Sheila Gunn-Reid warns Ottawa’s climate plan will hike taxes on a $400K home by 37%, funding 710 wind turbines and 36 km² of solar panels despite just 1% EV adoption. She cites flawed IPCC models (e.g., overestimating warming until 2017) and political mandates altering science, like the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, while dismissing claims of human-caused climate influence as "undisputed." Gunn-Reid argues wildfires stem from human arson (84% of U.S. cases) and poor forest management, not warming, and urges support for ICSC-Canada to fight fear-driven policies before they spread to other cities. [Automatically generated summary]
Arsonists burn the forest down and politicians blame your SUV.
That's a neat little trick.
And is the city of Ottawa bringing in one of the most expensive climate plans in all of North America?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Two people have been arrested in connection with the wildfires that have claimed at least two lives in Greece.
But as always, with these sorts of things, climate activists are standing on the graves of the dead to push their anti-human agenda, blaming the annual fire season in Greece on your SUV.
But this isn't some sort of international problem.
Friends, the same thing happened in BC just a few years ago.
The annual BC wildfire season was blamed on climate change by the media and politicians, as though they are hard of remembering that fire seasons are called fire seasons because they happen almost every year.
But the police in BC had other culprits in mind when they determined that at least 29 wildfires between 2014 and 2018 were actually arson.
These activists are an arsonist best friend, providing alibis for the fire bug and blaming your car and first world lifestyle instead of, you know, fire-starting maniacs.
But why do politicians do this, giving aid and comfort in the media to really dangerous criminals?
Well, it's so that they can use a dangerous tragedy to bring in expensive climate change policies.
Do you want expensive, unreliable electric buses and expensive, unreliable so-called green energy?
Or do you want the forest to burn down and kill people?
Those are the choices the politicians tell us.
It's all motivated by fear, however, largely unfounded.
Joining me today to cut through the fear straight to the facts is my friend Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition Canada in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon.
Joining me now from his home in Ottawa is good friend of the show, good friend of Rebel, and my friend, Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition Canada.
Tom, thanks so much for joining me.
I wanted to ask you, because you're an expert in the field, I think, and I've talked to Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science about this sort of thing.
Every time there is some sort of weather-related event, catastrophe sometimes, in some instances, you'll see climate activists standing on the graves of people to push their agenda.
It's forest fires right now.
Forest fires in Canada, forest fires in Greece.
Even when they catch the arsonists, they're like, nope, nope, it's climate.
It's climate change.
The weather gods are out to get you and it's because of your SUV and not the firebug they literally just arrested.
Yeah, it's pretty silly.
I mean, Greece has had wildfires ever since Homer with the Iliad.
I mean, you know, you see them referenced throughout history.
And the whole idea that global warming causes wildfires is actually upside down.
The fact is, as it warms, you have more precipitation because there's more evaporation.
As CO2 goes up, the pores in plants' leaves, which are called stomata, don't have to stay open for as long.
And so they lose less water to the environment.
And so the soil stays moister.
And as a consequence, you have actually less fires when CO2 goes up.
So they're exactly backwards.
But of course, the fact is these are being started by arsonists.
And you know, it's interesting in the United States, for example, they estimate that 84% of wildfires are started by humans.
Okay, so it's obviously if humans are starting it, that's the problem.
It has nothing to do with climate change.
People have to realize that, you know, before North American, before we started to actually stop the fires, fires were a normal part of nature.
And what would happen is a crown fire would rip through the forest and it would burn off all the dead brush and the underbrush, but it wouldn't kill, it would not kill the trees.
And as a consequence, that was actually stopped when Europeans came to North America.
We find that in sedimentary records, we can see that there were more fires before Europeans came to North America than there are now.
And the trouble is to actually compensate for the fact that we're stopping these crown fires, what you need to do is you need to clean the underbrush.
You actually have to have forest maintenance.
