My first thought is that it was a couple of playful environmentalists’ premature April Fool’s joke. On Thursday, like a lot of others I suspect, I was very taken with The Globe’s front-page photos.
More precisely, I was very taken by one of them: the picture of the golden eagle. Most birds are lovely to look at. Eagles are noble.
I suppose that, in these careful and enlightened times, to say that one animal is “noble” and others are not is a mortal sin against the grim egalitarianism that is the first principle of the keener consciences of our age. This principle holds that, while we may register differences, as between people or animals, to rate those differences—and, accordingly, to say of this person or that animal that one is superior to another—is a dreadful moral failure. In fact, in the rarer altitudes of ecological enlightenment, it is a fatal offence even to draw a line between human and animal.
This toad and that nuclear physicist, this slug and that classical pianist, they are both, in all that is of consequence, one. He who unpacks the quark is as one with the belcher of the bogs; she who unravels Liszt in all his tormenting keyboard velocities is no more than that still, wet blob on the underbough.
To speak or think otherwise is “species-ist,” one of these new and arid Orwellian coinages by which the true believers castigate and categorize the morally underdeveloped of our kind.
It is all bosh, of course. People do not travel thousands of miles and book passage on expensive tour boats to look at halibut. They do to look at whales. Whales are more impressive than halibut. This might not be nice if you are a halibut, and is probably quite a nick in the self-esteem of that unassuming and, happily, quite delicious fish, but alas, it is so.
This ranking holds for creatures of every element. Cougars will draw a crowd where armadillos open to an empty house. The Bengal tiger, to my taste, is the most wonderful spectacle that has ever prowled the Earth. The scaly-tailed rat, known to the connoisseur as the pier rat, is a damn nuisance. As opposed to the tiger, it has a very low fan base.
But it is the creatures of the air that, at their finest, speak to mankind’s wish and need to appreciate the beauty and wonder of nature’s living marvels. And of these, surely there is none quite so simply impressive as the eagle.
The poet Tennyson has covered this point so very well before me that it would be churlish not to quote him:
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
All together now: “Yeah! Alfred!”
So, let us return to The Globe’s pictures of Thursday morning, of a golden eagle and a marmot—specifically, the dead eagle and the live rodent.
The story was of a clandestine operation by the British Columbia government, which set out the carcass of a dead deer to lure golden eagles to lunch—and then shot six of them. This, because golden eagles, under God’s providential assignment of these matters, is a predator of the marmot, and the marmots of Vancouver Island are a dwindling clan. And because, one must presume, under the missionary zeal of ecological “management,” some wizards in the B.C. wildlife division felt a little shotgun intervention on the pro-marmot side of the equation was the really sensitive thing to do.
There was even a Gagliano touch to the story. A ministry spokesman indicated that, while the public wasn’t told of the kill, neither was it a secret.
I should add, just to gild this bloodied lily, the ministry in question has also “encouraged” the shooting of cougars and wolves under the same demented idea of marmot protection. This may well be the My Lai moment of the endangered-species movement.
There are six dead golden eagles in a refrigerator somewhere in B.C. because official conservationists wanted to spare some weasel’s cousin the wear and tear of the wild.
It’s a mischief on the same scale as harpooning a whale to “save” the sculpin.
In the civilized nation to the south of us, they have a better sense of priorities. In Bush country, it is a criminal offence to vex eagles; loggers have paid fines ranging into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for cutting down trees wherein they nest.
Lord, let us be saved from the people who care about things. There is no insolence stronger than that which springs from a caring heart.
Will Al Gore save the world?
Well, he was on Larry King Live the other night, which, as we all know, is the very hospice of our ailing world. When a man has a world to save, where else would he go?
Whenever the great, the rich or the famous feel the itch of social conscience, they head to Mr. King’s amicable chat hospital to have it scratched. For us. For the peons who, without their guidance, and a comatose nod from Larry, would not recognize the handbasket of the week in which our green and fragile world is careering to hell.
