Sheila Gunn-Reid examines whether climate change advocates form a quasi-religious cult, comparing their dietary restrictions (e.g., anti-meat advocacy) to cult manipulation. Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition argues models overpredicted warming by 300% in 30 years, while U.S. records show no extreme weather in 2022—contradicting alarmist claims. Skeptical scientists like Bob Carter and Peter Ridd face suppression, with dissenting students fearing backlash, yet Alberta’s Daniel Smith resists Ottawa’s overreach. The movement’s reliance on untested narratives, censorship, and economic harm (e.g., Canada’s 1.6% emissions policies) suggests a cult-like rejection of evidence and debate. [Automatically generated summary]
Is the deep green radical climate change movement a cult?
My guest today makes the case.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
You know, there are some characteristics of a cult that I do believe are overlaid with modern environmentalism.
One of the things that cults make you do, most sinister cults anyway, is change your diet drastically and sometimes change your sleep habits.
And that is to disorient the prospective cult member, but also to deplete their brain from the ability to think their way out of a situation.
And right now, the climate change movement is saying you don't need to eat meat, even though meat requires the things you need to make your brain work.
You don't need to eat animals at all.
You must not eat animals because you're trying to save the planet.
And I see that as a thing a cult leader would tell you to do so that you don't have the psychological, but also physical wherewithal to get out of the situation they're about to put you in.
Now, that's just one way that I would compare the environmentalist movement to a cult.
My guest today has given it, I think, even more thought than I have.
My guest today is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
Here's the interview we recorded earlier.
Check it out.
So joining me now is my friend Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
Tom, thanks so much for coming on the show.
And I'm very sorry I was late to do our interview.
There's a strong comparison and I make it all the time, but you have come to, I think, the same conclusion that I think climate change is a bit of a doomsday cult.
And, you know, as with most doomsday cults, at the end of it all, you're left with the truest believers who will do the most extreme thing.
Because with so many doomsday cults, they make a prediction of the comet or whatever, the apocalypse, and then it doesn't come.
And people leave, but others stay behind.
And then the next prediction comes and it doesn't come to fruition and people leave.
But at the end, you are left with a radical capsule of people who are true believers despite all evidence that they know that they are right and they are willing to do whatever it takes.
And that's, I think, how normal people end up drinking Kool-Aid or Flavorade, as was the case, or wearing matching track suits and Nikes, killing themselves.
What do you think?
Well, it's interesting because Michael Crichton gave a speech.
Remember, he's the author of Jurassic Park and the Andromeda Strain and all kinds of things, State of Fear, which was something that talked about climate change and how the environmentalists were actually causing disasters so that they could say, oh, look, you know, we're right.
But here's what he said in 2003.
He said, if you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature.
Then there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution, etc.
And he talks about there'll be a judgment day coming.
We're all energy sinners doomed to die unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability.
And, you know, it's interesting because there was an expert, Rick Ross.
He's an expert on cults and intervention.
Yeah, he's an intervention specialist.
And he developed a list of 10 warning signs for unsafe groups, which was published by the Cult Education Institute.
And I won't read all 10 of them, but let's look at a couple of them.
The first one is absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
And of course, that's exactly what's happening in the climate change thing.
We have Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio without any formal scientific training.
They're telling us it's the end of the world.
And if you question them, my God, you know, you're a denier.
And it's interesting.
I'll just go down here a little bit.
No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
You know, if you question it all, you're a denier.
The science is settled, Tom.
Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, just going through the list, I just do one more.
Number four is kind of interesting.
It said, unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies, and persecutions.
Okay, it's very much like the guy walking down the street who says the end is near.
You know, Thursday, it's the end of the world.
Thursday comes and goes.
He just crosses it out and he puts Friday.
And, you know, Al Gore is doing that all the time.
I mean, it is quite amazing.
Did you see his stuff at the Davos conference where he was really quite unhinged?
Yes, I did.
He was very upset, screaming and yelling.
And I thought, you know what?
Maybe you're mad at yourself in your big house, in your private jet that got you here, but it's okay because you can have your tantrum in your pile of money that you got from peddling this garbage.
Well, and it's amazing.
If you look at the other people on the stage at the time, he was saying things that are truly insane.
I mean, completely ridiculous.
He was saying the oceans are boiling.
Boiling?
Like, that's 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
It turns out that the average temperature rise of the oceans in the last century has been 0.14 degrees Fahrenheit, which is considerably less than a degree Celsius, less than 1.1 degrees Celsius.
That's been going on per decade.
Okay.
So if you actually believe the UN, now that's a big if because of course a lot of their stats are silly, but there, you know, these groups are actually saying that it's a about a 1.4 degrees C rise since 1880.
1.4 degrees.
Now, like the atmosphere, if you know, you would not even notice that in your lifetime, if in fact it really is happening.
And that's a good question because some experts say that there's no warming at all.
So he says boiling, but he gets away with that because he's on the side of the angels.
Okay.
He's on the side of the global warming catastrophes.
The other thing he said, which I thought was funny, and again, the people on stage were not questioning him.
That's just like a cult, exactly like a cult.
He says the equivalent of 600,000 Hiroshima bombs per day are being set off because of our greenhouse gas emissions.
We're still putting 162 million tons into it every single day.
And the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth.
That's what's boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach 1 billion in this century.
Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees.
What about a billion?
We would lose our capacity for self-governance on this world.
Now you have to ask yourself, first of all, how big is 600,000 Hiroshima bombs in comparison with, let's say, the sun's input?
It turns out that it is 0.25% of the sun's output that hits the earth actually in the course of a day.
It actually works out to, you know, 600,000 Hiroshimas today would be 9 million kilotons of TNT.
That's a lot.
But the sun gives us 400 times that amount of energy every single day.
The other point, of course, is when people tell me about these big numbers of energy being added to the atmosphere, my answer is: well, so what?
I mean, in eight and a half years, there's been no warming.
So obviously, something in nature is undoing it.
And of course, the answer is clouds.
What's happening is that as it gets slightly warmer, you get more evaporation and you get more clouds and the clouds cool it down.
And we know that's the case because there was no warming.
And if it's true, and I haven't done the full calculation for greenhouse gases, but if it were true that 600,000 Hiroshimas per day, well, the answer is like, so what?
There's no warming.
I didn't notice.
So, you know what?
Even with his gross exaggeration, if I didn't notice, I don't care.
Well, frankly.
When you spread it out over the whole thing, I mean, you know, it really doesn't matter.
And again, this is an indication of a cult.
I mean, we could go through all 10 of these things, but it's not really worth it.
You know, the group leader is always right.
That's number nine among the identifiers of a cult.
Al Gore is always right.
In fact, it's interesting.
I'll send it to you after the show.
You might laugh that they actually took that statement from Al Gore about boiling ocean, 600,000 Hiroshimas per day, et cetera.
His very excited, unhinged statement.
They took it and they put it to exciting music.
Okay.
So it's not as if it's not as if.
Yeah.
It's not as if the left were hiding it, saying, oh my God, he's saying things that are insane.
They were trumpeting it because the leader is always right.
That's number nine among the cults, you know.
So they were actually pushing it with music, exciting boom, boom, boom, music, you know, into the world.
And you find this all across the board.
I mean, it's not just Al Gore.
Al is a symptom, basically.
And he's the leader, of course, of the cult.
But you see this everywhere.
You know, they're saying we have 12 years left or there's an irrefutable change to the atmosphere, you know, and that sort of thing.
I mean, it's dumb.
I mean, Al Gore was saying there's going to be a billion climate refugees.
I don't know if you saw that.
Yeah.
But here's some interesting statistics.
In 2005, the UN forecast that there was going to be, oh my goodness, there was going to be, let's see, I'll just get the exact numbers so I don't, I'm not wrong.
Here we go.
United Nations Environment Program claimed in 2005 that by 2010, there would be 50 million climate refugees.
50 million.
Okay.
In 2010, there were none.
So they crossed that out and they changed 2010 to 2020.
And then they made the same statement: 50 million climate refugees by 2020.
Well, that's come and gone.
And you know what?
There is not a single climate refugee anywhere in the world.
And I think that the world at large understands that this is wrong.
Because you might remember that back in 2015, I think it was, the UN did a poll called My World.
And they asked people of the world what were the top things the UN should focus on?
And they gave a list of 17 things.
And the first one they put really first, big, you know, they wanted everyone to choose this first.
They put climate change.
But the people of the world did not cooperate.
And after 9 million votes had come in, much of it from Nigeria, interesting.
I don't know why.
But climate change ranked dead last.
Okay.
There were all kinds of other things like access to clean drinking water and peace and security and freedom of expression, things like that, which sometimes you wonder if you have in Canada.
It was interesting because all of the developing nations put climate change either at the end or very near the end because they, of course, needed the essentials of life.
Only in countries like Denmark, where they essentially had enough fresh drinking water, enough energy, security, things like that.
Only in those countries did it even break the top 10.
Okay.
So what you'd laugh to hear what happened.
The UN obviously wanted climate change to come out as number one because they keep saying it's the most existential threat to humanity.
Well, after a little while, when it became apparent that the world people were putting it dead last, oh, they just removed the poll.
But I captured it.
And I'll actually send you an image actually of the results of the poll, which show climate change not, you know, fifth or tenth, but dead last.
Okay.
So people of the world, I think, are waking up to this at large.
And you know, one thing that really excites me, I don't know if you've heard of the rap star, Tom McDonald.
Yes.
Yes.
He's great.
He is quite amazing.
Why Rap Stars Matter00:03:25
You know, I mean, he has tattoos all over his face.
So he has the image of a traditional rap star, you know, cop killing and all that.
But he says things that are really, really significant.
He has a video out called Brainwash.
And I love it.
I use it when I'm doing push-ups and exercises.
It pumps me up.
And it pumps me up not because he's saying these things, you know, don't defund police, defund the media who lie through their teeth, you know.
And he talks about all kinds of things that are really exactly what you talk about on this show, but he does it to a rap beat.
Now, the beauty of this, and the reason why I find it so inspiring, is because he has 17 million views on that video.
And here's the other thing: it's incredible: 64,000 comments, 64,000 comments.
And it's mostly young people saying, yeah, he's right.
You know, I agree.
Wow, we're really being brainwashed.
You know, a lot of this stuff is crazy.
And what McDonald says is he says the elite want to keep us fighting among ourselves, fighting left versus right, black versus white.
You know, all the different people fight, fight, fight, because he says they're afraid that if we get together, we'll go against them.
