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Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, Part I

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18 mins ago

43 minute read

From the C2C Journal

By Lynne Cohen
In his judicial review of the Liberals’ response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that “there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable.” With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s draconian actions thus exposed as unnecessary and excessive – in other words, illegal and unconstitutional – what now awaits Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, who each face up to 10 years in jail for playing key roles in the protest? In the first of a two-part series, Lynne Cohen charts the lengthy and vindictive prosecution of the pair, from their first appearance in downtown Ottawa to their initial arrest and pre-trial treatment.
As the 13-month-long trial of Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber lurched into its final days at the Ottawa Courthouse, Assistant Crown Attorney Siobhain Wetscher reached for her highest dudgeon and broadest hyperbole. In making her closing arguments, Wetscher declared this to be an “overwhelming case” backed by an abundance of “significant evidence.” Attempting to draw the focus onto the assembled facts, she swatted away claims it was a politically-motivated prosecution. “The defendants are not on trial for politics,” Wetscher stressed. “They crossed the line, objectively. The smell, the noise, the harassment were not lawful!” Given the reaching tone and considering the actual weight of the evidence, it often seemed as if Wetscher was trying to convince herself as much as Ontario Court Justice Heather Perkins-McVey.

To back their case, Wetscher and fellow Assistant Crown Attorney Tim Radcliffe had prepared a PowerPoint presentation that was projected onto two screens in Courtroom 5 during their final arguments. Entitled “R. v. Christopher Barber & Tamara Lich: Closing Submissions of the Crown”, the 106-slide exhibit began by listing the various charges: committing mischief, obstructing a peace officer and blocking a highway as well as counselling others to commit mischief, obstruct, block a highway and disobey a court order (the last one against Barber only). It also offered a quick guide to dozens of previous mischief, obstruction and intimidation judgements considered relevant to the case.

An “overwhelming case”: According to the closing arguments of Assistant Crown Attorneys Siobhain Wetscher (top left) and Tim Radcliffe (top right) presented in the Ottawa Courthouse, the trial of Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber was not about politics, but the fact the pair “crossed the line” during the protest. (Source of bottom photo: CTV News)

Beyond a useful summary of the charges and case law, the Crown’s slideshow was also meant as one last reminder of the “significant evidence” arrayed against the Freedom Convoy pair. It thus contained numerous exhibits already submitted during the 45-day trial, including maps of the protest area, snippets from TikTok videos, transcripts from press conferences, witness testimony and interrogations as well as court orders, texts, letters, handbills, emails, Facebook posts and so on. As such, it serves as a kind of multimedia scrapbook for the entire three-week-long protest in Ottawa during January and February 2022.

And as is usually the case with scrapbooks, there were also plenty of photographs, presumably selected for the same reason as all the other evidence – because they bolster the case against Lich and Barber. In particular, the pictures are meant to provide proof of their close partnership in leading an unlawful protest and convincing others to break the law. But there’s a problem with this plan: none of the photos show either doing anything other than participating in an entirely peaceful, apparently constitutional and often quite-joyous-looking protest.

Slide 61, for example, shows the duo in winter gear hugging each other with big grins on their faces. Slide 76 has a smiling Lich explaining on TikTok that the protest is “like Canada Day on steroids.” Slide 100 is a screenshot of Lich on the verge of being arrested telling her Facebook supporters that, “I pray and hope that you will make your choices from love…we can only win this with love.”

And then there’s slide 106. The presentation’s last slide pairs a quote from Wetscher and Radcliffe with yet another picture of Lich and Barber. The text reads, “The Crown respectfully requests that the court find Mr. Barber and Ms. Lich guilty of all counts as charged.” The photo shows them together once more – again smiling broadly. This time they’re standing with Mike Stack, another protester, in front of Barber’s truck “Big Red”. If the point of this photo is to prove once and for all that Lich and Barber were engaged in a dangerous, insurrectionist conspiracy, it fails miserably.

The Crown’s 106-slide closing presentation served as a multi-media scrapbook of the three-week-long Freedom Convoy protest, inadvertently highlighting the event’s joyousness and peacefulness. Of note, the final slide (bottom) shows a smiling Lich, Barber and fellow protester Mike Stack – while Barber’s dog Zippy enjoys the view from the driver’s seat of Barber’s truck “Big Red”.

And hilariously – as a close inspection reveals Barber’s dog Zippy sitting in Big Red’s driver’s seat, mouth agape in a wild doggy smile, looking down upon the trio as if to say, “Look at me. I’m driving the truck!” For a criminal case that threatens Lich and Barber with a decade in jail for allegedly imperilling the very foundation of public order across Canada, and has consumed more than a year of precious court time, Zippy’s photo-bomb doesn’t answer the question of guilt, it raises an entirely different one.

Is this really the best the Crown can do?

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Long-Haul Trucking

On January 23, 2022, the Freedom Convoy began rolling out from Canada’s West Coast towards Ottawa, while other smaller groups of vehicles streamed westward from Quebec and other points. Three months earlier, the Government of Canada had unexpectedly announced that cross-border truckers who had not received a course of Covid-19 vaccination would have to isolate for up to two weeks when crossing the U.S.-Canada border, overturning an earlier exemption for the trucking industry. Despite furious pushback, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused to relent and the mandate came into effect on January 15.

‘What kind of country had Canada become?’ Lich would later write about the impact of mandatory vaccine requirements. ‘We had governments who seemed far more obsessed with promoting vaccines…than they did with the reality and the struggles of the Canadian people. Someone had to stop it.’

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In response, thousands of truckers and others in cars and pickup trucks from all over the country joined the procession to make their feelings known, while thousands more waved them on from freeway overpasses and small towns along the way. Lich and Barber were involved in this movement from the beginning – creating social media accounts, setting up fundraising efforts and building an internal support structure – although the convoy itself defied organization. Lich and Barber may have been instrumental, but they were not almighty.

