Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth May, Naomi Klein: Climate handmaids fail—to tell the truth
Perpetuating the massive deception of a planetary climate emergency
It goes without saying that most rational people with a reasonable amount of common sense worry about pollution and want to keep our environment healthy and habitable. So why do the radical environmentalists and the man-made climate change/anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmist crowd choose to outright lie about the problems facing us?
The UN’s IPCC, the extreme-green groups, the mainstream media, the UN-dependent scientists, academia, and politicians are all perpetuating the massive deception of the unproven hypothesis of man-made climate change/anthropogenic global warming, and use it as supposed evidence of a cataclysmic global emergency demanding extreme measures and the surrender of our rights, freedoms, and money.
The AGW movement, a quasi-religious, political, ideological one, is supported by many celebrity acolytes who, by virtue of being famous people, garner huge publicity for the cause whenever they parrot the climate change dogma. This high-minded entertainment fodder has ripple effects that are far from trivial. Mindless celebrity regurgitation of the man-made climate change/AGW catechism, in the seeming absence on their part of any serious effort to study the issues, has grave consequences that affect people, the environment, the economy, wildlife, human rights, and democracy. The celebrity flag-waving on behalf of the AGW movement also serves to exacerbate the corruption of science and the scientific method for political purposes. That’s when things get dangerous and evil. Michael Crichton explained:
When we allow science to become political then we are lost. We will enter the internet version of the Dark Ages, an era of stifling fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better.
Celebrated author and poet Margaret Atwood has over half a million Twitter followers; Elizabeth May is an MP and the leader of the Green Party of Canada; Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and bestselling author. The three of them enjoy extensive national and international media exposure and public speaking opportunities. They are high-profile Canadians who have earned fame, honours, public respect and trust. They choose to voice their opinions on the subject of man-made climate change/AGW, a matter of public interest, on a variety of public platforms.
That being the case, shouldn’t the moral onus be on them to get at all the facts before they presume to preach to the people? Don’t they have an ethical duty to do their best to tell the truth if they want to try to influence public opinion and policy with their lecturing, moralizing, castigating, laying blame, and telling us how to live?
Atwood, May, and Klein appear to believe that the unproven hypothesis of made-made climate change/AGW is a fact beyond doubt. They tend to ascribe any and all weather events to AGW, even though the five standard global datasets (GISS, HadCRUT4, UAH, RSS, NCDC, comprising two satellite and three terrestrial datasets) that measure global warming have not recorded any increase for the last 18 years. Apparently, Atwood, May, and Klein are not aware of this 18-year-long development, or if they are, they choose not to mention it—because if they did, their doom-and-gloom exhortations would fall flat. They don’t explain that climate changes all the time, always has, always will—it’s natural.
The three celebrities demonize “carbon” and carry on about our “carbon footprint” and “carbon credits” and “carbon pollution” but never explain what they mean by “carbon.” They don’t seem to know, or choose not to acknowledge, that the “carbon” involved in the climate change debate is carbon dioxide (CO2), a harmless, invisible trace gas (constituting 0.04% of the atmosphere), vital to life on earth. Carbon dioxide is plant food—not a pollutant. And since they don’t mention that there hasn’t been any warming for 18 years, they also don’t tell you that during that time, the levels of carbon dioxide (allegedly the cause of global warming) have gone up. That’s a rather inconvenient fact if you want to demonize CO2 as the driver of man-made global warming/climate change!
Margaret Atwood: Hell on earth, a scary scenario
Last November, Margaret Atwood published an odd article on climate change in Huffington Post, in which she asserted:
Conditions around the world are being altered much faster than was formerly predicted…It’s a scary scenario, and we’re largely unprepared.
If, by “formerly predicted,” Atwood is referring to the dire prognostications of the UN’s IPCC faulty climate models, the truth is that every single one of them has actually turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Undeterred, Atwood doubles down and fast forwards the occurrence of the predicted conditions (she does not specify what they are) that have failed to materialize, providing no sources for her claims. The truth is that whatever weather and climate events have occurred within the last decade and a half cannot be blamed on AGW, because there hasn’t been any warming for 18 years and counting.
In the same article, Atwood makes a bizarre, not to mention irresponsible and naive suggestion. In reference to absorption of excess rainfall, she opines that “In cities, depaving could help.” (What? Would she advocate “depaving” and turning her hometown Toronto into Muddy York again?) Atwood obviously does not seem to know (or care?) that a major source of particulate pollution is unpaved roads!
