Here is a list of the soundbites I brainstormed:²

1. Scientists can’t predict the weather, how can they predict the climate?
2. The Earth is cooling, not warming.
3. The hockey stick graph is bullshit.
4. Everything is made of oil.
5. You drive a car, so don’t be a hypocrite.
6. We can’t stop climate change so there is nothing we can do.
7. Scientists don’t all agree about global warming.
8. The Earth might be warming but there is not enough evidence linking it to human activity.
9. Getting oil from Alberta is more ethical than getting it from Iraq or Iran or Nigeria.
10. Getting coal from Alberta is more ethical than getting coal from Columbia.
11. Alberta keeps Canada in the black.
12. If we don’t keep increasing oil production, and consumption, humans will starve.
13. Mitigating climate change is a waste of money.
14. We’re better off spending money to end world hunger.
15. Lethbridge will become like Arizona, which is a good thing.
16. The world is better off being warmer.
17. Climate change is a socialist conspiracy.
18. Only hippies care about climate change.
19. The oil industry meets and exceeds all industry regulation.
20. It is not government’s role to regulate free markets.
21. The IPCC is corrupt
22. The market will correct itself.
23. Only the free market can solve climate change.
24. Coal is clean.
25. We file a report if we spill a single drop of gas when we fill up our trucks.
26. We regulate ourselves and we set the standard worldwide.
27. We use coal to make clean energy.
28. Alternative energy sources are not enough so we need to expand oil production.
29. One word: China.
30. Volcanoes cause climate change, not Albertans.
31. Solar flares cause climate change, not Albertans.
32. The Earth’s orbit causes climate change, not Albertans.
33. God will keep us safe from climate change.
34. The Earth will always bounce back.
35. The sky isn’t falling.
36. Anyone who cares about climate change is an alarmist.
37. Consumer choices will solve climate change.
38. Government officials can’t be trusted to solve climate change.
39. Ocean ice is an obstacle to trade.
40. Don’t threaten our economic recovery with environmental regulation.
41. Don’t threaten our economic stability with red tape.
42. Our economy is an island of peace and security. Don’t put it at risk.
43. Let Stephen Harper take care of it. He is making a green plan that is custom made for Canada.
44. We have to wait and see what the U.S.A. is going to do.
45. Global temperatures have always been this way from time to time.
46. The oil industry is committed to habitat restoration.

I thought I had done pretty well making a list of public relations soundbites designed to stifle action to mitigate climate change. Then I discovered that some others have already done a better job. This guy even organized the arguments and included basic, intermediate and advanced counter arguments. But as well organized as these guys are, there are seriously hundreds and maybe thousands of websites out there, some well funded and some not, espousing climate denial.

And fascinating it is. It is perhaps the greatest epistemological challenge ever devised by an evil genius. Place billions of humans in a finite space. Give them different worldviews, disparate access to wealth and power, and widely ranging systems of knowing. Give the folks with more access to wealth and privilege a vested interest to keep the other guys confused about a pressing issue. Add in folks that think they are entitled to the resources without acknowledging the finite constraints of said finite space or their impact on the social and political fabric of said space.

It reminds me of the kind of puzzle presented to me when I speak to someone that believes the Earth is only six thousand years old. It’s the same kind of interpersonal puzzle I face when I talk to someone that believes there is a white man in the sky that killed his son on everyone’s behalf. It’s a puzzle. And I don’t know the answer.

Anyway, here it is: http://www.whatthefuckismyalbertaoilstrategy.com/

I say all of this because I have questions for Michael Shermer.² He has assessed the science surrounding climate change and published saying that: 1. the Earth is warming, and 2. this warming is caused by human activity, in particular CO2 production. This is great. ³

But Shermer has also published saying that there will only be “moderate warming with moderate changes.” He leans heavily on the analysis of Bjorn Lomborg and concludes that:

In my opinion we need to chill out on all extremist plans that entail expenses best described as Brobdingnagian, require our intervention into developing countries best portrayed as imperialistic, or involve state controls best portrayed as fascistic. Give green technologies and free markets a chance.

I should note that Chris Mooney of Desmog Blog has a podcast and an article about his interactions with Shermer and it’s definitely worth a listen and a read.

But my questions for Shermer have a slightly different approach. Like Skeptic Magazine readers, I am deeply interested in the way folks form beliefs about reality. And I am also interested in public relations and professional influence peddlers. And like the Tobacco industry’s interests in government spending and regulation of cigarettes, the oil industry has always had interests when it comes to government spending and regulations relating to climate change.

Continued retreating denial

I respect Shermer’s credentials and his approach on countless topics. From religion to dowsing rods to priming and junk science, Shermer is, in my opinion, right about many things. And he’s the first person to say that we shouldn’t believe him simply because he says so. Kudos.