Let those truckers roll, 10-4: In January 2022, thousands of vehicles from across the country converged on Ottawa to protest a dramatic change in the federal government’s Covid-19 vaccine policy for cross-border trucking. (Sources of photos: (top) Andrei Filippov/Shutterstock; (bottom) GoToVan, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Lich was born in Saskatoon to a Métis family and adopted as an infant. She has lived a varied life on the Prairies, working mainly as an administrator in the energy services sector and raising three children. She currently lives in Medicine Hat, Alberta with her husband Dwayne, who farms. She’s proud of her native heritage and also boasts of being a singer in a garage rock band. Lich has been politically active for many years, typically drawn to a robust defence of Western Canada’s political interests and consistently opposing the current Trudeau government. In 2018 she joined the “Yellow Vest” movement, and has also been a member of the Alberta Wildrose Party and the federal Maverick Party.

But it was the federal Liberals’ draconian response to the Covid-19 pandemic that pushed her activist inclinations into overdrive. “What kind of country had Canada become?” Lich would later write about the impact of vaccine mandates. “We had governments who seemed far more obsessed with promoting vaccines…than they did with the reality and the struggles of the Canadian people. Someone had to stop it.”

As for Barber, he hails from the small southwest Saskatchewan city of Swift Current. The 49-year-old married father of two children owns and operates a trucking firm, C.B. Trucking Limited, which specializes in long hauls of agricultural equipment. His popular TikTok account @bigred19755 provided him with a platform to complain – often impishly – about the impact of government regulation on the trucking business. As would be expected, the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic had a major impact on his business. Barber got the vaccine shots as required, but disagreed with how they were imposed.

By the time they got to Ottawa: Lich (left, with husband Dwayne) of Medicine Hat, Alberta, and Barber (right, with Big Red) of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, found themselves leading the Freedom Convoy as a result of their shared opposition to federal Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

“I was at risk of losing all that hard work [building my company] to not being able to cross the border anymore,” he explained to True North News. As his frustration with Covid-19 rules grew, Barber leveraged his status on social media to become a leading voice for truckers’ outrage over vaccine policy, which in turn spurred him to help launch the Freedom Convoy. “I was angry, very angry,” Barber later explained. “The provincial mandates, the federal mandates…it seemed like it was an over-reach.” From 30,000 followers prior to the convoy, Barber’s TikTok account grew to 170,000 by the time the truckers rolled into Ottawa.

When Lich, Barber and the rest of the original convoy reached Ottawa in late January, numerous other groups and individuals unaligned with the initial organization had joined the protest for their own reasons, and with their own objectives, timelines and standards of behaviour. What most participants had in common was a deep antipathy towards the Trudeau government and a desire to make this known in the heart of the nation’s capital. Their right to do so peacefully was initially acknowledged by the Ottawa Police Service (OPS). As they arrived, OPS officers met the truckers, showed them where to park and took steps to allow them to store provisions. For the first week or so, Lich and Barber worked closely with the cops to keep emergency routes open and relations cordial. This congenial situation eventually soured, however, as the protesters lingered.

Just over two weeks later, on February 14 the federal government took the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act based on the Liberal Cabinet’s assertion that the protest constituted a Canada-wide “public order emergency” that could not be dealt with under existing laws and which involved threats of “serious violence against persons or property.” This essentially criminalized the Freedom Convey and all its supporters. Riot police then moved to physically clear the protest area, and 196 protesters in the immediate area were arrested. Another 76 individuals were arrested elsewhere in Canada at around the same time for attending other protests, including blockades at three border crossings in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta.

Crushing the “insurrection”: Initially accommodated by the Ottawa Police Service, the Freedom Convoy protest was later deemed a national “public order emergency”. Shown at top left, police circulate throughout the protest on February 9; top right, police hand out notices to protesters on February 17; at bottom, police confront and arrest protesters on February 18. (Sources of photos: (top left) The Canadian Press Images/Lars Hagberg; (top right) The Canadian Press/Justin Tang; (bottom left and right) Michel Elzo/Shutterstock)

The federal Liberals also bullied Canada’s chartered banks into freezing the bank accounts of many people connected to the protest. Lich and Barber had their personal finances locked and both were later arrested. Lich’s single, initial charge was for “counselling to commit the offence of mischief”; Barber was charged with counselling mischief, as well as obstruction and ignoring a court order. While half-a-dozen other charges were later added to the pair’s alleged offences, mischief was the common thread that connected them to the vast majority of other protesters arrested during the crackdown.

This prevalence of mischief seems a rather surprising fact. Amidst what was supposedly a massive and violent breakdown in public order, mischief – or counselling others to be mischievous – turned out to be the most serious crime the police could detect. In Ottawa there were no assaults, no murders, no guns or bombs, no fraud or extortion, no rioting and looting, no treason. Nothing, in other words, that might have signalled that an actual (as opposed to imagined or media-manufactured) insurrection was underway or imminent.

There was, however, one criminal act that provably did occur in Ottawa during the protests. Two men attempted to set an apartment building’s entryway alight and then sealed the doors shut. This appalling and dangerous act was immediately attributed by some to the protesters. Ottawa mayor Jim Watson, for example, stated it “clearly demonstrates the malicious intent of the protesters occupying our city.” Police soon established, however, that the fire had no link to anyone connected to the Freedom Convoy.

Legal Mischief

While the term conjures up images of a misbehaving toddler, section 430 of the Criminal Code of Canada defines mischief very broadly as the willful destruction of property or interference with others’ lawful enjoyment of their own property. It should not be taken too lightly, cautions Michael Spratt, an Ottawa criminal lawyer. “Yes, mischief can be something very minor, for example drawing graffiti on a public space, or chalking a sidewalk,” Spratt says in an interview. “But mischief can also include very serious offences, for example, occupying and blockading the national capital and inflicting extreme harm on its residents, businesses, and communities.”

It seems doubtful the entirety of the chaos caused by the Freedom Convoy can be laid at the feet of Lich and Barber. Plenty of other participants deserve a large share of the blame, Velloso said, pointing especially to the police.

