Sheila Gunn-Reed and Tom Harris critique the far-left green movement’s celebration of COVID-19, framing lockdowns as a blueprint for climate policy despite 6M+ deaths. Media like CBC and CNN push "systemic change" to curb CO2, ignoring its role in boosting crop yields—studies from Climatechange Reconsidered and CO2Science.org show current levels are historically low. Harris and Gunn-Reed expose Earth Hour’s 2020 hypocrisy, debunking CO2 as "pollution" while praising Human Achievement Hour. They highlight the UN’s exaggerated "climate emergency," minimal temperature rises since 1880, and activists like Mark Moreno’s stunts at Glasgow. Climate Realism Canada launches to counter restrictive policies, warning environmentalist demands could permanently cripple energy and economic progress. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Sheila Gunread, and you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
Tonight, my guest is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition, and we are talking about how the environmentalist movement is seeing the response to the coronavirus outbreak as a test run for how they'd like to deal with the climate emergency.
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The environmentalist movement sees the upside to a deadly global pandemic.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
You know, there's nothing quite like a deadly disease spreading across the face of the entire earth to really bring us back to focusing on the important things in life.
The Planet's Unexpected Beneficiary00:14:29
Family, friends, self-reliance, preparedness, and of course, good hygiene.
That is, if you are a normal person with a normal set of priorities, but then there is the environmental movement.
Just look at this bizarre headline from CNN, of course, CNN.
There is an unlikely beneficiary of the coronavirus, the planet.
The article goes on to detail how the outbreak of coronavirus has led to a decline in coal use in mainland China, which, for the likes of CNN, means that the communist Chinese government allowing the coronavirus to spread out of control by censoring doctors who tried to sound the alarm bell months ago.
Well, it's not all that bad.
But if you think CNN is alone in its grotesque pseudo-advocation for the lockdown of all of humanity in the name of the planet, well, here comes CBC.
Coronavirus work-from-home policies give climate plan a boost.
People are working from home so that they don't spread a deadly virus or bring a deadly virus back home to their families.
CBC says, What a great thing for Catherine McKenna's bad ideas.
Oh, but wait, there's more.
COVID-19 pandemic response temporarily combating CO2 emissions, but systemic change needed, experts urge.
Wow.
Joining me via Skype in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon is Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition to discuss how the environmentalist movement is embracing the measures meant to stem the tide of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic as a template to battle their so-called climate emergency.
Now from the Ottawa area is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
And I wanted to have Tom on the show because one of the underlying things that has sort of emerged from the coronavirus pandemic is how some people have completely forgotten about the dire warnings of climate change that were just happening like three weeks ago.
And others are using it as a template for what could be done to deal with climate change.
Hey, Tom, thanks for coming on the show.
There's so much to talk about.
I sent you an article and you sent me five back.
Yeah, it's sort of sad because what they're saying is that this shows the kind of systemic change that's necessary in our society if we're to stop the climate from changing.
Well, you know, I guess the answer to that would be, well, yeah, and is this what you want?
I mean, have a look around you, with the exception of the gas being low price, the kind of changes that the environmentalists want would actually result in the kind of changes we're seeing like right around us, you know, jobs closing and people not being able to transfer or move around.
And I think that in a sense, I mean, they're saying this is going to give us an example of what we can do.
Well, I would say this is an example of what they want us to do.
And I would say, my goodness, is this the kind of society you want?
And I think when this is all over, that's perhaps the lesson that people will get is the environmentalists actually were not too displeased with this event because it showed what could happen.
Whereas I would think that most people would say, yeah, and that's not what we want to happen.
Yeah, I sent you a CBC article yesterday, and the title is COVID-19 Pandemic Response: Temporarily Combating CO2 emissions, but systemic change needed experts urge.
So somehow they've shoehorned a good news story, I guess, for them into all of this is that, you know, despite the fact that thousands of people across the world are sick and this has been unleashed upon us by the Chinese government, isn't it great that CO2 emissions are down?
I mean, it's so strange and anti-human that this is the immediate response from the environmental movement.
Yeah, in fact, we heard from one of the top UN people that there is a good side to it because people are not traveling and not flying and not living their normal lives.
And dying.
Yeah, I come back to the point.
Well, yeah, and is that the kind of life you want?
So in a way, this is an illustration of what the environmentalists are pushing for, except, as I say, gas prices will go through the roof, whereas right now they're quite cheap.
But that CBC article is a weird one because they're mixing up pollution and carbon dioxide on the climate issue.
And they talk about the number of deaths as a result of exposure to air pollution.
Well, you know, in reality, nobody dies unless they're sucking on a tailpipe or something or in a gas chamber.
