Today’s column is about global warming. Sitting down to write it made a nice break from all the hard physical chores we’re tackling thanks to the unseasonably cool weather.

Yes, unseasonably cool. As the July 16 Citizen reported, “Ottawa’s summer was supposed to be sticky and dry, and June passed the test with flying colours. But now the hot weather has taken a summer holiday of its own, with clouds and rain seemingly stuck in a holding pattern over the city.” In addition to almost constant rain, the paper added “Vacationers and cottage-goers might disagree, but July temperatures have only been slightly below normal. The average high has been 24 C; the average low, 13.4 C. Both are just two degrees cooler than usual. June was scorching by comparison. Eight days of 30plus temperatures were recorded, topping out at 34.2 on the 26th.”

I’m trying to be level in head and tone here. June was hot, July was cold, the predictions were wrong and as a result we know … not much. Other than that weather, like climate, fluctuates in weird ways because it is complex. A cool summer no more proves the Earth is not heating up or that humans are not causing it than a warm decade in the 1990s proved it is and they are. So I consider it unfair that when temperatures are “just” two degrees above average Al Gore starts holding rock concerts, David Suzuki is all over the billboards and arcane computer models acquire a degree of infallibility at which the Pope can only gaze in envy. But when they’re down by that much, an Environment Canada meteorologist dismisses the variation as “not extreme” and says, what the heck, computer models aren’t that reliable.

It’s also unfair that almost every story on global warming ratchets up the alarm. I’ve previously cited Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute, who says that “It is highly improbable, in a statistical sense, that new information added to any existing forecast is almost always ‘bad’ or ‘good’; rather, each new finding has an equal probability of making a forecast worse or better. Consequently, the preponderance of bad news almost certainly means that something is missing, both in the process of science itself and in the reporting of science.”

A case in point is the new study saying that global warming will make places that are too wet even wetter and those that are too dry even drier. Maybe it will. But is that really what the record shows to be normal? Or, like historians and social scientists who seem to discover in any place they examine at any period in history that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, is it just what you know they’d say regardless?

I take a similarly skeptical view of widespread insistence that a warmer Earth must spell disaster. Again, maybe it will. But our limited reliable evidence, from history, not fanciful cybernetic projection, is that it didn’t 12,000 years ago when the last Ice Age ended. And we know that the last time global temperature rose, in the “Medieval Warm Period,” (a) man didn’t cause it and (b) the effects were for the most part beneficial. That doesn’t mean it would be this time, let alone that we should encourage or ignore it on that basis. It means that claims to know the opposite so strongly that you refuse to tolerate dissent are hysterical and obnoxious.

OK, that was a bit snarky. So let me say on the other side that for skeptics to whine about the cost of fighting global warming is feeble-minded. The Klingon proverb that only a fool fights in a burning house goes double, in my view, for trying to turn a profit in one. (You might, after all, fight to get out of the house, or for that matter fight the fire.)

I concede that if global warming is as bad as they say, if humans are contributing seriously to it and if Canada meeting its Kyoto commitment would help significantly, then almost no price is too high to pay. But in return I ask that we be permitted an intelligent, courteous debate on all three links in that chain of argument, including what constitutes solid evidence.

I note that Environment Canada forecast a singularly hot dry summer across Canada in 2004. That August their senior climatologist, David Phillips, said “Never have we been so wrong for so long in so many parts of the country.”

Then it predicted it again, and again. Of course if weather is variable and you keep predicting the same thing you will be right about half the time. But reasonable people won’t treat your predictions as useful evidence.

Look out the window and tell me, are you cool with that?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Apparently Ottawa is not just drab, it’s also a crack den. I trust I will not be accused of mindless civic boosterism if I say things aren’t that bad in the Ottawa I inhabit, which is mostly pleasant, with excellent stores and ready access to the outdoors. Maybe it’s because I sometimes leave Parliament Hill and City Hall behind. By that very method I witnessed a singular success story last weekend, the Canadian Open Chess Championship, which followed the equally successful Canadian Youth Chess Championship held here the week before. Though not the largest Canadian Open ever, the 2007 event attracted a record 22 grandmasters including British former World Championship contender Nigel Short, who shared second place with four other players, including Canadian Thomas Krnan, the highest-finishing non-grandmaster. That’s cool. And there’s more. The Citizen’s own Peter Hum helped organize the open. Like a fool, he also decided to play in it then, quite unlike a fool, did so well he was in the elite top-40 game room on the last day. And thanks to a Canadian company’s wireless chess technology (see monroi.com) I could come home for lunch yet follow every twist and turn of Peter’s final game online. He seemed to be winning until, I’m sorry to say, time trouble caused his attempt to infiltrate on the h-file to go horribly wrong.

