The poet Henry Longfellow wrote in 1845, “I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth, I knew not where.” The same thing happened with my Quadrant Online piece a fortnight ago about satellite readings of Australian temperatures. A Melbourne scientist friend, Geoff Sherrington, had crunched the latest data from the UAH satellites (above) and found Australia has not warmed for the past ten years – so much for the “climate emergency”. The planet itself hasn’t warmed for nearly eight years, the satellites say.

The piece was titled “A Clear Case of Hot, Hotter … Hoodwinked”. Weirdly, it’s created a furore in the Parliament of British Columbia (BC), Canada’s western-most province. BC is about the size of NSW and has a Queensland-size population.

John Rustad (right) , the BC Liberals’ shadow spokesman for forests (he’s worked in forests 20 years) was fired from his party last week for tweeting a link to the Quadrant piece.  He now sits on the cross-bench as an independent.

The BC Liberals are vaguely centre-right and were kicked out of office in 2017 by the labor unions’ socialist New Democrat Party (NDP), initially Greens-allied but since 2020 governing solo. The Liberals are totally wet, spruik climate alarmism and aren’t short on hypocrisy. The Liberals and the NDP can afford their anti-emissions policies because the province enjoys nearly 95 per cent hydro-powered electricity (Australia: 6 per cent hydro).

The Rustad sacking went like this:

♦ Vancouver resident Dr Patrick Moore, a one-time Greenpeace founder but now with the sceptic science group CO2 Coalition, liked the Quadrant piece and  tweeted it on August 14.  His Twitter followers total about 119,000.  He  added, “The case for CO2 as the global temperature control knob is getting weaker every day… #CelebrateCO2.”

♦ BC’s Liberal John Rustad re-tweeted Moore’s tweet. To wheel out a cliché, next day all hell broke loose. The Liberals’ leader in Opposition, Kevin Falcon, felt that Rustad was sabotaging his party’s efforts to save the planet from dastardly CO2. A day later he expelled him.

♦ The BC media hacks threw objectivity to the four winds (another cliché, apologies) and laid into Moore and Rustad as exemplars of climate denialism. They combed the records and social media to publish evidence of the pair’s heresies. In the process they exposed hilariously their own ignorance of matters like the life-affirming properties of CO2 which are taught (or were once taught) to every 13-year-old botany student. They were also incredulous that Moore would tweet that the Great Barrier Reef corals are in record health., notwithstanding this is now Australia’s official position.

♦ Adding to the media onslaught, LinkedIn has now banned Dr Moore’s account.

There’s a welter of issues in this strange saga, particularly how dangerous it is to query the narrative of climate apocalypse. The climate story is such a house of cards that proponents, especially Big-Tech, want to crush doubters before they can put any wobble in the structure.

Patrick Moore is a case in point. He was president of Greenpeace Canada for nine years and a Greenpeace International director for seven more. He holds a Science Honors degree in forest biology and a PhD in ecology.

In 1986 he quit Greenpeace over its extremist agendas, especially its perverse opposition to chlorinating drinking water to combat diseases. He is now a director of the Virginia-based CO2 Coalition, which assembles peer-reviewed scientific papers that contradict IPCC dogma, and is a senior fellow at America’s premier conservative group the Heartland Institute. He toured Australia giving public talks for the Galileo Movement in 2014. Among his campaigns is promoting “Golden Rice” to remedy childrens’ vitamin A deficiencies, in opposition to Greenpeace campaigns against the life-saving rice additive.

 Greenpeace, Wikipedia and other liars now rewrite history to deny that Moore was a Greenpeace co-founder. JoNova refutes their claim here.

Moore  both re-tweeted Quadrant’s article and posted it on LinkedIn,  the professional networking business owned by Microsoft.[1] A day or two later, LinkedIn banned his account, alleging unspecified violations of its “professional community standards”. Moore doesn’t know if the timing was a coincidence. “Just another example of power-tripping egomaniacs who now reject free speech even when it is the truth,” he says. “I made a lot of posts and they don’t give you a clue as to which part of which post they think is a violation. There is nothing professional in their ‘Professional Community Standards’ except the name.”

