"Climate change is natural. Spending time and money on the issue is largely a waste," posited Steve Paikin, host of TV Ontario's The Agenda, to his live studio audience at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies Thursday evening. Paikin's statement to the students came in the middle of an hour-long debate on climate change in which I participated, along with four other panelists.
The statement, the first of three that Paikin posed to the university students, came from an earlier Leger public opinion poll, but unlike the results that Leger found (16% agreed with the statement), not a single student among the 80 in attendance raised a hand in agreement. Are these students so accepting of the prevailing orthodoxy that none believes that climate change is natural, I thought, scanning their faces from my perch on the stage. Or are these students too intimidated by their peers or by the presence of the Munk Centre's director -- Janice Stein, also on the stage with me -- to dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy on climate change?
I found the students' silence disquieting. The majority of the public in the English speaking world no longer gives credence to the view that humans are responsible for climate change. In the U.S. where the abandonment is most pronounced, only 36% blame humans, according a recent Pew poll. In the U.K., the figure is 41%. The abandonment is across the board, involving members of all major political parties, and all age groups, youths included. In the U.S., 45% of those under 30 blame humans, in the UK, 42%.
So why would no student in the room -- either out of youthful brashness or defiance of authority or conviction based on knowledge -- utter a peep? If any of them had done their homework on this issue, they would have found that the Arctic ice is expanding, not shrinking; that the Antarctic, too, is gaining ice, not melting; that polar bear populations are not in decline, that global temperatures have been dropping over the last decade, not warming as the computer models had predicted; and that, in any event, none of the computer models on which claims of climate change rest -- not one -- has been made to work.