But it does seem to me a little suspicious that he espouses a particular political ideology. He is a libertarian. Now I too have a political ideology (not libertarianism). ⁴ My point is not to say that clear thinking individuals can’t or shouldn’t have ideological leanings. My point is that is does seem to be a bit more than a coincidence that Shermer’s ideology is also the ideology that informs Conservatives and Republicans who are aligned against accepting or doing anything about climate change.

That is to say, Republicans and Conservatives have been lead deniers of climate change for thirty years. And now that denying climate change is untenable, they are denying that it’s worth doing something about it. So my question to Shermer is, is this grounds for suspicion?

There appears to be a structure and purpose to the shape that denial takes. The stages of climate change denial are well documented. The denier first denies that the Earth is warming. Then when they can’t sustain this, they deny that it’s caused by humans. Then when they discover that it is caused by human consumption, they deny that there is anything we can do about. Then when they realize that this is untenable, they deny that it’s worth doing anything about it. Then when they are forced to admit that we can and should do something about it, they deny that government should have any real active role in doing something about it.

The goal, at every stage of denial, is to deny that we should do something collectively. This defense of the status quo, is a defense of oil industry interests. It is also a defense of Libertarianism. Let’s call this continued retreating denial.

Warrant for skepticism

Shermer himself agrees that Republicans and Conservatives need to stop denying the fact of anthropogenic climate change. But he aligns with Republicans and Conservatives to affirm that we should continue to deny doing anything about climate change.

But here’s the thing. There is a huge oil lobby. There is a massive cover up campaign. The oil industry has intentionally confused the public about the scientific consensus. The Conservatives and the Republicans continue to deny the fact of climate change, and they do so because they deny that government ought to be in the position of regulator. And Shermer shares a political ideology with the Republicans. And Shermer denies that government ought to do something about it. Perhaps most importantly, Shermer relies heavily on Bjorn Lomborg, who’s other books and analysis on the topic of climate change have fit the pattern of continued retreating denial. Lomborg’s recent book, Cool It, which Shermer purports to be depending on for his analysis, was reviewed by economist Frank Ackerman of Tufts, saying that, “Lomborg has a weak grasp of some of the essential details and commits elementary mistakes, with little or no citation of sources that would explain his results.”⁵ Finally, and also importantly, many of the groups that lobbied against tobacco reform are the same groups lobbying against climate change mitigation and energy reform. They are also the same groups lobbying against other state interventions, like healthcare. They are the same groups.

So, Shermer. This appears to be enough evidence, structured in a predictable manner, to warrant deeper investigation into your social and political bias on this matter. Isn’t it? Wouldn’t you be skeptical?

But my intent is not to extoll the virtues of DePape or her act of protest. Instead, I want to say why David Akin,¹ of Sun Media, has written so poorly on the topic.

The only reason I even read the posting by Akin, is that Mike Moffatt tweeted a link to it calling it brilliant. Looking back now, I wonder if Moffatt actually read it.²

I find two glaring problems with Akin’s analysis. He thinks acts of protest are too often shortcuts that lack impulse control and that DePape is not committed to making long term social change. Most importantly, he doesn’t understand what democracy is.

Akin fails to understand the concept of democracy

Democracy is not simply about having national elections. Many countries have elections, but fail to meet a basic threshold of democracy. Democracy is not simply yes or no, on or off, black or white. It doesn’t work that way.

Democracy is a matter of degree. Most people get this intuitively. When more people vote, we have more democracy. When the electorate is better educated on issues, we have more democracy. When people’s human rights are protected, we have more democracy. When the power of corporations and rich people to spend money on elections and lobby government is curtailed by regulation, then we have more democracy. When people who wield power are expected to account for and justify their power, then we have more democracy. When citizens are able to elect representatives that reflect their values and interests, then we have more democracy.³

Seriously, Akin, are your following this? It’s not brain surgery.

When DePape called for a “Canadian version of an Arab spring,”⁴ she was calling for democratic renewal. She was saying that we need more democracy.

She thinks this, and I think this, and most Canadians think this. And in part, we think this because Stephen Harper wants less democracy. The Conservative Party of Canada wants less democracy because it is bad for some businesses. Democracy is bad for Big Tobacco. Democracy is bad for Big Oil. Democracy is bad for any business that knows that the community wants to make them accountable. Part of democracy is regulatory oversight on behalf of community interests. But regulatory oversight is bad for many business interests; notably, interests from Alberta that pay for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and the business media that cheerlead for them. The speech from the throne didn’t even mention climate change.⁵

Akin pretends to not to understand this. It is, after all, his job to not understand this.

