'Climate change'? It's whatever you want it to be

Lorne Gunter, National Post Monday, April 21, 2008

EDMONTON -The trouble with writing a column about an event just before it is about to begin is that it may not pan out exactly as you suspect. But I think I'm on solid ground when I say that Edmonton's Earth Day 2008 -- which was not slated to begin Sunday until a couple of hours after I had to file -- was not as well-attended as most of its 18 predecessors.

Then again, who knows? There's a large and receptive audience for ecoprop here. In the past, Edmonton's one-day Earth Day has been one of the biggest enviro-festivals in the country. So perhaps scores of local advocacy groups and "green" businesses managed to erect their tents and displays, and tens of thousands of Edmontonians trudged through knee-deep snow to visit them, eat "Earth-friendly food" and sit in on lectures about stuff like composting your own human waste and applying used engine oil as a night-time facial moisturizer. (Be sure to take advantage of the suspended metal particles. They make an excellent exfoliant!).

There was also to be a kids' activities area, no doubt with educational puppet shows, or the like, around the theme "If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down." But the city had nearly 10 centimetres of snow Saturday. Another 10 to 15 were expected Sunday, with a further 15 to 20 cms predicted for Monday. I make that a total of about 16 inches.

We're not supposed to see the sun or crack the zero mark until Wednesday at the earliest. So I can't imagine more than a few hundred environmental evangelists made it out to the lovely quarry-cum-park that hosts the annual event.

I'll confess, I feel genuinely sorry for the organizers and exhibitors. A great deal of planning and investment goes into an event of this size. There is no way to recoup either the time or the money. (I don't care what that organic-food salesman told you, those chickpea patties will not keep in your freezer until next year to demonstrate at your low-carbon barbecue booth.)

You would think participants might actually be happy, though, that Earth Day was called on account of snow and not sweltering temperatures. At least now they can claim victory. They've broken the back of global warming so decisively that Edmonton is now 25 degrees F below normal for this time of year. Their dire warnings during the last 10 Earth Days have been heeded and the planet pulled back from the edge of the precipice. Whew!

But I doubt there will be any celebrations. Indeed, one of the reasons "global warming" morphed into "climate change," beginning a couple of years ago, was so any weather extreme could be interpreted as an omen of impending doom.

Despite the claims of the likes of Al Gore and David Suzuki, the planet has not warned appreciably since 1998, itself the warmest or second-warmest year on record. Eight of the last 10 years have not been the hottest in history.

Indeed, if you use 1998 as the base year, the Earth has cooled in the last decade. Even if you use 2002 as Year Zero, there has been no discernable warming. We have entered a "temperature plateau" so far this decade. Even Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, grudgingly had to admit as much a couple of months ago.

Talking with Britain's Guardian newspaper in January, Dr. Pachauri admitted he and the UN climate body he heads are looking into the flat-lining temperatures. All the computer models of climate say we should still be warming, but we're not.

"Are there natural factors compensating?", the Indian economist wondered. It seems never to have occurred to him -- nor to most environmentalists -- that natural factors might be causing the fluctuations in temperature seen in the recent decades and that humans have little to do with it.

Climate change has replaced global warming in green rhetoric in part because there is less and less proof that much warming is occurring, but also so that whenever there is a climate catastrophe -- too much cold or too much heat, too much rain or too little, more hurricanes or fewer, longer summers or early frosts -- all of it could be blamed on humans