Margaret Atwood regularly tweets about things related to “climate change,” by which she means man-made climate change. For example, in one tweet she asserts that climate change is partly “at root of Toledo water pollution.” In another, she urges her 529,000 Twitter followers to sign and re-tweet a petition to phase out “carbon pollution to zero,” lest “climate change accelerate beyond our control, threatening our survival.” She is also joining David Suzuki’s Blue Dot tour (she’s an honourary member of the board of the David Suzuki Foundation), designed to “see every Canadian’s right to live in a healthy environment legally recognized” (emphasis added—sounds reasonable, but you can be sure that whatever “legally” really means, it will probably entail “depaving,” along with edicts, diktats, and intrusive, Big Brother smart-controls on how you may live your life).
Margaret Atwood is a President of the Rare Bird Club of BirdLife International and she has tweeted about saving vultures from poisoning, and spoken out about protecting Amherst Island (and Ostrander Point) in Ontario from industrial wind turbines:
I was horrified to hear of the proposal to blanket Amherst Island with wind turbines…The need to reduce our carbon footprint is widely known, but the destruction of rare natural habitat and species is not the way to do it. Amherst Island is the wrong place for a windfarm. It is a very wrong place.
Of course, as anyone who has taken a good look at the wind energy industry knows, there is no right place for the useless satanic white windmills, which kill birds and bats in catastrophic numbers wherever they are located. Why doesn’t Atwood tell the whole truth about how all industrial wind turbines brutally slice and dice any avian creatures that get in their way (ironically while actually adding to CO2 emissions)? What kind of activist bird lover is she? And doesn’t she see all the other devastating environmental, social, and economic evils the monster machines represent? (Talk about “depaving”! Each industrial wind turbine requires an 800-ton concrete platform, and that is just the beginning of how un-green those useless, eco-dirty things really are.)
The terrible irony is that Margaret Atwood has written novels about dystopian worlds, and that with her AGW activism she seems to be helping to create a real one. She says her novels are “speculative fiction” about worlds that “could really happen.“ Atwood has written that speculative fiction can:
…explore proposed changes in social organisation, by showing what they might actually be like for those living within them. Thus, the utopia and the dystopia, which have proved over and over again that we have a better idea about how to make hell on earth than we do about how to make heaven.
But Atwood seems unable to recognize that the man-made climate change movement, in which she is a celebrity activist, and the AGW ideology for which she is a high-profile advocate, have been deliberately conceived and engineered as the phoney rationale for a dystopian UN objective (“hell on earth”), as outlined in its master plan for world governance, Agenda 21. This plan would curtail, if not eliminate, not only our democratic rights but also our country’s very sovereignty; it’s a plan to inventory and control everything and everyone on the planet. And this plan not only “could really happen”—it really is happening right now; in fact, it began to be slowly, stealthily implemented more than 20 years ago.
That is the real “scary scenario.”
Margaret Atwood and all the other AGW celebrity acolytes seem to be completely oblivious to the big picture as they go about aiding and abetting the greatest scientific deception of our time. Atwood has written: “There’s a new term, cli-fi (for climate fiction, a play on sci-fi), that’s being used to describe books in which an altered climate is part of the plot.” With her high-profile AGW activism she is helping to perpetuate the real-life AGW climate fiction—a fiction that in Ontario has already cost billions of dollars in the name of green energy, diverted attention and resources from genuine, urgent problems facing us, inflicted untold suffering on people, stalled the economy, blighted the environment, killed wildlife.
Those are real “hell on earth” consequences.
Elizabeth May: Giving voice to nonsense
Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, claims:
The Green party is the only party that bases its policies on evidence. That is why we may take positions ahead of the “group-think” curve…We have been consistent about climate policies, while other parties treat the greatest threat to our children’s future as a passing fad.
If May’s claim about her party’s evidence-based policies is true, and she sees it as her job “to communicate the science,” why hasn’t she admitted that the evidence and science show that there has not been any global warming for 18 years? It appears that May is “consistent about climate policies” to the extent that she consistently and mindlessly (as in “group-think”) repeats false, long-ago debunked predictions (“greatest threat to our children’s future”), while apparently failing to understand, or deliberately ignoring, the latest scientific findings.
In an April interview on CBC TV, Canada’s public broadcaster, Elizabeth May lauds the IPCC, which is actually a political body masquerading as a scientific one, for part three of its Fifth Assessment Report:
It’s science, it’s evidence, it’s not someone’s opinion…based on evidence, based on science, these aren’t a group of people who get together and look in a crystal ball…this is scientific warnings that are based on what is happening now.