Bono ends a gig in Amsterdam, say, and remembers Africa is in a spot of trouble. There is no G8 meeting in session, and it’s pointless to issue press releases slagging Paul Martin anymore. Gives Larry a call. Appears next night. Africa fixed.
If tubular Dr. Phil fears America is too fat, a quick call to Larry, a fresh set of suspenders, and the alarm is sounded. America shrinks.
And it was only recently that Paul McCartney and his then-loving spouse, Heather, found themselves agitated over the parsimonious earnings from the “cruellest harvest” in the world, the Newfoundland seal hunt. They went to Larry, and now, of course, the ice floes of the North Atlantic are a floating daycare centre, a Christmas on ice, for unmolested seals.
Go on, Larry. Vent. All is well. It’s better than a syllogism. It’s neater than physics.
The seals are doing fine. Paul and Heather have hit cold water, though. Their marriage is finis. The publicity is horrid for Heather, and the sorting out of the marital spoils promises to be nasty. And yet, just a few weeks ago, there they were, cute as squirrels, on Larry’s show.
Yesterday, their troubles seemed so far away. And now—well, now it seems they’re here to stay. Oh well, it’s their business. Let it be.
So, when I saw Al Gore on with Larry, fresh from his jetting to Cannes and hopscotching the globe with his new documentary film/presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, I knew—as surely as I know that Liza Minnelli will be a guest again on LKL—that whatever state the world is in, we were saved.
Mr. Fixit was on with Larry. The Pied Piper of Global Warming (climate change, for those at the front of the class who have been keeping up) was executing a passionate seminar for our doomed planet and … was it just my imagination, or could you feel the ice caps mending? Were perspiring polar bears suddenly high-fiving each other? And was there, finally—thank God—a (recuperative) chill in the global biosphere?
Either that, or I’d left the fridge door open. Again.
Al is on a crusade. The chads are history. The one-time geek who lost to the frat boy has, in the immortal mantra of a million therapists, “put all that behind him.” He’s found himself, again. He is no longer wooden Al Gore. He is Al Gore the Jeremiah of a planet whose thermostat has gone wacko.
Al is a salesman. He’s the doctor, too. An Inconvenient Truth is the finest expository opus since Michael Moore caught George Bush reading about a billy goat to school kids the morning of September 11.
Al is everywhere. He’s new again. And he cares. Am I skeptical? Do Rice Krispies crepitate?
I know the word is delicate these days, but Al is on a crusade. And of all the causes that are out there, none is so sentimental, so saturated with vague, emotive attitudinizing, fed on soft science and ripe with moral grandstanding, as global warming.
Global warming, precisely because it is so grand and nebulous, precisely because it is that perfect storm of scientism and moralism, because it is so susceptible to demagoguery (however fashionably packaged and presented), is an almost unstoppable cause.
Hands up, those of you who are against “saving the world.”
There are the usual rote denials from Gore about a further run for the presidency. But now he’s riding the thermal drafts of undreamt-of popularity. He has the approval of all right-thinking people. Hollywood loves him, Cannes gushes, Larry nods.
The only thing between him and a clean shot at the presidency as the Democratic nominee is the ice queen of American politics, Hillary Clinton. And what chance has an ice queen against the Pied Piper of a warming world?
Hillary may want to take a look at An Inconvenient Truth. Some truths are more inconvenient than others. The verity offered for her digestion is that Al Gore is back.
Which city is more scrupulous in enforcing its pollution bylaws: Glasgow or Toronto?
No, this is not a thought experiment. In Toronto, during the manically hyped International Film Festival, the Iraq reporter and sometime actor Sean Penn lit up a cigarette during a press conference at the Sutton Place Hotel.
There are bylaws in Toronto against just this sort of thing, and they carry heavy penalties. I’ve seen postings in elevators warning of $5,000 fines.