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As an indictable offence, mischief carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Since lawyers for Lich and Barber readily admit that mischief occurred during the protest, Spratt says the only legal issue to be decided in court is whether the pair were at fault “either as a party, a participant, an encourager, an abettor or a leader of the convoy who bears some responsibility for it.” In other words, Lich and Barber could be found guilty even if they didn’t commit any mischief themselves. That would, however, require crafting a rather elaborate theory to explain a rather mundane crime.

Not every legal observer is convinced mischief best fulfills the government’s claim that it was facing an incipient violent insurrection, as is required by the Emergencies Act. According to University of Ottawa law professor Joao Velloso, most mischief charges in Canada are actually quite minor and usually punished without any jail time. Reliance on what he, unlike Spratt, views as a rather insignificant crime as the means to punish Freedom Convoy protesters seems like “a safe, bureaucratic choice for the police,” Velloso explained to The Canadian Press, adding it is “a less demanding choice in terms of police work.”

Much ado about mischief: While Ottawa criminal lawyer Michael Spratt (left) says mischief can include “very serious charges”, University of Ottawa law professor Joao Velloso (right) observes that most mischief charges in Canada are minor and punished without any jail time. (Sources of photos: (left) Michael Spratt; (right) Errol McGihon/Saltwire)

Plus, it seems doubtful the entirety of the chaos caused by the Freedom Convoy can be laid at the feet of Lich and Barber. Plenty of other participants deserve a large share of the blame, Velloso said, pointing especially to the police. “The seriousness of the mischief during the protest was produced by lack of policing,” he asserted. This echoes the February 17, 2023 findings of the Public Order Emergency Commission chaired by Justice Paul Rouleau, which also concluded that “policing failures” – in particular, inviting the truckers into the downtown area without any long-term plan to remove them – “contributed to a situation that spun out of control.”

In deciding whether the mischief charges faced by Lich and Barber are a big deal or not, it helps to consider the fate of other Freedom Convoy protesters faced with the same charge, many of whom have been represented by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF). Steven Vardy, for example, was arrested while driving in downtown Ottawa after the Emergencies Act had been imposed and charged with obstruction. The charge of mischief was added after police discovered Vardy had narrated a video about the protest. The Crown dropped the obstruction charge before trial, and after two days in court the judge determined the mischief charge was equally untenable, and it too was dismissed.

Christine DeCaire, another JCCF client, was arrested while standing alone on Nicholas Street in downtown Ottawa as police moved to enforce the Emergencies Act on February 18. She was acquitted at trial, a result recently confirmed after the Crown appealed. JCCF client Ben Spicer was charged with mischief, obstruction and weapons offences after police grabbed him off the street during the protest and found a pocket knife and bear spray in his backpack. Spicer was then secretly recorded in a police van. After a six-day trial, all charges were dropped because he’d been arrested unlawfully. Evan Blackman, yet another JCCF client, was charged with mischief and obstruction, and had three bank accounts frozen. Drone footage later showed Blackman holding back protesters in order to de-escalate the situation. And just before he was arrested, he could be seen singing “O Canada”. The judge dismissed all charges after a one-day trial because of evidentiary weakness; the Crown is appealing.

Feeling mischievous: Police arrested 196 protesters in Ottawa after the Emergencies Act’s invocation, charging many with mischief and obstruction. Most had their charges later dropped or were found not guilty at trial, with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms playing a key role in these successful defences. (Source of photo: The Canadian Press/Justin Tang)

Not every mischief case has collapsed in calamitous fashion, however. Publicity-seeking protester Tyson “Freedom George” Billings, who was not represented by the JCCF and had no direct link to Lich or Barber, pleaded guilty to counselling others to commit mischief. The other charges against him were dropped and he was sentenced to time served, about four months. And Pat King, who also garnered ample attention during the protest, is still awaiting the verdict of his mischief trial, which lasted three weeks. King and Billings were notable for their confrontational and often uncooperative relationship with the police during the protest, in sharp contrast with Lich and, for the most part, Barber.

Another exception to the raft of failed cases is the fate of the so-called “Coutts Four”. Separately from the Ottawa protest, Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, Chris Lysak and Jerry Morin were among the most hard-line of hundreds of participants at a tense, weeks-long standoff at the Coutts, Alberta border crossing. On February 15 the four were arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder police officers as well as other weapons and mischief offences, upon which the whole protest disintegrated. Meanwhile, up to 100 other protesters at the site were charged with provincial regulatory offences.

Mischief ignored: The “Coutts Four” – (left to right) Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, Jerry Morin and Christopher Lysak – were found guilty of serious crimes arising from a tense blockade at the Coutts, Alberta border crossing. While Olienick and Carbert were also found guilty of mischief, their six-month sentences for this crime are to be served concurrently with their other, longer sentences. (Source of montage: CBC)

This past February, Lysak pled guilty to possession of a weapon in an unauthorized place and Morin pled guilty to conspiracy to traffic firearms – clearly serious offences, but a vast reduction from the potential life sentences they faced. Both were sentenced to time served. More recently, Olienick and Carbert each received sentences of six-and-a-half years for various weapons offences. As for their mischief charges, each received an additional six-month sentence to be served concurrently with the other, more serious convictions. Finally, an Alberta law firm recently announced that of nearly 50 clients facing provincial charges for participating in the Coutts border protest, all either had their cases dropped or resolved for a nominal fine of $1 each.

At this point, Lich and Barber appear to be the only remaining major participants from the entire national saga who are still available to punish.

“Prosecutorial Vendetta”

While outcomes have varied, a clear pattern emerges from a survey of mischief charges laid during the Emergencies Act. Most have been dismissed or returned with a not guilty verdict after only a few days in court. A few – such as Billings’ guilty plea – have resulted in a minor sentence befitting the minor character of the crime itself. For Olienick and Carbert, their guilty verdicts for mischief had no impact on their overall jail time; they faced much more serious charges, and their mischief was essentially ignored. And the mischief trial for Pat King, who is still awaiting his verdict, was completed in three weeks.