And that's, of course, one of the reasons I think why government divides people, why the UN, others divide people up.
You know, like, I mean, this whole concept of dividing the world into developing and developed nations, and different countries have different obligations depending on their so-called status.
This divides us up hugely.
I don't know if you noticed, but China is still called a developing nation.
Right.
Yeah.
So they don't have to reduce greenhouse gases at all, even though they're twice as much as the United States.
So, you know, you laugh, Sheila, when they cornered the Chinese delegate at the Peru Conference of the Parties, I think it was 2014, they asked if they would change that part of the agreement, you know, and because, of course, that's underlying the Paris Agreements, the Framework Convention of Climate on Climate Change.
And the Chinese negotiator, he said, oh, no, no, the purpose of the Paris Agreement is to enforce the Framework Convention, not to change it.
So they know they have a sweetheart deal.
I mean, in 1992, when the Framework Convention was passed, there were no billionaires in China.
And now, I don't know how many there are, but there's lots.
So China's got a sweetheart deal here.
They can increase their greenhouse gas emissions forever because the Framework Convention says the first and overriding priority of developing countries is poverty alleviation and development, which makes sense.
Okay.
That makes sense.
And so they're going to say when 2030 comes around, where the Paris Agreement says they have to cap their emissions, they're going to say, nope, we have an out clause.
It's Article 4 in the Framework Convention.
And that is the fundamental rules of the whole UN climate approach.
And so they can increase their coal production, which of course is their cheapest form of energy because it helps them alleviate poverty.
They didn't put climate change top of the list.
And in fact, you know, I don't admire China the way Trudeau does, but I must say that they are a lot more practical than our leaders when it comes to this whole charade.
Oh, they for sure know how to play the game.
It's funny that poverty elimination is number one for the developing world, but it's climate policies that are leading to poverty poverty creation in the Western world.
Worldwide Pressure Builds00:06:51
I was making some notes as you were talking because, you know, Tom McDonald is so right when he says, you know, like they don't want us talking to each other.
They don't, they want us fighting.
And that leads me to all of these internet censorship laws.
They really don't want us communicating with each other and sharing ideas.
And importantly, realizing we're not alone and not crazy for questioning these things.
I remember that was the, I think for me, as I watched the trucker convoy roll across the country, for me, it was watching all those people pile out onto the overpasses and along the highway, because suddenly they realized like, I'm not alone.
The TV told me that I'm supposed to care about climate change, that I'm supposed to be intensely scared of COVID, that I'm supposed to stay away from my neighbors, I'm supposed to follow the stupid lines on the grocery store, or I'm a grandma killer.
And then the trucker said no, and the scales fell off everybody's eyes.
And it's the same thing.
It's why they don't want us talking to each other.
It's why they want to control the internet.
Well, that's right.
And you see that also in now, it's still happening in Ottawa.
You know, for example, they're having consultations with the public on, you know, their budget policies and things.
But guess how they're doing it?
They don't just let you go to the microphone and talk.
Not anymore.
No.
Yeah, exactly.
After our success.
But yes, but what you have to do, I'm going to the presentation for our award, and it's actually three wards in one, eight, nine, sorry, seven, eight, nine here in Ottawa.
And you have to submit your questions in writing, which they'll put in a box.
And then the counselors will choose what questions are being asked.
Because, you know, if you get one person go to the microphone and say, you know, I think this climate thing is insane.
You know, we haven't seen any warming for eight and a half years since, you know, there's been almost half a billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted.
Don't you think, Mr. Counselor, there might be something wrong with the theory?
What happens then is the next person in line thinks, damn, that's right.
You know, like I think that person's right.
I'm going to ask a question that's on that side too.
It's the same thing with call-in talk radio.
You know, if you, if there's a talk show, it's good to call in early on because if you express doubt against the politically correct position, whether it's drag queens or a million different things, suddenly you find a lot of other people are inspired and they want to phone in too.
Say, yeah, I agree with that guy, you know, because you've broken the ice.
And that's one of the tricks, you know, you have to do if you're fighting against these people is you have to get up and break the ice.
You know, you have to get up and say, yeah, I think that this climate change thing is insane.
You know, Sheila, I just want to read to you one of the reasons why more people aren't breaking the ice.
Okay.
This is a story.
It's in Epoch Times.
And the name of the article is quite revealing.
As you can see, the communism behind environmentalism.
Anyway, they're talking about how many of the strategies used by the environmental extremists and climate change are right out of the communist playbook.
And they talk about a Swedish meteorologist by the name of Lenart Bengsen.
And when he wanted to join the Global Warming Policy Foundation as an advisor, he had to resign only two weeks later.
And here's what he said in his resignation letter to the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
He said, I've been put under such enormous pressure, group pressure in recent days from all over the world that it's become virtually unbearable to me.
If this is going to continue, I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even have to start to worry about my health and safety.
Now, this guy's a leading scientist.
He's a meteorologist from Sweden.
I see no other way out there, therefore, except for resigning from Global Warming Policy Foundation, who are very good, by the way.
I had not expected such an enormous worldwide pressure put on me from the community that I've been close to for all my active life.
Colleagues are withdrawing their support.
Other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship, etc.
And he goes on and talks about it.
And he says, He says, you know, I used to think that this was a peaceful community.
Apparently, it's being transformed in recent years.
