011 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 011

Air Date: June 28, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

Program Disclaimer

The views expressed in this program are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Clip (Empire)

Rome, 44 BC. There are whispers of civil war. The military conquests of Julius Caesar have won him the love of the people and the hostility of the corrupted senate. To counter the cult of Caesar, his enemies lure the people with bloody spectacles where slaves are forced to fight to the death.

The Republic is dying and the age of the gladiator has begun.

Bob Metz

Good morning London. It’s Thursday June 28.

I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we will be with you from now till noon. Not right wing. Just right. Welcome to the show on this Thursday June 28, the last Thursday of the month, heading into Canada Day. I’m Bob Metz. Welcome to the show.

If you’d like to call in, it’s 519-661-3600 to join in on our discussion today. Our theme on today’s show will be basically about junk. I’m not talking about the kind of junk you put in your backyard or pile up in your garage, but the kind of junk that piles up inside our heads. I’m referring specifically to junk science and junk politics, which are themes that the national posts and the financial posts therein have done annually. Something we’ll get into a little bit later. Also, I want to talk a bit about conservatism. Where is it going?

Did it ever really exist? The questions are certainly being asked by a number of columnists and commentators, so we’ll comment a little bit on that. But first, I just want to start with a few follow-ups to some previous shows. Sometimes our time flies so fast here that I come in with all kinds of material that I don’t get to, or we have a guest, and there are so many issues that aren’t covered, or we weren’t able to follow up. So here’s a few that relate to the past few weeks of guests we’ve had on and things that have happened either to the guest or something with regards to that guest since that time. Now last week, if you’ll recall, those of you who tuned in, we had a guest, Anthony Verberkmos of Indy Media, and they had a weekend regional social forum here in London. It was very interesting because I wondered on the weekend, I was clipping some newspaper clippings, and there’s lo and behold in the London Free Press on the main editorial page on the weekend, were articles relating to the very issues that were being discussed at the conference. And I just wondered what would have been the reaction of the conference people to some of these articles on the weekend. We may find out yet in the future, we may get Anthony or a guest from his group back to talk to us, but in talking to him last week, it wasn’t my real intention to engage in this big debate with him. I really wanted him to get a chance to get out his points of view and what he felt his views and his group’s views were.

When I looked up their group Indy Media online, it was very interesting. Almost issue by issue, I have to tell you, I was on the opposite side of the general side that they took. Everything from the war right to the Gazette Spoof because all of those issues were in there.

And ironically, we’ve discussed all those on the show in the past few weeks. Now, of course, I found his anti-American and anti-Israel bias were rather self-evident. And you can see that on their website where they condemn Israeli checkpoints that are a daily reality for millions of Palestinians living under the brutal occupation. Basically, on their anti-globalism and free trade and anti-war protesters, of course, which is something we got.

We did get into a little bit last week. What I found ironic though is a lot of the folks in these movements think that they’re being radicals and radicals for change, when in fact when I look at what they actually believe, they’re really very much part of the status quo. The things that they’re advocating are the ideas that are permeating our society in so many ways. And, when you see a group like that that basically shows no moral differentiation between ideologies of either side in a conflict.

Sometimes there’s not, but in some cases it’s pretty clear. They change a subject to who manufactured a gun or who did this to who 200 years ago and completely avoid the immediate debate. So, I was almost tempted to tell them about our previous guest, John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute, who could give you a minute by minute blow by blow by terrorist name one after the other, just lists of them in terms of all the things that are going on in the mid-east and in so many parts of the world where, as he said, we’re basically in World War III. Now, on the London Free Press on the weekend, of course, there were a couple of articles that surprisingly really contradicted this general viewpoint and one of them was the editorial itself written by Licia Corbella, a headline Israel a Beacon for Mid-East. And in that article she’s talking about all how many Palestinians are fleeing to Israel for protection and safety. And she says Palestinians, quote, don’t believe their own Palestinian leaders.

Why? Because they are proven serial liars. They simply cannot believe.

And yet Israel is constantly criticized by the world community. And of course we heard that last week here. Michael Coren, too, had an article that day. Now, Michael Coren, I should let you know, I know Michael Coren. I’ve been on his show several times.

And with Michael Coren, I’m hot and cold. I could be on his show and I could be 100% in agreement with what he’s saying. And on another show, we are so diametrically opposed on some issues, you’d wonder that we could sit in the same room together.