Now it may not be your habit personally to infiltrate on the h-file and perhaps you wouldn’t enjoy watching someone else attempt it. But isn’t the definition of a diverse, even vibrant city one where all sorts of people enjoy all sorts of different activities without pestering others? Plus the event was highly cosmopolitan, ending with Chinese grandmaster Bu Xiangzhi taking first prize with a top-board victory over a Russian-born Swiss grandmaster from Israel. Drab? Hardly. And the only crack I saw was in a pawn wall.

Isn’t chess dingy? I hear you cry. OK, it lacks the glamour of at least one other notorious obsession scorned by non-practitioners; this tournament’s $20,000 in prize money can’t match the millions golfers earn for what Chesterton, in a rare lapse in judgment, called an expensive way of playing marbles. But chess has come a long way in the decades since my meteoric rise to mediocrity at a Toronto club so seedy boxers would have refused to enter its premises, where bathing was considered an eccentricity and the tobacco smoke was so thick an archeologist could not have told you what colour the walls were originally painted, not that you’d have wanted to know anyway.

By contrast the 2007 open was at the Ottawa Marriott (one of the sponsors, along with this newspaper, and others listed at canchess.ca/english/sponsors.php), in well-lit, stench-free surroundings with ready access to latte and cool digital clocks on loan from two chess federations. I thought I must be in the wrong place. But no. The organizers just did a really good job.

Such events don’t get as much publicity as they deserve in Ottawa. Nor do local martial arts, where I declare a small conflict of interest because having long since traded mediocrity at chess for mediocrity at karate, I train at a club that has produced a number of world champions, including my teachers Domenic and Fortunato Aversa. True, martial arts have too many federations, so their titles are not quite like winning the Stanley Cup. But let’s give our hometown heroes, and our home town, some credit.

There are a lot of good news stories here. There are also bad news stories and I firmly defend the press for having always considered “Sabre-tooth tiger outside village” a more useful front-page headline than “No sabre-tooth tiger outside village.” But it is also worth noting how often the bad news concerns government.

The litter might be our fault. But from policing to urban planning, Ottawa’s failures are overwhelmingly in the public sector, which couldn’t win a pawn ending with three protected passers (inside joke there). Its roads are even lousy places to cycle, though that doesn’t excuse the idiots zooming down sidewalks in ways I’d want the police to deal with if they weren’t so understaffed.

I think Ottawa’s major failures happen because too many Canadians, especially intellectuals, give politics too much attention but too little scrutiny. Many aspects of governance in the United States give me fits, but the core of Washington, D.C. is architecturally breathtaking and culturally dynamic in part because Americans keep a jaundiced eye on their public institutions. The core of Ottawa is drab, when not menacing, because we trust government to make it nice.

Still, for a boring crack slum, we play some pretty mean chess.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The British doctors’ plot certainly helps clarify things. I am glad the operation was a failure and the patients did not die for the obvious reasons. But also because it helps me discuss the merits of this botched atrocity. First, its sheer incompetence. One of our advantages in the war on terror, albeit unearned, is that we are fighting people who have difficulty setting themselves on fire in a car full of propane. The Globe and Mail claimed Saturday that British police were “hunting for at least three other suspects and a mastermind,” but I doubt they’ll find the latter in this affair. Despite the defeatist tone of much western news coverage, our enemies are often as clueless as they are vicious.

Second, that this comically inept villainy was apparently the work of educated people with lucrative, prestigious jobs underlines that our problem here is not poverty, social exclusion or racism but an idea. Specifically, the belief that we should be blown up as promiscuous intoxicated unbelievers. “Death to infidels” is the root cause of Islamist terrorism, as more and more people realize.

That’s why the third piece of good news was the blasé public reaction. The usual suspects feigned horror that such terrorist acts should have been attempted by highly paid professionals honoured by the host society, but few others were fooled. To call terrorism a product of poverty is, as Chesterton said of crime, a slander on the poor, many of whom live decent, honourable lives. It is also a slander on all mankind, a pernicious denial of free will, for materialists to claim we can buy off our enemies with big salaries, fancy offices and high-definition TVs.

