Every summer my parents piled us kids into our ‘53 Pontiac and coaxed it westward towards Jasper and up to the Columbia Ice Fields.
The glacier was close to the highway in my earliest memories. But each successive year you could see the latest end-moraine lying farther up the valley.
An interpretive signboard explained what was happening—the glacier and the ice fields higher up were the remnants of the last Ice Age. I could feel it, me in my summer t-shirt, the winds blowing off that 10,000 year-old ice chilled me to the bone. My dad explained that the prairie where we lived was not so long ago buried under a sheet of ice two miles thick.
Mindboggling.
And what about the rivers that flowed from those retreating glaciers? Back in Edmonton, I dug a cave in the clay banks of the North Saskatchewan River to watch all that life-giving water flow by. When the glaciers were gone, I wondered, would the river dry up? Would our taps at home run dry? In my cave, I rolled dead leaves into reefers to help me contemplate this and many more important issues.
I graduated from the U of A as a hydro-meteorologist and went to work collecting data on the hydrological cycle in the Zambezi River watershed.
If I didn’t have rivers in my blood before, I sure did after two years in Africa. I can show you the blood tests!
Returning to Canada, I abandoned a graduate degree in favour of making movies. And also because the climate at the university disappointed me. I found professors entrenched in their theories to the point of hostility toward competing ideas.
My earliest films concerned the environment. Urban pollution was the star of my first film. Our fledgling company examined the disastrous effect of a dam on downstream waterways. Mountains were a favourite subject—erosion, wildlife, and their wardens. Also the Arctic—a year in the life of the Eskimo, the threat of pipelines on the delicate tundra, and the outrageous challenge of oil exploration at the North Pole. We made films at Fort McMurray before they broke ground on the oil sands.
After twenty years, I traded camera for keyboard and focussed on writing for film and television. In the 1990s, I wrote two of the first shows on climate change for David Suzuki’s The Nature of Things. For Discovery Channel’s Storm Warning! I wrote the flagship episode that connected crazy weather events to a warming planet.
Global warming was my middle name.
And then something happened.
Climate crisists began preaching in slogans and pat phrases. Their fervor unnerved me. It reminded me why I’d abandoned a Masters program—science was taking a back seat to the need for a tight narrative.
And then something else happened.
I began to fact-check what smelled to me of propaganda.
Remember, I’d been a climatologist since I was ten. I never questioned the science. But I couldn’t buy arguments in which the facts no longer mattered. I began to challenge what I saw as propaganda.
Are we more likely to die from extreme weather today than in the past? Quite the opposite. Are wildfires on the increase? Please check the burn acreages from 100 years ago. Are polar bears going extinct as promised? The latest data shows their numbers greater than ever.
Nor did my discovering a few errors of fact erode my concern for the planet.
And then I discovered something else—clear evidence of scientists fudging the data.
Graphs were being manipulated to depict dramatic trends in climate phenomena. Clearly, the time frames were too short. As we all know, climate science demands the long view. Historical temperature graphs were being tampered with—one case well-documented—the elimination of previous eras of natural warming.
Why would climate crisists feel the need to do this?
And then recently something else happened.
I could easily have avoided this something else because politics was never my thing. I’m really just a ten-year old kid standing at the foot of the Athabasca Glacier in awe of a vanishing Ice Age. But I was badgered into looking deep into the origins of the U.N.’s environmental agenda. I didn’t want to, I resisted, I swear. But I did.
After wading through 500 pages of the most intensive documentation I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading, it was clear that the U.N. Environmental Program had the hidden agenda of redistributing the world’s wealth.
It went almost verbatim like this:
“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? In order to save the planet, isn’t the only hope that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?”
(Quote credited to a Canadian, Maurice Strong, chair of the Rio Summit of 1992, as reported in Cloak of Green by Elaine Dewar, James Lorimer and Company, Toronto, 1995.)
A climate crisis perfectly suited the global agenda.
On some level, a revolution makes sense. Climate is a global phenomenon, the perfect example of a problem that would require a global effort to solve.
But wait, there’s more.
What if the global power brokers who were funding environmental NGOs had other, deeper goals? What if they had their sights set on exploiting resources which until then were closed to multinational interests. They would only need to shift regulatory powers from nation states to the one world government they envisioned.
I’m stopping there.
The ten-year-old me can’t take anymore. I’m not ready to be politicized, I don’t really want to grow up yet. The chill winds off those revelations make me yearn for my cozy cave above the North Saskatchewan River. I imagine a fresh supply of crisp autumn leaves ready to roll into a monster reefer.
I remember how they smelled like almond.
I kept a large bottle of 7-Up in there.
Sometimes bits of the cliff would break off and tumble down into the river.
Oh, by the way—I did the math on the Columbia Ice Fields disappearing by the year 2100. (Just me checking, as usual.) In fact, melt all the ice in Canadian glaciers — it would raise sea levels by half the thickness of a human hair.
That’s a relief for the ten-year-old.
But the world’s youngest climatologist is still lying awake at night wondering what might be happening in the Arctic. And what’s in those fake burgers I’ve been eating lately. And doing the math on electric vehicles and carbon taxes and pipelines and China and India. There’s plenty to worry about and lots to do.
I’m doing it. You’re doing it. Let’s keep doing it each in our own way.
