Recent letter writer Kurt Koster dismisses responsible climate-change skeptics as "deniers," an egregious epithet with far more baggage than it can carry. Columnist Gus van Harten says, "(Canada must take climate change) prevention seriously."

Here are three facts:

1. The climate is changing, because it is always changing.

2. No one has proven that this change is man-made.

3. With 100 per cent certainty, one can say that global temperature in the future will rise, fall, or perhaps stay the same (as it has for 15 years).

The letter writer's references have pages of research "proving" that global temperature has risen with CO2. But as any statistician will despairingly remind us, correlation does not prove causation. Furthermore, many scientists have found that some of these "proofs" are riddled with assumptions, toadying to special interests, errors of omission and commission, deliberate falsification of data, misuse of statistics and, to cite more than one authority, lies and fraud. Proof of this is readily available on the Web. Try search words like "climate change fraud (or hoax)," "Dr. Don Easterbrook," "Dr. Bob Carter," "Science in the service of ideology," or similar key words.

You will find opinions of responsible skeptics. The soul of science is skepticism. It is mandatory for responsible scientists to question any hypothesis. Examples: to this day scholarly articles cast doubt on one aspect or another of Einstein's General Relativity; Renaissance skeptics successfully challenged the consensus that there were only four elements, air, earth, fire, and water and that the earth is flat.

Yet if, despite the fact that global warming has stopped cold for 15 years, we seek proof that man-made CO2 causes global warming, we find none. All such "proofs" depend upon the hidden assumptions that (a) CO2 is causing it, and (b) man-made CO2 is the main culprit. This has not been proven.

Consider some junk science that is driving some countries into bankruptcy:

•A two-degree rise in global temperature is not some law of nature; it was taken out of the air by some unidentified non-scientist connected with UN's IPCC. Some periods in geological history had temperatures as high as nine degrees above today's. Historically, many more people continue to die of cold than of heat.

•The CO2 concentrations in these high-temperature periods have been up to 15 times today's. Our huge deposits of fossil fuels grew, in those high-temperature, high-CO2 intervals, as plant matter that fed the dinosaurs, the biggest land animals ever. Greenhouse managers today pump CO2 into their greenhouses to improve yields. Satellite measurements have recently found that forest cover in some of the world's dry spots has increased 11 per cent since atmospheric CO2 has risen; the process is called "CO2 fertilization." The dreaded "tipping point" of 400 ppm of CO2 is also an arbitrary number out of someone's head. One expert, Dr. Bob Carter, says we are living through a "CO2 famine."

•That apple you just ate passed through energy conversions of whose efficiency we engineers can only dream. It was grown photosynthetically from sunshine, water, trace elements from the soil, and CO2 from the air into plant matter that we can use. We need more CO2 in our atmosphere.

•Frantic programs in Europe to control CO2 emissions have cost hundreds of billions and will bankrupt them. This money would provide safe drinking water to everyone on earth. Europe's double-dip recession is related to their waste of resources on expensive solutions that cannot work to problems they do not have. The same fate awaits us as we waste billions buying things like wind machines.

Compounding that, we have eco-terrorists who use the media to propagate their misinformation. Nigel Lawson, formerly Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, in his excellent little book An Appeal to Reason, writes that one publisher, in an apologetic rejection, said it was sound and well reasoned, but "too outside the conventional orthodoxy" to command a big audience. This is a universal complaint of people who dare to challenge the diktats of the unaccountable supremos of the IPCC.

No, that is not a right-wing political innuendo. As a responsible engineer having reduced coal and other fuels consumption by thousands of tonnes, and also as a dedicated dirty-fingernails gardener, I am keenly aware of the need to protect the precious environment we are busy destroying. But we have to protect it in a proper, scientific way.

We must seek and use authentic science, not junk science, to drive our climate policies. Every material benefit we have depends upon science; we'd better get it right.

Some references from the Web:

Climate Context As A Basis For Better Policy — YouTube,

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