‘There is no question whatsoever that this is a political trial,’ Goldkind states emphatically in an interview.

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By comparison, the trial of Lich and Barber stretched into a 13-month epic, comprising 45 trial days. All for a collection of rather modest mischief and obstruction charges. Why would that be?

The answer, according to Ari Goldkind, a high-profile Toronto criminal defence lawyer, lies in the exact thing Wetscher tried so hard to wave away during her concluding statement: politics. “There is no question whatsoever that this is a political trial,” Goldkind states emphatically in an interview. For the Trudeau government to justify its suspension of Canadians’ civil liberties through the Emergencies Act requires an identifiable villain or two. Lich and Barber fit that bill. The length and unprecedented vigour with which the Crown has pursued the pair – Lich especially – as well as the manner in which the trial has dragged on, argues Goldkind, suggest there’s a “prosecutorial vendetta” against them.

“Prosecutorial vendetta”: Referring to Lich and Barber, high-profile Toronto criminal defence lawyer Ari Goldkind says, “There is no question whatsoever that this is a political trial.” (Source of photo: Lorenda Reddekopp/CBC)

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Lich herself arrived in Ottawa, the diminutive, then-49-year-old Métis grandmother quickly became the public “face” of the protest. At a February 3 press conference, for example, she was introduced as “the spark that lit this fire and the leader of this organization.” And while she claims in her book Hold the Line: My story from the heart of the Freedom Convoy that such a description “wasn’t accurate,” she nonetheless admits she filled a necessary role. “I guess I found a talent I didn’t know I had before,” she writes, speculating that her time spent on stage with her band might have prepared her for all the attention. “But I mostly feel like it was guided by God,” she adds.

While the Freedom Convoy was essentially ungovernable, comprised as it was of many disparate groups and publicity-seeking, independent-minded individuals, Lich tried her best to put her own calm and reasonable stamp on the proceedings. Throughout the protest, Lich’s efforts were observably peaceful and without any apparent mal intent. One of her first acts was to set up an independent group of accountants to handle the flood of donations financing the protest to prevent any suggestion of financial impropriety. In her dealings with the police, she always tried to find common ground – a fact readily acknowledged by police witnesses during the trial. Sergeant Jordan Blonde of the OPS protest liaison team, for example, noted in his testimony that Lich was always “polite” in his dealings with her, and that the protest itself was comprised of “many different groups and factions… [and] unattached people” who were not “aligned with anybody.”

In her own interactions with the protesters, over whom she had no real control, Lich repeatedly stressed the protest’s peaceful nature and worked tirelessly to rid the movement of disreputable or hateful characters. She even cobbled together a deal with Ottawa mayor Watson to move some trucks out of the downtown area; ironically, that deal went into effect on the same day as the Emergencies Act was invoked. As her lawyer Lawrence Greenspon observed in a brief courthouse lobby interview, “She is a genuine, very pleasant person, and almost a throwback to the peace-and-love days. She was preaching all along that ‘we only wanted a peaceful, non-violent demonstration.’”

“A throwback to the peace-and-love days”: According to her lawyer Lawrence Greenspon (at left centre, in barrister’s robe), Lich was a source of calm and grace throughout the protest and “only wanted a peaceful, non-violent demonstration.” (Source of photo: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

Perhaps it’s this “peace-and-love” attitude that has provoked such spite towards her. Whatever the reason, the official animosity has been painfully obvious. While the physically-imposing Barber was released on bail less than 48-hours after his arrest, Lich spent 18 days awaiting bail. At her first bail hearing, Ontario Justice Julie Bourgeois claimed Lich posed such a risk to the “physical, mental and financial health and well-being” of the people of Ottawa that she denied her application outright. Only after a bail review hearing several weeks later was Lich finally released pending trial. As Goldkind points out, many extremely violent and/or repeat offenders in Canada spend no time at all in jail following their arrest. This, as many critics observe, is the result of the Liberals’ 2019 bail reform package widely derided as a “catch-and-release” policy; it apparently doesn’t apply to Lich.

When she was finally set free, Lich returned to Alberta saddled with a long list of bail conditions, including that she neither publicly support the protest nor have any contact with other protest organizers unless a lawyer is present. “After weeks of fighting for Canadians’ right[s] and freedoms, I was losing so many of mine,” she laments in Hold the Line. It was because of these efforts, however, that in June 2022 it was announced that Lich had been awarded the annual George Jonas Freedom Award, sponsored by the JCCF. Naturally enough she wanted to go to Toronto to accept the honour in person. But before she could, the Crown came after her yet again.

At her next bail hearing, the Crown argued that the decade of prison time Lich faced made her a flight risk and that she should be kept in jail until her trial was over – a move that would have resulted in several years of imprisonment, regardless of the verdict.

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At a court hearing necessitated by the award (since her bail conditions also banned her from setting foot in Ontario), Crown prosecutor Moiz Karimjee argued that simply by accepting the honour, Lich had violated the terms of her bail and should be locked up again. Such an absurdity was quickly brushed aside by the presiding judge, who ruled she could travel to Ontario to attend the celebration, provided she abided by the remainder of her bail restrictions. While there, however, Lich was photographed standing beside another convoy participant, Tom Marrazzo.

The fateful photo: When she went to Toronto to accept the 2022 George Jonas Freedom Award at a gala presentation, Lich was photographed beside fellow protester Tom Marrazzo (second from right) with lawyers standing just off-camera. This led to a Canada-wide warrant for her arrest and another 31 days in jail. (Source of photo: CBC)

 

 

 

 

 

As she recalls in her book, “Lawyers were standing just outside the frame” when the picture was snapped, in fulfilment of her bail conditions. No matter. When the lawyer-less picture began circulating on social media after she’d returned home, Karimjee issued a Canada-wide arrest warrant in her name. Two homicide detectives were then dispatched from Ottawa to pick Lich up in Medicine Hat; the two burly detectives slapped her in leg shackles for the trip to the Calgary airport. You can’t be too careful with grandmothers.