Akin’s article gives no evidence and yet frames DePape as being not interested in hard work or commitment

Akin’s entire article works to frame Brigette DePape as someone who prefers shortcuts. But a protest is not, as a rule, a shortcut. To say so reveals just how out of touch Akin is with the challenges of making social change. A protest, is the symbolic nub of a larger analysis and commitment to progressive social change. This larger analysis and commitment to social change, Brigette DePape has in spades.

That said, some protests fail to be effective. This one has not failed in it’s symbolic power. Akin certainly has not provided any evidence that it failed. He has written at length about the virtues of diligence and perseverance and the value of taking the long view. Great. DePape probably, and I certainly, agree with these virtues. By simply asserting otherwise, without evidence is inappropriate.

If Akin simply disagrees with her claims, just say so. If Akin simply thinks she shouldn’t have stood up to Harper this way, just say so. Akin is, I believe, a Libertarian. He probably doesn’t believe in climate change. And, like other rich people, he probably hates paying progressive taxes. But if this is his problem with DePape he should just say so.

Instead, Akin employs rhetorical devices to make DePape out to be less courageous and less hard working than she is. He even refers to DePape by her first name. This is a patronizing move that coheres with his overall undermining tone. Yes you have a better paying job and you are an older, taller, white, right wing, middle age man with Big Oil cheering for you and lots of privilege. And yes DePape is a younger, less well paid, woman that is standing up to, among other things, Big Oil.

But more than that, he argues that DePape and her supporters think that symbolic protest is the only way to make change:

“Brigette DePape may despise Stephen Harper’s politics but showing up in the Senate — or anywhere else in Canada — with a sign that says “Stop Harper” and issuing a press release after the fact is so not going to change things, one feels pity for her and her supporters for, if this is how they believe change will happen, they will never know it.”

I see no evidence that DePape has not considered that there are other ways to make progressive social change. She votes. She no doubt has canvassed. She no doubt participates in committees and other democratic forums. So do I and I’m a DePape supporter.

Did I already mention that the throne speech didn’t even mention climate change? Harper has committed to a balanced budget in 2015. Good one.

But no longer. I wrote about Rex Murphy last year. Anyone that follows me on Twitter will know that I have posted some of my challenges with Rex Murphy there. And, crucially, I committed to writing a post defending and footnoting my claims. This is it. Here are six of my tweets and their reasons. ¹

But first, I will express one point of admiration. Rex Murphy is a curmudgeon. For this I admire him, in part, because I am somewhat of a curmudgeon. And curmudgeon-ness is a power. It’s a virtue. But it’s not enough. And his defects are many.

My challenges with Rex Murphy: #2 he is ignorant about climate change.

This is a big one. It’s his job to understand the significant issues of our day. But most of what he is on record saying about climate change works to:

1. undermine public confidence in the science of global warming
2. undermine public opinion of the policies Canada and other countries have tried to initiate to mitigate climate change

He succeeds at undermining the legitimacy of the conventional wisdom of global warming by being, well, confusing about his claims. He uses obfuscatory language when discussing the facts and he casts doubt at every turn on the scientist that purport the facts. He speaks mostly in derogatory and demeaning ways about environmentalists and climate change activists. And while some of his individual criticisms are defensible, the nature and direction of his criticisms is patterned.

Take, for example, his televised rant on the so called climate-gate emails: http://youtu.be/lgIEQqLokL8 He casts a number of aspersions on the scientists studying climate change and casts a number of aspersions on the activists and advocates trying to make social and cultural change. He uses the following language (partial list): “alarmism,” “manipulation,” “destroying the data,” “unprofessionalism,” “ideology,” “dishonest science,” “stink of intellectual corruption,” “lack of neutrality,” “lack of good science,” “partisan.”  But he has never returned to the issue to retract his claims. He simply has never bothered to follow up.

It’s not rocket science. Just go to a real newspaper online and see what they say.

The thing is that there are real and important issues around climate change. And we need curmudgeons asking questions and pushing for a better analysis. But when every soundbite you issue works to confuse the electorate, support the oil industry interests, and undermine public opinion about global collective action, then you deserve biting criticism.

It’s worth doing a search on the DeSmog Blog for “rex murphy.” And just in case you think it’s all old news, just check out his recent soundbites at the National Post as of April 16 2011.

Remember this the next time someone says that the science of global warming is “settled,” for many environmentalists are inspired not by science, but by spirituality — Andean and otherwise. – Rex Murphy

It’s worth noting here that many of his individual points are defensible. Most of the best propaganda is, after all, true. But the article’s logic is invalid. You cannot argue from some hand picked examples of environmentalism (no matter whether they are actually examples of fuzzy thinking or not) to the general conclusion that “environmentalism rots the mind.” That’s a bullshit argument. And it’s a fancy piece of rhetoric that fits a larger pattern in which his columns and soundbites are continually critical of certain issues, in this case climate change, and never critical of others.