Ultimately we are accountable for our choices, not our circumstances, and deep down we all know it. Life is never easy, though tribulations vary. But adversity crushes some and strengthens others. And while poverty can contribute to despair and rage, as indeed can wealth, both are at best partial explanations, not legitimate excuses. If you believe in a merciful God, you must prepare one day to explain to Him why you chose terrorism, not why you had no choice.

In public policy, too, choices and ideas matter far more than circumstances. Islamists try to blow us up not for refusing them attractive jobs or for our foreign policy misdeeds, but because they think we should die for being happy, tolerant people who do not claim to love the Creator while despising His creation and His creatures. And unless we convert to their way of thinking, they will not relent.

Not everyone gets it. At a Wednesday press conference, NDP leader Jack Layton said we should label civilian casualties in Afghanistan “unacceptable,” distance ourselves from the Bush administration, withdraw our troops and initiate a “comprehensive peace process” because “nobody could advance the idea that there’s a military solution ultimately in Afghanistan.”

Since the Taliban see an obvious military solution, shooting their way back into power and killing everybody who taught girls, I asked him: “When you talk about your comprehensive peace process, what’s the offer to the Taliban?” Mr. Layton blithered that “Students of history will know that all major conflicts are resolved ultimately through peace-oriented discussions ...”

Unfortunately for him I am a student of history with three university degrees in the subject from two different countries, so I said: “And by the armies marching into Berlin and an atomic bomb dropped on Japan. That’s how World War II ended and students of history know that.” He responded: “Well I beg to differ that if you study the precise processes that took place most of the conflicts in the world you’ll see that there are always negotiations that take place. And that’s what needs to happen here.”

His response was insolently stupid. Of course at some point in almost any war someone staggers forward to sign an instrument of surrender, but other obvious historical examples of major conflicts that ended by crushing victory include World War I, the Napoleonic Wars and the Cold War. I didn’t have time to make this point, but it didn’t matter because most other journalists present, including from francophone media, were openly incredulous about Mr. Layton’s proposal. They might not support the Afghan war. But even the press grasp that you can’t sign useful treaties with people who dream of waving your severed head at a cheap webcam.

As students of history know, John Maynard Keynes was right that “soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil.” It’s why doctors try to bomb nightclubs and airports. Clearly.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Well, it’s Lent, when Jesus-debunking news stories rise from the dead. This time it’s a tomb with the whole family gathered, including his wife and kid. Unless it’s just the dusty bones of decency and good sense in those boxes. In a way it’s a backhanded tribute that, to the modern mind, Christianity is like a train wreck: gruesome, but they can’t look away. Newspapers don’t greet major Buddhist festivals with claims that Siddhartha Gautama was a cokehead, or open Ramadan by saying Mohammed was — (do NOT fill in this blank). As we said while not reprinting the infamous Danish cartoons, never would we insult someone’s beliefs or faith tradition — and by the way did you know that Jesus wasn’t resurrected, plus he had sex with Magdalene.

This latest Christ-married-and-founded-the-Merovingians-or-some-other-“potential-dynasty” fantasy is a brain wreck.

The Globe and Mail story (online in their “Science” section, no less) said, “If their evidence is verified, the film, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, and a companion book, would raise profound questions for Christians and their faith.” It also called the evidence “compelling” and said “if further DNA testing were to link Jesus and ‘ his brother’ Yose with Mary, it would call into question the entire doctrine of the virgin birth …”

Who writes this stuff? If science is the issue, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth prevents Jesus sharing Joseph’s DNA, not Mary’s. And how could the evidence be “verified”? Even if someone had written “Jesus of Nazareth” on one of the boxes, which he didn’t, you can’t compare the DNA in the tomb with known samples of Christ’s DNA unless, say, you plan to swab a communion wafer. Preferably Roman Catholic because you want transubstantiation not consubstantiation let alone commemoration, which … oh, never mind.

This is not a theological issue. It’s a journalistic one. Kate Heartfield recently wrote in these pages that “journalists tend to be — in their professional lives — cynical, contrary and mistrustful.” Right. We may no longer carry the hip flask and pork-pie hat with press card in it, but if our mothers say they love us, we still check it out. The bones of Jesus’s kid, however, we print without even proofreading. Didn’t we ask why they’d put Mary Magdelene’s name cryptically in Greek?

