Facts different from propaganda
To the Editor,
Re: Environmental groups unfairly represented, Letters, Dec. 13.
In her support for self-styled ‘environmental’ groups, letter-writer Liz Fox urges learning “the difference between fact and propaganda.” Both the British Courts and I agree.
On Oct. 10, 2007, Justice Burton of the High Court, London, found that Al Gore’s global warming film An Inconvenient Truth contained nine factual errors.
He ruled that it constituted “political indoctrination” under Section 406 of the U.K. Education Act. This ruling meant the film could not be shown in British schools without teachers “offering a balanced presentation of opposing views.”
Similarly, the official Russell Review of the first Climategate emails from the University of East Anglia exposed climate researchers’ “failures, evasions, misleading actions, unjustifiable delays, and pervasive unhelpfulness – all of which amounts to sub-optimal academic practice.”
Yet the U.N. used Climategate “facts” to demand Canadians transfer millions of dollars to socialist countries.
Direct observations are facts.
Anyone in Nanaimo can look up and see we do not live under a thick sheet of ice. The global warming that melted the ice sheet at the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago was not caused by oil pipelines.
Anyone can see tropical turtle and fern fossils in Canada’s Arctic; review the global warming of Mars; or visit Greenland’s Hvalsey Church ruins, once in a farming community which thrived during the Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago, but was frozen out by the ensuing Little Ice Age.
The Earth’s climate has changed repeatedly over the past 95 million years. This is fact, not propaganda. Self-serving environmental groups should learn the difference.
Bart Jessup
Gabriola Island
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