My challenges with Rex Murphy: #4 he complains about expedience in electoral communications, but he is, himself, a master sophist.

Take, for example, his recent article of April 16, 2011. The first sentence is a question. It’s the question which frames everything he says in the article. He asks the question, because he can deny asserting it, in the next sentence. Here’s the full first paragraph:

Does environmentalism rot the mind? I am beginning to believe that the more feverish and agitated greens are suffering from a morbid condition. There is, it appears, no intellectual folly to which they are immune, no frenzied leap off the pier of reason they will not joyfully execute, in their reliably bizarre efforts to horrify the rest of us into supporting their cause.

Anyone can ask a question. I could ask some about Rex Murhpy. Does Rex Murphy eat kittens? Does Rex Murphy have actual friends? Is Rex Murphy getting senile? These are just questions. I’m not asserting that he is senile. I don’t know that. I have no evidence. wink wink It’s a slick move. In the very next sentence, once he’s already planted the framework and subtext for the rest of the article, he says something very safe. Actually, if you read the second sentence carefully, it’s practically a tautology. He basically asserts that he is beginning to believe that the more agitated greens are mindless. Well, that’s a very carefully constructed sentence. It’s a highly defensible sentence.

This device works like this. Is Rex Murphy a jackass? I’m beginning to think so, because sometimes he acts like a jackass.

There is a second rhetorical device that Murphy employs in this first paragraph. His argument structure is to find some people that identify as environmentalists and then argue that their ideas are crazy. And maybe the people in his examples have crazy ideas. Most people will think so and that is why Murphy picked these examples. But the move is to then argue that all environmentalists are crazy. That’s what the article is about. He’s not informing us of the national green mvoement of Bolivia. Not really. He’s actually informing us about the nature of environmentalism here. But he paints all environmentalists with the same brush. It’s a tremendous leap of inductive logic. Were it not so cleverly hidden in his well penned prose it would be laughable. But it somehow passes.

Both of these techniques are very strategic acts of communication. Murphy somehow thinks that he’s allowed to do this but that politicians aren’t. We should expect more from politicians. But we should also expect more from journalists.

Interestingly, the article, which I thought was editorial is listed under NEWS. Here’s a screenshot.

My challenges with Rex Murphy: #5 he doesn’t want an election but then proclaims that the election is “unwanted, unwarranted and unwelcome”.

Rex Murphy doesn’t like this election. That’s fine, that’s his opinion. He says so here: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/pointless+campaign/4587006/story.html

He says so again on March 26 here: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/03/26/rex-murphy-liberals-hope-to-sell-a-civics-lesson-as-a-campaign-theme/

And he says so again on March 25th. He uses the language of “unwanted, unwarranted and unwelcome” on March 25: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/03/25/rex-murphy-if-nothing-else-the-election-will-mean-the-last-of-familiar-faces/

It’s a classic fallacy of reasoning. It goes something like this:

premise: I think that x.
premise: I'm important.
conclusion 1: Therefore, everybody thinks that x.
corollary: If everybody thinks x, then x is the case.
conclusion 2: Therefore, x is the case.

Rex Murphy makes a lot of money. His work, on the radio and on television and as an author, all adds up to him making a healthy paycheck. I say this because he has the time and resources to get clear on issues and educate himself. Generally speaking, scholars have moved beyond the arcane “objective” language of the 1970′s in which every opinion was stated as objective fact. If you want other people to think the election is unwelcome, just say so. If you think the election is unwelcome just say so. But don’t use the term “believe” to discuss the likelihood of an election, and then just pass off “unwanted, unwarranted and unwelcome” as fact.

For the record, I want, and welcome, the election.

My challenges with Rex Murphy: #6 he considers the prorogation of parliament, by Harper, a “great non-controversy.”

Murphy says so on August 7 of 2o10, “The Perils of Question 32B”: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/08/07/rex-murphy-the-perils-of-question-32b/

My challenges with Rex Murphy: #9 he has been, by and large, a Barack Obama detractor and an admirer of Sarah Palin.

See “When crisis strikes the world, Obama falls silent” and “Mid-terms touch on American despair.”

