A Polite Discourse with Professional Climate Alarmist David Suzuki
Guest post by Jim Lakely of the Heartland Institute
Back in March, The Heartland Institute sent professional Canadian climate alarmist David Suzuki – formerly on the board of Canada’s notoriously left-wing David Suzuki Foundation – a copy of Rael Isaac’s excellent book, Roosters of the Apocalypse. Today, while rummaging through my over-filled inbox, I saw an envelope from this “esteemed scientist” that arrived two weeks ago. Even in the address he put down for Heartland’s world headquarters, Suzuki exposed his childish contempt for those who disagree with his faith-based climate views.
(See the envelope below)
Then there is the note Suzuki wrote on our cover letter for the book.
In case you couldn’t make that out, let me type it for you:
I am a scientist and I take great umbrage at being sent such a load of crap from a bullshit shill organization for the oil industry. You are the most anti-science group I can imagine.
David Suzuki.
Quite an imagination, considering. But Suzuki left off the Xs and Os. I’m crushed. At least I set him back $3.70 Canadian.
I guess David didn’t get the memo that we should tone down the rhetoric and try to get along. Of course he’s wrong about us, but defaming people who disagree is the only trick aging alarmists like him have left.
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WUWT Readers might recall this research effort by the same esteemed Canadian scientist:
More here.
He has also advises African leaders about the “evils” of GM foods and this “expert” opinion along with the Euro “blockade” on GMO has prevented the import of GM based food aid and seeds by all but three African countries and this has made their famines much worse. In other words his arrogance has contributed to hundreds of thousands of the poorest people on the planet suffering and dying unnecessarily but he shows no remorse or regret.
And like Al Gore he has gotten very wealthy on this and other green science boondoggles.
IMHO: he is.a despicable human being and an embarrassment to all Canadians.
Suzuki had the same sentiment to me about my homeland when I noted his upcoming first visit to Australia; “I am not looking forward to it…they’re are all nothing but a bunch of red-necked racists!”
His $10,000,000 Vancouver waterfront home ( he has another in Haida Gwai of recent earthquake fame and has/had another in Australia) is a 3 minute Prius ride from the building housing the Suzuki Foundation. This block long building was heavily promoted as one of Vancouver’s first “Green” developments as it used heat exchanger plumbing loops driven into the soil below the building. This ended up in the press as “drawing it’s heating from the earth’s molten core!” Al Gore engineering perhaps? The racket from the in-room ceiling compressors was a constant irritation.
You have to cut him some slack though. He is obsessed with finding a green solution to his cremation. Perhaps the solving the problem of the extra carbon footprint of the “several pounds of dissolved plastic we all carry around in our bodies” is distracting him.
Les Johnson, i cant believe Suzuki said that in public.
Im glad i don’t read the Vancouver Sun – obsessed as it is with “celebrities” and “Real Estate”- if I did I would have fallen off my chair laughing and I would now be nursing a concussion.
David Suzuki, what a moron and an embarrassment to science.
David Suzuki hasn’t done any science since his fruit fly research in the 60’s. By his own metrics as a geneticist he has no qualifications to comment on climate science. The CBC is not an institution of science !!
http://jr2020.blogspot.ca/2012/03/david-suzuki-funded-by-canadian.html
suzuki at his best. notice the source of his funding
What is utterly frustrating is his total grip on the CBC science desk. It has been this way since I was a kid. I think his work on fruit flies was great. But it is time to hang up the gloves on the climate debate. Let a younger and more informed generation take his place, CBC.
Where the heck did Suzuki get his education? If I didn’t know who authored that little note, I would assume that it was written by a young, high school dropout. I normally associate such language with ignorance–definitely not with science.
The address on the envelope and the note were written by different hands. The note though was written by a member of the ‘green ink brigade’, someone who suffers from the paranoid delusion that his enemies are organised.
“The expression is the more-or-less affectionate description given by journalists and politicians to the people who write them eccentric letters, often in block capitals and frequently underlined in multicoloured inks. For some reason I have never heard satisfactorily explained, the most obsessive of these correspondents seem to prefer green.”
Ian Aitkin
“The term refers to a particular kind of letter writer, who claims that he is the victim of some injustice, or who composes long and vehement complaints against a person or an organisation, or who believes that a numerical calculation based on the name of the Prime Minister shows he’s an agent of the devil, or who is sure that invisible rays are being beamed into his house by his next-door neighbour to cause him injury, or who puts forward a thsis which, if adopted, will lead inevitably to world peace.”
Michael Quinion
“There came in the post an eighty-five-page handwritten letter, written in green ball-point ink, from a gentleman in a mental hospital in Ottawa. He had read a report in a local newspaper that I had thought it possible that life exists on other planets; he wished to reassure me that I was entirely correct in this supposition, as he knew from his own personal knowledge.”
Carl Sagan
Incidentally, the use of green ink was once favoured by MI6. The first chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Mansfield Cummings, established a tradition of signing documents with a C in green ink.
You know, the conservative author Mark Steyn once used a similarly offensive quote from the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia as a cover blurb for his book. You might want to conside the same approach.
Tony Hansen says:
November 9, 2012 at 3:50 am
When I first read it I thought it said…Iam a socialist…
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That is how I read it too.