They don't die due to pollution.
I mean, it's a contributing factor in extremely bad areas like in China.
But in Canada and the United States in particular, we see that pollution levels have been dropping so much that, in fact, on the Environmental Protection Agency website, I was just noticing they were saying that a car today puts out, they said, 99% reduction in pollution since 1970.
Okay, so we're actually doing very well when it comes to pollution.
CO2 is another story, but as you know, CO2 is plant food.
So when they mix the two issues up in the article like this, it really doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, you also sent me an article that was published in the Sunday Times of London lamenting the fact that the pandemic is sort of taking a higher priority than climate change.
And some of the quotes in that are quite crazy.
You know, it says, for now, COVID-19 can't be stopped, only slowed, but climate change can both be stopped and slowed.
How?
How?
In fact, Greenpeace hurt my door a few years ago, and I guess she chose the wrong door to knock on.
They asked me if I would contribute money to help them stop climate change.
So I asked them, well, are you going to help us stop the next ice age?
And they kind of looked at me like, huh?
And I think that's the point is that climate changes naturally all the time.
We've had far hotter and far colder, far stormier, far higher and lower sea levels.
You know, the bottom line is this is climate change is natural, unlikely, very much unlike this pandemic, which is not at all natural, of course.
So there is really no comparison except for saying this is the kind of future environmentalists seem to want.
And that should be a big warning.
And also, as Rex Murphy pointed out in his piece, climate fanatics never miss an opportunity.
They really are fanatics when they take something which is so serious across the world.
And they say, oh, but you know, this is actually a good thing because we're reducing CO2.
So it is really kind of mentally ill, actually.
Yeah, there's a Times of London article published on March 5th that says, don't take this the wrong way.
So you know that this is going to be gross.
When they preface the sentence with don't take this the wrong way.
But if you were a young hardline environmentalist looking for the ultimate weapon against climate change, you could hardly design anything better than coronavirus.
Unlike most other diseases, it kills mostly the old who, let's face it, are more likely to be climate skeptics.
It spares the young.
So what a great thing.
It's getting rid of all the people left with common sense so that the anti-human environmental movement can just move in and clean up the, I guess, what's left of the world.
If there's any people left.
You know, some of the extremists, of course, in society are members of a group called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
And if you on the web, you'll see there's thousands of people across the world who actually think that the earth would be far better off if humans just disappeared.
Now, they're not saying we should all go out and kill ourselves, but they say we should have no more children.
So that, in fact, it would be the gradual end of the human race.
So, you know, this is underlying some of the more extreme elements of the climate change movement.
And it's really sick, you know.
I would argue that it's not more extreme.
I think this is actually probably the mainstream position of the environmentalist movement, that there are too many people, that the old people are taking up resources, that the old people should stop having opinions, that climate skeptics really of any age should be rounded up.
I'm pretty sure David Suzuki expressed a sentiment to that effect.
I think it is absolutely the mainstream position of the environmental movement.
And it's so mainstream that it's being printed in the Times of London and nobody bats an eye.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And yet, you know, as societies advance, as we have more money and more wealth, prosperity, what we find is that we protect the environment better, okay, because people have the resources and the time and the energy to actually care about the environment.
So the whole idea that, you know, we should impoverish society, which is kind of implicit in a lot of this silly stuff that you're quoting, it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, if you look at a country like Somalia, how much do you think they care about the environment?
Okay, when you have warlords fighting back and forth.
So in fact, in many cases, the environmentalists are shooting themselves in the foot because trying to make our society impoverished is the exact opposite of what you should do.
There's something called the Kuznets curve.
And the researcher, Mr. Dr. I presume, Kuznet, actually got a Nobel Prize for this, in which he showed that if you draw a curve that plots standard of living versus environmental degradation, what you see is at first, as the standard of living increases and you have more consumption, the environment gets worse.
But you get to a certain point and then it drops off.
And as you get wealthier and more wealthy and you have more time and more resources to care for the environment, the environment actually improves.
So indeed, we should be encouraging countries in Africa, for example, to use their natural resources, their coal, their oil, their natural gas, to boost their society so that they will have the funds and care about the environment.
So in many ways, you know, the Earth Hour and all these other different crusades where they're trying to get us to use less energy are exactly the opposite because we see societies that use almost no energy are poor.
And that's not the way we want to be if indeed we want to protect the environment, let alone all the other things we need.
You know, it's as you were saying that some of the other solutions that the environmentalists think will be the answer to the problem they think is out there.
One of the big ones is that we need societal and governmental change, i.e. moving away from a capitalist, consumerist-based society that has made us the most prosperous society ever to exist and the healthiest society ever to exist.