But the environmentalists said, oh, well, that's not natural.
So they forced the governments to not do it in many places, especially in places like California.
And as a consequence, when a fire does hit, it has lots of kindling.
So what you have sometimes occurring is what's called a base fire, which is so bad that it actually burns into the ground.
And when they actually think they've eliminated the fire, a few days later, it'll break out again.
So it's not that extreme weather or climate change is causing these wildfires.
It's extreme stupidity.
Because the bottom line is that if you don't let nature do what it normally would do, which is cleaning the underbrush with these crown fires, then you have to do it yourself.
And that's what they have to do.
Now, in British Columbia, the estimate is it would cost well over $5 billion to start doing this kind of cleaning.
So they're just not doing it.
It's much easier for a politician to simply blame it on climate change, but it's simply ridiculous.
They have it upside down as usual.
Well, and I think there's something to be said for proper logging techniques.
You know, when you suppress, you know, burns in the forest, natural burns in the forest, you end up with a forest that's all the same age that ends up burning at the same rate as opposed to, you know, different parts of the forest that are different ages.
And so the fire burns itself out.
Now we have forest fires that are enormous because we've basically, in some parts of the world, outlawed logging and outlawed underbrush clearing.
And then so you end up with this aging forest that is just a tinderbox.
And I think if we were more engaged with some logging practices and logging out the forest and replanting it, it would mitigate some of these enormous wildfires.
Well, that's right.
And also people have to realize that fires are a part of nature.
I mean, there's some trees that germinate when there is fire.
Before Europeans came to North America, there were fires that were so big, they would cover a whole state, for example, in the United States with fire.
I mean, they would burn until they hit a natural barrier, like the Mississippi River or the Rocky Mountains.
So controlled burning is another thing they should be doing.
So the idea that you can stop all fires, not do the underbrush clearing and not have wildfires.
Come on.
It's silly.
All you've got to do is park your SUV, Tom.
You know it.
Exactly.
But I think, you know, it is interesting that they must have timed the release of the IPCC report to appear at the same time as, you know, wildfire season.
Because of course, if you look at many of the news reports talking about this IPCC report, which is quite ridiculous, we can talk about that in a sec.
The main image they're using on the Guardian and all kinds of newspapers is wildfires.
My god, the earth is getting hotter, so we're going to have more wildfires.
Unequivocal Warming Claims00:05:25
Well, a degree or two isn't going to make any difference, I mean.
What does make the difference though, is if you have arsonists, of course, but also if you don't have proper force maintenance.
So this is uh typically, you know, IPCC.
They use it as a lever to get attention and excitement.
I mean, think about it when Murray Strong back in the 70s, was warning that there was only 10 years left to avoid catastrophe.
He was talking about global cooling and Rojanda Pachari.
He said, if we didn't have, you know, incredible action by 2012, it was like the end of the world.
They do this all over and over and over.
I mean the forecasts.
It's always 10 years away.
They never come true and, of course, the reason is because they're basing all of this on their computer models, and it's interesting that, just last week, leading IPCC scientists said that they have to admit that their models are running hot.
Well, over a 30-year period until about 2017, the models were forecasting three times the warming that was actually occurring.
So you would think, having admitted that their models are running hot and they're basing these reports on those models, that they would have held the reports back and changed the reports, but no, they go issuing them completely.
I just wanted to read you one really amazing quote from um, you know, from an IPCC expert.
This is Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa's Goddard Institute FOR Space Studies.
He told the, the journal Science.
He said this, it's become clear over the last year or so that we can't avoid this admission.
You end up with numbers for even the near term that are insanely scary and wrong.
So they're admitting that their models are way overheating the atmosphere than reality, but then they expect us to believe their reports based on these models.
You know, the report doesn't even have.
If you look at their summary for policymakers and i'll send you a graph of that, please do yeah, they actually don't show that there was a Medieval warm period or a Roman warm period with temperatures that were similar or even greater than today.
