Environment Canada's Climate Change Fiasco

Global Warming rivals Sponsorship Scandal

By Dr. Tim Ball, Natural Resources Stewardship Project

Friday, August 24, 2007

Many years ago, I warned Henry Hengeveld of Environment Canada (EC) that, if he thought it was difficult to convince ministers and MPs that global warming was due to human carbon dioxide (CO2) production, it would be twice as difficult to change their minds once they were convinced. The theory was, and still is, unproven of course, but by adopting it so completely so early on, Hengeveld would find himself on a treadmill virtually impossible to get off.  After all, it would be very dangerous for a bureaucrat to go back to those same politicians with the message that their political positions were wrong because they were based on wrong information.

Yet Hengeveld made a career out of CO2 by producing a monthly magazine on the topic. Instead of following the scientific method of trying to disprove the hypothesis that human CO2 was causing climate change, Hengeveld and other EC employees were essentially directed to find evidence that it was correct--despite increasing indications it wasn't.

The person mostly responsible for the singular and devastating direction the department took for several years was Gordon McBean.  He came to EC with a PhD and so achieved high rank quickly, bringing to the department a particularly skewed view of environmental issues and particularly global warming. McBean spent his career promoting global warming dogma, wasting billions of dollars ($6.3 billion between 1997 and 2005 was committed to climate change programmes by the Federal government, according to former Environment Commissioner Johanne Gelinas) while virtually destroying the Canadian weather service.   There are less weather stations in Canada now than in 1960, and many that remain are merely Automatic Weather Observing Stations. These were so bad that when NAV CANADA was formed to take over the airports they refused to accept them, triggering a Senate investigation under Senator Pat Carney. 

While EC was awash in money for global warming work, many other important activities and data collection practices were abandoned. For example, when I chaired the Assiniboine River Management Advisory Board in Manitoba the worst flood on record occurred. When we asked the Water Resources Branch why they didn't forecast the event, they said they had no data on the amount of water in the snow in the valley.  We learned EC had canceled flights that used special radar to determine water content of the snow. Savings, as I recall, were $26,000. The cost of unexpected flood damage was $7 million to one level of government alone. The loss of basic weather data means the long term continuous records essential to research into the patterns and causes of climate change are completely unavailable.

Climate is different than weather.  Weather is the atmospheric conditions at any given moment; climate is the weather in a region, or how it changes, over time. Climatology was a very minor and unimportant part of EC's operation until very recently; government 'climatologists' were usually people who wanted out of meteorological forecasting.  People hired into meteorology were required to have a Masters in Physics because meteorology is the study of physics of the atmosphere, a very small component of climatology.  New recruits received a brief, (I believe ten- week) training program in Cornwall, Ontario, in which there was apparently very little climate instruction. This means most EC employees have little, if any, training in climatology. The most extreme example of this ironically involves the person with the highest public profile, David Phillips. He is listed as a Senior Climatologist by EC but actually has a BA in Geography.  

McBean established his new post-government career by using $61 million of government money to set up the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS), a climate research organization that he took over as Chair with a salary of $140,000 a year in the month he retired.  From that position he directed funding and resources into studying global warming, mostly intended to support the alarmist hypothesis. I realized what was going on when EC spent $300 million on computer modelling incapable of accurately simulating global climate or climate change. In addition, they spent $2 million trying to produce better long-range forecasts but abandoned the idea when they achieved less than 50% accuracy.

Another egregious example of EC's failure under McBean was the canceling of support for "Climatic Change in Canada During the Past 20,000 years", a joint program run under the auspices of the National Museum of Natural Sciences (now the Canadian Museum of Nature).  This program brought together a multitude of experts in various aspects of climate and climate reconstruction and produced volumes of collected papers that put Canada at the forefront of climate research and reconstruction. To my knowledge none of these experts were ever called to testify before Parliamentary hearings on Kyoto or climate change. EC followed a deliberate policy of excluding most Canadian climate experts – something that continues to this day. Consequently, the issue became purely political, controlled entirely by bureaucrats at EC.

McBean's influence went beyond his role with EC. He was a principle participant in the formation of the highly political UN body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), at Villach, Austria in 1988.   Of course, only those scientists who supported the alarmist view of climate change were selected to participate, a practice that continues to this day.

Fortunately, the present government has cut off funding to the many of the Canadian agencies McBean helped establish, groups which had few, if any qualified climate experts on staff.   Their role had been to support EC's position through public propaganda and so it is appropriate that they have been disbanded.

McBean, Hengeveld and others at EC led the department to take the singular and unsupportable position that climate change due to human CO2 was established fact. They were a perfect example of MIT Professor of Meteorology Richard S. Lindzen's observation that the consensus was reached before the research had even begun. They, and many of their EC colleagues, effectively thwarted the standard methods of science to promote a political agenda at taxpayers' expense, causing extensive damage to the entire environmental program, leaving much important environmental work inadequately funded. Diversion and misuse of funds meant EC didn't even achieve their own pollution reduction targets, especially in Southern Ontario.

Environment Canada's climate change saga makes the activities of Chuck Gité and others exposed by the Gomery Commission look tame.   It is time for the Government to step back from the abyss – withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol in February 2008, as we can do legally under the terms of the treaty, suspend all activities to "fight climate change", a ludicrous objective, and commission a full enquiry into Canada's climate change fiasco.  Only then will we have a chance of developing environmental policy our descendants will respect.  

Dr. Tim Ball is a renowned environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the Univ. of Winnipeg. Dr. Ball employs his extensive background in climatology and other fields as an advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition, Friends of Science and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Dr. Ball can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com Recent articles by Dr. Tim Ball