Guest essay by Dr. Tim Ball
The cover story of the November 25, 2013 Canadian weekly magazine Macleans pictures self-appointed Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki.
The caption reads, “Environmentalism Has Failed”“David Suzuki loses faith in the cause of his lifetime.”
Suzuki doesn’t realize he‘s the cause of the failure as a major player in the group who exploited environmentalism and climate for a political agenda. Initially most listened and tried to accommodate, but gradually the lies, deceptions and propaganda were exposed. The age of eco-bullying is ending. Typically Suzuki blamed others for the damage to the environment and climate but now he blames them for not listening to him. He forgets that when you point a finger at someone three are pointing back at you.
Environmentalism was what academics call a paradigm shift, which Thomas Kuhn defines as “a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.” It was a necessary new paradigm. Everybody accepts the general notion it is foolish to soil your own nest and most were prepared to participate. Most were not sure what it entailed or how far it should go. Extremists grab all new paradigms for their agenda but then define the limits for the majority by pushing beyond the limits of the idea. Environmentalism and the subset climate are at that stage pushed there by extremists like Suzuki. Instead of admitting the science is wrong they double down and make increasingly extreme statements, just like the IPCC. It underscores the political rather than the scientific agenda. For example, Suzuki, apparently frustrated that politicians were not listening to his demands for action on climate change said they should be jailed.
Environmental groups grabbed environmentalism and quickly took the moral high ground preaching that only they cared about the Earth. Suzuki set up the David Suzuki Foundation (DSF) with tax benefits that required it to be non-political, but after active involvement in an Ontario election he was forced to resign. His major theme in the election was to push the climate change and alternate energies put in place in that Province when Maurice Strong was in charge of Ontario Hydro, the state controlled energy agency. Ontario is the perfect example of how and why climate energy policies promoted by Strong as Founder of UNEP are a disaster.
The Foundation campaigned on environmental issues most presented in deceptive or incomplete ways. An example was the attack on salmon farming and corrupted research on PCBs and sea lice. This was the focus of an interview of researcher Vivian Krause by Ezra Levant. Another was Suzuki’s parade across Canada pushing extinction theories and claims of DSF Board member E.O Wilson that 3 species go extinct every hour. He never named one. He never listed the plethora of new species found. He refused to discuss the issue and in his visit to schools pre-arranged and wrote a question for a selected student to ask. He promoted threats of global warming, but refused to debate the issue or answer questions. When asked questions on a radio interview in Toronto, he swore and stormed out of the studio.
He hired former Federal politician NDP (socialist party) David Fulton as Director of DSF. James Hoggan has been Chairman of the Board for many years. His PR Company has major alternate energy companies as clients. Hoggan is the proud creator of DeSmogblog a web site that claims it is “Clearing the PR Pollution that clouds climate science” but mostly involves personal attacks on people asking questions. The objective was to denigrate people by creating “favorable interpretations” to the following questions. “Were these climate skeptics qualified? Were they doing any research in the climate change field? Were they accepting money, directly or indirectly, from the fossil fuel industry?” This doesn’t answer skeptics questions about the science.
Their real agenda was disclosed in a Climatic Research Unit (CRU) leaked email dated December 2007 from senior writer Richard Littlemore to Michael Mann.
Hi Michael [Mann],
I’m a DeSmogBlog writer [Richard LIttlemore] (sic) (I got your email from Kevin Grandia)* and I am trying to fend off the latest announcement that global warming has not actually occurred in the 20th century.
It looks to me like Gerd Burger is trying to deny climate change by “smoothing,” “correcting” or otherwise rounding off the temperatures that we know for a flat fact have been recorded since the 1970s, but I am out of my depth (as I am sure you have noticed: we’re all about PR here, not much about science) so I wonder if you guys have done anything or are going to do anything with Burger’s intervention in Science. (emphasis added)
(* Grandia was a former writer for DeSmogBlog who moved there after serving as a research assistant for a Liberal Minister in Ottawa.)
Do as I say, not as I do is the hallmark of extreme environmentalists behaviour. Al Gore is the poster boy for this hypocrisy. It appears Suzuki is only different in scale. They were enumerated in programs by SUN TV Reporter Ezra Levant. They include the familiar list of funding and financial activities and personal wealth accumulated, especially in properties.