As we have mentioned, all of the climate model predictions the IPCC uses to formulate its reports for policy makers—predictions which are actually nothing more than opinions, the equivalent of looking into a crystal ball—have failed. None of the climate models have agreed with the observed data, i.e. the empirical scientific evidence.
Does May not know this, or is she deliberately obfuscating the truth? Either way, it doesn’t make her look good. And by “what is happening now,” does she mean that the “serious threat,” with which she tries to scare Canadians, and “the risk for security, the risks of failed states, the risk of a collapse of civilization” are actually unfolding now, at a time when global warming, supposedly the cause of all the doom-and-gloom, has not happened for 18 years? If there hasn’t been any global warming for almost two decades, how can whatever is “happening now” have been caused by it? May’s rhetoric, misinformation, and apocalypse-mongering are deeply irresponsible, reckless, and harmful.
In the interview (see it to believe it), and in what seems like a breezily sanctimonious, arrogant, holier-than-thou tone, Elizabeth May goes on to make the astonishing statement that “99.5% of the scientists who know the issue” agree that climate change is man-made. This claim has been debunked many times over (and just like Pinocchio’s nose, the original phoney statistic of 97% seems to get bigger every time someone cites it). And yet, here is Elizabeth May on national television telling viewers something that is simply not true. Perhaps she thinks she’s in good company because everyone from President Obama down with a vested interest in maintaining the fiction continues to make the same bogus claim. Needless to say, and as usual, the CBC interviewer, in this case Peter Mansbridge—probably because he isn’t informed but given his position certainly ought to be—doesn’t challenge her on the untruth.
And it gets worse. May says that the “denier industry was invented by the fossil fuel industry lobby.” She seems to be proud of her knowledge of “the science,” as she calls it:
I learned the climate science when I was a senior policy advisor for the Minister of the Environment in the 1980s. We were looking at all the science that was coming in from all around the world, and it was before anyone had “invented”* the idea that there was doubt. The “invention”* of doubt was a product of the fossil fuel lobby that decided after the Earth Summit and after the Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed…then they decided, oh oh, this could cut into profits, we’d better invent doubt…
*[May employs air quotes.]
What’s astonishing here is May’s smug, self-satisfied conviction that the doubt could only have been manufactured by an avaricious, manipulative fossil fuel industry bogeyman, and not perhaps have come out of the rigorous research of honest climate scientists, (as, for example, Canadian Dr. Tim Ball), who adhere to the scientific method in which healthy, questioning, intelligent scepticism plays an indispensable role. And, if she really does know “the science” as she claims, why is she not telling the truth that there are sound scientific findings out there that invalidate the AGW hypothesis?
May also displays an unbelievably patronizing attitude about people who question the fiction that she promotes:
So when I talk to people who aren’t convinced, I’m very respectful because I understand that a lot of good people have gotten one little bit of information that seems plausible and have allowed that to morph into their head into some level of large-scale doubt about the science. If we had a lobby that wanted to deny the laws of gravity and the media decided to give them equal voice…that’s the level of the science debate. We shouldn’t be giving voice to nonsense.
Wow! Look at the poor saps who have that one little “plausible” thing morph into a huge, doubtful balloon in their heads! Let’s censor the ones who let it fester and want to talk to the media about it! Who is actually being granted a national platform and given voice to nonsense here? The irony is that the mainstream media, including our taxpayer-funded national broadcaster the CBC, have given scant, if any voice to the fine scientists and other experts who have not been corrupted into toeing the party line of man-made climate change.
Elizabeth May is a national political figure who holds herself out to be an expert who knows “the science,” but seems to be getting away with disseminating serious misinformation, with the CBC’s vaunted Peter Mansbridge uttering nary a peep of a challenge. This is a national disgrace. Pity the young people, because as she indicates in the interview, she speaks to (indoctrinates?) them in places where they are a captive audience, as she puts it, and they are forced to listen to her nonsensical, apocalyptic view of their future.
Naomi Klein: A death sentence for the planet
In the media and in her latest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein does a good job as an AGW alarmist, with what some might even say is histrionic fear mongering. A sampling:
…keep warming below catastrophic levels,” “…this crisis continues to be existentially terrifying,” “…in the midst of a climate emergency,” “…we’re on a four-to-six-degree temperature trajectory. To be in decade zero, and out of time,” “…a clear and present danger to civilization, “…a death sentence for the planet,” “…a weapon of mass destruction,” “…the road we’re on…will lead us to a greater brutality..to a world of a kind of disaster apartheid I think we caught a glimpse of with Hurricane Katrina.