And that, of course, is right out of the communist playbook.
You demonize your opponents, you attack them, and you scare the daylights out of them.
I mean, that sounds like a struggle session.
Sounds like the poor guy came out the other end of a struggle session.
Yeah.
And all he did is he wanted to join this group that is seriously looking at the data.
And the data is what's really important.
And that's what our climate fact check is about.
We're saying, okay, you think that, for example, there is reducing snow over Canada.
And I don't know if I ever told you this, but a few years ago, Ecology Ottawa had a session at the National Aviation Museum.
And they were bringing in skiers from across the country, world-class Olympics, talking about the end of snow in Canada.
And so before the event, I actually looked up and you can see on the Snow and Ice data center that snow has been actually increasing over the decades in actually for 30 years.
There's been a gradual increase.
So I called Ecology Ottawa ahead of time and I said, are you going to bring in a scientist to talk about the real state of the climate?
And of course, they wouldn't.
So it's funny, about 500 people were there.
And I got up to the microphone and I asked these skiers on stage, I said, how do you feel about the fact that they haven't brought in a scientist who can tell you that snow cover is actually rising for decades across North America?
And oh my God, it was like I was in some weird cult because people were so angry.
You know, one woman in the front row, she stood up and she shook her fist at me and she said, go home.
I said, well, look, check the snow and ice data center.
It's right there.
I mean, I agree.
It would be really bad if there was, you know, less and less snow.
If you're a skier, that would be a problem.
And I'm a skier, okay?
But it's not happening.
It isn't happening.
And they were just furious.
You know, I thought I was going to be assaulted actually.
And it's interesting that I was there with a really big Egyptian friend of mine.
And that might be one of the reasons I wasn't attacked.
Henny, you know, a big strong guy.
And he had his little son there with him.
I guess he was about 12.
And they had just come from Egypt.
And his son was shocked.
He said, I came to Canada.
I thought I was getting away from this dictatorial, you know, thought suppression.
And he was astounded.
And so we have to be careful, you know, because our fathers and grandfathers and mothers, they all fought to keep us free.
We have to use that freedom by breaking the ice and asking questions that are really hard.
And that's, of course, what we're doing here in Ottawa.
And we're hoping to spread that out across Canada.
Ridiculous Claims About Asthma Triggers00:04:07
Now, your climate change fact check is always so great because you go through some of the most ridiculous claims.
And they really are ridiculous when they're made.
But the environmentalist left is always making ridiculous claims.
So much so that when they make them, you're just like, well, it's another crazy thing those cultists said.
But you actually sat down, documented them, and debunked them along with some other organizations.
The one that I really appreciate is this gas stoves and childhood asthma one.
Because when you dig down on this, it's China behind it.
And I have a real tough time worrying about childhood asthma when the people who worked in collaboration to develop this study still allow people to just open air burn things inside their house for home heating.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, you know, you only get asthma.
I mean, it's a genetic condition and it's triggered by some sort of allergen.
Okay.
And now the allergens could be things like pollen or dust or mold or pet band or things like that.
You know, but gas stoves don't actually give out any pollen or dust or things like they actually give out things that could be serious as problems for pollution if your gas stove is not properly maintained.
Obviously, they give out carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, things like that, nitrogen oxide, I should say, particulate matter.
And if you don't have a properly serviced stove, yeah, you could actually emit some pollutants.
But the bottom line is this whole claim of asthma, I mean, that's ridiculous.
It doesn't make any sense because there are no allergens that are emitted from gas stoves.
I think to a large extent, they're just trying to stop us using anything, fossil fuels of all kinds, coal, natural gas, oil.
And, you know, now they're targeting our gas stoves.
I mean, well, and this claim wouldn't be, I mean, it's particularly outlandish.
The problem is it fell on the ears of some very important people.
So it was the consumer product safety commissioner, Richard Trumpka, is the guy who floated this idea as a serious policy option.
But when you look at the green group behind the study he cited, I think they're called the Rocky Mountain Institute, they partnered with China on this study.
The Free Beacon dug into this and they said, well, where is this stupid study coming from that Richard Trump is citing?
And it was the Rocky Mountain Institute and they partnered with China to demonize Western fossil fuels.
Imagine that.
Yeah, I didn't know that China had that connection, but I'm not surprised.
I mean, the whole climate scare is hugely beneficial to them, you know, because we'll be shutting down more and more of our industry and have to get, you know, import more and more things from China.
The other thing, of course, Sheila, is that if we actually went to the just transition, and I loved your interview with Chris Sims from the Taxpayer Federation two weeks ago, it was really great.
It's anything but just.
But regardless, if we actually went to that and we really did the things that they want to do, we'd have more and more wind and solar power.
We'd be more reliant on China for the raw materials.
And this is where I think many on the left who are good in their heart, they're ignorant with respect to the actual facts, but they really do want to help social justice and environmental protection.
I mean, they simply don't understand that if you're making electric vehicles, for example, you need cobalt for the batteries.
And that cobalt comes from tens of thousands of children mining in very dangerous and unhealthy conditions in China.
They're breathing radioactive dust and, you know, very low technology.
Easily, you could have lots of cave-ins.
And guess who runs the mines?
It's China.
Okay.
And then China ships the cobalt to China.
And, you know, they make batteries almost undoubtedly using very low conditions for slave labor, who knows what.