There are bylaws in Glasgow, too. I haven’t had a chance to peruse that city’s elevator literature, but I’d wager it features equally big fines in similarly small print. In Glasgow, it was Keith Richards who lit up in a public place.
Perhaps, because it is Keith Richards we’re talking about, I should be more explicit: he lit and smoked a cigarette. Whether Keith was, himself, lit up, is irrelevant. He wasn’t at a news conference—nor, it might be helpful to add, was he up a palm tree.
He smoked, on stage, during a Stones concert.
Here in Toronto, the result was interesting. Sean Penn escaped any penalty. But the Sutton Place Hotel, the venue of the press conference, got hit with a $605 fine. This doesn’t seem fair. The hotel wasn’t smoking. But, evidently, the hotel’s staff had neglected to convey personally to the intrepid Mr. Penn the many prohibitions of the Smoke-Free Ontario Act.
The Glaswegian authorities were more merciful. Neither the company that operated the stage, nor the Great Inhaler himself, Mr. Richards, was fined. In Glasgow, they made a judgment of Solomonic finesse: a “stage” was not an “enclosed public space” in the meaning of the bylaws. Scots are nothing if not subtle. David Hume was a Scot, and he could unravel cobwebs—with his teeth.
It is useful to add that Mr. Penn’s defiant fumigations caught the attention of no less a marplot than Ontario Health Promotion Minister Jim Watson, who allowed that Mr. Penn was a “great actor” but, notwithstanding the comforts his great art has brought the world—I’m paraphrasing here—he was not above the law, and that “he could be charged and he should be charged.” He hasn’t been, and he won’t be.
Film festival officials grovelled in perfectly toneless and abject prose: “The festival and our hotel partners make every effort possible to ensure that our guests are aware of and respect Ontario’s Smoke-Free Act. We apologize that our moderator did not address the issue during the press conference.” I hope none of the PR people are writing movie scripts.
So, Toronto takes its bylaws very seriously. And so does the Ontario government. When a minister scolds a widescreen demigod, you know it’s serious. The environment is a big issue in this province, as I hope this comparative study illustrates. Those Scots may be slackers, but Ontario is the dour jurisdiction when it comes to its air.
Just as it’s big on global warming. Or so I thought. This is a province in love with blue boxes and a house of great crusaders against the tobacco menace—which no less an authority than Al Gore has recently linked to the global warming phenomenon itself. Except when it comes to areas larger than a pop star’s studied show of trivial rebellion, or something a little more drastic than parking the liquor empties in the right-coloured bin.
Consider the statement this week of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.
Rona Ambrose, the federal environment minister, has been talking of imposing fuel-emission standards on automobile manufacturers. Here’s Mr. McGuinty: “The one thing we will not abide is any effort on the part of the national government to unduly impose greenhouse-gas emission reductions on the province of Ontario at the expense of the auto sector.”
This is the same premier who recently welcomed the news that government-subsidized GM plants would soon be the home for the manufacture of the new “muscle car,” the gas-guzzling Camaro.
Fine a hotel for one star-lit cigarette, but welcome the manufacture of thousands of environmentally retrograde muscle cars. And promise not to “abide” any effort to “unduly impose greenhouse-gas reductions.” This is a parable of the entire global-warming debate. Those who accept the science of the climate-change projections, who profess to be most anxious over the “greatest crisis” of our times, will say every right word, and pursue the most trivial acts of symbolic environmentalism. But when it comes to action that has any real cost—political or personal—they are as hard-line an opponent to any change in the status quo as the most relentless climate skeptic.
It really is time for those who say they accept the crisis represented by climate change to live up to their professions.
The skeptics can always retire to Glasgow. And contemplate the Scottish understanding of an enclosed space. While having, if it pleases them, a smoke.
The Stern Review on Global Warming was released this week, and once I’d had the chance to catch a few of the headlines it inspired, I thought immediately of Joey Smallwood.