However, we’re both fans of Jethro Tull, so we have that old 70s group in common, and it’s not something that we can listen to together. But I certainly did agree with his perspective on the weekend paper. Watch the Fault Line was the name of that article. And he says, it’s too easy to blame Israel for the, in the U.S. for Palestinians, sorry, for Palestinians’ ills. And in his article he just goes through a list of atrocities carried out by Palestinians and following each atrocity, Coren comments, who’s to blame?

Israel and the United States, of course. Now, I said earlier, well, this is about moral equivalence. Really, that may not be the right word, really. It’s more about moral superiority. And the people that are often anti-war protesting are actually arguing the moral superiority of the thugs in our society, not of the good guys. It’s sad that people tend not to think about black and white or absolutes and conflicts of an international nature. They just pick sides.

I’m on this side, I’m on that side. And usually, strangely enough, picking the side that appears to be the underdog, and this is subject to some theory that if you’re subject to a superior force that can arbitrarily claim might as right, they must be wrong. Because, Israel does have a superior force in the region.

And as does the United States in many places. So naturally, people think, well, might is right, that makes them right. But they even have this backwards. Because if you read history, and I’ve seen some critical analysis on this, the truth is the reverse.

Right makes might. Now, to give you an example, Rome was not built in a day, as they say. Rome became mighty because it discovered the proper principles in the context of its time in history of proper government, which meant representation tied to a geographic area, rather than by race, religion, or heritage, which was the Roman way.

And that was very clear. For example, anyone could become a Roman citizen, just like anyone can become an American or a Canadian. So you could be a Greek and become a Roman citizen. A Roman, on the other hand, could not become a Greek.

It doesn’t go in reverse. Because the Roman criteria was not about your heritage, even though it might have played a role in your status. But it was not about citizenship. And if you had Roman rights, that was a concept unheard of up until that time. I mean, even Ben Hur became a Roman. And he had a few complaints about what they had to do to his homeland.

People also don’t seem to realize that Rome, in its height, we always talk about the fall of Rome, the fall of Rome, what happened to Rome when it came down. But at the height of the Republic, they actually kept private armies. They didn’t have conscription, which was unbelievable. There were no forced taxes.

Taxes were given voluntarily by rich people and tithing to the state. And there was some sort of balance of power that worked for years and years in terms of making Rome the great empire it was, generally. And again, in the context of the time, if you’re talking about today, again, you can’t do that.

That’s just unfair historically. You have to look at what was around the Roman Republic at the time. And of course, the Republic, basically, when we’re talking about the fall of Rome, when it deteriorated into this majority-rule democracy where, in effect, power was given to the mob, which was kind of a strange thing, if you think about it in that way. Getting back to the issue of morality and judging one side and the other, one of the reasons I think that the United States and Israel get judged so much is that only they have a real clear moral code against which their actions can be judged. Take a look at the United States. They’ve got this Constitution that guarantees individual rights, etc., etc. So when they do something wrong, we can really hold them to account because they said we won’t do this or don’t want do that.

Whereas when you see a country like this former Soviet Union and countries like that that used to slaughter their own by millions and then cut down to half a million, we gave them praise because, oh, well, they’re only killing half as many people this year as they did last year, things must be getting better when, in fact, we don’t hold them to the same standard at all in any way, shape, or form. And of course, if you go to Israel, most anyone would know. Any Palestinian in Israel has more rights than in any of the Islamic nations, and that’s just a fact. So those are the absolutes.

So if you’re having a hard time picking which side is, quote, better than the other, that’s one way to do it. And that’s all I’m going to say on that subject. Also on May 17th, another previous guest we had here from Ottawa by phone was Tom Harris of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project. And they issued a media release on June 18th, which I got a hold of. And it dealt with Premier Dalton McGuinty’s plans to close Ontario’s coal-fired electricity generation stations by 2014. They don’t think this is a good idea. They think coal is clean, that we have technologies now that can make coal very clean and efficient. And they state that, quote, government statistics reveal that levels of most common air pollutants, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, particulate matter, and mercury, have steadily declined for the past three decades in urban areas. Only ground level ozone has not fallen, remaining roughly constant in most locations. Explains NRSP Allied scientist David Wojick, where air pollution is most severe in a near metropolitan area that’s primarily due to our millions of cars, not to distant-fired power plants. But he says cars vote and power plants don’t, so the Ontario government’s pulling a publicity gimmick, phase out coal to solve the air pollution, quote, problem, instead of addressing the real energy supply dilemma that we are soon to be facing. And they point out that coal is an inexpensive, abundant, and increasingly clean source of crucial electricity in Ontario.