Others from the CO2 Coalition banned by LinkedIn since July are executive director Greg Wrightstone,[2] economics associate Darren Nelson, member Peter Frank, and Coalition PR consultant A.J.Rice, whose account was re-instated a week ago.

Wrightstone  believes LinkedIn has set out to silence the CO2 Coalition. He was permanently banned without warning  after posting two climate charts derived from the IPCC itself, and the Coalition page has been shut down. He says, “This is contrary to long and rich traditions of the Western civilization that established the scientific method. All reasonable people should be chilled by LinkedIn’s actions.”

As an aside, there have been two Oxford Union-style science debates in New York between top alarmists and top sceptics. In 2007 the alarmist team was led by NASA guru Dr Gavin Schmidt and sceptics’ by MIT’s Professor Richard Lindzen. Lindzen’s team won in official results from audience before-and-after polling, with a 16 per cent swing to the sceptics. Dr Schmidt has fled from such debates ever since, claiming (despite being a scientist) that debates are not worthwhile. To make the best of a bad job, warmists furtively altered the official results on-line to record a warmists’ win by 89 per cent, despite the correct results remaining in the transcript. This fraud was present in 2020 but now removed.

From 2007 it became settled policy in the warmist community to shun debates with sceptics, although there are honourable exceptions like Melbourne’s Dr David Karoly (warmist) debating in print with Will Happer (sceptic) in 2018, with inconclusive results because Karoly had to pull out mid-debate for personal reasons. In last week’s debate between Texas A&M’s Andrew Kessler (alarmism) and NYU’s Steven Koonin (sceptic) the official result was a sceptic win with a 25% favorable swing.

TURNING now to the BC Parliament, the Liberals, socialists and greens seem to be competing for alarmist credentials. The Liberal’s supposed right-of-centre leader Falcon says on his website he’s proud to have helped introduce a revenue-neutral carbon taxin 2008, when serving in a former government.  BC became the first North American jurisdiction to do so.  He says the policy was “lauded” by the OECD, UN and the New York Times – some praise, that.

His  position can be excerpted:

♦ “Like any team, our caucus operates on a foundation of mutual respect and trust. While a diversity of perspectives are encouraged and a source of strength, they cannot exist without that important foundation in place. Following a pattern of behaviour that was not supportive of our caucus team and the principles of mutual respect and trust, I have removed MLA John Rustad from the BC Liberal Caucus effective immediately.”

♦ “Anyone who has fundamental doubts about the reality of climate change won’t be welcome in the B.C. Liberal caucus moving forward.” 

♦ “Climate change is one of the most serious threats facing our future. The BC Liberals are strongly committed to reclaiming BC’s place as a world leader in climate policy.”

Rustad’s push-back acknowledges some adverse human-caused warming is occurring but he says attacking CO2 emissions would do real harm to vulnerable communities. CO2 causation is a theory that should be open to debate, he says. In particular, current goals of suppressing nitrogen-based fertilisers would create global food shortages, worsened by rising fuel prices. He would not go along with elitist policies to punish local families already trying to deal with high inflation.  These issues are more important than facades of unity in the party caucus.

He’s also called out alarmists for attributing weather mishaps, like floods, to climate. Alarmists are issuing “extreme heat warnings” for 27degC days with drizzle, when BC people in the 1980s viewed 30degC days as normal, he says. Political priorities instead ought to be affordable housing, food and energy, and effective health care.

Reporters gleefully resurrected that Rustad last year told MLAs that CO2 was an essential element for life on this planet, not “pollution”.  Patrick Moore tweeted last week, “He is right, they are intolerant fools.”

While it’s nice to know that Quadrant’s readership girdles the planet, I feel sorry to have dropped Mr Rustad into such hot water. I guess politics is not for the faint-hearted.

 Tony Thomas’ latest essay collection “Foot Soldier in the Culture Wars” ($29.95) is available from publisher ConnorCourt

[1] Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016 for $US26 billion

[2] Wrightstone, with a Master’s in Geology, has  served as an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC itself.