They don't show the little ice age.
You know, these things are just basic stuff.
That's not there.
One of the things that really bugs me about all of these IPCC reports is their use of one key word, and that's the word unequivocal.
Okay, i've actually pulled out a statement uh, from the report in which they they actually use the word in a way that isn't even possible.
It's not only wrong, but it's not even possible.
They use the word unequivocal 33 times in this new report, the Working Group ONE report about the science basis of climate change, and here's one of the quotes.
For example, and i'll send you this, warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air temperature and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.
Now there's two really major, major problems with that.
They're talking about observations of global average air and ocean temperatures.
Well, you don't observe average temperatures.
What What you do is you take thousands of measurements around the world and you manipulate it in some way so that you can get what they call an average temperature.
It's really just a statistic.
It's not really a temperature.
So that's wrong.
You can't actually observe average anything, average sea level, average, so it doesn't make any sense.
But some time ago, I reached out to two philosophers who actually study the logic of science.
One of them was Professor Stephen Goldman from Lehigh University, a philosophy professor who actually supports the climate scare.
And he said statements like this are flawed.
Okay.
He says this.
He says it's an attempt to persuade extra logically, strictly logically, no observations can lead to an unequivocal interpretation.
And of course, unequivocal means there is no other possible explanation.
It must be true.
You know, unequivocal applies to two plus two equals four.
Okay, mathematics.
It applies to chess.
We know how the knight moves and the queen moves.
Those are things that actually are unequivocal.
But science is never unequivocal.
It's always based on our interpretation of our observations.
And he says for this, talking about the IPCC, and remember, he agrees with them that we have a climate scare, a climate crisis.
He says reasoning from evidence is inductive logic.
As for unequivocal, that's never the case in inductive logic.
And he goes on to say global averages are not observations.
And if you ask other scientists, of course, philosophers like David Wojak on the other side of the debate, he actually said that last quote.
I misquoted it.
Goldman said the first quote about it not being possible.
And Wojek said the business about, you know, it just is not possible as well.
So they're both agreeing.
They're both agreeing that the statement doesn't make any sense.
The report also said that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for about 1.1% degrees Celsius of warming since 1850 to 1900.
So what they're saying is that all of the warming essentially that we've seen, and it's not a great deal, 1.1 degrees in the last somewhat greater than a century, is due to human activity.
And their IPCC working group co-chair named Valerie Masson Delmont from France, she said, it has been clear for decades that the Earth climate is changing.
Well, duh, that's the only constant of climate.
It always changes.
And here's where she goes completely off the rails.
And the role of human influence on the climate is undisputed.
Well, come on.
I mean, there are scientists all over the world with the Intergovernmental Panel on, sorry, the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change, you know, and I'll send you a link to that because these are reports that come out, which have thousands of peer-reviewed studies showing there's huge debate in the climate science community.
So, you know, they come across with these very, very absolute statements, which even their own scientists would have to admit don't make any sense.
You know, one time I asked Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science, why are these climate models so wrong?
And she said, they come, they have the fear and inaccuracy built into them because they use the people will hear the term if you follow climate science, even in the most vague of ways, RPC 8.5.
Right.
And that's the doomsday scenario.
And that's their starting point for their climate model.
That is, if we burned everything in the ground, if we filled the earth up with people, and all we did was just fire up the dirtiest coal-fired electricity without scrubbers, with no technology, with no carbon, with nothing.
And we just let all this particulate along with carbon emissions into the air.
That's the basis for their climate modeling.
So, when they say we have 10 years left, yeah, I guess we do if that's your base point.
Yeah, that's plausible.
Yeah, exactly.
And you know, one of the things I think is weird is they have various possible scenarios which would actually make sense, but they do choose that high level to generate all these exciting headlines.
So, you have two factors.
First of all, the models are overheating the atmosphere, and the scientists themselves are saying that.
