On February 16, 2024, The Fifth Estate rolled out a documentary titled: Boiling Point: Climate Chaos. The CBC proudly calls The Fifth Estate “Canada's premier investigative documentary program.” This episode however is probably the farthest thing from ‘investigative,' and can only be described as a mouthpiece for green propaganda. As usual, the CBC conflates climate (measured over decades) with extreme weather or wildfire events. As climate policy analyst Roger Pielke, Jr. explains on his Substack, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not attribute wildfires or extreme weather to human causation.CBC’s Susan Ormiston hosted the show and interviewed a parade of climate activists, who appear to have common links with Big Green, like CAN-RAC and Citizen’s Climate Lobby. So much for non-partisan journos. The Fifth Estate also interviewed Premier Smith of Alberta and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, framing their energy differences in Guilbeault's words, “The Premier of Alberta has turned this into a culture war.”Fact-free CBC doesn’t bother to show the Alberta Electric System Operator dashboard, which would have quickly demonstrated to viewers that dispatchable natural gas is the dominant and necessary means by which Alberta keeps from going to blackout when wind and solar fail. Neither did CBC show the International Energy Agency (IEA) country dashboard graphs which show that Canada’s ‘transition’ to the proposed Clean Electricity Standard by 2035 is very unlikely, as wind and solar constitute only a tiny fragment of Canada’s energy mix. .At the same time, across Canada right now, our massive hydro facilities are facing serious challenges from drought (BC) to over commitment (MB and PQ,) to technical difficulties (NL.)Thus, the fixation on a ‘clean’ power East-West grid, a Liberal platform centerpiece since 2005, seems doomed to fail.Shouldn’t Canadians know about that?CBC’s Ormiston highlights the case of ~17-year-old Sophia Mathur and her youth climate activist colleagues who, thanks to Ecojustice, are taking the Ontario government to court over its lack of climate action. They neglect to mention that Sophia’s mom, Cathy Orlando, is an Al Gore acolyte, the program director for Citizen’s Climate Lobby International, and sits (or sat) on the board of the “We Don’t Have Time Foundation” with Greta Thunberg.Cathy Orlando and foreign-influencer friends such as climate scientist James Hansen are why Canada has a carbon tax and rebate program, which they call ‘climate money.’ They like to push the idea that higher carbon taxes will give you higher rebates — when the truth is, it’s just a case of tax 'em and bribe 'em with their own money.Friends of Science Society exposed the child exploitation of these green groups as we debunked earlier CBC coverage of the Sophia Mathur et al #GENAction case.CBC doesn’t bother to interview Prof. William van Wijngaarden, the expert witness in the Ontario Case.But Wijngaarden wrote a 43-page analysis of Ontario’s contribution to global warming which shows Ontario’s impact is negligible. CBC’s ‘investigative’ journos do not show us that! Wijngaarden is also signatory to the CLINTEL World Climate Declaration which states there is no climate emergency.The Fifth Estate focusses on Peter Kalmus, an American activist NASA climate scientist who chained himself to JP Morgan bank in protest of fossil fuel funding. Kalmus is also an author whose book Being the Change includes an important piece of misinformation, one that destroys the entire CBC climate catastrophe narrative.On page 33, Kalmus writes that the scenario known as RCP 8.5 “is the business-as-usual scenario.” As energy economist Robert Lyman writes of RCP 8.5 in “Between the Implausible and Impossible,” this is an implausible scenario that incorporates three to six billion more people on the planet by 2100 than even the UN estimates, that would require the burning of more coal than exists on this planet, that would require oil companies to find and produce roughly four trillion barrels of crude oil between now and 2100, a practical and technical impossibility.Dr. Judith Curry says that climate conferences have dropped consideration of the RCP8.5 scenario since COP26 (2021) and COP27 (2022).So, the climate emergency is over once RCP 8.5 is out of the picture.Ormiston then commits the unforgivable journo sin (37:26), by egging on Peter Kalmus to suggest that direct action against pipelines or other critical infrastructure is okay as an escalation over paint-throwing climate protests.With shocking naivety, Kalmus says he thinks it’s fine to “disrupt deadly infrastructure in a way that doesn’t even injure an actual human being…” as it is just infrastructure.Hundreds of people died in Texas in February 2021 when wind collapsed in that winter storm and natural gas infrastructure struggled to save the day. The grid was four minutes and 37 seconds away from total collapse, which might have meant weeks or months to restart. That was caused by a natural event. A direct-action attack on infrastructure could harm or kill thousands of people.Fact-free CBC’s Fifth Estate has become a mouth-piece for false, outdated, and dangerous green propaganda. File your complaints here: https://www.cbc.ca/mediacentre/contactMichelle Stirling is a writer/researcher whose op-eds have appeared in various Alberta newspapers. She is also the Communications Manager for Friends of Science Society