A major part of Suzuki’s attacks relate to global warming. His refusal to debate or even answer questions is legendary. He ignores his lack of qualifications on climate, but uses that challenge when it comes to his supposed expertise in genetics and genetically modified food. A possible explanation for his “environmentalism is a failure” claim is a PR move to divert from the exposure of his climate ignorance in an Australian interview. He could not answer questions about information fundamental to any understanding.
Suzuki abandoned his academic career in genetics decades ago explaining why in a 1999 Seattle speech. His concerns related to the internment of his Japanese Canadian family during WWII. Here are his words:
In the exuberance of the excitement over the discovery of new principles of heredity — that seemed to apply across the plant and animal kingdoms — geneticists began to make wonderful, wild statements about the implications of their discoveries. I’m sure most of you know that it ultimately led to what was considered a legitimate area of science called Eugenics.
Some of our most eminent geneticists taught courses in eugenics, wrote textbooks in eugenics, published articles in eugenics journals. Eugenics being the attempt to apply the new-found knowledge of heredity to improve the genetic quality or makeup of human society.
It seems more logical to maintain standing as a geneticist and work to prevent such drifts occurring. Instead he quit and became a tele-evangelist using state television (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) to push his environmental/political agenda.
His television series became his undoing as a classic example of how extremism is its own undoing. It’s why Suzuki’s exploitation of environmentalism, as he defines it, caused failure. Most programs in the series were unjustified, misleading condemnations of different components of society. I identified some of the misinformation in a presentation to farmers in Saskatchewan a few years ago. Afterward a woman told me that a month earlier she would have disagreed with my comments. Now she understood because Suzuki did a program on farming and as a farmer’s wife she knew how wrong and biased it was. Each new program exposed another segment of society to the deception. This created a populace open to and not surprised by the exposure of his hypocrisies. The same is happening to climate alarmism as more and more segments of society are negatively affected. His actions and climate driven energy policies close industries, decimate communities, cause job losses and force business closures, virtually all unnecessarily.
As Suzuki’s campaign to use environmentalism for a political agenda fails he lashes out, blaming others for the failure. It parallels what is happening in the climate alarmist community. The comments and claims become more extreme, but achieve the opposite of their goal. It is necessary to consider the further negative effects of their exploitation and deceptions. What is the damage to the credibility of science? Can we pursue environmentalism with rational, science based, prioritized policies?
Related articles
- CNN mocks Greenpeace’s “Save Santa’s Home” video (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Climate change: Fear based messages don’t work (psychbot.wordpress.com)
- The nature of David Suzuki (macleans.ca)
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If we criticise his views in any way, isn’t that racism?
@ur momisugly A. Deakin,
If “Lunatic” is a race…..sure!
Being humiliated in public, as Suzuki was by his very first questioner on Q&A, can make for a great teaching moment.
What is the damage to the credibility of science? The folks that matter have always known better. The ones that don’t will believe anything anyway.
Can we pursue environmentalism with rational, science based, prioritized policies? No. But it has nothing to do with Suzuki and his ilk.
Dr. Tim Ball says:
“The same is happening to climate alarmism as more and more segments of society are negatively affected. His actions and climate driven energy policies close industries, decimate communities, cause job losses and force business closures, virtually all unnecessarily.”
———————-
Absolutely correct. Climate change and/or CAGW is not the problem, …. fanatical climate extremists are.
…………………………
Alfred Deakin says:
December 7, 2013 at 12:12 am
“If we criticise his views in any way, isn’t that racism?”
——————–
If we do not criticize those for their wrongdoings …… then education of the populace comes to a screeching halt.
First ,what is environmentalism…????
according to wikipedia
Environmentalism is a broad philosophy, ideology and social movement regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the health of the environment, particularly as the measure for this health seeks to incorporate the concerns of non-human elements. Environmentalism advocates the preservation, restoration and/or improvement of the natural environment, and may be referred to as a movement to control pollution or protect plant and animal diversity.[1] For this reason, concepts such as a land ethic, environmental ethics, biodiversity, ecology and the biophilia hypothesis figure predominantly.
At its crux, environmentalism is an attempt to balance relations between humans and the various natural systems on which they depend in such a way that all the components are accorded a proper degree of sustainability. The exact measures and outcomes of this balance is controversial and there are many different ways for environmental concerns to be expressed in practice. Environmentalism and environmental concerns are often represented by the color green,[2] but this association has been appropriated by the marketing industries and is a key tactic of greenwashing. Environmentalism is opposed by anti-environmentalism, which takes a skeptical stance against many environmentalist perspectives.
is it clear to you?