I just quoted one of them from the NASA Institute for Space Studies in New York.
So, the models are wrong, they're overheating the atmosphere.
They take the most extreme, totally unrealistic input, and then people are surprised that they're saying, Oh, there's going to be like five degrees or something warming, which would be serious.
But the fact is, I think that between now and the end of the century, you know, we might see another degree, something like that.
And the cost-I mean, the cost is really incredible.
Bjan Lomborg, you might remember from the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Denmark.
He actually calculated that if every country that's in the Paris Agreement met their targets and kept those targets right to the 2100-year mark, the cost would be between one and two trillion dollars US a year.
A year.
So, we're talking about like in the order of a hundred trillion dollars.
And you know what the change in temperature would be if you believe the IPCC models?
It would be one-third of one degree Celsius by 2100 for the cost of hundreds of trillions of dollars.
So, I mean, the whole thing is just ludicrous, even if you do believe their models.
You know, and again, with the IPCC, this report it's underneath, it was initially leaked to journalists.
So, if you're really cared about, you know, if you thought that this were scientifically sound, you would not leak it to journalists who are true believers in climate science as they may see it.
You might want to leak it to skeptical journalists and skeptical scientists to say, Look, our work is rock solid, it's indisputable, but that's not what they did.
They leaked it to their de facto communications teams in the mainstream media.
Yeah, exactly.
And those are the people who will not ask the basic questions.
And one of the basic questions is simply this: the IPCC was formed in 1988, and it had the original mandate to study the causes of climate change, and that would include the sun and all the natural effects.
And you know, it's interesting, I pulled out a quote from their first report, and their first report actually occurred at a time before they became corrupted.
And here's what they said in 1990: okay, and this they were still doing what appears to be an honest job.
It is not possible at this time to attribute all or even a large part of the observed global mean warming to an enhanced greenhouse effect on the basis of the observational data currently available, which of course is true.
I mean, that's still true.
But what happened in 1992?
Now, remember, that was a 1990 statement by the IPCC.
In 1992, Brian Mulroney and George Bush and others signed the Rio Declaration down in Brazil.
And what they decided then was that the IPCC would be supporting the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was the treaty they signed.
And they had agreed that climate change was this huge crisis.
So the IPCC's mandate was changed to not look at all climate change, but to only look at human causes of climate change.
And that's how it's been ever since 1992.
And that is a complete distortion, of course, because if there is no significant human effect, then the raison d'être for the IPCC disappears.
There's no reason to have it because their mandate is to study supposedly dangerous human-caused climate change.
And, you know, it's interesting because the framework convention and other UN documents, they often define climate change as being caused by humans.
So, of course, they're going to find that climate change is caused by humans because they define it that way.
You know, they say it's in addition to natural variability.
Well, yeah, but natural variability is climate change.
Otherwise, we'd all be under two kilometers of ice because we'd still be in the last ice age.
So the process was corrupted way back in 1992.
And it's a shame because the IPCC could have been a useful organization if they'd been allowed to continue with their mandate of looking at all causes of climate change.
But they don't.
So you really fundamentally can't trust them because they exist to support the framework convention and they say that it's a catastrophe that's coming.
Yeah, I mean, what was a scientific organization engaged in scientific pursuits is now a political organization engaged in political pursuits.
I mean, you and I have been to these climate change conferences.
It's always some micro-nation telling the world that they're going to be underwater right away.
Climate Crisis Politics00:09:57
And the only way to fix that is give me some money.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Richard Lindsay from MIT, I worked with him on occasion, and he says that when he was involved in the process, he actually witnessed green runners going from room to room to room to make sure that the scientists were staying on script.
Okay, so it's a very controlled process.
And you're not welcome if you don't agree with the politically correct mantra.
So the whole idea that this is the world's leading science group, come on, it's silly.
But you know, one of the problems is that we have governments around the world who are basing very expensive policy decisions on what the IPCC are saying.