On February 16, 2024, The Fifth Estate rolled out a documentary titled: Boiling Point: Climate Chaos. The CBC proudly calls The Fifth Estate “Canada's premier investigative documentary program.” This episode however is probably the farthest thing from ‘investigative,' and can only be described as a mouthpiece for green propaganda. As usual, the CBC conflates climate (measured over decades) with extreme weather or wildfire events. As climate policy analyst Roger Pielke, Jr. explains on his Substack, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not attribute wildfires or extreme weather to human causation.CBC’s Susan Ormiston hosted the show and interviewed a parade of climate activists, who appear to have common links with Big Green, like CAN-RAC and Citizen’s Climate Lobby. So much for non-partisan journos. The Fifth Estate also interviewed Premier Smith of Alberta and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, framing their energy differences in Guilbeault's words, “The Premier of Alberta has turned this into a culture war.”Fact-free CBC doesn’t bother to show the Alberta Electric System Operator dashboard, which would have quickly demonstrated to viewers that dispatchable natural gas is the dominant and necessary means by which Alberta keeps from going to blackout when wind and solar fail. Neither did CBC show the International Energy Agency (IEA) country dashboard graphs which show that Canada’s ‘transition’ to the proposed Clean Electricity Standard by 2035 is very unlikely, as wind and solar constitute only a tiny fragment of Canada’s energy mix. .At the same time, across Canada right now, our massive hydro facilities are facing serious challenges from drought (BC) to over commitment (MB and PQ,) to technical difficulties (NL.)Thus, the fixation on a ‘clean’ power East-West grid, a Liberal platform centerpiece since 2005, seems doomed to fail.Shouldn’t Canadians know about that?CBC’s Ormiston highlights the case of ~17-year-old Sophia Mathur and her youth climate activist colleagues who, thanks to Ecojustice, are taking the Ontario government to court over its lack of climate action. They neglect to mention that Sophia’s mom, Cathy Orlando, is an Al Gore acolyte, the program director for Citizen’s Climate Lobby International, and sits (or sat) on the board of the “We Don’t Have Time Foundation” with Greta Thunberg.Cathy Orlando and foreign-influencer friends such as climate scientist James Hansen are why Canada has a carbon tax and rebate program, which they call ‘climate money.’ They like to push the idea that higher carbon taxes will give you higher rebates — when the truth is, it’s just a case of tax 'em and bribe 'em with their own money.Friends of Science Society exposed the child exploitation of these green groups as we debunked earlier CBC coverage of the Sophia Mathur et al #GENAction case.CBC doesn’t bother to interview Prof. William van Wijngaarden, the expert witness in the Ontario Case.But Wijngaarden wrote a 43-page analysis of Ontario’s contribution to global warming which shows Ontario’s impact is negligible. CBC’s ‘investigative’ journos do not show us that! Wijngaarden is also signatory to the CLINTEL World Climate Declaration which states there is no climate emergency.The Fifth Estate focusses on Peter Kalmus, an American activist NASA climate scientist who chained himself to JP Morgan bank in protest of fossil fuel funding. Kalmus is also an author whose book Being the Change includes an important piece of misinformation, one that destroys the entire CBC climate catastrophe narrative.On page 33, Kalmus writes that the scenario known as RCP 8.5 “is the business-as-usual scenario.” As energy economist Robert Lyman writes of RCP 8.5 in “Between the Implausible and Impossible,” this is an implausible scenario that incorporates three to six billion more people on the planet by 2100 than even the UN estimates, that would require the burning of more coal than exists on this planet, that would require oil companies to find and produce roughly four trillion barrels of crude oil between now and 2100, a practical and technical impossibility.Dr. Judith Curry says that climate conferences have dropped consideration of the RCP8.5 scenario since COP26 (2021) and COP27 (2022).So, the climate emergency is over once RCP 8.5 is out of the picture.Ormiston then commits the unforgivable journo sin (37:26), by egging on Peter Kalmus to suggest that direct action against pipelines or other critical infrastructure is okay as an escalation over paint-throwing climate protests.With shocking naivety, Kalmus says he thinks it’s fine to “disrupt deadly infrastructure in a way that doesn’t even injure an actual human being…” as it is just infrastructure.Hundreds of people died in Texas in February 2021 when wind collapsed in that winter storm and natural gas infrastructure struggled to save the day. The grid was four minutes and 37 seconds away from total collapse, which might have meant weeks or months to restart. That was caused by a natural event. A direct-action attack on infrastructure could harm or kill thousands of people.Fact-free CBC’s Fifth Estate has become a mouth-piece for false, outdated, and dangerous green propaganda. File your complaints here: https://www.cbc.ca/mediacentre/contactMichelle Stirling is a writer/researcher whose op-eds have appeared in various Alberta newspapers. She is also the Communications Manager for Friends of Science Society