It isboth revolutionary and conservative….
with such definition any boarderline is blurry…
no some crazy alamrmists have failed in their will to be the ruler of theirs country or replace democracy by tyranny.
Suzuki has a point that modern day environmentalism is collapsing. Far too many of these originally worthy organisations have been hijacked by activists with agendas at total odds to those of the founders. Not surprisingly, support for these organisations declines until such time as the whittled hated guys manage to regain control.
I almost feel sorry for climate alarmists, as they desperately flounder around looking for a new proof of man made climate change as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels.
So, a brief glance at current ‘proofs’ is not encouraging for alarmists:
1. Polar bears are thriving and not starving to death as predicted; there are, of course, local variations on a year by year basis.
2. The ice caps are melting – problem is the Antarctic one is growing and the recent decline in Arctic ice has just gone into sharp reverse.
3. Sea levels are rising – well, yes, but that started back in the 1850s and has recently been slowing.
4. The glaciers are melting – well, yes, some of them are, but this is also a process that started back in the 1850s
5. The oceans are acidifying – nobody knows, because no one bothered to measure ocean pHs a century ago. In any event, the projected alarmist change in pH is less than local annual or global variations in ocean pH. In the unlikely event acidification is happening, this is most likely to be the result of man made sulphuric and nitric acid emissions,
6. Rising surface temperatures – well, yes, global temperatures have risen by around 0.7 degrees C over the past century, with most of this occurring before carbon dioxide could possibly have been the cause. Then there are the two inconvenient facts of: I) massive data manipulation in historic temperature records, and ii) a 17 year ‘pause’ in rising temperatures.
The alarmist propaganda machine continues to churn out the same old drivel. Sometimes their arguments sound compelling, as long as you don’t know the facts.
Wherever there is a trough of easy money, the unscrupulous and criminal minded are attracted like moths to a flame.
‘Whitle hated’? That should be white hatted. My apologies.
Thank you, Anthony.
I have more than a dozen Google periodical news alerts daily that surround my research and the ones on man-made global warming ARe so numerous, we can’t fight them all. It is a rampant disease in itself and the best we can do is lean on the ears of the politicians for equal ground against this driving hypothesis.
That is where I aimed my print letters in the last years,right at Congress and the Tea Party and Republicans. It has some affect. Democrats are in line hook and sinker.
What is happening in my alerts is a growing number of winter deaths in animals and people and lay that at the feet of this solar sunspot minimum. It has also a string relationship to our world- wide drought and earlier winter storms.
This the historical trend for solar sunspot minimums.
Most Sincerely,
Paul Pierett
Couldn’t agree more. The real threat of global warming is that climate alarmists have totally wrecked the true environmentalism.
Like many working in climate ‘science’ one thing Suzuki as no shortage off, unlike honest and an addiction to good science, is ego .
There is indeed a large element of the cult of personality around the area with people like Mann and Suzuki see themselves as great hero’s and leaders of men . And so have developed very thin skins because in reality they could not be more wrong , and being constantly reminded of this clashes with their very over developed ego’s.
Thanks for this review of extremist in environmentalism. I have been an environmentalist for 50 years and lately have been ashamed to admit it. Ashamed because I am also a humanist and I object to extremists telling me that frogs and glaciers come before people.
“KNR says:
December 7, 2013 at 2:00 am
Like many working in climate ‘science’ one thing Suzuki as no shortage off, unlike honest and an addiction to good science, is ego .
There is indeed a large element of the cult of personality around the area with people like Mann and Suzuki see themselves as great hero’s and leaders of men . And so have developed very thin skins because in reality they could not be more wrong , and being constantly reminded of this clashes with their very over developed ego’s.”
There is also a commensurate financial compensation and bank balance that accompany’s such supposed environmental ego’s as well. A large proportion of which is funded by the taxpayer through government consultation or their vested interest’s that just happen to benefit from the agenda being pushed.
We had our own version here in Aus with Flim Flam Flannery sucking at the public teat and a hot rock pie in the sky Thermal Electricity generation company that he held shares in having a cool $90 million thrown at it at the public’s cost.
Ah the moral high ground huh ?
There are countless examples of policies promoted by environmentalists that have ended up having detrimental effects on the environment. Perhaps the most glaring of these is the promotion of bio-fuel which has led to the destruction of natural habitats around the world. True environmentalists, those people who are only interested in protecting the Earth, and not those who seek to use it as means to a political end, have seen through the PR and are staying clear of the hype.
