Calgary – Is the climate issue over? A marketing campaign by Friends of Science that has put up billboards and Youtube videos stating that the issue of climate change ended sixteen years ago is drawing wide-spread comments from critics. The campaign states, that the “Climate Crisis” has been cancelled.
The issue of global climate change and the issue being driven by man’s activities on Earth are accepted as fact by a vast majority, 97% of the world’s scientists.
Friends of Science are stating in their Youtube video that any change in the world’s climate are being driven by the solar activity and that right now radiation from the sun is at the highest level in 8000 years.
“Friends of Science” state in a media release, “As reported in Montreal’s Le Soleil Nov. 20, 2014, the Friends of Science digital billboard campaign that says “The sun is the main driver of climate change. Not you. Not CO2” running in 6 selected Canadian cities, has erupted into controversy, especially in Montreal, as environmentalists and renewable energy proponents are calling for the message to be censored. Freedom of speech is enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”
Norm Kalmanovitch, P. Geoph. and resident scientific adviser to Friends of Science rejects such comments as antithetical to scientific inquiry.
Canada’s Globe and Mail published a report on Nov. 17, 2014 claiming that the Friends of Science campaign was running in over a dozen cities and would have cost $65,000 dollars, citing an anonymous advertising expert. PR man James Hoggan, the founder of DeSmogBlog, chair of the Suzuki Foundation and Climate Project Canada, an offshoot of Al Gore’s global outreach weighed in with his opinion.
“We’re only in 6 cities and on a beer budget,” says Kalmanovitch. “We wish the Globe and Mail would contact us first and not speculate.” “We’ve taken them to task on this before,” he said, referring to a Jun. 18, 2014 commentary.”
Friends of Science billboards in Montreal, Quebec, translated into French, are sparking controversy. Reports appeared on Nov. 20, 2014 in Le Devoir, Le Soleil, Le Journal de Montreal, and in AVEQ on Nov. 21, 2014, all were widely critical.
Twitter burst into a stream of invective, primarily calling Friends of Science ‘deniers.’
In a tweet Friends of Science responded saying “We do not deny and we do not comply. We think for ourselves and rely on scientific evidence, not models.”
The issue of climate change, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May told a Thunder Bay audience is one that the Canadian Government seems to be fighting.
Merran Smith of Clean Energy Canada, an offshoot of TIDES Canada ENGO tweeted a letter of complaint about the Vancouver billboard claiming the billboard was ‘immoral and unethical,’ citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Synthesis Report as evidence of climate change doom.
“As reported in the Wall Street Journal Oct. 1, 2013, the IPCC Working Group I report of September 2013, written by the physical scientists, stated there had been a long-term hiatus in global warming despite a rise in carbon dioxide,” says Kalmanovitch.
Kalmanovitch continues, “Clearly the drop in solar irradiance is a factor. Why would it be immoral or unethical to make sure the public knows that expensive carbon reduction schemes do nothing for the climate?”
“Clean Energy Canada has a mandate to push renewable power. The main rationale for so-called renewables like wind and solar, is the alleged threat of human-caused global warming,” he says. “So, is that why they want to censor us?”
A 2014 MIT publication entitled http:// Cheap and Clean identifies wind and solar as the most expensive and most unreliable forms of power generation, but the authors explain people are easily mislead into thinking they are free and clean because the sun and wind are ubiquitous and have happy personal associations with warmth, sunny and breezy days.
About
Friends of Science have spent a decade reviewing a broad spectrum of literature on climate change and have concluded the sun is the main driver of climate change, not carbon dioxide (CO2). The core group of the Friends of Science is made up of retired earth and atmospheric scientists.