Real skeptics would also ask how Joseph, a poor artisan from backward Nazareth notorious for believing his fiancée’s claim that God got her pregnant, could afford a fancy tomb in Jerusalem where his family would later quietly join him after causing a vast upheaval. Or did the outcast family buy it after the crucifixion, bring Joseph’s bones, and get quietly buried there over decades? As Michael Coren noted in the National Post on Wednesday, Roman and Jewish authorities ransacked Jerusalem to find Jesus’s body in order to prove he wasn’t resurrected and put an end to this troubling new religion. They failed. But James Cameron? He just brilliantly stumbled over it.

Of course, scripture explains a fancy tomb for Jesus. It says Joseph of Arimathea bought it. Scripture also explains that the body vanished because Christ was resurrected. But never mind that silly old Bible. We’re talking about Jesus.

The Citizen’s initial front-page story spoke of “a tomb that may have once held holy bones.” But if Jesus was not the Messiah, what’s holy about his bones? As C. S. Lewis rightly says, Christ presents just three choices: Liar, lunatic or Lord. Each is problematic. But the search for a fourth option is silly. Normally it’s theologically feeble-mined. This one skipped theological. (As Coren also noted Wednesday, Mr. Cameron said, “I’m not a theologist.” That we believe.) And you can’t get Jesus off the hook, or cross, by saying the Gospels misrepresent him. As our only source for Christ’s specific words and deeds, they too must be dismissed as fraud or frenzy or else taken with terrifying seriousness. If Matthew made up the Sermon on the Mount, why did he do it? And how? And why was he believed?

If you’re looking for fraud or folly among the evangelists in this tomb question, you’re digging in the wrong place. Say, maybe I can write a bestseller claiming the missing ossuary of “James” contained Jimmy Hoffa. By the way, I’m a space alien. And king of France.

Still, I’m pleased that the Raiders of the Lost Credibility plan to open another tomb, just 20 metres away, with three ossuaries. It’s probably the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in there.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Now that the latest UN report has ended debate on global warming (again), the alarmists must come up with a plan. Yes, I’m skeptical. But despite my own bouts of exasperation, I find all the shouting in public policy tiresome. So I decided to ask civilly what such a plan might look like. And it paid off. No, really. I asked the main Canadian political parties, the Sierra Club of Canada and the David Suzuki Foundation about specific options for tacking Canada’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. The Tories didn’t respond. But everyone else was helpful.

First, they agreed that we do know the main sources of GHGs, thanks to Environment Canada’s 451-page National Inventory Report 1990-2004: Greenhouse Gas Sources and Sinks in Canada (www.ec.gc.ca/pdb/ghg/inventory_report/2004_report/2004_report_e.pdf ). It says about half of GHGs come from three big sources (coal-, oil- and gas-fired power stations; the “upstream” extraction of fossil fuels including the tar sands; and heavy industry such as smelting, chemicals and cement), another quarter from transportation, followed in importance by residential and commercial use, agriculture and forestry, then other industry.

Second, I found enough agreement on possible solutions to discern, like it or not, what Canada’s Kyoto plan will look like if there ever is one. Everyone I spoke to except Green party deputy leader Adriane Carr started with a “cap and trade” permit system covering the “big three” emitters listed above (and she did mention caps, but her first step was a moratorium on expanding oil sands and offshore drilling). And in principle “cap and trade” is quite simple.

The government issues permits to current “big three” emitters for their current GHGs. They can’t emit more. And no one else can emit any, in those industries, unless they buy out some of a current emitter’s permits. Moreover, the GHG quota of each permit will shrink year by year until it hits the Kyoto target of six per cent below 1990 levels. The time frame and details varied (David Suzuki Foundation Policy Analyst David Marshall, for instance, insisted on forcing each emitter down to six per cent below their own 1990 levels, as a blanket 30-per-cent cut would penalize conscientious “early actors”). But there was broad agreement on the main idea, including from John Godfrey, chair of the Liberal Caucus Committee on Environmental Sustainability.

