I was first encouraged to study and write about climate change in 1987 by then-federal energy minister, the late Marcel Masse.
He championed federal environmental scientists pioneering world-leading Canadian studies of climate.
Masse arranged for me to meet some of those scientists that year at their Downsview Airport research centre in Greater Toronto. They said that erratic weather with disrupted patterns would mark the onset of changing climate. To illustrate, they described a future western Canadian year of weather like this one, 30 years later, dry with wildfires in summer and periods of deep polar cold in winter.
Thirty years later, our January temperatures in Mountain View County this winter have ranged from 15 (in my backyard one sunny day) to - 30 C.
Snowfall in winter and rain in summer is increasingly erratic. Wildfires in the boreal forest and prairie grasslands are more frequent and more devastating.
The Pacific Ocean, vital to our economic future as an oil trade route, is more acidic and less productive of marine life because it is a huge carbon sink for increasing volumes of carbon dioxide.
Climate change has been occurring throughout the 4.5 billion-year life of the Earth and other planets in the solar system in their geological lifetimes.
There is no politically correct doubt that, in the current geological era, greenhouse gases emitted by the 7.7 billion humans on the planet seeking food produced by agriculture, clothing, shelter with heat, and transportation in a mobile global economy, contribute to atmospheric warming.
There is no scientific doubt that oilsands emissions are only a nominal contributor to total global greenhouse gases – one-tenth of one per cent of global human emissions.
If producers doubled oilsands production, oilsands emissions would still be less than one-third of one per cent, a rounding error on tables of greenhouse gas emissions by nation.
There may be other causes as well, and massive reductions to emissions may not forestall global warming.
A significant body of scientists think sunspots are a cause of climate warming and they have convincing politically incorrect but scientifically reliable data collected to show that increases and decreases in sunspots and changes in global temperature coincide over the past millennium.
Sunspots, several times larger than Earth, are temporary spots darker than the surrounding areas of the sun’s photosphere. They are regions of reduced surface temperature.
In a period of active sunspots, the sun’s energy striking the Earth and other planets and moons in the solar system is increased and warmer than when sunspot activity is reduced and it is correspondingly cooler.
The best sunspot science is being done in the Russian Federation, possibly accounting for its rejection by scientists from Russia’s traditional enemy countries.
It also explains why the Russian Federation has been unenthusiastic about international collaboration on greenhouse gas emission.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s research on sunspot activity points to it as a cause of the Little Ice Age from 1645 to 1715, resulting in crop failures, famine, disease and increased child mortality in Europe.
Ironically, the International Panel on Climate Change is a denier that sunspots are a cause of climate change.
It brings to mind former U.S. vice-president Al Gore’s phrase, “an inconvenient truth.”
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