Mr. Smallwood liked big numbers. Especially big numbers preceded by dollar signs. If a road somewhere on the South Coast was about to be paved, a new trades school built, or a new industrial project launched, Joey would wind himself up and find a microphone. “This new road/school/industry is going to cost NOT 10 million dollars, NOT 20 million dollars, but FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS!”
He could find nearly infinite rhetorical variations on a simple number (breaking it down into its constituent “hundreds of thousands”; pluralizing—50 millions of dollars—etc., etc. and etc.). The trick was to bludgeon Newfoundlanders, not accustomed even to the sound (never mind the actual possession) of great amounts of cash, into a state of catatonic awe at the nearly inconceivable heaps of money this project or that was going to cost.
The trick grew stale. After a while, being told how many twenties were in a stack of 50 million dollars became tedious, and the long tease of “not 10, not 20, not 30 but … X millions of dollars” became a risible bore. Another failing of the technique was the fading power of the word “million.” By the end of his fractious reign, the campaign speeches rang with allusion to hitherto unapproached altitudes of “billions of dollars.”
When arithmetic is rhetoric, each new speech must have a bigger number. Let us call it Smallwood’s Law.
The Stern report on climate change illustrates Smallwood’s Law in a way that would make the old conjuror proud. It projects a cost to the world, if measures are not taken to mitigate or halt global warming, of seven trillion dollars. Even in these days of Enron-scale frauds and income trust cancellations, a trillion dollars is an astronomical number. Seven trillion summons the galaxies and all their wheeling stars.
I look at that number more as an instrument to arrest attention than as a real figure. If Sir Nicholas Stern had said nine trillion or six trillion, would he have been pounced on by accountants and academics the next day saying, “He’s up by two trillion, or down by one?” I don’t think so.
When we enter the area of projecting costs in the trillions of dollars, based on the wild variables of planetary weather patterns over the next forty-five years or so, and speculations on the industrial growth of 162 nations over the same period—a marriage, let it be noted, of two roulette tables: weather forecasting and the stock market—any claim of exactitude is at best a mirage, at worst a carny’s bark.
I know that skepticism over global warming—or, as it has been more tactically rebranded, “climate change”—is less and less a popular stance. In some quarters, it even approaches being socially unacceptable. On the not-so-far fringes of Gaia-consciousness, to mark such disapprobation, the phrase “climate change denial” is being tested out.
It is a worrisome development. The ardent advocates of climate change are more than a little imperious in their certitudes. Every counterargument or qualification to their view of things is discounted as being “paid for” by the oil industry. Or, it is labelled as being a denial of “the science.” They cast yesterday’s hurricane as “evidence” of extreme weather brought on by greenhouse gas emissions in the full knowledge that what we now call one “weather event” is, or can be, proof of nothing.
In my view, it cannot be emphasized sufficiently that the climate-change movement is at least as much a subcategory of rhetoric—the art of persuasion—as it is a branch of science. It is at least as much a partisan exercise (partisan in the sense of supporting a cause) as a harvest of neutral experiment and observation.
The science is not complete. The models are not perfect. The projections, economic or meteorological, over the next fifty to two hundred years are most unobligingly and massively complex. Prediction on this scale is necessarily wildly fallible.
Journalistic skepticism on climate change is a rare orchid indeed. Too many journalists are advocates, and that—whatever the cause—is a fatal mixing of mutually exclusive categories.
Most pernicious in this context is the attempt to declare, “The debate is over.” It isn’t over. That declaration is unsupported assertion. It is rhetoric’s oldest trick. Just as declaring the arguments of those who see things differently as being corrupted by other interests is not a counterargument but a commonplace ad hominem evasion.
It is in this same territory that I place the Stern review’s $7 trillion warning. It is not a number. It is just a gorgeous and late-blooming illustration of Smallwood’s Law. How Joe would have worked it—a seven and then that whole mile of zeros.