So, I mean, this is a huge benefit to China, you know, and I should tell you one other quick thing.
No CO2-Temp Correlation00:08:01
And that is, how did I finally come over to climate realism?
Yeah.
Yeah, because in 1990 and 1991, I was speaking at Earth Day here in Ottawa, and I was talking about how the space program actually helps us solve environmental problems.
And the major thing I was talking about was something called comparative planetology, which means that we study the planets and we learn things, other planets, we learn things that we can apply here on the Earth.
And I actually had an article published in the Ottawa Citizen, and I made various points, you know, which were correct.
But one point I said, in retrospect, was totally wrong.
I said that Venus gives us a warning as to what could happen on the Earth if we have highly concentrated carbon dioxide.
And a professor at Carleton University, Tim Patterson, he actually used my article in his course.
But he said to the students, what happened on Venus cannot happen on the Earth.
Okay.
He liked the other parts of my article, but he said it cannot happen.
And he explained why.
I mean, there's a whole lot of reasons.
For example, Venus has no oceans to absorb carbon dioxide and it has no plate tectonics, which is important on Earth because otherwise the CO2 that goes into the ocean and then eventually is deposited with bicalcium carbonate into limestone in the base of the ocean, eventually the floor of the ocean would become saturated and that would be it.
It couldn't absorb anymore.
But we have plate tectonics.
So that plate pulls down into the ocean.
You get refreshed new surface of the bottom of the ocean, which can then absorb more carbon dioxide from the ocean.
So because Venus is, first of all, much closer to the sun than us, that might have something to do with the Venus has a very slow day.
It takes literally months to turn around once.
So unlike the Earth, which cools down every 24 hours because we're facing away from the sun, Venus really, really cooks.
But also it has oceans and it has plate tectonics.
So what happened on Venus simply cannot happen on the Earth, no matter how high CO2 goes.
And I, you know, at first I wondered, you know, who's this climate change denier?
You know, I thought it was all true.
And he invited me into his lab and he showed me the research that he's doing.
And, oh, how about that?
When you look at the geologic record, you don't see the CO2 temperature connection.
In fact, what you do see is that CO2 was as much as 1300% of today.
Now, you know, they talk often about a 50% rise since 1880, 50% rise.
That's a catastrophe.
Well, no, it's not.
And we know that's not because it was as much as 1300% higher sometime in the last half billion years.
And the thing that really struck out to me was 440 million years ago, the Earth was in its coldest period of the last half billion years.
And we can only go back about a half a billion years because they use fossilized seashells.
They grind them up and they analyze the oxygen isotopes in them and they can actually tell what the kind of temperature was like.
But regardless, so that's as far back as we can go, about at most 600 million years.
So what we find is that at 440 million years ago, we were stuck in something much worse than an ice age.
We were stuck in what's called an ice house.
Ice houses last for millions of years.
And there are some scientists who believe that the Earth was covered totally, the oceans included, with ice at times during the ice house period.
So they lasted for millions of years.
They were much colder than the glacials that we experienced in North America, let's say 25,000 years ago.
And guess what?
CO2 was about 10 times as high as it is today.
And that was the coldest period in the geologic record.
So, you know, talking to other geologists, Ian Clark at Ottawa U, you know, various geologists, these are the people that are never interviewed by Al Gore or by, you know, the various UN groups.
They don't talk to the geologists because the geologists have a living record, a real record of what happened in the past when CO2 was much higher.
And the truth is there were times when CO2 was high and temperature was high.
There are times when CO2 was high and temperature was low.
And there are times when they're both in the middle.
I mean, there's no correlation.
Okay.
There's no correlation, except that occasionally you see it actually CO2 rising centuries after temperature rises.
So in other words, it's a reverse correlation to what the UN are saying.
And it makes sense.
If you take a glass of pop out of the fridge and you put it on the counter and you let it warm up, it releases its carbon dioxide because carbon dioxide, you know, it can't hold as much CO2 when it warms up.
And that's the same with the oceans.
As the oceans warm, they actually release CO2.
And you do see that at times in the record.
But generally speaking, there is no correlation.
And that is real world data.
Once again, we're back to this whole thing.
The group leader is always right.
Well, no, Mr. Gore, take a look at the actual record.
You can have all the computer models in the world that show that there's a positive feedback, that a little bit of warming is going to lead to a lot more and a lot more, but that doesn't happen in the real world.
Okay.
In the real world, geologists know that there is no connection between, you know, it's not driving climate change.
It just isn't there.
Okay.
So when people actually say, well, what is the foundation of the climate scare?
If you're not looking at the motivations, and we can talk about that in a second, but the real thing that's driving the climate scare is computerized climate models.
Okay.
That's the only thing, because if you actually look at the data, and that's the whole point of our climate fact check, look at the data.
You know, for example, there has been zero records set, extreme weather records set in the entire United States on a state-by-state basis.
Now, think about that.
That's pretty significant.
They record all sorts of things, maximum temperature, minimum temperature, most rain, most snow, highest wind, biggest hailstone, and on and on, okay, for every state in the union.
So you've got hundreds and hundreds of records that could be set every year.
So statistically, since they've had their records only since 1880, you have to say, well, then you'd expect to have three or four records set every year because there's 50 states and at least five records per state.
Guess what?