It costs about one cent per kilowatt hour to produce, apparently. And carbon dioxide emissions from Ontario coal stations can be more costly to be removed, but are not something we should be concerned about. He says, since their contribution to global climate change is insignificant. So he says, instead of wasting billions fighting climate change, we should be focusing on continuing to reduce real pollution from the coal stations.

And this can be done at a reasonable cost with today’s technology. So this, again, is sort of a bit of junk science leading into that subject we’ll be getting into after a couple of breaks. Right now, though, we shall be taking a break. And when we get back, we’ll be talking about more details of sort of the collapse of the empire, and that is the death of conservatism, such as we have ever understood it.

Back after this.

Clip (Mike Macdonald)

You know, I actually used to like shopping, but now I hate it because, and I figured out why, because it takes so much longer to do shopping now. Remember your parents? They used to be able to go to the supermarket in five seconds. Eggs, bread, milk, sugar, salt, booze, cigarettes, done. When you go to the supermarket now, it takes three hours because, I mean, first of all, I’m spending an hour just in the mayonnaise section. Okay, let’s see here.

It’s a buck eighty nine. Clestral’s really good. But the sodium’s a little high. Gotta watch my sodium ever since my wife watched that twenty twenty with Barbara Walters. Couldn’t keep her fucking more shut. This one’s about seventy nine.

Sodium’s good, but the cholesterol’s a little high. Put them in the maybe column. Do that fifty times with fifty items.

No wonder you’re about to snap when you get to the checkout stand.

Clip (From HBO’s Rome)

I’m not going to be a fool. We prepare honors at the Senate steps and instead Caesar brings us here. That’s smart politics. You give the mob a voice. The Senate is Rome, Brutus, not the mob. The Senate is the Republic.

You think the Rome is a true land? He aims to be king. Who else would have the nerve to change the bloody calendar? As if owning half the earth went enough, now he aims to win the sun and moon as well. King?

He aims to be a god.

Bob Metz

Welcome back to Just Right here on CHRW 94.9 FM, where you can call in to join on the conversation. 519-661-3600 is the number. My name’s Bob Metz, and right now we’re going to be talking a little bit about conservatism. I know a lot of people have often thought of my views as being somewhat conservative.

It’s not a label I certainly would use. In my complete, what would I say, political career, activist career, some of which preceded actual politics, I’ve affiliated with a lot of conservative types and mingled with them and talked to them, but I have to say in the long run, very few of them actually uphold what I would call conservative values when it comes down to where the rubber hits the road in terms of legislation. I certainly got into that in great detail in a past show where I strictly pointed out how the conservatives, particularly here in Ontario, have brought in some of the most socialist legislation the province has ever had. But it seems to be coming to the attention of other people as well. And, I sort of could call this section the death of conservatism if in fact one could argue that it ever lived in at least in our recent lifetime.

Refer to a few comments I heard recently. One was on a radio show as I was driving around, and I heard Professor Paul Nesbitt Larkin talking about, I believe, federal conservatives, although he was talking about conservatism in general, and he said conservatives tend to stand against things and are very, not that often identified in terms of what they’re in favour of, and they don’t speak too much about what they’re in favour of. You hear about conservatives, they’re against, I’ll say gay marriage or against some sort of sexual type of freedom or certainly against liberals, that’s probably the one thing they’re against on which they can unite.

But, when we’re going to the polls and we have some elections coming up, both federal and conservative, what are really our choices? And to give you a perspective, okay, from what I would call the left, and that would be more or less the Toronto Star, referring to Tory’s platform here in Ontario, Ian Urquhart, columnist Ian Urquhart for the Toronto Star on June 11th, headline reads, Tory platform vague flabby. And the subquote says, the easiest way to describe the new conservative platform released on the weekend is in the negative. It is no common sense revolution, and there comes that negative again, eh? They’re against something. We’re not only against the liberals, we’re against the conservatives too, Mike Harris and the common sense of revolution. And they really are coming out and saying that. I quote Ian Urquhart, the platform is all over the map with dozens of promises to spend more and tax less. Now, just figure that one out for a minute, folks, spend more tax less. What happens to you when you do that? Trust me, it happens to government too, except guess who gets to pay?

You do. Quote, Tory is promising to do things the liberals are already doing such as spend more on health care and education. The numbers in the conservative platform are only marginally different from those in the liberal budget.

Where Tory’s platform appears to be directly at odds with the governing liberals such as his call for the repeal of the health premium and funding for faith-based schools, there is less than meets the eye comments, Urquhart. The health premium would be phased out, quote, over the life of the government’s mandate. So what would that mean if they were in power for 20 years? We’d still have a health care premium for 20 years? Hmm, could mean that.