And, almost unbelievably, see April 10, 2010 “Understanding the Sarah Palin effect.” The National Post seems to have taken this article down. They do a terrible job of archiving their content. But I found a cached page of this troubling article here.  ²

But there she is, in all her roughness and candour, and her spiky wit and ability to irritate her self-nominated betters. She also happens to be the most naturally charismatic politician at the moment in the United States. She is the one major figure who can claim authenticity without morally choking on the word. That makes her the populist rallying point of a nascent rejection of the fervid partisanship and Washington insiderism that is eroding the consent on which American politics is founded

It’s not the first time Murphy applauds Palin. On November 20 of 2009 Murphy praised Palin’s capacities at length.

My challenges with Rex Murphy: #10 he doesn’t understand human rights. And he repeats too many #cpc talking points.

On April 03, 2010, Murphy wrote “Please don’t call it ‘human rights’” and in this article (article here), he claims that:

By some crude osmosis, or just from the luxuriant carelessness of our pampered lives, we have overturned one of the great concepts of all human law. The concept of human rights, as experience and history inform us, is protection from the state’s power, not oversight, interference and punishment by the state’s power.

The core concept of human rights is the protection of the irreducible safety and dignity of the individual from the massive and arbitrary power of the state. Not, the state wandering in, with its apparatus and procedures, its boards and tribunals into the doings, or speech, of the individual. This is what the Guy Earle case, in its triviality — it’s about heckling, remember — upends. It perverts the name of “human rights,” earned in blood and suffering in circumstances of utter consequence and unspeakable misery.

This is flatly wrong. The core concept of a human right is not the protection of an individual from the state. Our human rights are entitlements in toto; they protect us from churches, individuals, companies, organizations, families, corporations and states. And for the record, most human rights that are actually protected, are protected by the state. Only a wealthy libertarian would claim that the core concept of a  human rights protects us from the state. I have some complicated thoughts and feelings about states and governments myself. Some days, I even drift towards anarchy. But I also understand that the state also occasionally affords the protection of our human rights. And so should Murphy.

And this is one of the problems with Rex Murphy. He seems all to happy in his job at the National Post to reflect and amplify the soundbites of the Conservative Party of Canada (#cpc). Just browse the string of headlines found at http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/author/rmurphynp/

What you will find, is a string of articles that:

1. frame the election as unnecessary and dangerous
2. condemn politics as a waste of time
3. frame detractors of the Conservatives as time wasters
4. disparage environmentalism
5. undermine public confidence in climate change science
6. promote the role of the oil sands in Canada
7. are critical of Michael Ignatief
8. abuse the notion of human rights

On January 15 2011, Rex Murphy titled his articled with the very metaphor that Harper himself uses to characterize his leadership and economic policies: “Harper didn’t move mountains — but he kept our seas calm.” Rex Murphy, and the National Post, should have a duty of disclosure.

Just admit who you’re voting for and who you want others to vote for.

It’s more honest.

It’s a terrible public relations and advertising tendency. I would also speculate that on a more basic psychological level, it’s also a common human behaviour that we utilize almost instinctively. It’s not exactly rational and I think it probably happens more often and more subtly than most would care to admit.

But sometimes it happens not so subtly.

To underscore the point, Russ Campbell has several posts generally denying human caused global warming. So he loves Tim Ball. So he tries to affirm Tim Ball’s status as an expert in the field, claiming that, among other things, “Dr. Ball has the bona fides to talk about global warming.” The DeSmogBlog’s goal is to remove public relations spin from the climate change debate so they have a different take on Tim Ball’s credentials. Tim Ball is in the employ of those whose short term fiscal interests are diametrically opposed to making policy changes to help mitigate human caused global warming. Oi. But Russ Campbell never mentioned that.

It is interesting that Russ Campbell quotes Wikipedia on Tim Ball. But there is currently (at the time of publication) no entry on Tim Ball. I can imagine that this entry has been very controversial and the Wikipedia community can be very tenacious about this sort of thing. I am a little curious why the page was deleted. The pages on both climate change and global warming are very good. ¹ Russ Campbell doesn’t mention these either.

Check out http://co2now.org/Current-CO2/CO2-Widget/ to find an assortment of widgets that you too can post on your website. Yes, they have a WordPress widget.

Novel situations, of course, make it difficult to remember what to do. Global warming is a novel situation. Oil gushing into the gulf in the deep deep water, is a novel situation. That the Tories are choosing to remove the requirement for environmental assessments seems somehow related.

Canada’s climate researchers are being muzzled, their funding slashed, research stations closed, findings ignored and advice on the critical issue of the century unsought by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government…

Harper is the guy that once claimed that global warming was nothing but a socialist conspiracy after all. And Harper is from Calgary. But, in defense of Calgary, there are many scientists that live there and there are even a few that don’t work for Big Oil. I guess that’s why Harper decided to just muzzle them. A scientist from Edmonton, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, said this:

It is clear that muzzling under the Harper government is the most oppressive in the history of federal government science. Incredibly, some of the most eminent scientists in Canada have been forbidden to speak publicly on scientific matters where they are recognized as world experts, ranging from climate change to pollution of lakes and rivers. Instead, the public is referred to media-savvy spin doctors, who usually know very little about the science of these topics, spouting the party line.

