attendant methane production (let’s face it, O Reader — cows are quite flatulent) was causing a rise in the average global temperature. The interview was going along quite well, until one caller phoned in with a question about North America before humanity’s major emergence there. We don’t know exactly how large the buffalo herds were, but even during the first few decades of European colonization, what figures we have on those populations suggest that there were more buffalo in North America back then than there are cattle in North America today. And buffalo, this caller reminded Dr. Suzuki, are both much larger and much more flatulent than cattle. And yet we observe, in the historic temperature record, that temperatures fluctuated quite a lot between those years and the modern era.

The caller was quite particular on that point, and David Suzuki had to beat a hasty retreat from the points he’d been making, conceding that yes, there were many more buffalo back then than there are cattle today, and that yes, there would have been a lot more methane produced by those much larger herds.

In one sense, I do agree with Roland about methane production — it is a stronger contributor to global warming than CO2 is. At the same time, it’s still not a strong contributor — the major culprit is water vapour. And there is very little that humanity can do to limit or control vapour levels in the atmosphere, anymore than we could do anything to stop the rain when it comes. I also do agree with Roland that there, but for the grace of God, humanity goes. I even agree that, for reasons of stewardship, humanity should be careful in its use of resources for any number of reasons; we ought not to be wasteful, we ought not to be gluttonous, and we ought to care for the world that God has given to us. We ought to care for each other, furthermore, by limiting to all reasonable extents the quantity of truly harmful pollutants that we put into the atmosphere; sulfur dioxide, for example.

At the same time, I continue to doubt that humanity makes a meaningful contribution to global warming; we’re fairly insignificant as regards biomass to begin with, and most of the emissions from our industrial processes, even the ones that are harmful to us to breathe, are not major contributors to the atmosphere’s ability to retain heat. Even our production of water vapour is, as I understand it, rather insignificant next to the naturally occurring vapour from the planet’s water cycle. This is equally true as regards methane; there was a time in history where the animals of the Earth, roaming freely, produced vastly increased amounts of methane as compared to what we see produced by livestock today — during those centuries, the Earth’s temperature fluctuated quite a lot, at times rising well above the point at which the global average temperature is at today, and at times dipping well below same.

For an explanation of those cycles, I still look to the Sun.