And the faith-based schools would get funding only if they agreed to a wide range of conditions. Tory doesn’t want to be seen as Harris, rather Tory invites comparisons to Bill Davis. Now, that’s Ian Urquhart. On the left, you might think, well, he’s got a lot of reasons to not like the right wing and want to say something nasty about them, but consider this comment too from someone who might be considered more on the right. And that’s from the National Post Andrew Coyne. An idea with out-of-party, he says, June 16th, quote, perhaps we should simply say that the conservative moment has passed in Canada, end quote.

Yeah, I guess we could say that if you can agree that it ever existed, but I think if you took a real honest look at the legislation versus what was told, you’d see a huge gap between the two. But Coyne continues, he says, despite railing against the McGuinty government’s $22 billion spending increase, the Conservatives can’t think of a single program they would cut beyond an unspecified promise to find $1.5 billion in quote savings, end quote. Indeed, at various points in the document, the party is at pains to emphasize how much more it would spend. There is little in the entire document to suggest any fundamental differences in how Ontario would be governed under Mr. Tory, but the government would be just as big as it is now and would do just about the same things in more or less the same way. But Coyne goes on, he says, I don’t mean to single Mr. Tory out. As a statement of policy, his platform or plan or whatever it is, that’s kind of funny, is a fair reflection on what Conservative parties stand for today, not only in Ontario but across the country, which is to say, not much. There was a time some years ago, says Coyne, when Conservative parties were willing to advocate for smaller government and freer markets for cutting spending, ending subsidies, deregulating prices, and privatizing government services. Today’s Conservatives are Conservative only in the sense of wanting to preserve the status quo. The Conservatives of the radical reforming variety are now in more or less the same position as Socialists, sincere, well-meaning, but without a hope of forming the government. That might describe me, and I think a lot of people have said that about me too. You’re not ever going to get elected saying the kind of things you’re saying because you’re telling it like it is and you’re not doing the usual out and out lying, I hate to say, but that’s what it is, especially on a number of issues.

As we’ll come up, you’ll hear in junk science, especially when it has to do with science. But the interesting thing that Coyne comments is, quote, the strategy of the reforming Conservatives throwing in their lot with the Conservatives has been tried and failed, not in the sense that Conservative parties have been unable to win power, but that they win power if they do at the expense of conservatism. How true, that’s why when we see Stephen Harper going in, when he went into the election, he was totally opposed to Kyoto and the whole global warming concept such as it was, and made some very blunt statements about it that more or less coincided with the facts. Now that he’s in power, all of a sudden it doesn’t sound like a Conservative anymore, and that’s also true of the spending promises. It’s interesting too that as long ago as 1960, I ran the, who’s also identified by many people as a Conservative, but she wrote an obituary for Conservative back in 1960, which she delivered as a lecturer at Princeton University, and she basically defined the issue very clearly. She said if the Conservatives do not stand for capitalism, they stand for and are nothing. They have no goal, no direction, no political principles, no social ideals, no intellectual values, no leadership to offer anyone. Individual rights, freedom, justice, progress, where the philosophical values and the theoretical goals and the practical results of capitalism, no other system can create them or maintain them. No other system ever has or ever will. Yet capitalism is the one thing Conservatives dare not advocate or defend.

And this is oh so true. I’ve been in politics now since officially, okay a little unofficially, maybe I got involved in the late 70s, but got more officially involved in the early 80s. And at that time we had in power none other than Bill Davis.

And the contender was David Peterson. And I remember at that time writing for a newspaper myself called The London Metro Bulletin. And I wrote an article called Bill Peterson and David Davis, Leaders of the Same Party. I switched their names around a bit. If anything was, I met a guy later whose name actually was Bill Peterson.

Nice guy. And he was in politics too. But at that time I wrote, Being a conservative liberal like David Peterson is the same thing as being a liberal conservative like Bill Davis. Both are really socialists in disguise.

Bob Rae on the other hand isn’t in disguise. And even then I commented. I said whether they’re consciously aware of it or not, there’s a single common denominator to all of their philosophies that makes them politically the same. It is their mutual contempt towards the word capitalism and the principles of individual rights that it represents. And I also wrote, Canadians have grown to believe that the ultimate struggle between capitalism, individual rights, and socialism, collectivism, is somehow being fought along party lines. But such is not the case.