I can, alas, hear him now.
It’s not just the planet that’s warming, it’s the rhetoric on the subject of the planet’s warming.
Elizabeth May, the Green leader, in a sermon preached this past weekend in London, Ontario, invoked the words of an activist British journalist who has likened the governments of Tony Blair, George Bush and Stephen Harper and their respective responses to global warming as worse than Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis. May cited his words, but now claims on the Green website she did not compare Nazi government and the Holocaust to any current issue.
In a purely literal sense, perhaps she did not, but if you are preaching a sermon in a church and global warming is its theme, you are not chatting loosely with friends in a coffee shop. Furthermore, invoking Chamberlain and appeasement in reference to those who do not share your views makes it fairly clear you also wish to invoke the unqualified moral authority of what followed appeasement, the Holocaust, on your side of the rhetorical ledger.
Another noted environmentalist, Prince Charles, has been standing on this same tricky ledge. The Prince has claimed that urgent action is needed on climate change and likened the struggle to do something about it to Britain’s battle against the Nazis in World War II. These are not the only occasions. The more fervent advocates of global warming are also far too fond of calling those who disagree with them “deniers,” trying to colour a policy difference with the brush of Holocaust denial.
It is a despicable tactic. There are a number of problems with injecting the Holocaust or its shadow into the current political debate on global warming, and the separate debate on what to do about it. For the West, the Holocaust is the absolute standard of evil. It was—maybe the reminder is necessary—the deliberate, conscious torture and inhuman murder of six million people, men, women and children, by the Nazi government because those people were Jews. It is also a historical fact, something that dreadfully has really and already happened. Aside from the most pathetic anti-Semites, no one can or does dispute it.
Political policy on global warming is a choice, from a range of possibilities about what to do in the face of some very serious arguments that mankind is influencing the global climate. Advocates on either side may be claiming absolute certainty for their positions, but precisely because we are dealing with the future, approximated by models and estimates, neither side can possess such certainty. Invoking the Holocaust is wrong first on logical grounds. It has happened. We know it. Global warming policy is an attempt to meet a future contingency. The tactic is also wrong on a much higher level, for it is an attempt to claim, or associate with, the absolute moral authority that belongs to the Holocaust and all who were victims of its torments, and to transfer that absolute authority to the advocacy of a current and contentious issue.
Extreme rhetoric is often a mask for weak argument. It is also very often an attempt to override discussion in favour of a stampede to predetermined and unexamined policies. Surely, with all the science that Kyoto and its advocates have lined up on their side of the debate, dipping into the history of appeasement and the Holocaust is, at the very best, unnecessary.
Too many people, I among them, have noted the overlap, sometimes tending to perfect symmetry, between environmentalism and the more rigid varieties of religious adherence.
For all the most ardent environmentalist’s loud prattle about the “science,” they show precious little respect for any contest over their views. Scientists don’t invoke the Holocaust when there is a quarrel over a line of research, or a dispute in some of the arcane understandings of quantum physics. They do not see quarrels as a form of heresy, or seek to argue down their opponents by questioning their motives and associations.
The most strident of the global warming enthusiasts—and they are many—demonstrate a willingness to be very nasty indeed when it comes to “debating” those who hold a different view from them. And of all their miserable tactics the attempt to picture their opponents as in the same moral domain as Holocaust deniers is the most desperate and despicable. Some scientists.
David Suzuki has stirred a minor controversy, recently, by some remarks he made in a speech to six hundred students at McGill University. A report in the McGill Daily tells us “he urged today’s youth to speak out against politicians complicit in climate change.”
“Complicit” is the damning word there. People are complicit only in dark and pernicious undertakings. He went on to suggest the students “look for a legal way to throw our current political leaders in jail for ignoring science,” those comments drawing rounds of cheering and applause.