Dr. Ball, Sir! Permission to repost!?!
The tragedy is compounded by the insane focus on CO2 to the detriment of effort directed at real environmental issues. Wind turbines are slaughtering birds and bats, but have been exempted from the laws to protect those species. Imagine what would happen to a coal fired plant if they were even accused of having done that. The Chesapeake Bay fishery has be decimated by the combination of pollution and overfishing and all of the “plans” to fix it have been inadequate because of politics. Of course, maybe it’s for the best. Imagine if pompous git like Suzuki focused his efforts on the real problems and the mess he’d make.
Wondering how some creepy guy with weird clothes and mad hair can persuade people who aren’t necessarily thick that a spaceship will be leaving from a mountain top at a certain time and they’d better be there because the world is ending?
Wonder no more. The impression that Suzuki left behind in Oz was a lot like the impression left by Gore after his “millions of degrees” and “special drill bits” comments. You realised that it simply did not matter what Suzuki had claimed, was claiming or would claim. It did not matter what utterly basic things he did not know. He was pre-believed, and mostly by the more educated.
I asked this question to Oz friends the other day when considering the demographic involved in the recent Climate Action rallies (colour co-ordinated GetUp rent-a-crowds):
Have we indeed reached a turning point for humanity, a point where the tertiary educated are mostly dumber than the rest?
I have also been an environmentalist for half a century; and as a Taoist, I know that our earth and its climate are beyond our puny manipulations. We could and should, however, look at not deforesting large areas of land by burning wood for heat and cooking. We should burn coal instead. We should also look and not poisoning our environment with chemicals. In other words, environmentalism was always about not fouling our nest; an easy and understandable message that got overlooked in the false heifer dust about CO2.
After more than 40 years of environmental efforts in the US and massive expenditures at ridding pollution and environmental degradation ( with a lot of good done), at some point there needs to be a national conversation about the laws of diminishing returns. What are the future marginal returns for the marginal costs. How clean does it all need to be.
“Have we indeed reached a turning point for humanity, a point where the tertiary educated are mostly dumber than the rest?”
There does seem to be a trend where they are not only not taught to think and to critically evaluate, but they are explicitly taught NOT to. We had a tertiary educated govt (almost all union lawyers with 5 year degrees), and not once in 3 years did they EVER catch something said by the Greens or Flim Flammery and say “No, wait – that sounds like BS; let me check if the data supports that.” Not when “100 metre Robyn” agreed that 100m sea level rises were possible, or when Flannery said the drought was permanent and the dams would never fill again, or when Treasury said that importing $1 TRILLION of carbon credits would have no effect economically. Not when Christine Milne said, well, anything. They just nodded like the dashboard dogs they are.
Yet it’s self-evident that logarithmic climate sensitivity, when simply naively extrapolated, is closer to 1C than 6C. Virtually everyone knows that alarmist claims are alarmists, except the “eilte.”
It’s racism not to as long as you are genuine. Secondly, how do we know the race of the one making the criticism if it’s a web comment? Suzuki is a nut job. That’s genuine. 😉
Climate change extremism is the best friend of the sceptics. It causes people to ask questions. Colder, snowy winters helps a lot too as many, many people remember what they were promised about the lack of snow and cold in future winters.
Can anyone think of any movement in history that has received so much scientific, political and media backing, as CAGW has, and failed so miserably?
I will say one thing, that if anyone should charged with crimes against humanity, it should be him. As well as the crime of fraud. As Dr. Ball says above, Ezra Levant of Sun News TV has some excellent exposes of David Suzuki. He has become a multi-millionaire off of taxpayers funds.
BTW Thanks Dr. Ball for writing this.
David Suzuki impeached himself with his hysterically ignorant stand on the 33 Kg Pu-238 RTG’s powering the Cassini-Huygens mission launched in 1997.
Eugenics are fundamental to the progressive tradition, starting with Plato’s Republic (misnamed/mistranslated), and through Hegel’s dialectic adopted by Marx, and the watermelon movement – sickly greenish on the outside and fellow-traveller pinko on the inside.
The details are in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, starting with his complaint of the mistranslated title.
“Can we pursue environmentalism with rational, science based, prioritized policies?”
No. At some point, the bureaucracy would have to admit they’ve already done the bulk of the work and need to shift into maintenance mode. They are trying to grow their power, and to do so now, they need to misrepresent and distort.