The eternal folly and being forced to vote for the lesser of three evils, which boils down to voting against instead of for, lies in the admission that you’re still voting for what you even what you call evil. So that’s what I said then. I haven’t changed much in 25 years, have I?

I’m still saying the same things. But as Rand concludes too, she says capitalism is not the system of the past. It is the system of the future. And I didn’t know about capitalism until I started reading Ayn Rand, and I was very challenging to it. But the one thing I learned very quickly was that the reason politicians of all stripes don’t really like the capitalist system is that it literally is the system that gives the power to the people. And it takes power away from politicians. Everybody’s under the same rules and laws, and that’s why they prefer other kinds of isms. They don’t want an ism that has these strict parameters to it where they can’t buy our votes and give us free health care and give us free education, give us free whatever is next on the list until we find out we’re no longer free. There’s a clever quote too that sort of points out how we lose our freedoms just a little bit at a time. Nobody really wants to say, take away all my freedom. And there’s an old saying that goes something like this.

It says, don’t blame me. I just wanted the government to control prices, wages, profits, industry, science, health, art, education, television, and the press. I never advocated a dictatorship, and yet that’s exactly how dictatorships arise, is through a process. It’s not like somebody, even Hitler taking power, even Stalin and all the rest of them, we marked the dates at which they took power as being with significant date and something like, as if something happened overnight, which was not the case.

Never is. You have to look before the bubble bursts, what were the actions that already were taking place, what was the continuum, if you will, once you get that set of actions going. You really can’t stop it. And that’s why I fear greatly for the times we live in today, and I think that’s going to more or less segue entire next issue on junk science and how junk science is being used to manipulate the whole political sphere. Now when we return after the commercials, you will be hearing for a few moments the voice of financial post editor Terrence Corcoran speaking on the subject of junk science, and he’ll be telling you a little anecdote about something. Now that was actually recorded here, live at the University of Western Ontario, back in the year 2000, and the National Post has been running an annual series called Junk Science Week. For several years now, I’m not sure how many, but we’ve been keeping track of them, and it’s quite a learning experience to understand what we think we know in science and what some of the facts are. So after this, we’ll be coming back and we’ll be turning to the issue of junk science in the media season. I’ll tell you about government.

Clip (Yes, Minister 20)

You must always try to do the right thing, but you must never let anybody catch you trying to do it, because doing right is wrong.

Right? Do we have enough done? Still as I’m left in the bottle. Now, the thing about government is principle, and the principle is you mustn’t rock the boat, because if you do, all the little consciences will fall out.

You must all hang together, because if you don’t hang together, you’ll all be hanged separately.

Clip (Terence Corcoran)

Junk Science is at the core of the most peculiar and ominous political developments of our time. The escalating use of state power to enforce the alleged findings of science, no matter what the risks are, and no matter what the science, and no matter how uncertain and junky the science.

Now, to understand this process, we need to have, I think, a definition of junk science, but before I get to that, let me give you a sample of junk science at work and how the media sort of gets sucked into it. And this is a story about a story in The National Post, my newspaper, a few months ago, about smoking. The headline on the story was, non-smoking men have sex more often and enjoy it more. Now, journalists love this kind of story. It gives them an opportunity to write clever sentences. And in this story, for example, the writer begins, the Marlboro man may be good in the saddle, but he is likely not so good in bed. Now, that’s fine, and a little fun in a new story is good for everybody, I think.

But then we get to some of the facts. The researchers reportedly studied 290 men between the ages of 24 and 36 to come up with this conclusion that smokers had sex less often. Worse than that, smokers didn’t enjoy their sex as much as non-smokers.

Now, that could have been the end of the story, except for some of the numbers. The story said, and this is a true story, by the way, I’m quoting from the story as it appeared in the newspaper, the story said, smokers only had sex six times a week. While non-smokers had sex 12 times a week. Anyway, unlike you, I thought on reading the story, I said, this is a lot of sex.

It works out to twice a day for non-smokers, given time off to reorganize for the Sabbath, or at least to go out now and then to buy some groceries. And if that’s the average, you had to figure that some men would be above the average. And the whole story just didn’t make any sense. So I decided to try to find out more about this study. And what I found was that it was a study not of average men. Instead, it was a study of men enrolled with their wives in fertility programs.

This is absolutely true. These were men who were trying with their spouses to have babies to create a pregnancy. Now, with that information, which was not reported in the newspaper, the story made a bit more sense. And now we can understand why smokers have less sex. After a while, having sex 12 times a week, or about twice a day, to create a baby was bound to become something more like work.