That doesn’t mean it will work. I’m not sure how you reassign 1990 emissions from firms or facilities that no longer exist to ones that didn’t back then. Also, if you allow international trading of permits, there’s a real danger of buying phantom reductions, either through legalistic fiddling abroad or outright fraud. And no matter how you slice it, if trying to cut emissions by a third brings economic ruin, our own and other governments will blink, issue new permits, and ruin the whole scheme. Still, it’s clear that if anything happens, it will include a big three cap-and-trade.

A Kyoto plan would also include legally requiring better fuel efficiency for trains, planes and automobiles. Again, details varied, but everyone wanted a 25-to-30-per-cent improvement within 10 years. Mind you, if cars do get way more efficient, people might drive more, not use less gas. But it’s coming all the same.

I also found strong support for stricter energy-efficiency requirements for new homes and office buildings (Ms. Carr also strongly urged subsidies to retrofit older buildings) and for new appliances. Here NDP environment critic Nathan Cullen singled out “vulture appliances” including computers that draw lots of power even in standby mode, while Ms. Carr wanted incandescent light bulbs phased out for ordinary home use. Which Australia just did.

So there’s the basic plan. Expensive? You bet. And only Sierra Club of Canada atmosphere and energy campaigner Emilie Moorhouse mentioned problematic Third World noncompliance. But at least everyone had specific proposals to debate.

Moreover, the last time energy was a big federal issue, with the dreaded NEP, it was hard to get even Conservatives to use the language of economics. This time the NDPer praised “cap-and-trade” because “it will free up the capital to flow to the cheapest solutions that the industry can find. ... a market-oriented approach that actually came out of the U.S. ...” The Suzuki Foundation guy dismissed one scheme as “senseless from a market point of view.” And the Green party wanted “full-cost accounting” for coal-fired electric power. It’s music to my ears.

It doesn’t mean a Kyoto compliance plan will ever emerge, let alone work. But it means we know what it will look like if it does emerge.

Which at least helps us talk rather than shout.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The 17th-century French wit Francois La Rochefoucauld said we are even more offended by criticism of our tastes than of our opinions. On the 25th anniversary of the Charter of Rights, his remark is painfully relevant to the debate on appointing judges, in which the best people seem to be having hysterics about a peasant uprising. The Globe and Mail especially got the vapours over Conservative plans that its star columnist John Ibbitson called “perverting the rules” and “ideological contamination.” At the risk of boring you, the Tories actually made minor changes to the “judicial advisory committees” that vet prospective appointments to federal and provincial superior courts: adding a fourth federal government appointee, representing police, to the other three the feds appoint, with the remaining four chosen by the relevant provincial government, the law societies, the Canadian Bar Association and other judges; limiting the judges’ appointee to voting only as a tie-breaker; and limiting the committees to yea-or-nay pronouncements on applicants. Hardly a coup d’état. But, cried the Globe and other critics, the Tories are appointing Tories to their other three panel spots.

Can you imagine? Tories. Ugh. Vulgar persons who openly favour law and order. Not our sort, dear. Not at all. When Liberals appointed progressive-minded members to approve progressive-minded jurists, all was well. Now, according to two days of polemics by the Globe (including front-page stories and a lead editorial) and progressive politicians, our cherished constitutional principle of judicial independence is jeopardized. But the philosophically vacant tone of their complaints suggests smelling salts as a remedy.

The claim that judicial independence is endangered is silly at a trivial level. If it wasn’t threatened before 1988 by the executive branch appointing whatever judges it felt like, nor, after 1988, by the executive branch appointing judges from a list vetted by seven experts, how can it be jeopardized if they are vetted by eight?

The claim is also profoundly silly. Judicial independence means politicians shouldn’t peer over judges’ shoulders, telling them how to rule in specific cases, and taking away their parking spaces, fining them or breaking their knees if they don’t. Which the Tories aren’t trying to do. But it doesn’t mean judges should form a closed and unscrutinized elite answering only to themselves and like-minded lawyers. Especially not when the judiciary plays, if not the lead role, at least a far larger role in our governance than before 1982 (think only of gay marriage).

Our core constitutional principle of checks and balances points in exactly the opposite direction. At one time anyone claiming to think seriously about political freedom would cite Juvenal’s famous question: Who shall guard the guardians? (Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) Or as Chesterton put it in his homely way, “The plain, natural history of all political institutions is that you want a policeman to keep his eye on the traffic, but also want somebody to keep his eye on the policeman.” I no longer expect to quote the Latin and have people nod sagely. But does the translation no longer make sense? Ibbitson in Tuesday’s Globe called on the judiciary to repel this crass legislative assault on their prerogatives, implying that judges not only do have untrammeled authority but, alone among human beings, may safely be entrusted with it.

