Let’s start with the fact that its beginning was dubious. When I was in short pants, it was ‘global warming’. That didn’t perfectly fit the reality of what was going on, so the environmental profiteers figured the more all-encompassing ‘climate change’ would serve their purpose better. It’s a nice catch-all for having an explanation for any question no one’s asked yet. And it can insulate from the ever-growing list of failed predictions from our climate scions.

And what is their ‘purpose’? I’m going to have to say the science isn’t settled (natch) on that.

Is there a ‘one world’ government conspiracy going on that the nefarious powers that be know the best way to buckle the will of the people is to muck with their quality of life by making a cheap power source expensive, with a sprinkling of wealth redistribution on the side?

Or is Al Gore that smart that he realized the racket here? Maybe, he’s made a ton while not doing a thing to help the environment, and created an entire industry on ‘carbon trading’. This whole false economy is now actually a thing adjudicated, adjusted and enforced by governments to varying degrees, and varying depths into the cores of their taxpayers.

Or is it the fundamentalists that just hate things that work? Fossil fuels have fostered the best quality of life in the planet’s history and is helping the basket cases of the world crawl out of it. As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats. But some can’t stand that for whatever reason. They’re just negative? Or they like the government teat as opposed to gumption and innovation. The cheerleaders of government’s funding ‘alternative’ energy cannot be serious about helping the earth and her inhabitants. Let’s look at solar power, it’s about as reliable as Justin Trudeau making it through a paragraph without at least half a dozen ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’. Or wind power, the hideous structures that require more steel coking than any oil well, and more grotesquely harvested rare earth elements than a high school classroom of cellphones, that also has the benefit of being unreliable, inefficient and murders flying wildlife with holocaust-like magnitude.

We constantly hear the science is settled, no more questions, this interview is over – well, it’s not. The very nature of the scientific method can address this point as ridiculous. Many people are questioning more and more every day. So waving a magic hockey stick and declaring it ‘settled’ does not work, and in fact weakens your position.

And then the claim that should make us ‘normals’ shutter – that 98% of climate scientists say the science is settled. This has been eviscerated by many people (none in mainstream media), but recently an interesting article at examiner.com addressed the issue. Check it out here, but I’ll point out some of the main highlights. The Examiner thinks the real number of scientists who believe in global warming is actually somewhere around 30%, but to me, the most revealing thing is the sub-groups revealed by the survey. It’s not a black and white issue – there were a number of respondents that have a truly scientific, nuanced approach to the issue; that climate change is a combination of the following variables: man-made, natural, bad, good, threat to humanity, benefit to humanity, something we can do something about, something we can’t do something about, something that we can not efficiently do something about or a mixture of all these.

With that being said, I think its time people look at climate change in the right terms: if it gets colder, buy a toque – if it gets warmer, turn your jeans into jean shorts – and most importantly, do not tax carbon, support safe pipelines, continue to innovate best practice technologies for environmental management, and keep calm. In fact, get back to and export those ideals, because Western Canada has been doing that for decades.

It’s madness to overturn the economic apple cart for something we don’t understand, and even if we could agree to an understanding, no cost-benefit analysis has been done to justify the actions many are trying to inflict on their citizenry.

And no, the sky is not falling, but don’t take it from me – I’m a, (gasp), denier!!!