At her next bail hearing, the Crown argued that the decade of prison time Lich faced made her a flight risk and that she should be kept in jail until her trial was over – a move that would have resulted in several years of imprisonment, regardless of the verdict. To this request, Superior Court Justice Andrew Goodman asked Karimjee if he could name a single mischief case in Canada that had resulted in a 10-year sentence. When Karimjee demurred, Goodman set Lich free once more.

In his ruling, Goodman offered his own expert opinion on the fate awaiting Lich. She “is charged with mischief and obstructing police-related offences, not sedition or inciting a riot,” the judge pointed out. “It is highly unlikely that this 49-year-old accused, with no prior criminal record and questions regarding her direct participation in the overall protests…would face a potentially lengthy term of imprisonment.”

Even if she’s found guilty, Goodman concluded, she’ll probably be sentenced to no more than time already served. All told, that amounts to 49 nights in jail. Says Goldkind: “That’s 49 nights longer in jail than someone who is caught driving three-times over the legal [alcohol] limit would likely face.” Had Karimjee gotten his way, however, she’d still be in jail – a term of 28 months and counting.

In an effort to explain the Crown’s extreme hostility towards her, Lich reveals in her book that prosecutor Karimjee has donated over $17,000 to the federal Liberal Party since 2013 and that his generosity has merited an invitation to at least one “donor appreciation” event with Trudeau himself. Similarly, Bourgeois, the judge who initially denied Lich bail, was once a Liberal candidate in an Ottawa-area riding during the 2011 federal election. In her journey through the courts to that point – a case the Crown argues is not political in any way – it was Karimjee and Bourgeoise, both with longstanding and very public Liberal sympathies, who had been the gatekeepers of a legal system intent on holding her to account for leading a massive political protest against the Liberal government. As Lich writes, “I didn’t stand a chance.”

“I didn’t stand a chance”: According to Lich’s book Hold the Line, Crown prosecutor Moiz Karimjee (top right) made substantial donations to the Liberal Party of Canada beginning in 2013, while the judge in her initial bail hearing, Justice Julie Bourgeois (bottom right), ran as a Liberal candidate in the 2011 federal election. (Sources of photo: (top right) True North; (bottom right) juliebourgeoisgpr/YouTube)

Part II of “Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber” will appear on November 5.

Lynne Cohen is a journalist and non-practicing lawyer in Ottawa. She has published four books, including the biography Let Right Be Done: The Life and Times of Bill Simpson.

Source of main image: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld.

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C2C Journal

The Indigenous “Land Back” Movement: A Land Mine for Canadians

Published on October 26, 2024

By

From the C2C Journal

By Michael Melanson
Amidst the litany of grievances levelled by Indigenous organizations it is easy to overlook the genuine progress made by some First Nations. Democratically elected native governments have negotiated additional rights, expanded their lands and gained control over natural resources and major projects, creating a sustainable economic base. But that apparently isn’t the course desired by a vocal subset of politically charged Indigenous North Americans. They’re unsatisfied with incremental progress or compromise. They are all grievance, all the time. And they want it all. Michael Melanson examines the emergence of the Indigenous “Land Back” concept, its evolution into militancy and potential violence, and its recent metastasis into some of the darkest crevices of the human psyche.

At a recent in-service for Manitoba teachers on the subject of Indigenous education, attendees were told by guest speaker Christopher Emdin that “resistance to colonialism is not terrorism” – the words splashed across a giant display screen. The American author and educational theorist was alluding to the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attack against Israel, but he was also making a general statement about lands “occupied by settler colonialists” – i.e., ordinary non-Indigenous Canadians. Emdin had been hired because “settler colonialism” has become a source of pedagogical angst in the Winnipeg School Division. In trying to do its bit to effect Indigenous Reconciliation, the division – like others across Canada – has come to regard settler colonialism as the historic yet current oppressor. Emdin’s message conveyed an essential subtext: Indigenous people have a right to resist colonial occupation by any means necessary in order to get their land back.

Land Back is a political sentiment originating among Indigenous thinkers and activists in the United States that is now flourishing in Canada. Land Back is fundamentally revanchist: it seeks a return of lands considered to have been possessed by North American Indigenous peoples before contact with Europeans. As such, virtually all of North America can be regarded as former native territory if “possession” is defined loosely enough. It is difficult to characterize Land Back as a political movement because it lacks the associated cohesion and formal organization. Its core impulses are a combination of mysticism, grievance, aspiration and ideology. But its goals are unquestionably political – often fiercely so.

“Resistance to colonialism is not terrorism,” Christopher Emdin recently told a gathering of Winnipeg teachers; the American educational theorist was speaking in reference to Hamas’ terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 (right) but also as a general condemnation of “settler colonialism”. (Sources of photos: (left) The Brainwaves Video Anthology/YouTube; (right) AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

Definitions of Land Back (also sometimes spelled Landback, LandBack or #LandBack) vary among professional and grassroots activists, opinion-leaders and other adherents. Jesse Wente, the journalist and current Chair of the Canada Council for the Arts, says Land Back is “about the decision-making power. It’s about self-determination for our Peoples here that should include some access to the territories and resources in a more equitable fashion, and for us to have control over how that actually looks.”

Ronald Gamblin, an Anishinaabe from Manitoba who is National Learning Community Coordinator of the 4Rs Youth Movement, states that the term “encompasses a complicated and intergenerational web of ideas/movements. When I hear Indigenous youth and land protectors chant ‘Land Back!’ at a rally, I know it can mean the literal restoration of land ownership. When grandmothers and knowledge keepers say it, I tend to think it means more the stewardship and protection of mother earth. When Indigenous political leaders say it, it often means comprehensive land claims and self-governing agreements.”