I do not think anyone would make this argument explicitly. To make it implicitly, in overwrought terms, suggests snobbery not philosophy. Particularly when no one seemed to notice, let alone mind, when Liberal governments filled these same committees with their own kind. Former justice minister Irwin Cotler actually said that past panel members “may have had a political affiliation, but it wouldn’t have been known to me and I would never appoint them for that reason.” Perhaps it never did strike him as odd that the people he was appointing to the boards, and the bench, were like himself. Bill Buckley once said liberals are always talking about other points of view but are always astonished to find that there are other points of view. It’s even more true of sociological preferences in jurisprudence. But blithe lack of self-awareness is not an improvement over deliberate partisanship. If it were, Marie Antoinette would have been a better statesman than Richelieu.

I actually think the Tories have not gone nearly far enough in reining in the imperial judiciary. But I sympathize with their implicit recognition of another core constitutional principle, that ordinary people should be consulted about how they’re governed.

Mind you, I’m no cynical French aristocrat. I’m just a vulgar peasant.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

"Where the devil was the United Nations?’ bellowed its former special envoy for HIV/ AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, last week in Ottawa.” So reports the latest Maclean’s, describing Mr. Lewis’s reaction to a report that 530,000 more children were infected by HIV in 2006. Well, he should know. I mean that. He should know where the UN was because he was its special envoy on that exact topic. I wasn’t. You weren’t. So why’s he asking us? Why doesn’t he know? How can it be that, in an era of great faith in government in the abstract, so many politicians seem as clueless as they are uncurious about actual government?

For instance, Garth Turner. In his second tour as MP, he went from Tory to Independent to Liberal. And yes, I consider it an important safeguard of our constitutional freedoms, or what’s left of them, that MPs be able to cross the floor in any direction. Whether Mr. Turner and the Liberals will have a long, happy relationship or one marked by flying plates remains to be seen. But I firmly defend his right to move in and out of various caucuses.

I defend that right against Mr. Turner himself, as it happens. You see, back when Stephen Harper recruited David Emerson from the Liberals in 2006, a Tory MP named Garth Turner proposed a private member’s bill requiring MPs who switch parties to resign and run in a byelection. As I argued recently respecting Wajid Khan, this proposal is not merely undesirable but incoherent. It’s ridiculous to suggest making MPs keep the same chair while letting them change how they vote. Or were we going to outlaw free voting in the name of restoring MPs’ independence?

Meanwhile Mr. Turner’s new suggestion that the prime minister call byelections in the ridings of Mr. Emerson and Mr. Khan, whose seats are not vacant, amounts to letting the executive unilaterally expel any legislators whose votes they dislike. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Nor does former justice minister Irwin Cotler’s recent Globe and Mail article insisting that “Canada, in concert with the international community, can exercise the moral, political and diplomatic leadership to save Darfur” and proposing, among other things, sending a UN army into Sudan “with the consent of the Sudanese government if possible, but without it if necessary.” Oh, just that? Apparently. For he concluded: “As the student posters cry out at the ‘Save Darfur’ rallies: ‘If not us who, if not now, when?’”

To which the obvious retort is: How about you, when you were in government? Whatever prevented your Liberals from acting on this crisis between 2003 and 2006 might well be exercising the same inhibiting effect on Canada’s New Government. So it would have been helpful if Mr. Cotler had at least hinted at what paralysed him as a minister of the Crown, a privileged position most of us will never hold.

Then there’s Stephen Harper promising a law saying any interest savings from paying down the national debt must go to personal income tax cuts. Leaving aside the formidable technical flaws in this proposal, I object that no Parliament can bind its successors. If such a law were enacted, a future Parliament wouldn’t have to repeal it to ignore it. Simply passing budget legislation incompatible with it would automatically supersede it. Mr. Harper must know this.

So, you’d hope, would the opposition. MPs who don’t know how Parliament works are like mechanics who don’t know why, or that, exhaust comes out the tailpipe. Yet former finance minister Ralph Goodale instead dismissed Mr. Harper’s proposal by claiming if his party had won the last election they’d have lowered taxes further, a proposition with the merit of being untestable but the defect of being irrelevant. I ask again: Can’t anybody here play this game? Can’t you intelligently critique what did happen instead of whining about what didn’t?