And, you know, here in Ottawa, we're about to release a report and people can actually sign up.
I'll send them the report as soon as it's ready.
It should be ready in the next week or so.
If they go to climate, I got to get it right, eh?
ICSC-Canada.com.
If you go to icsc-canada.com, you have a little window where you can put your email address in, and I'll send you the report as soon as it's ready.
But we're finding some pretty amazing things.
I mean, if you actually look at the amount of money that they're spending, they will have to increase the city's annual budget by 37% just to cover their climate plan.
Okay.
Say that again.
That is outrageous to me.
That's nearly 40%.
Yeah.
And they're saying this will be translated unless they get really significant help from senior levels of government, which are all broke right now, but unless they get very significant help, they're going to have to increase property taxes by 37% in Ottawa.
You know, and this is to bring about things which are quite literally impossible.
They're basing it on the idea, for example, that Ottawa is getting a lot hotter.
They talk about the average summer temperature in Ottawa is hotter.
But if you actually look at how that's calculated, it turns out that the average summer maximum is not increasing in Ottawa.
In fact, there are places like Hogsback near Ottawa where the temperature has been dropping.
What's happening is the minimum temperature at night is going up somewhat.
So the average is increasing.
But the actual hot, hot, hot, you know, middle of the day, it's just not happening.
So what they want to do is they want to move our transportation and our heating entirely to electric.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
The thing that's crazy is right now, electric vehicles are 1% of Ottawa's stock.
So they want to go from 1% to 100%.
They want to eliminate all the driving in the downtown core to the market, for example.
This is going to ruin the market.
I mean, a lot of people simply won't go.
They have the idea that they can get as many as 20% of the Ottawa population to walk and ride bicycles.
Now, if you look at even Victoria is not even close to 20%, and it has the best climate in Canada for walking and bicycling.
Right now, it's less than 10% in Ottawa, and they want to go all the way to 20%.
Also, the other thing here, they want to cover the city with 36 square kilometers of solar panels, you know, to try and meet their 100% renewable target.
And it's interesting, the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, here's what they say about recycling solar panels.
They say Canada's regulations do not currently make the recycling of solar panels mandatory, nor do they provide guidelines for the use or disposal of panels that have reached the end of their lifespan, which is very short, typically 20 years.
With the number of Canadian solar farms on the rise, we must bear in mind that there is a real need for thoughtful approaches to eventual decommissioning.
Well, that's an incredible understatement because by 2050, Canada is expected to produce 650 tons of solar panel waste and 650 tons.
Compare that with 350 tons, which we produced in 2016.
So we're going to be going up from a few hundred tons to hundreds of thousands of tons, and we have no recycling plan.
And, you know, a lot of times when they just throw it into toxic into dumps, the toxic materials leaks out into the watershed, you know.
And so, even if you don't care about the impact on birds because of the wind turbines, they can't dispose the wind turbine blades properly either.
I mean, there's just so many things.
And to pay the amount of money that we're talking about, which is approaching $60 billion on the part of a city that's only a million people, I think we probably have the most expensive climate change plan in the world, you know, for a city.
And, you know, Parker Gallant, who's an electricity expert, he said the only way this is going to happen is if Ottawa disconnects itself from the Ontario hydro grid, because with that much wind turbine power, which is 710 industrial scale wind turbines, much higher than the Peace Tower, not only are you going to have to cut down all the trees in the greenbelt because you can't put them too close to houses and they can't be too close to each other.
What he's saying is it will destabilize Ontario Hydro's grid, having so much flaky, unreliable, inconsistent power.
So he's saying Ottawa is going to have to disconnect themselves from the Ontario Hydro Grid.
So this plan is truly ludicrous.
And we go through the numbers.
We talk about the assessed property value, how taxes are going to rise.
We go through the whole thing.
So yeah, people should sign up at icsc-canada.com and we'll send them the report.