No single definition: Canadian arts journalist Jesse Wente (bottom left) describes Land Back as being “about the decision-making power”, while for Ronald Gamblin (bottom right) from 4Rs Youth Movement, the meaning depends on the person using it. Still others say it includes having the Sioux tribe gain control over the iconic U.S. Presidential Memorial at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota (top). (Sources of photos: (top) Dean Franklin, licensed under CC BY 2.0; (bottom left) Royal Ontario Museum/YouTube; (bottom right) 4Rs Youth Movement)

From its general beginnings around 2010 or even earlier, Land Back’s first explicit expression came in 2018, according to Wikipedia, when Arnell Tailfeathers, a member of the Blood Tribe in Alberta, used it in the protests demanding the reversion to Sioux tribal control of the world-famous U.S. Presidential Memorial at Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Versions of Land Back now are also found in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Mexico.

Though it is hard to pin down precisely – as the varying descriptions above make clear – generally speaking Land Back is a militant iteration of aboriginal nationalism. Proponents often disavow the legitimacy of Canada and the United States and frequently express hostility to their citizenry, whom they label “settler colonialists”. As in virtually all expressions of ethnic and racial nationalism, an autonomous sovereign territory is sought by some Land Back proponents.

This article on the website of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (not to be confused with the High River, Alberta newspaper of the same name) attempts to instruct “white” readers in the Land Back movement’s virtues – and is therefore instructive in another way. It defines “land ownership” as merely a tactic “that keeps wealth and power in white families” (Hispanic and blacks apparently being uninterested in owning land), equates police with “violence”, lays essentially all of North America’s current ills at the feet of Europeans, suggests “Western colonizers” are “evil”, and talks about “so-called” civilization.

While the sentiments of Land Back are most commonly expressed at the populist levels of social media and public events, the initial success and popularity of early Land Back activists prompted composition of a formal manifesto in 2019: Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper. It is written in the spirit of the 1970 Citizens Plus “Red Paper” by Harold Cardinal of the Indian Association of Alberta, which had been issued to angrily counter the Pierre Trudeau government’s preceding White Paper (formally, the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969).

Although the 1969 White Paper recognized the clear problems arising from ‘the policy of treating Indian people as a race apart,’ it nonetheless did not call for the complete disassembly of the reserve system or the erasure of Indians’ separate status, but recommended something closer to what Quebec nationalists would later famously term ‘sovereignty-association’.

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The new Red Paper makes it clear that Land Back aims to rationalize aboriginal sovereignty and, as it states on page 48, assert “fulsome Indigenous jurisdiction”. The 65-page document proposes a radical departure from liberal-democratic norms. It seeks to override the non-Indigenous nation-state and privilege a minority on the basis of ethnic/racial origin. The authors appear well-aware of what they are doing. They seek to justify a cultural exception to our ostensibly universalist liberal-democratic creed by using the assimilationist caricature of the 1969 White Paper as their theoretical foil.

Despite being widely if not universally portrayed as such – including by the authors of both Red Papers – the 1969 White Paper was not in my opinion concerned about cultural assimilation, but actually sought a third alternative to Canada’s historically fluctuating and often contradictory Indian policies of segregation and assimilation. Unfortunately, the White Paper only vaguely outlined this third alternative, as in the following passage from page 13: “For many years Canadians believed the Indian people had but two choices: they could live [in effective segregation] in a reserve community, or they could be assimilated and lose their Indian identity. Today Canada has more to offer. There is a third choice – a full role in Canadian society and in the economy while retaining, strengthening and developing an Indian identity which preserves the good things of the past and helps Indian people to prosper and thrive.”

A 2019 official manifesto of Land Back activists (top left) advocates for “fulsome Indigenous jurisdiction” and a radical departure from Western liberal-democratic norms; their argument is based on a common critique of the Pierre Trudeau government’s 1969 Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, aka the White Paper (top right).

Although the White Paper recognized the clear problems arising from “the policy of treating Indian people as a race apart,” it nonetheless did not call for the complete disassembly of the reserve system or the erasure of Indians’ separate status, but recommended something closer to what Quebec nationalists would later famously term “sovereignty-association”. As the paper states: “Frustration is as great a handicap as a sense of grievance. True co-operation and participation can only come when the Indian people are controlling the land which makes up the reserves.”

The failure of the White Paper as a new policy direction resulted in a continuation of the frustration and grievance of the failed reserve system and, half a century later, Land Back activists like the Red Paper authors are trying to redeem the added years of misery. “Our times, too, are revolutionary,” the document states on page 6. “While tragically little has changed since 1968-1970, there are also emerging debates to reflect on and work through together. We continue to grapple with federal and provincial bureaucrats and/or industry on rights, title, and jurisdiction, but we are increasingly turning inward and are having productive conversations about what reclaiming land and water might look like, for all of us.”

“Citizens plus”: The 1970 “Red Paper” challenged the principles of universalism and racial equality, demanding special rights and thereby giving rise to the notion of “Indigenous exceptionalism”. Shown, Harold Cardinal (standing), 25-year-old leader of the Indian Association of Alberta, addresses Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his cabinet during a Parliament Hill meeting, June 4, 1970. (Source of photo: CP PHOTO)

This is a disingenuous remark on the post-White Paper stasis, because that state of affairs was itself largely promulgated by the aboriginal nationalists of the day (and their white academic supporters), who fiercely denounced and resisted any civil reforms that might have resulted in Indians becoming like other citizens of Canada. This stance would have profound consequences.

The 1970s and 80s gave rise to the idea of Canada’s Indians becoming “citizens plus” – as the original Red Paper’s formal title suggested – meaning they would have the same rights as other citizens but also held additional rights by virtue of being aboriginal people. This is also when a notion of “Indigenous exceptionalism” arose and began to challenge the principle of universalism – the liberal-democratic ideal that every citizen should be equal and none should be discriminated against on the basis of race or ethnicity, and which had otherwise come to inform social and government policy in Canada. The great Mackenzie Valley Pipeline debate crystallized and amplified these elements, as well as birthing the Canadian version of the “decolonization” movement, as chronicled in this C2C article.

