Climate change - a successful propaganda campaign

Today the Globe and Mail’s lead story is "Welcome to the New Climate" highlighting a new Globe poll’s finding that "4 out of 5 Canadians say they’ve seen it first hand". This is in agreement with a number of other polls that have ‘the environment’ as a top concern among Canadians.

This is bizarre, but understandable. ‘The environment’ a.k.a. ‘global warming’ a.k.a. ‘climate change’ has risen to number one on the list of Canadians’ concerns in the space of one year. Last year it was nowhere near the top - ‘health care’ was it. I find this bizarre because Canada is a sparsely populated country with no immediate environmental crises, a global GHG emissions footprint of less than two percent which will have, even if the GHG theorists are correct, near zero impact on global climate no matter how radically Canada cuts emissions.

Is global warming a reality? It seems so. Is human activity the cause? Not proven and there are competing theories and evidence to strongly suggest otherwise. So why the huge shift in public opinion?

Simple. An unusually warm start to the winter season in central Canada, some wind and unusually rainy weather on west coast, Al Gore’s movie, climate change alarmism by the usual suspects and relentless media coverage (newscasts, weather casts, political talk shows) reporting and repeating every weather event and non-event with an explicit or implicit tie-in to global climate change. In other words there has been a massively successful propaganda campaign. I expect it has been beyond David Suzuki’s wildest dreams. And he’s a fruit-fly scientist, not a climatologist.

And what’s really scary is that this hysteria has gotten ahead of the Tories, forcing them to join the Chicken Little brigades - no, armies. The only chance for a turnaround will be a couple of very cold winters. What are the odds?