When it comes to the climate, Klein also seems to have a problem understanding or telling the truth. She claims to have “immersed myself in the science and politics of climate change.” But she doesn’t appear to be interested in facts: “It’s that I don’t want quibbling about the science. This is how a lot of the debate gets derailed. I don’t want to be derailed with quibbles about how many hurricanes there were in 2012.” (Could that be because, inconveniently, statistics show that there have been a lot fewer hurricanes and other extreme weather events than the AGW believers claim to be the consequences of man-made climate change?) In a recent CBC radio interview, she quotes Michael Mann, “the famed climate scientist” of the Hockey Stick debacle who apparently employed statistical tricks to produce a misleading graph of global warming history—the graph was used extensively as a propaganda tool to fuel the man-made global warming hype. Perhaps Klein doesn’t know that two Canadians, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, exposed the manipulations:
What they found was that 99% of the time you could process random data using Mann’s techniques and it would generate a Hockey Stick shape. This meant that Mann’s claim that the Hockey Stick graph represented an accurate reconstruction of the past climate was in tatters.
Given Klein’s Jewish heritage, it’s hard to understand how she can use the odious term “deniers,” with its terrible allusion to the Holocaust, when referring to the learned climate scientists and others who have demonstrated that the scientific data do not support the hypothesis of man-made global warming/climate change: “We focus too much on climate deniers,” she says. The use of this nasty ad hominem label has led to outrageous excesses, such as a sickening ad for the upcoming climate march in New York City, wherein it’s implied that respected scientists, other experts, and ordinary people who think for themselves and who happen not to agree that the scientific data support the unproven hypothesis of man-made climate change are tolerant of genocide.
Klein advocates “deep changes to our political and economic system.” She says, “Core inequalities need to be tackled through redistribution of wealth and technology” and bemoans that we seem to be “incapable of responding collectively to an existential crisis and incapable of acting collectively for a greater good.” The socialist/communist plan of action she’s apparently advocating appears to be in line with the UN’s Agenda 21 objectives, which Canadian Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (now resident of communist China when he’s not being fêted in Toronto by celebrity and former Canadian governor-general Adrienne Clarkson as “a true Canadian gem” who “invented the environment”) took a lead in formulating when he said:
Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?
That would be a real death sentence for the planet.
The grave consequences of celebrities thinking that star power doesn’t need the truth
Of course, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth May, and Naomi Klein aren’t the only Canadian celebrities chastising us for not “believing in” the religion of man-made climate change or doing enough about it. There are many others, including the publicly-lionized David Suzuki, another pseudo-expert on climate science whose shocking and appalling lack of knowledge on the subject was exposed to world-wide ridicule on Australian national television last September. (Watch the video or read the transcript here.)
Do any of the celebrities ever stop to think about the damage they cause by failing to do their homework and study the issues before recklessly and irresponsibly taking their uninformed opinions on the road?
Do they have any inkling that what they say, write, tweet, or sing in public forums may help to bring about and sustain, for example, the miserable realities of trying to live amidst industrial wind turbines which have been forced on rural residents as a direct result of the deception of man-made climate change posing a planetary emergency, thus supposedly necessitating special, draconian, democratic-rights-robbing legislation which gives the wind industry unprecedented rights to despoil prime farmland, expropriate land, kill wildlife, adversely affect people’s health, destabilize the electrical grid, fracture communities, devalue property, and allows it to enjoy 20-year guaranteed, significantly above-market returns on investment, courtesy of the taxpayers?
People are suffering badly for a big, celebrity-enabled lie, and losing their rights, their jobs, their homes, their communities, their environment, their way of life, their money.
Celebrity acolytes and advocates of man-made climate change, with their hysterical exaggerations, outrageous fear mongering, blatant misinformation, and bald-faced untruths have to take a good look at themselves and their role in the terrible consequences of helping to propagate the greatest scientific deception of all time.
There will be blood on the ground: permission to kill and do serious, irreversible harm
An Ontario Divisional Court overturned last year’s decision by the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal that stopped the construction of nine industrial wind turbines that would despoil the environmentally sensitive Ostrander Point, situated on provincially-owned Crown land in Prince Edward County. Last year, the Tribunal had revoked the approval, given by the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) in December 2012, on the basis that the Blanding’s turtle would suffer serious and irreversible harm if the development went ahead.