Well, this is a turnaround of some proportions. In the old days, the really old days, it was the foes of science, the enemies of what we have come to call the Enlightenment, who used to call for the rack, the stake and the dungeon to treat those who challenged religion’s pre-eminent authority to both speak and know the truth.
We generally look upon it as a backward moment when the Catholic Church put the bridle on Galileo, subjected him to house arrest and the tender rebukes of the Inquisition. So it’s at least mildly disconcerting to hear of a celebrated son of the Enlightenment, in the person of one of Canada’s star communicators, urging a university audience, no less, to seek to “jail” those whom he perceives as “ignoring science.” I think it’s fairly clear he doesn’t really mean science in general here, but rather a very particular subset of that great endeavour, the contentious and agenda-riven field of global warming.
I am under no illusion about the force of the global warming consensus. It is the grand orthodoxy of our day. Among right-thinking people, the idea of expressing any doubts on some of its more cataclysmic projections, to speak in tones other than those of veneration about its high priests, such as David Suzuki or Al Gore, is to stir a response uncomfortably close to what, in previous and less rational times, was reserved for blasphemers, heretics and atheists.
But wherever we are on global warming, and on the models and theories supporting it, it is not yet the Truth, nor is it yet Science (with a capital S) as such. And to put a stay on our full consent to its more clamorous and particular alarms is not, pace Dr. Suzuki, either “ignoring science” or “complicity” in criminal endeavour. Nor is reasoned dissent or dispute on some or all of the policy recommendations that global warming advocates insist flow, as night follows day, from their science.
It’s worth pausing on this point. What global warming is, what portion of it is man-made, is one set of questions properly within the circle of rational inquiry we call science. What to do about it—shut down the oil sands, impose a carbon tax, sign on to Kyoto, mandate efficient light bulbs or hybrid cars—are choices within a range of public policy options that have to be made outside any laboratory whatsoever.
Global warming’s more fulminating spokespeople are apt to finesse that great chasm between the science and the politics. They are further apt to imply a continuum between the unassailable authority of real and neutral science and their own particular policy prescriptions. (I notice late in the week that something called Environmental Defence has hailed the Alberta oil sands as “the most destructive project on Earth.” It goes on to say that “your desire to tackle global warming is being held hostage by the Tar Sands.” I’m not sure how they latched on to that “your” there. Is Environmental Defence elected? But let that pass; it is the tactic that is familiar.)
Global warming is the truth. So, shutting down the oil sands is also the truth. If global warming is primarily a “man-made” phenomenon, then what to do about it is a political discussion before it is anything else at all. If Environmental Defence or Dr. Suzuki thinks shutting down the oil sands is not a political choice, I advise both the group and the man to visit Alberta and acquaint themselves, while they are at it, with the history of the National Energy Program, and what its consequences were for the West and Confederation. Shutting down the oil sands would make the storm over the NEP feel like a soft rain on a sultry day by comparison. It would break the Confederation.
So, far from jailing our politicians if they continue to debate what should be done, I’m in favour of leaving them where they are for now. If that’s a soft stance, all I can say is that I favour discussion over imprisonment. Dr. Suzuki will surely agree that truth, like science, is not under the ownership of either any one group or any one man. To argue that those who question a prevailing orthodoxy should, even metaphorically, be tossed in jail is radically inconsistent with the essence and spirit of science itself, the essence and spirit that Dr. Suzuki, in his better moments, so clearly reveres.
We may decorate reports with graphs and charts and huge numbers, and conjure pages of the most exquisite and arcane equations, but the very best we can offer on climate a hundred years from now is a series of sophisticated and ever-ramifying probabilities that are themselves subject to a myriad of unforeseeable contingencies.
Who will undertake the difficult task of sifting the real science from the alarmist advocacy? Who will draw the boundaries between climate activism and cold analysis? Who will present a statement of the case, as close as reason and science today can make it, to what we actually know, and can reasonably project on the basis of what we know?