And by the end of the first month, or even the first week of this twice a day sex effort, the average couple would begin to suffer from sex fatigue. And for the smokers, at least, there’s an alternative. Oh, no, honey, not again.

Why don’t we have a smoke instead? The point of this is that the world of scientific research and public policy research is drowning in this kind of bizarre information that has no real relation to truth.

It’s a form of junk science.

Bob Metz

Welcome back. You’re listening to Just Right with Bob Metz on CHRW 94.9 FM.

519-661-3600 is the number to call if you want to call in. What you just heard there was financial post editor. Of course, financial post is distributed through the National Post, Terrence Corcoran, here at the University of Western Ontario, in 2000 participating in a summer conference of the ISIL, known as the International Society for Individual Liberty, of which yours truly was the official registrar, and I was also a participant in the event. And it was a week-long event held here, and there were people literally from around the world who had come to hear many prestigious speakers from also around the world here at the university. And you’ll be hearing some of these folks in the future, because it was basically a form on individual freedom and many of the other issues involved. But right now the theme is junk science, and that little story that Terrence Corcoran just told there is just an example of how so many simple little ideas can get out of control if you’re missing one little fact, or you don’t understand the context of a story, and it just might not make sense. So when you see something that doesn’t make sense, you question it.

I guess that’s the first thing to say. But now that was in year 2000 when that was recorded, and the National Post is still at it today, and I think they just wound up their annual Junk Science Week series in which they feature a series of editorials and articles in the financial post, where they have, again, this year, of course, guess what junk science is mostly about? Mostly about global warming.

But where they have people who deny things and encounter things, we commonly believe. So I picked a few that I thought were quite interesting from the National Post over the last couple of weeks. One of them that caught my attention right off the bat was one by Ross McKitrick, economist at the University of Guelph, who had an article appearing in the June 21 National Post entitled Air Confusion Index. And I know a lot of us are wondering, you might hear someone like me or others saying, hey, the air has been getting cleaner for the last 20 or 30 years, and yet what you hear is, oh no, the warnings and the air pollution index warnings are higher than ever before.

Well, here’s a reason for that. And Ross McKitrick points out, he says, here in southern Ontario, there are now, for the first time, smog warnings in the fall and winter, which never used to happen. And he says that Ontario air quality has actually been improving for decades, even in Toronto. And he’s referring to an official Ontario government report that begins by saying, quote, overall, air quality Ontario has improved significantly over the past 35 years for nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide. However, ozone and fine particulate matter, the major components of smog, continue to exceed the ambient air quality criteria and set reference levels, end quote, which by the way coincides with the press release that I read, or referred to earlier on in the show as well.

So this is a Ross McKitrick here. The situation is that air pollution has been steady or going down, yet the number of smog warnings is rising. The system is setting new records for the number of days under advisories and the mismatch between smog warnings and pollution trends is expected to get larger in the future. He says, now, if you find this confusing, you are not alone. But there’s a very simple reason for this. The reason that you don’t remember smog warnings from when you were growing up is that the system was only set up in 1993. And smog advisories, the very first one ever issued, was in 1995. So before that, there were no smog warnings anywhere, anytime, anywhere in Ontario, not through the 1960s, not through the 1970s, because we just simply did not have a smog warning system.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? In fact, I think we were just discovering smog about that time. We didn’t even realize what we were doing to ourselves. But there certainly was air pollution and almost certainly more than there is today. Now, what’s interesting too is Terence Corcoran, again, who we just heard a little while ago, also commented on the same day’s paper under Tory Smog Plan, Big Cost Little Game, June 21st. He says, even though the prime minister’s office and scores of other officials know that their smog claim is wrong, the Harper government keeps repeating it. Environment minister John Baird dragged it out for his action plan announcement in April, quote, air pollution is getting worse, he said. The Liberals did nothing to fight air pollution, but watch our air get dirtier, end quote. And of course, Corcoran says, this is simply not true.

It’s not even factual, according to the government’s own statistics. And so you get this point where, why, is this conservatism? Is that what you have to do to be a conservative nowadays?

Just lie through your teeth, even when people can find out for their own information that what you’re saying is demonstrably false? Really strange. We call it junk science, but I call it all junk politics. And as soon as politics gets into science, it’s not science anymore. I’m sorry, science does not succumb to prejudices and preconceptions and points of view in that sense. That’s not what science is about.

Now, here’s another interesting one. This one’s by Timothy Patterson, Professor and Director of the Ottawa Carlton Geoscience Center at Carlton University. And his article appeared on June 20th, again, under the Junk Science Week banner. And it says, read the sunspots, end quote. And he says, sunspots correlate well with climate, but CO2 does not. By 2020, the sun will weaken and the earth will start cooling again. Quote, climate change research is now literally exploding with new findings.