The MOE joined the project proponent, Gilead Power, in an appeal of the Tribunal’s ruling to the Ontario Divisional Court. “Three lawyers from the Ministry of Environment and the Attorney General’s office argued that their own MOE-appointed panel had erred,” said the Wellington Times.
With the Divisional Court’s decision on February 20, 2014, Gilead Power Corporation is presumably once again entitled, according to the permit it was originally granted on July 23, 2012 by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) under the Endangered Species Act, 2007 (ESA), “to ‘damage and destroy the habitat of Eastern Whip-poor-will’, as well as to ‘kill, harm, harass, capture, possess and transport’ both Blanding‟s turtle and Whip-poor-will, resulting from the development and operation of the Project” (from the Tribunal’s ruling, see Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County v. July 3, 2013).
Permits to kill, harm, harass, capture, possess and transport a species at risk or to damage and destroy its habitat are no longer issued to industrial wind turbine developers, but not for the reasons you may think.
Seven months ago the Ontario government almost completely undid its leash on the marauding weasels of wind. It gave up its power to monitor and regulate what the industrial wind turbine developers do to wildlife and the environment, making it even easier for the wind companies to do their dirty work, and harder than ever for concerned citizens and communities to assert their rights. New regulations granting more special rights to wind companies state in part:
Under the amended regulation, eligible proponents are automatically given an exemption provided they follow the prescribed rules. MNR has given up its power to say “no” to any project, regardless of the ecological importance of the area or the possibility there will be damaging cumulative impacts on the species at risk or its habitat.
Although proponents are generally required to document the measures they will take to minimize “adverse effects” on species, proponents almost never have to submit the documentation to MNR. MNR will therefore have no ability to know whether the permit-by-rule system is actually protecting species at risk.
The government’s own Environmental Commissioner has stated:
“By eliminating the permit process, the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) has shed its ability to say ‘no’ to a proposed activity, no matter how harmful it may be to an imperilled species,” says Commissioner Miller. “And since proponents don’t have to file any monitoring reports with the ministry, MNR will be blind to the effectiveness of its new rules.”
The Ontario Liberal government is wilfully enabling the destruction of the environment (not to mention people’s health, communities, property values, quality of life) for a fake-green technology that has proven to be useless and has already wasted billions of dollars. It’s enough to make you scream at the insanity, the government’s dereliction of fiduciary duty to the people, and the perversion of democracy in Ontario.
Serious and irreversible harm
We know that wind energy is economically ruinous, a faux-green shell game that has no benefit whatsoever, except for the wind companies and their political enablers. And yet the only thing that was able to stop nine useless industrial wind turbines from invading an environmental and tourist treasure in Ontario was—a little reptile.
Thanks to evidence that “serious and irreversible harm” would befall Blanding’s turtle, a globally endangered species that is threatened in Ontario, on July 3, 2013 the Environmental Review Tribunal revoked the approval for a wind factory at Ostrander Point in Prince Edward County that had been issued by the Ministry of the Environment in December 2012.
It was the danger to the turtle and its habitat alone, not the distinct prospect of turbine-slaughter of other animals such as birds and bats, not the likelihood of turbine-construction related destruction of plant life, not the probability of turbine-syndrome harm to human health, not the insult of a useless project allowed to squat on the people’s Crown land (it is “the policy of the Ontario government to promote the use of Crown land for renewable energy projects”), not the shock of turbines licensed to impale a designated Important Bird Area (explicitly permitted by the government) that swayed the Tribunal in this case. Only the turtle’s predicament met the very rigorous legal test of “serious and irreversible harm”, and thus the threatened reptile managed to protect all the other potential wind turbine victims as well.
The Ostrander Point outcome is welcome news for “anti-wind” warriors, but not every appeal to the Tribunal will have a handy endangered or threatened turtle to help out. The harsh reality is that it is very difficult to meet “the statutory onus” of proof of harm. But the damage is all too real and proven for the scientists who study the adverse effects of wind turbines on birds, bats and the environment and for the people who have had to move out of their homes because nearby wind turbines have made them too ill to stay.
The Tribunal’s decision (see Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County, 03 Jul 2013) is recommended reading for anyone interested in how tortuous a path anti-wind turbine advocates must tread, even when the Ontario government’s wind power scheme has been thoroughly discredited as a scam and very costly sham.
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