The report that got this all started was written by the Climate Action Network and can be found here. There is much that is interesting in this report and one detail that I found particularly  interesting was the fact that Harper has appointed climate change skeptics to the boards of two super important granting bodies: NSERC and CFI. So just to explain how this works, students in Universities that are working at the graduate level in the sciences are funded by granting agencies like NSERC. In fact, I believe the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) is responsible for the funding of all of the PhD scientists I know. And NSERC has the difficult position of selecting and denying applications for funding. Not everyone’s research gets funded and not all research gets the green light. So the significance of Harper’s appointments to the board, is very very real.

One of these appointments is Mark Mullins. Mark Mullins was the Executive Director of the Fraser Institute for four years.

Another one of the appointments (to CFI) was John Weissenberger. He’s a geologist from Calgary who worked in oil and gas for twenty years. He’s actually a friend of the evil-overlord himself and was a chief of staff for the evil-overlord’s government. The author of the Climate Action Network report, Andrew Cuddy, took the time to include a quote by John Weissenberger and I’ll sign off by quoting the quote. But first, you should know that Weissenberger didn’t write the following soundbite alone. He was joined by George Koch, who I’m assuming is from the Koch family of Koch Oil. The Koch family are all pious followers of Ayn Rand even, I believe, requiring that their employees and executives read Rand’s books. The Koch’s, in short, are libertarians and conservatives.

“[T]he great weakening of the Stalinist intellectual monument of global warming theory continues in regular increments.” — George Koch (from a blog published jointly with Weissenberger), September 13, 2008

Of course, that wasn’t enough to convince me of his points of view and eventually he said, “Meteorologists can’t predict the weather next week, how can scientists claim to predict global warming?” Now when he said this, some kind of alarm bell starting to ring deep down in my brain stem. Maybe he was just a little too slick. Or maybe, since I was so often speaking from a script, I was in a heightened state of script awareness. So at that point, I fell out of my own script and stuck out my hand and introduced myself. And he introduced himself. His name was Tim Ball.

We had an animated conversation about peer reviewed publishing, the dimensions of relative objectivity in science, global cooling, and socialism. Actually he accused me of being a socialist. And that was when my moment of glory came to pass in the form of a question I would ask in return. See, when he accused me of being a socialist I was provoked first to a moment of confusion – it just struck me as a non sequitur. But after the confusion, came clarity. And I asked him, “Do you work for the Fraser Institute?”

I still remember that moment and I remember exactly where we were standing – corner of Government and Yates in front of Eddi Bauer.

His eyes widened a little and he stepped back. Pointedly, he said no. I told him that equating concern for global warming with socialism sounded like something the Fraser Institute or the Heritage Foundation might do. He mumbled something and walked away. I quickly made some notes about the exchange, including writing down his name and went on with my day.

But that night I did a name search online for ‘Tim Ball’. Then I did a name search for ‘Tim Ball’ on the Fraser Institute website. And maybe he wasn’t an employee but I did find his name on lot’s of their communications. I was so excited! I met an important person who was clearly a hired gun for climate change denial and made his cover on one try! It was easy.

But unfortunately, many reporters and journalists have found him convincing over the years. Unfortunately, many so-called journalists continue to find him interesting. As of today, he’s still listed on the Fraser Institute website:

This is how his bio reads on the Fraser Institute website:

Dr. Tim Ball, one of the first Canadians to hold a Ph.D. in climatology, wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of London (England) using the remarkable records of the Hudson’s Bay Company to reconstruct climate change from 1714 – 1952. He has published numerous articles on climate change and its impact on the human condition. Dr. Ball has served on numerous committees at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels on climate, water resources, and environmental issues. He was a professor in the geography department at the University of Winnipeg before retiring. He has written a regular column on weather in the agricultural magazine. Country Guide, for 14 years. He is currently working as an environmental consultant and public speaker based in Victoria and has written, with Dr. Stuart Houston, 18th Century Naturalists on Hudson Bay, a book on the science and climate of the fur trade (McGill-Queens University Press, 2003).