Lancifer says:
November 9, 2012 at 5:41 am
I’d say in a phase diagram, Suzuki exactly defines the triple point.
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/04/19/vivian-krause-suzukis-funding/
http://drtimball.com/2012/david-suzuki-and-scientific-and-social-responsibility/
Matthew W says:
November 9, 2012 at 6:26 am
Seriously though, are “we” actually expected to have any type of an adult, rational, intelligent discourse with people like that?
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No.
If you read between the lines David Suzuki and his buddies would much rather put us into “reeducation camps”
He is a picture of the real David Suzuki. Too bad the general public does not see him that way.
ferd berple says:
November 9, 2012 at 6:45 am
….Even though the US has hundreds of years of coal reserves, CO2 policy will force US companies to export coal to China, where it will be used to produce low cost goods and services, driving the US further and further into debt. So ends the worlds last super power.
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I would change that to so ends the last free super power.
It looks like Khrushchev was correct.
“Whether you like it our not, history is on our side. We will bury you.”
“Your children will live under communism.” Khrushchev said.
“On the contrary,” Secretary Benson replied, “My grandchildren will live in freedom as I hope that all people will.”
Khrushchev then retorted: “You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept Communism outright; but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you; we’ll so weaken your economy, until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”
(Ezra Taft Benson was Secretary of Agriculture under the Eisenhower Administration.)
Dear Doctur SocioZukee
Thank you for your scintillating expose into the mindset of a hick who thought after all these years, mankind hasn’t been able to check for a rise in gas-specific infrared light in the atmosphere.
Criminal posing scumbag.
Here’s the kicker…. and yet this is what I did not find a way to mention on today’s show. When a highly controversial study of contaminants in farmed salmon and another highly controversial study of sea lice were published in the prestigious journal SCIENCE, the editor in chief, Dr. Donald Kennedy, was a trustee of the Packard foundation. The current editor-in-chief, Dr. Bruce Alberts, is a trustee of the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation.
Below, here’s the grant for an “antifarming campaign” involving “science messages” and “earned media.” By the way, shortly after I raised concern about this grant for $560,000 from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, this grant and three other grants for $3.6 million were quietly re-written by the Moore Foundation.
http://fairquestions.typepad.com/rethink_campaigns/2011/06/2nd-tv-interview-ezra-levant.html
The crux of the matter (as always) is vested interests.
http://fairquestions.typepad.com/rethink_campaigns/
Oh, but Suzuki has strongly endorsed IPCC’s AR5 WG1 Lead Author, Andrew Weaver’s candidacy as a deep Green Partisan in BC’s spring election. Such a noble guy, eh?!
Although if he had any sense, Suzuki would tell Weaver to step aside from one or t’other, since it doesn’t appear that the IPCC is likely to recognize this glaring conflict of interest which compromises the “objectivity” of their “gold standard” report.
New, improved “gold standard” IPCC: Business as (conflicted as) usual
Suzuki “going postal” isn’t news.
Wake me up when he goes pastel!
In case you’ve not seen David Suzuki in full alarmist doomsday rapture emotionalism in a two part interview on the CBC a few years back, and it is an epic rant by my, embarrassed to say, fellow Vancouverite rapture soothsayer. Quite the sght to behold.
http://pathstoknowledge.net/2009/12/17/david-suzuki-rants-epic-on-global-warming-and-copenhagen/
Shades of the Fly. Maybe Doctor Fruit Fly really was the inspiration of the SF tale of a mann mingling his genes with a common house fly.Cause he has sure turned out to be a buzzing irritant, that flies around on CBC endlessly. Another reason to defund CBC.
[snip. Multiple user names. —mod.]
I remember as a student of the University of Western Ontario I was renting an apartment from the mother of David Suzuki. I held him in very high esteem, because through the CBC he popularized science. He became my hero!
Fortunately the science education from that school gave me the necessary skill to be a skeptic . I have long ago given up my adoration of David as a scientist and realized that he was more than that but was a scientist with a political agenda. There should be no room in the Canadian Broadcast Corporation for his monopoly on presenting his political views. He has underhandedly highjacked the CBC into presenting him as Canada’s preeminent scientist. They do not understand what they have done. I have been ashamed as a Canadian scientist at the politics of David Suzuki and I am enraged that he presents himself as a practicing scientist. He popularizes science but does not practice it. He is an environmental activist first and foremost. There is no grey here it is clearly black and white.
I am a geophysicist who explores for the very oil and gas he uses every day, that he uses to fly about the globe, captain his boat, where his clothing, heat his home, house his family and generally make life comfortable and enjoyable. He has no respect for this! He is reaching the final segment of his life and his behavior is that of a bitter old man with an agenda rather than that of an inquisitive and objective scientist!
My heart aches that science is so misused and misunderstood. His behavior is sadly and extremely disappointing!
I see that people here are using the modern term that Suzuki has jumped the shark, I personally would tend to go back further to explain Suzuki and his ramblings. The old TV program. The Twilight Zone explains Suzuki. He long ago entered the twilight zone and many followed him in there, sad really, not for Suzuki but the dimwits that followed him.