I mean, the grocery store is a testament to that, that you can walk into your local, for me, Fort Saskatchewan grocery store and get food from all around the world at an affordable price, things my grandparents a couple generations ago would only dream of.
But they want us to move away from that to communism.
And when you look at communist societies around the world, they're filthy.
I mean, the Soviet Union before it fell, absolutely disgusting, the most polluted lake in the world was in the Soviet Union.
Look at China.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Jordan Peterson, who I, you probably interviewed him, I guess, he had a really interesting answer to a woman in Australia just the other day.
It just came out.
I put it on my Facebook page, and people can follow all of our articles that way.
If you search Tom Harris and Climate, you'll see my Facebook page.
But regardless, this woman was asking him about, oh, this terrible climate disaster.
And Jordan Peterson said, you know, I think most of the people who are charging on this crusade are people who don't have their own houses in order, you know, their own personal lives in order.
So they use this crusade to kind of deflect their attention away from all their own shortcomings.
And that what he said is that what young people should do is try to make themselves powerful and strong and healthy and intelligent and take their education, you know, and do the things they need to eventually be able to contribute to society.
But he was saying that in fact, he thinks a common denominator amongst many of these crusaders for the climate or other environmental concerns are that their own lives are actually screwed up and that they're using this as a distraction rather than fixing themselves.
And I thought that was a pretty unique answer.
Yeah, I think there's some truth to that, that, you know, it's easy to one to fix the entire world because it's easier.
To to make somebody else the villain and then, instead of fix your own life where you are actually the self-destructive villain, I mean we should control the controllables.
Okay, there's so many issues that I have personally, and everybody has personally, that you actually have actual control over.
And what Peterson was saying is, look, get your own house in order, control your own controllables, and then someday you can help the world.
But he says, when you have people trying to help the world who are all kind of mentally upside down, that's not really very good.
Um, you know, in one of the articles here, we're talking about Earth Hour, did you?
Would you like to talk about that a little?
I would love to talk about Earth Hour.
That's the next thing up on my screen.
Yes, and it's sneaking up on us again this year.
Tom, how are you celebrating Earth hour?
I plan to have every light in the house on and they're going to see me from the International space station.
Calling Climate Realists00:13:59
Yeah exactly, because energy consumption correlates directly with wealth, which correlates directly with protecting the environment.
So yeah, the Earth Hour people.
They're saying to switch off your lights for an hour on saturday, march 28th 2020 at 8, 30 p.m.
Your local time.
Now if, as I said in the article that we had published recently, if this were about saving energy to show our support for the 860 million people who don't have electricity around the world, then it could make some sense.
But in fact, the driving factor in Earth Hour for years in fact the origin of it in Australia was basically to stop climate change.
Okay, and if you actually read through the promotions from last year, they say global warming.
This is from the Australia Earth Hour webpage.
Right at the top it says, choose your climate future global warming caused by carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels.
Oh, come on.
There's two mistakes in that sentence right away.
It's not carbon, it's not pollution and it's not global warming is not being caused by our burning of fossil fuels, or at least not very much, if there is any at all.
But I mean, this is like and I always love the appendix for the book 1984 and people should read that again.
If they read it years ago, read it again because it's right in the debate constantly, carbon pollution, green energy, climate deniers.
The language of the debate has been completely skewed so that you can't really even have a sensible conversation anymore because everyone's using this sort of language.
Even many conservatives are calling it carbon pricing, and that's a big mistake.
You should not do that because, of course, as as you know, carbon is soot.
It's also diamonds.
You know it's pure form of carbon in nature, but uh, carbon dioxide, of course, is plant food and you know if, if people actually go to the Climate Change Reconsidered Climatechange Reconsidered.org website.
What you'll find here is they have a report called Biological Impacts, and it cites 1,000 peer-reviewed studies that show that forests and grasslands have actually become more productive.
They've actually increased as CO2 levels have risen.
And you see what CO2science.org is another interesting website that people should check out, CO2science.org out of Arizona.
That's the IDSOs, Dr. Idso.
He actually does tests in greenhouses, which show what happens when you double, triple, or quadruple carbon dioxide levels above the ambient atmosphere.
And what he shows, first of all, not surprisingly, plants grow much better.
But the other thing which he shows, which I think is really quite amazing, is they need less water.
So as CO2 levels rise in our atmosphere, we're going to find areas that start growing plants that currently are too dry because of a lack of water.
So carbon dioxide, carbon pollution, come on, it's the exact opposite.
It's beneficial to all of us.
Now, it's true that if CO2 levels were too high, we would be displacing oxygen, and so we'd be in trouble.
