Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore claims that man-made climate change is just a bunch of hot air, as it were

In his Capitol Hill testimony this past week responding to the United Nations Panel on Climate Change, Moore — who earned a PhD in ecology — insisted that “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years … no actual proof, as it is understood in science, actually exists.”

Moore left the environmental activist organization Greenpeace in the mid 1980s when the organization became too political for his liking. Formerly the head of an organization called Greenspirit Strategies, Moore is currently the chair and chief scientist of Ecosense Environmental in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The environmental movement, and liberals and Democrats from President Obama on down, along with big media outlets, have declared that the climate-change debate is settled. Secretary of State John Kerry recently claimed that climate change is equivalent to a weapon of mass destruction.

For the ordinary lay person with an open mind about the while thing, however, the notion of declaring something as far-reaching such as climate change as “settled” — which started out as global cooling and then became global warming prior to the climate change appellation — seems odd. First, politicians and journalists generally have no scientific training. Second, isn’t the purpose of science to continually probe for new information and then discard accepted theories when additional knowledge makes them obsolete?

Although the “rapid transit” train has left the station, regardless of your views on climate change, the whole discussion of climate change or not would have been better served if it wasn’t politicized.

Some other issues have emerged with climate-change research. Back in 2009, for example, there was a scandal involving British climate-change proponents “through the leak of emails from the world-leading research unit at the University of East Anglia. They appeared to show that scientists had been massaging data to prove that global warming was taking place.”

When asked about what might be driving the climate-change agenda, Dr. Moore offered this observation in an FNC interview:

“It is a powerful convergence of interests among a very large number of elites, including politicians who want to make it seem as though they’re saving the world, environmentalists who want to raise money and get control over very large issues like our entire energy policy, media — for sensationalism, universities and professors for grants. You can’t hardly get a science grant these days without saying it has something to do with climate change. It is a kind of nasty combination of extreme political ideology and a religious cult all rolled into one, and it’s taken over way too much of our thought process and way too much of our priorities… Nobody’s saying that the Earth hasn’t warmed a little bit. What we’re saying is there’s no proof that it is human activity that has caused this little bit of warming …”

It’s worth noting in this context that Al Gore made a fortune promoting environmental causes while flying around the world in a private jet and then selling his cable television station to Big Oil.

There are other reputable scientists who have raised questions about man-made climate change, but they aren’t afforded the media or academic megaphone, and sometimes ostracized instead.

Watch the testimony and subsequent interview on climate change with Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore and draw your own conclusions.

Parenthetically, Moore also seems to be a fan of GMO crops, a technique that is opposed by many across the spectrum on a non-political basis.

[Greenpeace “snowman” image credit: Salvatore Barbera]