And another thing. I trust you’ve carefully read the Canada Strong and Free proposals for improving Canada’s governance from Fraser Institute Senior Fellows Preston Manning and Mike Harris. Despite a few unsound components, they provide a welcome opportunity to debate bold and comprehensive reform. But we have to start by asking of Mr. Manning and Mr. Harris: Where was any of this when you were in politics, as leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and premier of Canada’s wealthiest and most populous province? I’m hoping the next volume of their series will discuss the problematic incentives that often prevent people in politics from doing, or even saying, what they know is right. We need less bellowing about what governments should do, and more calm discussion of how they should do it, and why they find it difficult.

So never mind the devil. As usual, he’s in the details. Where were you, and what were you thinking?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Oh, dear. The debate on global warming just ended. Again. On Saturday Globe and Mail editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon wrote that his newspaper “decided that we would also turn 2007 into our year of going green” because “We concluded that debate over whether global warming and climate change actually exists was over ...” Yes, the same Globe and Mail that nine years ago told us “It appears 1998 will go down as the year that atmospheric and scientific evidence finally put to rest any doubt that the planet is being subjected to global warming, with human activity the probable cause.”

Talk about a story with legs. In February 2000, Maclean’s asserted that: “Now, what was once a hotly debated theory – that a vast layer of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other man-made gases in the atmosphere are causing the Earth’s envelope to heat up – has hardened into near certainty.” In October 2000 the New York Times announced that “Scientists Now Acknowledge Role of Humans in Climate Change.” In 2001, the National Post said “Scientists have dispelled most of the lingering doubts about the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere with new evidence from satellites orbiting the Earth.”

Then in 2006 the BBC reported that “Consensus grows on climate change” while Time magazine said, “In the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it.” Wanna guess the 2015 headlines?

In one sense they have a point. Those of us who question the whole “man has set the sky on fire” theory are now routinely dismissed, at least by non-scientists, as insane or in the pay of the oil companies. It could be worse; in 2004 the head of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change compared a leading climate skeptic to Hitler. But I still think if I am in the pay of the oil companies, who I am also led to understand are successfully conspiring to keep gas prices high, they might send me larger cheques more often. As for those in the pay of governments, gosh, who could question their integrity?

In any event, those like me trying to suggest that the science is complex are not argued with so much as sneered at. We are snubbed by snobs. As the Globe’s Jeffrey Simpson recently authoritatively sniffed, “Climate-change scoffers are now as rare as defenders of the invasion of Iraq.” And they all moved away from me there on the bench. But there is something peculiar about the drumbeat of stories that this time, for sure, the evidence really is conclusive and we’ve won the debate.

As Patrick J. Michaels noted in a 2006 Cato Institute paper, new scientific discoveries should, statistically, be just as likely to increase or decrease existing forecasts. That each global-warming story ups the ante about how bad it is, how little time is left to fix it, and how certain scientists are, smacks of propaganda rather than science.

So does the rhetorical peculiarity that the people who have won the debate in the court of public opinion keep setting out to win it again instead of doing something useful with their victory. In its green coming-out, the Globe reported a vast new poll that 78 per cent of Canadians claimed to have noticed climate change in their surroundings.

Pardon me while I snore. Last April the Citizen said 90 per cent of people in 30 countries including Canada thought climate change was serious. Even in the U.S. it was 76 per cent. In 2001 the Globe said three quarters of Americans thought progress in fighting global warming “too slow” while just over half of Canadians wanted to give the UN power to “impose legally binding actions on national governments.”

Heck, in 1997 the Citizen reported an Environics poll that 61 per cent of Canadians felt “We should assume the worst and take major action now to reduce human impacts on climate, even if there are major costs.”

So why are people such as David Suzuki and Al Gore keen to persuade the public global warming is a problem? Why is the UN all itchy to convene another megaconference to sign a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord no one even tried to implement? Why are politicians now donning ugly green ties to trade slashing insults? Surely you have something to contribute besides self-congratulatory abuse of dissenters.

I’ve said for years the alarmists have a problem because their science is bunk. But no one’s listening to me. So stop selling the product and start delivering it. Tell us what to do. Something practical that would make a difference. Based on this rock-hard “science” of yours.

Oh, dear. Did I just end the debate?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]