But how high does it have to go before it's actually a threat for humans?
Here's the answer.
In submarines, CO2 levels can reach 10,000 parts per million.
Our outside atmosphere is about 125th of that.
Okay, so you would still be able to be okay because there's no harmful effects on the crew with CO2 levels of 25 times today level.
And of course, throughout Earth's history, there have been many times when CO2 was much, much higher than today.
Indeed, over the course of geologic history, we're at one of the lowest levels of CO2 in the whole of Earth's history.
And Patrick Moore, who I know you've interviewed, he's a wonderful person to talk to, you know, former Greenpeace founder, now totally on our side in the climate issue.
He points out that CO2 has been dropping steadily for millions of years.
And if we hadn't come along and liberated it through cement and fossil fuel combustion, we would in fact perhaps see CO2 drop to a level at which plants die.
So the whole concept that CO2 is pollution that needs to be controlled, it's a huge mistake.
And sadly, you know, our government and to a certain extent, even the Conservative Party, they mix these things up, pollution, carbon dioxide.
You know, they got to back up and say, just a minute, we're talking about oranges and apples.
They're different things.
And sure, we're controlling pollution and we're doing a good job of that.
CO2, let it go.
In fact, there are people who say we should be happy that it's rising because we'll see more crop productivity.
So the Earth Hour concept is wrong.
And Dr. Ball says it point blank.
He says the basic assumption on which the entire theory that human activity is causing global warming or climate change is wrong.
Okay, he says it point blank.
And Dr. Ball is, you know, one of the best authorities in the world on this field.
You know, I think it's funny, and I'm sort of proud to say that normally during Earth Hour, energy consumption spikes in both of the major cities in Alberta.
So, you know, we got to pat ourselves on the back for that.
But I do, and there's some great irony in the fact that there are a lot of uninformed and however well-meaning.
I don't think that they're like sinister, although some people in the environmentalist movement clearly are.
But a lot of well-meaning, however, ill-informed individuals sitting in the dark, burning a paraffin candle for an hour and not even having a clue where that paraffin came from to fight climate change.
Yeah, in fact, I've heard there's a group in the States that they call it Human Achievement Hour, where they, like you, intentionally use more and more resources specifically to celebrate how our society has done so well.
And, you know, it comes back to this virus again.
We're having a preview of what would happen if we all, if we actually followed the environmentalist advice, you know, we'd have a society that's very poor.
We wouldn't have jobs that, you know, we couldn't drive anywhere.
I mean, that's where these extremists want to take us.
So, yeah, in a way, that is a lesson from this virus is that, yeah, if you want their kind of future, you're experiencing it now.
Yeah, life would be short, miserable, not very much fun, and plagued by disease.
Moving along, you and your co-author, Jay Lair, you have an article where you make the case that it is time to end the UN climate fiasco.
And I kind of hope it goes on just one more year because next year's event is in Glasgow, Scotland.
And I've never been.
So just one more year and then let's stop it.
I've never been to Scotland either, and I'll probably go there.
But, you know, one thing that the group Clintel out of the Netherlands, I believe it is, planning to have a full-blown climate debate, okay, presenting the science, the economics on both sides so that people can actually hear what's going on.
And I think that that will be very, very productive.
And in that sense, I hope the Scotland event goes on because it's about time we had that sort of a debate.
I mean, the whole idea that you can't discuss it without people calling you a denier and turning you off, I mean, that's very sad because this is real science.
And, you know, it also, the pandemic might help people take a bit of a different perspective about the whole use of the term climate emergency, because we are in an emergency now with respect to the pandemic, and we have to take sensible precautions.
That is something that's real.
Now, when they use the term emergency to apply to climate change, I mean, you found yourself in your own research that they did no research before the government decided it was a climate emergency.
They just grabbed the term.
And the trouble is, if you're calling Wolf too often with a term like emergency, then people won't take it seriously when you really have one.
So I hope this makes people reevaluate the whole concept of using the term emergency with respect to a gradual tiny change in climate.
I mean, since 1880, we've seen just over one degree Celsius rise.
Okay.
And you have to look, well, when were the extreme weather records?
Virtually all of them were set in the 1930s.
So, you know, there's no emergency.
In fact, there's very little going on when it comes to climate at all, except in the heads of people who welcome the virus.
Like, they're nuts.
Yeah, isn't that the truth?
Now, I wanted to sort of plug some of the other work that you're doing.
You not only are with International Climate Science Coalition, but you do interviews and you have your own podcast.
And you had a really great podcast with Mark Moreno from Climate Depot, who is great.