Forty-six years after Pierre Trudeau’s White Paper, his son was articulating just how far the idea of Indigenous exceptionalism had progressed in Canadian political discourse. During the 2015 federal election campaign, Justin Trudeau said that his government would “renew the nation-to-nation relationship with aboriginal people.” Then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper neglected to press Trudeau on just what he meant by that promise, unfortunately so, because it is a highly dubious statement. What nation-to-nation relationship, never mind what happened to it that necessitated renewal?

The relatively recent concept of universalism fundamentally rejects distinctions in law and governance on the basis of ancestry. The large exception being made for aboriginal people is based mainly on historical grievance: as the Indigenous people of Canada, they suffered from the colonization of their homelands by foreign nations and therefore deserve special considerations of redress.

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Land Back can thus be seen as an accelerant to that fuzzy notion of renewing intra-national relationships (given there are at least 630 First Nations, there are potentially hundreds of nation-to-nation relationships in need of renewal), something that would guarantee years if not decades of grinding political negotiations, with all the frustration, disappointment and anger that would surely entail, leading to still more strife. The new Red Paper’s authors suggest what this might mean when they hint at the inherent militancy of Land Back on page 56: “[Another], and perhaps more direct, type of assertion revolves around physical reclamation or occupation of lands and waters.” If negotiations fail, in other words, we have other tactics at the ready.

Gamblin is explicit about this: “When you look at it, as Indigenous peoples and nations, we come from the land. The land is our home, our mother, our caregiver, it’s what makes us Indigenous,” he writes on the 4Rs Youth Movement website. “Considering this, non-Indigenous folks need to understand that land back is about much more than land. You need to understand that when you hear youth scream ‘LAND BACK’, when you see land protectors stand off against the RCMP, when elders make prayers for the land, and when political figures sit in land negotiations, Land back is about Indigenous peoples confronting colonialism at the root. It’s about fighting for the right to our relationship with the earth. It’s about coming back to ourselves, as sovereign Indigenous Nations.”

The implications of “Indigenous exceptionalism”: Shown at top, graphic art recently posted to social media (at left) and spraypainted on a walkway (location unknown, at right) carrying violence-inciting messages; at bottom left, protesters unload a truck full of tires as they fortify a rail blockade in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, Belleville, Ontario, February 2020; bottom right, Ontario Provincial Police arrest a protester at the same blockade. (Sources of photos: (top right) dav, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (bottom left) The Canadian Press/Lars Hagberg; (bottom right) The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

The existential association of being with land has been common if not ubiquitous among Indigenous peoples worldwide throughout history. It has been widely romanticized and is typically regarded as essentially harmless, or at least understandable. But when viewed unsentimentally, it is clear that it is ethno-centric and exclusionary if not explicitly racist. In perhaps its worst expression, the Nazis harnessed this atavistic impulse in their racist doctrine of Blut und Boden (which means “blood and soil”): since they are from the land, they are of the land and, as such, have more right to the land than someone who came to this land from elsewhere.

The relatively recent concept of universalism fundamentally rejects distinctions in law and governance on the basis of ancestry. The large (and ever-growing) exception being made for aboriginal people is based mainly on historical grievance: as the Indigenous people of Canada, they suffered from the colonization of their homelands by foreign nations and therefore deserve special considerations of redress.

Turning again to Gamblin, who provides a routine example of this mindset. “The architects of Canadian colonial policy,” he writes, “knew that if they wanted access to the lands in order to generate wealth and power, that they would need to separate us from this relationship. So, they used tactics such as forced relocation away from our homes and onto reserves (Canada’s apartheid system), introduction of patriarchal governance (Indian Act Chiefs), starvation of traditional resources (such as buffalo massacres), breaking family units and knowledge transfer through Indian Residential Schools, targeting women and children with violent policies, limiting our access to on the land cultural practices, and even making it illegal for us to fight in the Canadian legal framework for stolen land. These were systematic tactics intended on destroying our relationship with our mother.”

Among the Canadian “colonial” government’s “systematic tactics intended on destroying our relationship with our mother”, Gamblin names “targeting women and children with violent policies” and “buffalo massacres”, yet verifiable historical facts contradict his accusations. Shown at top, Indigenous children receiving medical examination; at bottom, a pile of bison skulls in the United States, 1892. (Source of bottom photo: Burton Historical Collection/Detroit Public Library)

Space does not permit a thorough parsing of Gamblin’s litany of grievances, but none of what he writes should be taken at face value. Although superficially factual at first glance, each phrase is loaded with emotionally charged adjectives and adverbs, exaggerations or falsehoods. The intent appears to be to convince by sleight-of-hand and emotion rather than historical accuracy.

Two quick examples by way of illustration. First, to Gamblin’s accusation of “targeting women and children with violent policies”. Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, saw to it that every native Canadian was vaccinated against smallpox – in some cases, receiving inoculation even before the local white population. Second, “buffalo massacres” as a “systematic tactic” of “Canadian colonial policy”. It is established that well over 90 percent of the eradication of North America’s up to 50 million bison occurred in the United States. Of the rest, much of this was done by Indian and Métis buffalo hunters and, of that portion, nearly all of it took place before the newly formed Dominion of Canada gained legal control over the Prairies in 1870. The Government of Canada inherited a tragedy; it did not bring it about.

The new Red Paper’s academic tone is an exception to standard aboriginal activist discourse, but it too resorts to emotional hooks. “The stakes of these struggles are immense,” the authors state on page 64. “Of course, while Indigenous land and life are the focus here, the life of our species and of the planet are at risk from the type of economic philosophy and practices of (sic) perpetuated by colonialism and settler colonialism…So the matter of land back is not merely a matter of justice, rights or ‘reconciliation’; Indigenous jurisdiction can indeed help mitigate the loss of biodiversity and climate crisis…Canada – and states generally must listen.”

