It’s time to set the record straight on "man-made" climate change. And that’s what I’m going to do with my new documentary project looking at what we really know about the Earth’s climate, not just cherry-picking from the last ten years or a hundred, but looking back thousands, millions and hundreds of millions of years. It’s going to expose a lot of hype, bad science and unjustified shouting on the part of the alarmists and lay out what we really know.

The climate has always been variable. And yes, sometimes it changes in ways that can spell trouble. But hysteria, misinformation and name-calling won’t help us deal with anything that might be coming our way. Virtually everything the conventional wisdom maintains on climate, about what we know and about what’s probably happening, is demonstrably false and it’s time to cut through the scaremongering and tell the real story.

I’m really excited about this project. I’m convinced the time is right to push back against the exaggeration, alarmism and intellectual bullying. But to make it I need your help. We’re crowdfunding it, as we have our last four documentaries. So it will only happen if you and people like you contribute, large amounts or small, and crucially share it with friends, family and associates in person, on Facebook and Twitter, by email and any other way you can.

I’ve set a minimum goal of $50,000 because for that I can make a documentary on this vital topic. But I want to be completely frank that to make a truly polished film, to get the gear we need, to travel to important locations and to help sustain us in our work, we need to get well past that minimum, to a "stretch" goal of at least $100,000.

So if you’re ready for some sound information and straight talk on "man-made climate change", click on the Kickstarter link to back the project, and share it as widely as you can.

To support the documentary, click here.

"Doubt comes at the window, when inquiry is denied at the door." Benjamin Jowett

My latest for The Rebel:

"When good economists die, they come back as physicists. When bad economists die, they come back as sociologists. It is an old joke, but class envy is no stranger to academics: Everyone wants to go up-market in the rigour wars." Paul Kedrosky in National Post May 5, 2001

On this date back in 1616, February 26, the Catholic Church made its infamous effort to undo Joshua 10:12 and make the sun move in the sky. Or at least it ordered Galileo to shut up about the fact that it made far more sense to regard the Earth as in motion around a stationary sun. Confirming once again Robert Conquest’s 3rd Law of Politics: "The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies." Because to this day almost nothing seems to confirm the beliefs of anti-Catholics that the Church is repressive and obscurantist than this episode.

In my view the charge is not entirely fair. Even when it comes to science, the Catholic Church has very often taken very sensible views, in the spirit of Cesare Cardinal Baronio whose comment about the controversy was "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." But this episode with Galileo is the one that sticks in the popular mind.

And for what? After silencing Galileo the Church went on to ban all books advocating the Copernican system as "altogether contrary to Holy Scripture". Galileo himself was unrepentant and despite formally accepting the 1616 decree went on to publish his devastating Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems which earned him a trial for heresy in 1633. And a conviction, and house arrest for the rest of his life.

The sun, you’ll notice, didn’t escape from the stationary position relative to our solar system to which Galileo had assigned it. (It is splitting hairs to argue today, as some do, that the Church was sort of right because the sun does move relative to other stars. The problem was declaring astronomy a branch of theology.)

A mere 122 years later, in 1758, the Church dropped the ban on heliocentric books without actually reversing the verdict against Galileo or allowing uncensored version of Copernicus’ key work De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium or Galileo’s Dialogue. Not until 1820 did the Church go "Ooops" for real and lift the ban on the two books, and a mere 15 years later a revised Index of Forbidden Books no longer listed them.

Eventually Pope John Paul II said it was a mistake to go after Galileo. But I am not sure the conviction for heresy was ever overturned. I mean, you don’t want to rush into things, right? Or rather, having rushed in, you don’t want to rush out just because the building is on fire or anything.

As I say, the Church has often done better on science than in this episode. But if you were in fact part of a cabal of its enemies secretly controlling its conduct, and desirous of discrediting it badly in a way that would last centuries, you’d do just about exactly what they did.

P.S. Conquest’s other two laws are "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best" and "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." The extent to which these also apply to the Roman Catholic Church is a matter for another day.

My latest National Post column ridiculed faith in government to solve all our woes despite its dismal record. And now we read that the Trudeau administration is going to make Canadians innovative after more than a century of supposedly disappointing sloth and timidity on the invention front. Does anyone really believe it's an appropriate use of government's monopoly on legitimate force within society to make us creative, flexible, inspired and dynamic in our laboratories, workshops, home offices and cubicles? Does anyone really believe government can do such a thing? If so, why?

Would anyone apply words like innovative to government itself except as biting satire of its endless capacity, as Dave Barry once put it, to find expensive new ways to appear ridiculous? Yet a bunch of serious people with impressive credentials and public sector salaries to match stroke their long grey beards and murmur in soothing tones that at last government will work its exciting magic on that sluggish private sector though it has no idea how, and they are not laughed off the stage.

On March 17 and 18 I'll be helping host the Economic Education Association of Alberta annual conference on "Meeting the Climate Change Challenge." We'll be gathering in Calgary to talk about the science, the policy choices and the rhetoric surrounding the alarmist vision of disastrous man-made global warming, not because the environment isn't important but because thinking sensibly is. We've got a great lineup of speakers and panelists, which you can see here, including my talk on "The Environment: A True Story".

So register now and join us in March for a compelling discussion that dispels myths and cuts through shrill rhetoric to make sense of this crucial issue.