In 2022, there were zero records set.
There were none.
And yet, NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they say extreme weather is driving or climate change is driving extreme weather.
You say, yeah, but they set no records.
So I did a search to find out, okay, what happened in the 1930s?
It turns out in 1936, 1936, in the middle of the Dust Bowl, there were 27 state records set, 27 in one year in comparison with zero last year.
And those records still stand.
So here we have what is probably the best database in the world, and the facts don't match the theory.
But they don't care.
They still charge ahead with these ridiculous computer models that in the last 30 years have forecast triple the warming that actually occurred.
Now, I don't know about you, Sheila, but if I had a stockbroker who every time he made the forecast, he was out by 300%.
I think I'd change stockbrokers.
Stockbrokers.
Yeah.
But again, like a cult, they just continue to put more faith in these people.
And they just, it's like they feel like they're not believing hard enough.
So if they just believe hard enough and force the rest of us to believe along with them, that maybe their doomsday predictions will come to fruition.
And, you know, as you pointed in your climate change fact check, it's so often for some reason, they use animals as their, I want to say their avatar of what they're up to.
Conservatives And Climate Change00:15:32
Polar bears, definitely.
For years, they've been saying, you know, like every time you see a sickly polar bear, that's indicative of my comfortable SUV doing bad things to the climate, as though polar bears don't get old and sick like every animal at the end of their life.
And apparently they've found a reason to care about migratory birds, which is odd because these are the people also putting up windmills.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, exactly.
And, you know, the polar bear situation is kind of interesting because in 1950, there were about a quarter of the number of polar bears there are now.
So yeah, we take a lot more polar bears.
You might remember Bob Carter was our science leader for a long time.
And sadly, he passed away.
It's amazing, Sheila, how many of these characters are passing away now.
I mean, Dr. Ball, as we talked about last time, he passed away sadly about three or four months ago.
And Dr. Jay Lair, he passed away on the 11th of January.
Terrible.
So, and the sad thing is we don't see the young scientists standing up and taking their place.
And I think it's partly because when I went through college and university, the climate scare, you know, it didn't exist.
I mean, they were actually worried about global cooling.
You might remember Leonard Nimoy talking about the end of the world from global.
So we weren't all indoctrinated with this.
But the people coming through university now are almost universally indoctrinated into the climate scare.
So whether they actually believe it or they're just too frightened to actually say it.
You know, a friend of mine is a professor at Calgary University.
And I won't say what field she's in because it would kind of narrow her down.
But she signed an open letter to Stephen Harper when he was prime minister.
And I asked her, I said, do you have any knowledge or expertise in the causes of climate change?
And she said, no.
I said, well, then why did you sign this open letter?
And she said, well, you know, the chairman signed it and I'm a junior professor.
And well, you know, I sort of had to go along.
So I think what's happening is two things.
First of all, a lot of the young scientists have been indoctrinated because they went through the school system.
My eldest child is 29.
And, you know, when she was going through the high school, for example, it was heavily climate.
They were forced to watch Alcore's film.
My son, too.
Yeah, I think she said they had to watch it three times.
I can't remember.
But, you know, I went into a parent teacher night and was sitting in her chair, you know, like we were students.
It was kind of fun.
And her biology teacher was talking and asking us if we had questions.
So I put up my hand and I said, oh, are you teaching both sides of the climate debate?
And she was like, oh my God, no, of course not.
I would not teach the denier side.
You know, she was like, I said, whoa, okay, I won't say any more about this because I didn't want my daughter to be people.
And actually, you know, that's the thing is I think many students who like Tom McDonald are actually questioning, you know, a lot of these things.
They're probably afraid to speak out.
My little Arab friend, you know, the son of my friend Hanny, he asked me, he said, I'm hearing all this loony stuff in high school about climate change.
What should I do?
Should I tell the teacher I disagree?
Oh, no, don't do that because, you know, you want to pass your grades.
So, I think a lot of what's happened is that the students have come through and they either believe it, even though they're scientists, you know, they maybe haven't dug into the data, or in fact, they are too afraid to bring it up.
You know, even really smart people like Ian Clark at Ottawa University, he says point blank that he used to support the climate scare until he dug into the data.
And then he came to realize, oh, this doesn't make any sense.
And so, you know, I really encourage people, you know, look at icsc-climate.com, which is the homepage of our ICSC primarily U.S. focused group.
And we have the climate fact check right there.
And people can look at it.
And if you disagree with what we've said, you know, send us an email and we'll share with you all the data, et cetera, because the data just does not support the climate scare.
You know, it's funny.
We were interviewing Peter Ridd, who had all his troubles at James Cook University, because he was, of course, disagreeing with political correctness on his specialty, and that was the coral reef.
And he told us actually in our interview just a few weeks ago: he said, You realize we're now measuring more coral on the Great Barrier Reef than we ever have, ever.
So, and you find that all over the place.
You know, sea level, it's not accelerating.
It's been rising gradually since the end of the last glacial.
There have been times when sea level rise was a problem.
If you go back 8,000 years ago, sea level was rising 10 times faster than today.
Today, it's seven to nine inches per century, that kind of thing.
Well, when it's rising 10 times that, it could be a serious problem.
But today, it's just not happening.
It isn't happening.
So, the whole point of this is that it's a cult.
The data does not support what they're saying, but it doesn't matter.
