Prime Minister Trudeau is bringing Canadian science back to the stone ages. From the Financial Post:
So much for the science, Trudeau government sticks to pre-determined climate agenda
Apparently the Canadian government is willing to listen to climate scientists again. It seems like just yesterday when government officials feared losing their jobs for talking about science and data that didn’t match the official party line. I can remember not long ago a senior Environment Canada official telling me he was trying to bring some rationality and balance back to the place but feared the Minister would have him fired if he spoke up. And then there was the other government scientist who sent me a binder full of material showing their environmental planning process had been hijacked for ideological reasons because the government was determined to put its hardline climate politics ahead of real-world data.
But enough about the Chretien era. The Tories who followed seemed to take a hands-off process to the climate science scene, letting a thousand flowers bloom, which made sense since most policy decisions have never had much to do with the science anyway. But to some of the old climate warhorses it apparently felt like betrayal.
Now we have a government that insists it is open to science again. So it organized a special climate briefing on November 23 and even put the presentation —by Gregory Flato of Environment Canada and Alain Bourque of Ouranos — on the internet. But, surprise surprise, before the briefing even begins, the PR people have dictated what the conclusions will be: “The scientific evidence is clear: climate change is one of the greatest threats of our time. The Government of Canada recognizes that global temperature increases must be limited to at most two degrees Celsius.”
Stop right there. The “science” does not tell us whether climate change is a greater challenge than, say, terrorism or the national debt, that’s something that citizens and elected officials have to sort out. As for the “two degrees” slogan, this has always been a political construct, it doesn’t emerge from thermodynamics or meteorology.
So it’s starting to look like the old days again, when the science gets heavily torqued to promote a pre-determined policy agenda. The preface goes on: “The Government of Canada takes great pride in the work of all of Canada’s scientists and will continue to feature science work to Canadians.” Huh? I can think of lots of Canadian scientific work on climate that the Government will never listen to, because it doesn’t support the policy agenda.
Sad really - there is so much that could be done with this effort but people simply do not have the ability to see the truth. Classical cultural marxism write large.
The politicians are seen as "doing something about a big scary issue" all the while they will be safely out of office when the butchers bill comes due.
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