Derek H. Burney is a former 30-year career diplomat who served as Ambassador to the United States of America from 1989 to 1993.Paul MacRae’s book “Through the Looking Glass: A Citizen's Do-It-Yourself Guide to Climate Science” is a meticulous repudiation of the pseudo-science that has driven the debate, nationally and internationally, on climate change or global warming for decades. The fact that apocalyptic prophesies by “experts” like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg have not materialized should be proof enough, but MacRae digs deeper to expose the fallacies versus the facts. His views command new currency as many countries focus on more pressing and practical priorities for public funds.The “science” as expressed in computer models and the likes by regular sessions of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not nearly as “certain” or “settled,” nor as scary as climate alarmists would have us believe. The actual data simply does not show an “accelerated” or “catastrophic” potential outcome from climate change. In Aristotle’s terms, “with a true view, all the data harmonize, but with a false one, they clash.” The fact is that temperatures have mostly flatlined in the twenty-first century and even in the last half of the 2000s.Carbon dioxide is not the culprit. In fact, it is essential to plant growth, in short, food. It is a fertilizer, not a pollutant, that helps “green” the planet, not the reverse. Efforts for “net zero by 2050” are “insane” and will endanger not only food production but also the livelihood of literally billions of people on the planet.For realists, the actual causes of climate change and occasional bouts of “record heat” stem from, e.g. a massive Tonga undersea eruption that increased the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere by 10-15% and the large El Niño current that just got up to speed in 2023, or any of a dozen natural weather causes that work together to create climate change. Humans have been dealing with these for thousands of years, mostly with success, by finding affordable, engineer-based solutions — better fire management, better flood controls, better channelling, and the use of water resources to reduce drought..MacRae advocates practical “piece-meal engineering” as solutions to global warming, tackling problems as they arise, as opposed to “utopian social engineering.”Realism rather than idealism should be the watchword for politicians, enabling societies to tackle concrete, not fanciful, miseries. “Net zero” targets would deliver a devastating 10% loss of GDP while reducing temperature by a trivial fraction of one degree Celsius. What politician anywhere could defend this equation? That is why virtually no countries are meeting their ‘holier than thou’ commitments. China opens two or three coal mines each week while demanding that developed nations pay the full price for exercises in abject climate futility. Who wins in that equation?The major driver of the alarmist view is the UN. Secretaries General Ban Ki-moon and António Guterres have separately described the world as “boiling” and the prospect as “oblivion” or “on a highway to hell with one foot on the pedal.” So much for global diplomacy. Where is the rational discourse here? Or from the IPCC’s 5-year reviews, which are, in turn, reviewed by governments, but produced by a small but biased group of environmental activists — a process that is hardly the best guarantee of the “objectivity” and “transparency” promised by the IPCC mission statement. .Critics or skeptics are denounced as “deniers.” Climate alarmists lie or distort facts to promote their ideology, creating scary stories to get public attention. Fear-mongering zaps rational thought. Net zero by 2050 will be astonishingly expensive — $275 trillion or $9.5 trillion per year for almost no gain in net “cooling.” But what will this funding replace? Where is the cost-benefit analysis? MacRae contends forcefully, “The idea that humanity faces an existential challenge — a threat to our very existence – from ‘climate change’ is absurd and not supported by any empirical evidence whatsoever.” In fact, he presents extensive empirical evidence that “we aren’t headed to climate disaster.”According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a 2024 study by Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research alleged that actions causing climate change would wipe out the equivalent of the North American economy, and then some, every year. Other scientists flagged serious problems with the study. There were so many errors that Nature subsequently retracted it. The WSJ concluded, “If progressives want to know why Americans don’t believe claims of the climate apocalypse, it’s because so much of climate science has been shown to be unbelievable.” As MacRae notes, the debate has been “groupthink on steroids.”.The real alarmist agenda, according to MacRae, is to “radically restructure our social, political, and economic systems along what can only be called communist lines, in the process destroying liberal Western civilization as we know it.”Books like MacRae’s, along with similar interventions by Bjorn Lomborg, Karl Popper, and Steven Koonin (author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters”), among others, are helping rebalance the debate towards greater realism.Mark Carney, who, along with his wife, was once a fervent champion of dire climate change prophecies, is, as Prime Minister, deftly backpedalling, appearing to moderate his stance to reflect Canada’s high dependence on the riches of our fossil fuel energy resources. If he cannot lead his Liberal caucus to adopt that realistic position, or he chooses not to, in favour of continuing to enact net-zero policies while seeming to ‘do his damndest’ to support fossil fuel exports, he will not succeed on either.The US under Trump has moved even farther away from the UN consensus, as have several European countries, which sense higher, more urgent needs for government expenditures, and search for a pragmatic blend that preserves not only their environment but also their livelihood.Greta Thunberg, the poster child for global alarmism, laments that climate change is “stealing my future.” MacRae contends convincingly that “climate alarmism, if allowed to continue, really will steal the future of our kids and grandkids, making them both less prosperous and less free.” A realistic position based on fact, not fantasy, and one that I heartily endorse.Derek H. Burney is a former 30-year career diplomat who served as Ambassador to the United States of America from 1989 to 1993.