He's always so much fun at the UN climate change conferences because he always has some sort of little stunt that he pulls to bring everybody back to reality and re-emphasize the ridiculousness of these things.
Like a couple of years ago, he dressed as the captain from the love boat and he tried to get onto the Greenpeace boat.
Yeah, Mark is a rocket.
And the beauty of it was the day before Greenpeace had tried to board a coal ship, like, you know, Greenpeace's generalized stunts where they trespass and board coal ships.
And he just tried to return the favor.
And I think they were calling the cops.
So it's pretty quick how they proved themselves to be hypocrites.
But I wanted to make sure that everybody knows what else you're doing out there because not only are you with International Climate Science Coalition, but you're doing some interesting things and you are having these discussions that the environmental left thinks need to be shut down.
Yeah, exactly.
If people do a Google search between Tom Harris and the name of my show, which is Exploratory Journeys, it'll come up on iHeartRadio and all sorts of places.
Or they can just go to our homepage, which is climate scienceinternational.org.
And you'll see Ian Clark's interview, because I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago.
Mark Morano's interview, people have got to listen to it because it's so great.
Yeah, I mean, Mark is a total live wire.
He's a wonderful guy.
And, you know, he is hated by so many environmental extremists that, you know, people have got to listen in.
I actually hung out with Mark in 2009 at the Copenhagen Climate Conference.
And it was quite a riot because we were allowed to get into the press center.
Oh, my goodness, Mark.
And we were sort of moving around talking to people.
And then they said, what are you doing in the press center?
We said, oh, they said we can get into the press center.
And so there's an argument back and forth as to whether we should be there.
And it was quite hilarious, actually.
But yeah, Mark is wonderful.
And his new movie, Climate Hustle 2, I was just corresponding with him.
Unfortunately, it won't be released on the 21st of April because it sounds like the theaters will be closed until the beginning of May.
So indeed, it'll be released a little later.
But I encourage people to check it out because the trailers are already on the web for Climate Hustle 2.
And Kevin Sorbo, you might remember from Hercules, also from the Andromeda Ascendant science fiction.
That's where I knew him.
He was wonderful in that.
He's the host of this movie.
So they've got a real, you know, first-class Hollywood star as their main character in Climate Hustle 2.
So people have got to check it out.
And if you are not sure, if you can't find the trailer, just go to CFAC, CFAT, CFACT, I guess it is, which is Committee for Constructive Tomorrow, and they advertise it right there.
So we've got a really beautiful video about to come from Mark Murano and company.
That's fantastic.
We at the Rebel, we did a premiere of Climate Hustle, the first one.
When it came out, we packed theaters in Edmonton and Calgary.
And then we sort of did a Q ⁇ A session with Mark afterwards.
And it was, I would suggest, some of our more successful events that we've ever done.
Because, you know, it's great to have somebody like Mark come to town.
He's this big American name.
And, you know, and he's not afraid to have these discussions.
And he does it with his own sort of style and panache.
It's great for Canadians to see that.
And one more thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As you were talking, I just pulled up Exploratory Journeys with Tom Harris on my phone.
You're on Google podcast.
So I'm assuming you're on iTunes there too.
24 fabulous episodes of Tom's work.
If you want to subscribe, folks at home.
Tom, where else can people find the work that you do and support the work that you do?
Well, the best thing is to look at our website, which is climate scienceinternational.org.
Okay.
And we're going to be actually launching a new group, as we've talked about previously, called Climate Realism Canada.
So stay tuned.
That's coming soon.
Okay.
I'm working with some others in the background, but that's going to be quite a nice movement because we're actually showing people how, you know, Canada has to have a climate realist movement.
And we better get it soon before we kill more and more of our activities and we actually end up with a permanent crippling of our society.
I think some of the damage that has been done, especially to our investment sector, may be permanent, especially with the energy renaissance taking shape in the United States.
But Tom, as soon as Climate Realism Canada is ready to launch, please let me know so I can have you back on the show and let everybody see what you're up to next.
Okay, well, that's great.
Thanks a lot, Sheila.
Thanks, Tom.
In The Coming Weeks00:00:58
Thanks for taking the time today.
You're always so generous with your time, and we'll have you back on the show real soon.
Okay, bye-bye.
In the coming days and weeks ahead, we are going to see exactly who is made of what.
Are people going to be decent, good neighbors?
Are they going to learn how to be self-reliant when our government has failed to keep us safe?
Are people and more importantly, politicians going to be able to set aside their differences to do what's right for all of us?
A lot of things are going to shake out of the trees in the next few weeks, but so far, the environmentalist movement is proving themselves to be the anti-human crazy people I've always thought they were.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time in the same place next week.