Yeah.
And it's funny because you can see who is willing to talk about the science.
There's the science is settled side, and then there's the, as Michelle Sterling from Friends of Science always puts it, the open civil debate side.
Like, look, we just want to talk about it.
We just want to show you why we think the way we do so that you understand us and where we're coming from.
And the other side doesn't even want to get there.
I mean, for Michelle, she's like, I'm not trying to convince anybody.
I just want to talk to them, but they don't even want to talk to me.
And I think a lot of grassroots conservatives agree with Michelle because, you know, we had a booth at the Strong and Free Networking Conference last year.
And, you know, we had a big poster saying there's no climate crisis, check the data, you know, that kind of thing.
And, you know, we had hundreds of grassroots conservatives, people who had science degrees, people who didn't, coming up to us and saying, yeah, you're really right.
And we wish our leaders would say this.
Just down the hall, they had a special session about a conservative approach to stopping climate change.
And of course, I was sitting in the front row and I was going to say, what the heck are you guys talking about?
Well, of course, they were going to have a question period.
They may have seen me in the front row because, of course, they skipped the message.
So I buttonholed the chairman of the whole session and I said to him, Do you think that we're having dangerous human-caused climate change?
And he said, no.
So I said, why do you have a session on a conservative solution to a problem you don't think exists?
And here's what he said.
He said, well, we fought that war and we lost.
So we're trying to minimize the damage by advocating things like the conservatives say actually in their current policy plan.
I'll just read what they say.
They say in their current policy book, okay, you can see it on the web right now.
It says, we believe that an effective international emissions reduction regime on climate change must be truly global and include binding targets, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay.
So, I mean, that was from 2008.
Okay.
Now, I don't believe anything's changed because Pierre Polyev, during his run to be leader of the Conservative Party, I attended several of his presentations.
He was saying, we have to have sequestration, storing carbon dioxide underground.
Well, what?
If it's not a threat, what are you doing?
You know, it's just going to increase electricity costs.
Essentially, carbon sequestration means no coal because coal becomes too expensive then.
And, you know, Alberta has lots of coal.
We should be using coal.
He also supports electric vehicles.
He wants people to be pushed off of coal onto natural gas.
And natural gas is fine, but to a certain extent, using natural gas where you could use coal is kind of a reverse Midas touch.
Right.
It's turning gold into lead because you can actually get baseload power very solid from coal and save your natural gas for home heating, for pharmaceuticals, for its special uses.
And, you know, so I'm, you know, really sad that, in fact, the conservative, the grassroots are being betrayed.
Their leaders are not standing up and say, look, this whole thing is wrong.
And we've got tons of research to show you.
You know, this is the non-governmental international panel on climate change report, thousands of peer-reviewed studies.
Why aren't the conservatives holding that up and saying this whole thing is bunk?
Okay, let's dump it.
People forget that Donald Trump got elected as a climate skeptic.
Stephen Harper, somewhat before he became prime minister, had said the whole thing, Kyoto, is a money-sucking socialist scheme, and he became prime minister.
So the whole idea that you have to, you know, basically become a useful idiot and support the people who are trying to destroy Canada.
No, stop it.
And where has all their mitigating the damage gotten us?
No pipelines, no coal, and a carbon tax.
It makes life in Canada so expensive that we're in an inflationary crisis.
So all of their capitulating and trying to mitigate the damage in the last 10 years, what has any of it done?
What has any of it done?
Yeah.
And, you know, you did that interview with Chris Sims was wonderful because you showed the real cost of what happens when you capitulate to the climate scare.
It'll ruin Canada, literally.
And, you know, it's about darn time that the Conservatives started to use the available tools.
I mean, that's a tank.
It's being parked in their driveway.
Use it.
Tom, I could clearly talk to you all day, but I want to make this easy for the viewer to watch and listen to.
Tom, how do people find your work and support the important work that you're doing?
Because you are one of literally a palm full, not even a handful, a palm full of independent groups trying to provide some counterbalance to the prevailing climate scare nonsense of the day.
Yeah, exactly.
People should go to icsc-canada.com for the Canadian version.
And that's, of course, the one that I'm speaking most to Canadians about because we rely entirely on donations, whether it's five bucks or 5,000 bucks.
We have no government support.
You know, we have no industry support.
We need your support because we're going to do a lot more of this as the time unfolds.
We're going to be actually trying to do what we did in Ottawa in other cities, Calgary being a good target with your $87 billion climate plan.
And an insane mayor.
The mayor there is absolutely insane.
That's right.
So yeah, do donate because without your money, we can't do it.
Well, Tom, thank you so much for your hard work on this and just bringing some sanity and common sense to the whole mess.
And again, back to the theme of this being a cult.
Is the carbon tax anything but a tithe to the weather gods?
Well, it isn't.
I mean, it's going to do nothing to stop climate change.
Even if you believe the UN's climate theories, I mean, it'll have no impact whatsoever.
Canada's 1.6% of world emissions.
So what?
If we could disappear, it would make no difference.
But if you understand that the whole thing is a hoax, then indeed you realize the carbon tax is totally wrong.
So we don't need a conservative approach.
They haven't fought the war.
It's about time they fought it.
The left have been very aggressive.
We've been way too passive.
Tom, thanks so much.
We'll have you back on the show very, very soon.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thanks, Tom.