Now, here, this is important. Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which by the way is 10 years old already, remember that, the field has had more research than in all previous years combined. And the discoveries are completely shattering the myths. Ours is one of the highest quality climate records available anywhere today. And this is Dr. Timothy Patterson, Professor at the Ottawa Carlton Geoscience Center, saying this when he’s referring to his data. And, he says, they see obvious confirmation that natural climate changes can be dramatic and have been dramatic even in the past without our present here, presence here. Specifically, he says, they find a strong and consistent 11 year cycle throughout the whole record in the sediments and diatom remains, which now, here’s some names I’m sort of vaguely familiar with.

He says, this core relates closely to the well known 11 year Schwabe Sun Spot cycle. But that’s not the only cycle out there. There is also longer period cycles. There’s the 75 to 90 year Gleissberg cycle. There’s a 200 to 500 year Suess cycle.

And the 1100 to 1500 year Bond cycle.

But apparently, a lot of these cycles are all coincidentally coming together right now. And here’s the clincher. Even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, what else do you have to say after that to account for earth warming? And that explains also why the polar ice caps on Mars and we know some of the other planets are warming as well. More on global warming and junk science after return, following these messages.

Clip (John Stossel)

Bet you haven’t heard this. Some scientists say global warming would be a good thing. Most of the one degree warming that’s occurred has been in the coldest parts of the globe. The United States has warmed only half a degree in 100 years. No real change here. But in Siberia, it’s warmed up from minus 40 to minus 38 in the last 50 years.

How much money do you want to pay to stop that? I don’t think that would be a real popular proposal in the dead of winter in Almaty. A little warming is okay. Maybe a little warming is better.

Maybe. That’s not what you usually hear on TV.

Clip (Terence Corcoran)

Now it’s easy to use the phrase junk science and apply it to anything you don’t agree with. It’s sort of a loaded, pejorative phrase that makes some people uneasy. And probably there is a problem with it. But I think it’s a useful concept, one that can be defined in an objective way that should be understandable and acceptable even to senior bureaucrats and scientists. Scientists who are in sensitive positions in government and industry. The day when a bureaucrat can turn to a journalist and declare that the Greenpeace report on this or that hazard is based on a form of junk science, perhaps only then will the advance of good science be assured. So the junk science needs to be defined and Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, once defined the two key elements of junk science. The distortion of scientific fact and the exaggeration of risk. And I would take the definition just a little bit further. Junk science occurs when scientific facts are distorted, risks are exaggerated, and science is steeped in politics and ideology.

I think it’s important to add those points on. From this perspective, the role of the media essentially often defines junk science. Indeed, if you look at the definition, you are also looking at science journalism in action. Distorted facts, exaggerated risks, suffused with politics and ideology.

These are the hallmarks of media activity.

Bob Metz

Welcome back to Just Right. I’m Bob Metz and you’re listening to CHRW 94.9 FM, where you can call in at 519-661-3600. What I found interesting about some of Terence Corcoran’s comments, and that was again financial post editor Terence Corcoran recorded here at the university back in 2000 on the subject of junk science, which is still a series going on in the National Post annually. He was criticizing his own paper. The story he picked earlier was from the National Post, and of course he criticized it. And I found this not just in the National Post, but in many papers, and even occasionally on radio stations, where the station or the paper continues to carry a story with a certain bias, even though it has already been discounted either by scientific factor by other people, including the principles in a case, involving that issue.

And I’ve seen that happen a lot, where someone will deny that X has happened, and then the paper or the radio station goes on reporting that X has happened, as though they never talked to that guy. I’ve never understood that dichotomy at first, but now I understand that, of course, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, so to speak, because the papers are made up of many differing points of views, and it’s not like people think it is. It’s not as controlled as they think it is. There is a lot of difference of opinion there, especially when you’re talking about opinion pages versus the news. But what the scary part is, these days, for more accuracy, you have to go to opinion pages rather than rely on the news. So something different there, or tune into the Colbert Report or something like that. Here’s another one from the National Post. This is by Lawrence Solomon, who’s the Executive Director of Urban Renaissance Institute.

And this is again under the Junk Science Week banner. Apparently, there’s a website you can visit, and it is at www.myfootprint.org. And if you go there, you can apparently fill out a form and find out, how did he put it here, how reprehensible you are when it comes to how big a, quote, footprint you leave on the planet by the way you live. But what’s interesting, I guess they had some people take the test to see how much we’d have to give up to live according to the way some of the environmentalists would have us live. And this is interesting.