We'll be blasting it out to the media as well because people have got to wake up.
And their big push for electric buses is going to leave a lot of people standing on the street corner at minus 30 until what an internal combustion bus finally comes because these buses they break down all the time.
They've tested them in Germany.
They don't make their expected range.
And Germany is nowhere near as cold as Ottawa.
Can you imagine relying on an electric snowplow to clear the roads in Ottawa?
Like my head is just swimming with all the horrors that you've explained.
And all I'm thinking is, boy, I hope to God the state of New York ramps up their electricity production because Ottawa is going to have to buy a ton of it to support their bad ideas.
And the poor Ottawa taxpayer.
Tom, give me a rough range.
What you think the average property tax cost is for an average single family house in Ottawa.
What does that look like?
Well, if we talk about a house of $400,000, for example, property tax now is $4,035.
Bob Lyman did these calculations for us.
He's saying that unless there's very serious government aid, this is $4,035 per year.
He's saying that it'll go up to $5,528 per year.
So that's the 37% rise just for this climate plan.
So, you know, otherwise they're going to have to cut services enormously unless they, you know, if they don't want to increase the tax.
So Ottawa already has been cutting back on our snow removal.
It's not safe at times.
You know, we're not properly icing or de-icing the sidewalks.
So at the very least, with our aging population, we should be spending more on snow removal.
And the idea that snow's going away, you'd laugh.
A college Ottawa had a presentation a few years ago in the Aviation Museum called the End of Snow in Canada.
They had skiers on stage who were all kind of moaning about the end of snow.
And I went to the mic and kind of reminded them that actually snow cover has been gradually rising for decades.
So, you know, that went over like a lead balloon, of course.
I was really kind of swore at get out of here.
But that's what we're going to do.
We're going to simply tell them, look, here are the facts.
Here are the numbers.
Here's the cost for no impact whatsoever.
Ottawa's sacrifice will be for nothing.
Well, and let's not even, let's throw the property tax hike out the window.
And on top of that, you're looking at some of the world's most expensive electricity after the fact.
That's right.
And it's absolutely nothing about it that's green.
It is not green.
It is among the dirtiest energy sources on the planet.
It kills millions of birds and bats every year.
The wind turbines, the solar factories, when they make them in China, incredible pollution.
So these are not green energy sources.
And this is something that is, you know, they say they want to have a green, resilient city.
Well, it won't be resilient.
We'll be out of power and it won't be green.
Tom, tell us again how people can support the work that you do with the International Climate Science Coalition Canada.
Right.
They should go to the web to icsc-canada.com and they can donate directly there too if they'd like.
But at the very least, we hope people put in their email address so we can update them when our report is ready in a week or so.
I would encourage people to donate to you because as we head into the next federal election, we are going to see these green groups get tons of money dumped on them, a lot of it coming from outside of the country to influence Canadian politics.
And you're just out there telling the truth about what it's going to cost your family if these governments pursue these wild and crazy green ideas.
And, you know, for people in the West, you say that's happening in Ottawa.
I don't care.
I think all bad ideas come from Ottawa.
Just wait because pretty soon the Edmonton mayor and the Calgary mayor will say, oh, look what they're doing in Ottawa.
Let's do that too.
That's how this stuff happens.
It spreads like a plague across the country.
Yeah, it's nuts.
Thanking Tom00:00:50
Well, Tom, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
And, you know, you're always such a pleasure to talk to you.
Frightening at times.
But I want to thank you so much for your time and we'll have you back on again very, very soon.
Okay.
I don't know about you, but I'm so tired of society being motivated by fear of a doomsday.
We're constantly told we're all going to die of climate change and then now of COVID.
The good news is the doomsdays never seem to come and it's time for society to stop living by flawed modeling and predictions and start living in freedom and with hope.
Quit scaring people and let's quit being scared.
Well everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here or wherever I am at the same time next week.