Well, friends, this is the portion of the show where we go looking for your viewer feedback.
I say it every week.
I probably sound like a broken record, but I actually care about what you think about the work that we're doing here at Rebel News and the stories that we cover and the people that we interview.
And so here's when I give out my email address at Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Put gun show letters in the subject line so that I can find it because I do get sometimes hundreds of emails a day and it gets a little difficult to weed through.
But don't hesitate to leave a comment on one of the platforms where you're watching us, like Rumble and YouTube.
Even though YouTube's a censorship platform, sometimes I do go looking for comments in their comment section.
Just because YouTube is bad, well, that doesn't really mean the people who watch things on YouTube are bad.
So if you're watching the free version of the show, just leave a comment there and I'll check it out.
Well, tonight's letter comes to me by a very staunch supporter of us here at Rebel News and a supporter of my work at Rebel News, in particular, a regular viewer of the gun show.
And I appreciate him so much.
It's Bruce from Radway, Alberta, and his cat, Delta.
Bruce always signs off his emails to me with a special greeting from his cat.
And Bruce writes to me saying, I loved your interview with Corey Morgan.
Now, Corey Morgan is a columnist with the Western Standard, and he has a brand new book.
It's called The Sovereigntist Handbook.
And the book examines the problem of taking people who loosely have a common idea and getting them to sort of all march in the same direction.
But the problem with this common group of people with a common idea is that they don't like to do things in groups.
And their common idea is they don't like being told what to do by anybody, but especially Ottawa.
So it's sort of antithetical to these people to organize them all going in the same direction.
And so his book, The Sovereigntist Handbook, examines the common goals of people who may describe themselves as sovereigntists or separatists or independence-minded people.
And how to advance the movement and to maybe proselytize the movement a little bit so that they can, well, it's frankly, it's a normalized philosophy here in Alberta, but how do they get legislative and policy change?
Now, Bruce writes, Corey's right, that now is not the time for Alberta to become independent.
But if Daniel Smith, that's our new premier, goes rogue on us again, that will be the time we can call for independence from the ball and chain that is Ottawa.
You know, that is true.
For a lot of people who would describe themselves as Western independence people, a lot of them just wanted a premier who would fight back.
And Daniel Smith is doing that.
And she's put it into legislation that it is the duty of the province to fight back against Ottawa anytime that Ottawa encroaches on provincial jurisdiction.
And for a lot of people, that's all they ever wanted, something more intangible than previous Premier Jason Kenney's strongly worded letters to Justin Trudeau that you definitely know Justin Trudeau never bothered to read.
So, I mean, time will tell.
But as with the previous Premier Jason Kenney, who seemed quite freedom-minded and strong in the beginning.
Always prepare yourselves to be let down by politicians because that is indeed what they tend to do.
Thorhild County Bylaw Controversy00:03:35
Bruce also writes, also with the Thorhild County land use bylaw, it was defeated and is going back for a rewrite.
No progress on keeping the post office yet.
So if you are in Alberton, and I know people outside of Alberta watch the show, and I thank you for that.
But Thorhild County is a county just to the north of me, very, very rural, very sparsely populated.
Just a couple of what I would legally call hamlets, but they're really not even municipalities.
They have a post office, right?
And the county itself, which is an enormous county with almost no people and it's largely agricultural, they decided to do a land use bylaw rewrite.
And from what I understand, although I can't confirm it, and I can get to the reason for that in a second, there were some really crazy urbanist things shoehorned into it.
And from what I understand, the company involved in the rewrite is a company based in India that works normally with large municipalities, or at least municipalities that have something resembling a town, which is not really Thorhild County.
Like I said, they have a couple of hamlets and that's it.
And I went looking the other day after I saw that the land use bylaw had been defeated after public outrage.
And the outrage spread outside of Thorhild County because other rural people said, oh my God, what are they trying to tell us?
Is this going to come to my rural community?
Are they going to tell me that I have to ask permission before I can put chickens on my farm or put barbed wire up or other things that I have heard were in this bill or the use bylaw.
And I went looking for it because I wanted to confirm the things that I had heard and seen.
Here's the problem.
The land use bylaw has been pulled down.
So the proposed one, I can't go looking to see what caused the outrage.
It's just gone.
Now I can find the 20, I think it's 2015 bylaw that the county is operating under right now.
And it looks reasonable.
I don't know why they had to rewrite it, but they did.
And they hired an outside firm to do it from what I understand.
So where's that land use bylaw?
If you're rewriting it, can't I see the original draft?
I guess not.
The good news is I filed for access for it and I've also gone looking for a contract for this foreign company, if indeed they contracted with this foreign company.
I can't really tell right now.
I want to know how much Thorhild County paid, if anything, to a foreign company to rewrite the land use bylaws for farmers in this rural community in Alberta, because I want to make sure it never happens again.
And I think sunlight is the best disinfectant.
And frankly, I think Thorhild County knows that, which is why I can't find a copy of the proposed land use bylaw anywhere.
Anyway, I will stay on the case.
Although it may seem like I'm not working on it, I am quietly but furiously working on it in the background.
Thanks for the letter, Bruce.
And thank you, Delta.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
Thank you, Jesse, by the way, my producer, who works really hard behind the scenes to put my show together.
I don't thank him enough.
Well, I'll see you back here in the same time, in the same place next week.