This is from Lawrence Solomon’s article, which by the way ran on the 19th of June. Even if, quote, you live in a tiny house, you take public transit daily, refusing to even share a car ride with a friend. Even if you eat meat only once a week. Even if you have fewer than 2.2 children. Even if you take no trips by plane.

Still not good enough. If everyone lived like you, this website will tell you, we would need 3.0 planets to survive. Then Solomon goes on, he says, okay, so think subsistence rather. Give up that tiny house and move into a hut with no electricity or no running water. Give up public transit. Ride a mule.

Forsake meat altogether and forsake your children too, just for the examples of this exercise. Still not good enough according to the website. You would still need 1.4 planets to support a world in which everyone lived like you, the website admonishes. To get your footprint down to about 1 planet, it turns out you also need to become a vegetarian. You can’t eat eggs, you can’t have cheese, you can’t have any animal products. And you also have to give up on oranges and bananas.

Because they are imported from far away places and we wouldn’t want to have all that fuel spent on bringing them here on a boat or a plane. Now, they go on to explain in the paper, of course, the idea of an ecological footprint. You’ve been hearing this a lot. The only time I ever used the term footprint was in relationship to how much space my computer took up on my desk. That was a footprint. And so you wanted to have a small footprint. But apparently it was applied to the environment in 92 by William Rees at the University of British Columbia. And according to him, he’s already got this preconceived notion that a GDP of $7,000 to $8,000 per person is all that’s needed to maximize human happiness and that any surplus above that should be taxed away to prevent you from over consuming.

Imagine that. Of course, Solomon says that this crude one size fits all approaches extraordinarily and profoundly anti-ecological. And of course it is. Your footprint doesn’t decrease as you approach a subsistence economy and meat consumption doesn’t doom us to wasteful agriculture.

It’s exactly the opposite. We are more resource efficient now than at any other time in human history, says Solomon. But the last word on this global warming thing, I have to, I’m not going to tell you who said this until I finish reading this to you because this is just wonderful.

I think this is clearly, this by the way was also in the National Post, but was not under the junk science section, but it certainly relates to the issues we’ve just been talking about. And I’m going to quote someone here, tell you who it is after I quote it and try and guess who it might be. Quote, the author Michael Crichton stated it clearly, the greatest challenge facing mankind is a challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.

End quote. I feel the same way, says the writer, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of truth versus the propaganda problem. The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius change in the average global temperature. As a witness to today’s worldwide debate on climate change, I suggest the following and he gives us seven points here.

One, small climate changes do not demand far reaching restrictive measures. Two, any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided. Three, instead of organizing people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants. Four, let us resist the politicization of science and oppose the term scientific consensus which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority. Five, instead of speaking about the environment, let us be attentive to it in our personal behavior. Six, let us be humble but confident in the spontaneous evolution of human society. Let us trust its rationality and not try to slow it down or divert it in any direction.

And seven, let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives. Now who do you suppose said this? Unbelievable, this was the president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, who in an article in National Post called Resist Hysteria and subheading was rational and freedom loving people have to respond and he concluded by saying this and this to me puts it in a nutshell. As someone who has lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by sort of central and global planning.

Boy did he hit the nail on the head, that’s exactly, I didn’t realize there’d be a world leader anywhere who would say something that explicit on that issue. Running out of time now, time to wrap up, just wanted to let you know, next week’s show, have something planned for you already, we should have all things, if everything goes okay, we should have an in-studio guest with us. Many of you may know him, it’s Jim Montag, it was a former mayoralty candidate in London, probably the best third place or ever in the history of the city for mayor. You also know him as the London Middlesex Taxpayers Coalition Chair and he’s also the owner operator of Great Lakes Guns and Knives and he really knows a lot about gun control, gun laws and guns themselves. So we’re going to be talking about the whole gun issue and so if you’re interested in that, you know someone who’s interested in the issue, that might be the time to tune in. So until next week, we’ll see ya, take care and until we come back, remember, be right, stay right, do right, act right and think right. We’ll see ya.

Clip (Glen Foster)

It’s true, guys do not need a relationship as long as they’re having sex and women don’t need sex as long as they’re having chocolate.

You know about the chocolate, I know, get this chocolate, eating chocolate right releases certain chemicals in your brain, give you the same feel you get from being in a relationship. Fat and useless. Oh look at the time, huh?