But this is how he’s described in James Hoggan’s recent book, Climate Cover Up, The Crusade to Deny Global Warming:

There are few “skeptical scientists” with as little actual expertise and as much ambition as the Canadian geography professor Dr. Timothy Ball. Never a climate scientist per se, Dr. Ball quit his position as an associate professor at the University of Winnipeg in 1995, apparently ending an academic career that featured a lifetime output of just four peer-reviewed journal articles, none of which addressed atmospheric science. Yet ten years later, Ball-the-climate-expert seemed to be everywhere – on the radio, in the newspapers, on the lecture circuit, even testifying before a committee in the Canadian parliament.

Turns out that Tim Ball is paid by the Friends of Science that is funded through the University of Calgary Science Education Fund, set up by Barry Cooper who is friends with Stephen Harper, which is funded by the Oil patch. He’s also connected to the National Resources Stewardship Program, Tom Harris with APCO Public Relations, High Park Advocacy Group, Canadian Gas Association and the Canadian Electricity Association. He’s effectively a paid mouthpiece with fewer credentials than he and the Fraser Institute claims he has. But I met him and he’s quasi famous and so I guess I met an almost famous guy! And I made him. That was my moment of glory.

Then I scored the articles, on a scale of -10 to +10, on the following criteria:

How many soundbites are from libertarian, big-business think tanks? How many soundbites are from published scientists who work in the field of climatology? How many soundbites challenged the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by humans? How many soundbites encouraged or supported the notion that Canada ought to meet it’s carbon emission reduction goals? How many soundbites create confusion about the fact of climate change? What is the educational and informational value of this article? Is it evidence based?

Conclusions

All scores range from -10 to +10, where a positive score is a good article and a negative score is a bad article. This score is than multiplied by the word count to factor in the relative volume of the article. The scores are then added. If the sum total is a positive score than the Calgary Herald has been publishing good and informative articles. If the sum is negative, than the Herald has been publishing bad articles.⁴

Only three article scored in the positive end of the spectrum. Interestingly, the articles that were better in terms of their content were generally the shortest articles. There is one exception to this: the first article (and the shortest at only 117 words) scored a minus five. The average article length was 578 words. After factoring for the article length, the final average value of the articles from the Calgary Herald on the topic of climate change, on a scale of -10 to +10, is -4. Which sucks.⁵

The total negative points by the seven bad articles came to: -27369
The total positive points by the three good articles came to: 5404
The grand total is: -21965
The average value of each article is: -2197
The average article length: 578 words
The average value of each article: -4

Take climate change for example. The fact of climate change, by itself, is not perceived as a threat by Big Oil and their bottom line. But public opinion and the subsequent possibility of government taxation and regulation is a perceived threat by Big Oil and their profit margin. So organizations like the Conference Board of Canada, C.D. Howe and the Fraser Institute step forward to disrupt public opinion.

The first step is to get air time. To do this they call up their media buddies with the National Post or Cross-Country Checkup. Either by getting quoted directly or by influencing the analysis of the overworked, job-threatened and under-educated reporter, the underlying message and the framework for that message gets public exposure.

The second key ingredient is to pretend to be trustable. This happens through the use of expert titles and heavy reference to the number of researchers and academics employed by the think-tank. Crucially, they’re usually economists or communications people, but they never say this. The representative will generally pretend, and Rex Murphy will pretend along with him, that they are all experts in climate change science. Add to this the years of branding by the National Post and Cross-Country Checkup that they’re impartial and authoritative news sources serving our democracy and you get a potent recipe for believability. And this brings me back to why I think Rex Murphy is a jackass. He creates a call in show, branded for everyday Canadians, but brings in well paid representatives from right-wing think tanks to represent the wealthiest and biggest businesses in the country. He poses as a show for the people. But it’s not.

With this access to a trusting public ear the key message has propogated: climate change and it’s causes are uncertain. The underlying message has been confusion. The result is a public opinion that we shouldn’t jeopardize our mortgages and our jobs and our habits of consumption. This brings me to the December edition of FOCUS and a great article by Gene Miller. Rex Murphy has perhaps too eagerly defended Big Oil and too eagerly added his voice of dissent to the environmental movement. Rex calls the movement Big Green. Miller says:

“Big Green?” Those the ones associated with Big Feminism, Big Peace, Big Anti-Land Mines, Big Racial Equality and Big Anti-Child Slavery?

…you sound like the South before Lincoln, or the British before Gandhi. You sound like the flatearthers in Calgary. You sound like some gaseous table-pounder bellowing about how good-paying jobs in the oil-patch now are worth more than some speculative issues that maybe our great grandkids will have to deal with—woo-woo stuff like the bankrupting relocation of coastal infrastructure around the globe, global loss of freshwater, global loss of arable land, global desertification, the migration north of a couple of billion people, and the end of national boundaries and the nation-state. Deal or no deal, Rex?

Actually, we won’t be getting our energy from Alberta within 25 years anyway (my guess); and red deer will wander through the silent, empty office canyons of downtown Calgary. (Take oil out of the Calgary economic equation and the city folds like a suit from Kresge’s.) The world by then will be operating on a mixed-source energy regime that conspicuously excludes oil.

Miller is great. Partly what makes his article such a great example of a solid communications strategy is that he first focuses on the environmental and moral considerations of ignoring global warming. He then reconsiders his argument from an economic perspective for the sake of those that only understand these issues through the lens of economy. Stephen Harper and Rex Murphy seem to think that the economy has greater reality than our environment or climate. Miller, acknowledging their psychological impediments, attempts to parse his message in a way that they will understand.

I checked today and we’re currently posted right beside David Suzuki’s own call to Harper! Can you tell I’m a fan of David Suzuki?

In case you’re interested, here is where you can find the report that the Suzuki Foundation co-authored with the Pembina Institute. Let me summarize for you: 1. the current Canadian plan to deal with climate change is not working, 2. there is a way to do something that does work. The report also lays out a detailed and thorough plan but I won’t summarize that. The idea is that if we change our climate by more than 2°C (or Kelvin) from the pre-industrial levels we’ll face a harsh reality. To prevent that, industrialized countries need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to 25% lower than the 1990 levels. Here’s the kicker: we need to do it by 2020. But what is amazing about the Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina institute is that they actually show how we can do that, while maintaining a vibrant economy. It requires strong political leadership to do it. So let’s make that happen, shall we?

P.S. if anyone needs help taking video of their phone call to the PM or posting their video to Youtube, you’re welcome to contact me, and, time and space depending, I will endeavor to help you.

Life here on Earth has been around for about a billion years. Humans have been around for about two hundred thousand years and the life stuff and the human-life stuff both rely heavily on the fragile mixture of the chemicals and various fundamental forces of our universe at play here on Earth.

This fragility is what I want to comment on today. Somehow we’ve developed a cultural story, here in North America and elsewhere, that our life support system isn’t fragile. The cultural story is that humans have some kind of God given right to exist. We think our life support system is something we don’t have to care about. We think that the life support system is in constant and eternal regeneration and that humans are too important to go away. We are adoring of our consumptive practices. The story is that we are entitled to our consumptive practices.

But our Earth is not eternally regenerative. That is, the way our Earth is organized to support human life, is not eternally regenerative. It is possible for our life support system to fail. It is possible for our life support system to collapse. It is likely that if it does, we won’t be able to fix it.

Anyone that has scrambled an egg knows that some things can’t be undone. Anyone that has mixed paint until they ended up with a grey-brown smear has a personal experience with entropy. Anyone that has watched a loved one battle against disease and lose, knows first hand that there are things that we can’t undo or fix or do over or reset or restore. It’s never the simple presence of chemicals and forces in our bodies that matter. It’s their very specific arrangement that allows or disallows the body to live.

I think the Earth is very much like a human body in this way.

Anyone that has watched a loved one battle against disease and lose, knows first hand that there are things that we can’t undo, reset or restore. Sometimes there’s no do-over.

It’s not the simple presence of various chemicals and forces at work on Earth that makes our Earth a life support system. It’s the unfathomable arrangement of the stuff that keeps us alive. This complex, interconnected arrangement of stuff can be helpfully understood as a metastable system.

Our life support system is a metastable system in the sense that it can withstand a certain range of strain. Like our human body, it’s not like you give it a shove and it simply undergoes a radical and irreversible collapse. But neither can you keep shoving it without the system finally succumbing. Eventually the system undergoes a shift so dramatic that it’s no longer functioning in a recognizable way.

Climate Change

How resilient is our life support system in the face of climate change? This is a zillion-quadrillion dollar question.

I believe our life support system is not infinitely stable.² So our life support system is metastable. How stable is it? I believe that our ability to answer this question is extremely limited. We don’t really know. Let’s face it, the Earth and it’s vast delicate interconnectedness(es) is beyond our current science.³

I’m not suggesting that climate change could cause our life support system to stop supporting all life. Well, actually, I think that is within the realm of possibility. But mostly I’m suggesting that climate change could result in a life support system so changed that it no longer supports human life.

All of this points towards change our sense of entitlement and our approach to consumption.

In essence, I am making the really rather conservative argument that we should now be prioritising human welfare, security and indeed survival over the pursuit of short-term economic growth, and not, as at present, the other way around. This is hardly a radical proposition…Yet to date, all discussion of emissions reductions strategies at the level of national and international politics has been circumscribed by the growth agenda. We are predicating our ability to avoid catastrophe on our ability to make money out of doing so. That strikes me as totally insane. — Leo Murray

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.