Having used decolonization ideology as a springboard to investing Indigenous-led solutions with the capacity to save the world, the Red Paper portrays the nation-state as posing a barrier to such an Indigenous-led global salvation. It portrays the UN as “an organization of states that first and foremost defends the territorial integrity of sovereign states,” which “means that states are the primary vehicle to address climate change and loss of biodiversity.” And so, the paper laments on page 65, “Even while the UN recognizes the harms states perpetuate against Indigenous people (including denying consent), they cannot imagine non-state Indigenous-led solutions that may threaten the state system.”

A global saviour in our midst: The Red Paper lays the blame for the world’s climate and biodiversity crises on settler-colonialism and calls for expanding the Land Back movement’s scope to one that offers “non-state Indigenous-led solutions” for the whole world. (Source of photo: Backbone Campaign, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

The Red Paper authors appear to be suggesting that Indigenous organizations (to be determined) be given supra-jurisdictional authority. As grandiose and unrealistic as it sounds, it seems that they think aboriginal people should rule the world because they know what is best for the world and they know that because they are of the world in a way that non-Indigenous people are not; Mother Earth has given them her blessings as a birthright.

The continuing and in some ways worsening Indigenous/non-Indigenous dichotomy is a bane of humanity; it is antithetical to humanism because it presumes to determine who belongs here the most and who the least. If humanity matters most, it cannot matter who was here first. Some of the more sophisticated Indigenous exceptionalists are now staking their global campaign for jurisdiction on an issue of convenience: the fears of an existential peril – climate apocalypse – underpinned by the belief that they are somehow imbued with knowledge, skills and a force of origin that ordinary mortals do not possess. It is of course preposterous, and surely tempting to laugh off such presumption. But it needs to be taken seriously, for it is ultimately a mythos of race that justifies dominance of a sort that, in my view, has genuine and deeply disturbing parallels to Nazi “blood and soil” mysticism.

A new iteration of “Blood and Soil”? Land Back’s fundamental ethno-centrism mushrooms into overt racism among some of its extremist adherents, reminding the author of Nazism’s Blut und Boden doctrine, which held that only the racially pure local Volk had rights to the land. Shown at left, logo of the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture; at right, farmers in Innsbruck, Austria wave swastika flags to salute German soldiers, March 1938. (Source of right photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2005-0923-505, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 de)

Transposed to dullards and maladapts, the sentiments of Land Back become a surly revanchism that does not balk at the potential for barbarism. A disturbing number of Indigenous activists have, for example, come out in support of Hamas, grotesquely refashioning the October 7 atrocity as an act of decolonization. The Idle No More movement hosted a webinar barely a month after the massacre called “From Turtle Island To Palestine”, and a month after that Red Nation in the U.S. staged a teach-in on the same subject. “Palestine is actually doing a Land Back,” declared Sioux activist and academic Nick Estes, who spoke at both events. “They’re actually doing what we think we want to do but we haven’t gone there yet. Palestine is just doing it now…and for me, that was beautiful. I just want our resistance to be so strong, our fire as a people so strong that we just take back what is ours.”

Like Land Back, ‘decolonization’ is a term without fixed definition holding the potential to signify insurrection or violent, racially targeted civil strife. At the very least, in their ambiguous current states of definition, both are programs for which anyone with a chip on their shoulder can ‘write code’.

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Thankfully, there are courageous and notable Indigenous voices calling out such twisted opportunism. Noting that in Israel, it is Jews who are the Indigenous people, Chris Sankey, a businessman and former elected councillor of the Lax Kw Alaams Band near Prince Rupert, B.C., roundly condemned both the Hamas massacre and the attempt to distort its meaning to serve Canadian Indigenous activists’ decolonization agenda. “What has troubled me the most has been the frequency with which my peoples’ struggle for reconciliation has been invoked to justify the bloodshed, often by so-called ‘experts’ in the academy,” Sankey wrote in the National Post. “This is an absurd and, frankly, offensive comparison, as Indigenous-Canadians and Palestinians stand worlds apart.”

Like Land Back, “decolonization” is a term without fixed definition holding the potential to signify insurrection or violent, racially targeted civil strife. It can never be said often enough: “decolonization” is a foreign idea, developed in the context of wars of independence in Africa by trained Marxists who advocated organized violence from the start. It is itself hateful and racist.

Speaking in support of the Hamas atrocities, Sioux activist Nick Estes (top right) praised the Palestinian attackers for “doing a Land Back” and called for the same behaviour among his own people; Chris Sankey (bottom right), a member of the Tsimshian community of Lax Kw’ Alaams in northwest B.C., replies that “Indigenous-Canadians and Palestinians stand worlds apart.” Shown at bottom left, members of Samidoun (subsequently designated a terrorist organization) burn a Canadian flag on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, October 7, 2024. (Sources of photos (clockwise starting top left): Appalachians Against Pipelines/Facebook; @nickwestes/X; Conservative Paty of British Columbia; Jarryd Jaeger)

At the very least, in their ambiguous current states of definition, both are programs for which anyone with a chip on their shoulder can “write code”. Some of those defining those terms are brooding nationalists informed by a colossal ledger of grievances against “settler colonialism” who are self-propelled with an existential sense of moral and mortal imperative and have come to regard themselves as a higher order of the human species. This is real: the Indigenous campaign to force the changing of the name of Powell River, B.C., has featured one aboriginal leader repeatedly referring to white Canadians as “subhuman”.

We should take caution. Between the pity, reverence and romanticization of Indigenous peoples and ways, there is a blind spot in which a ruthless racialist ideology can continue to grow.

Michael Melanson is a writer and tradesperson living in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Source of main image: The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette.

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C2C Journal

A Planet that Might not Need Saving: Can CO2 Even Drive Global Temperature?

Published on October 19, 2024

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From C2C Journal

By Jim Mason
Climate change has ingrained itself so deeply in the public consciousness that it’s likely an article of faith that the foundational science was all conducted, tested and confirmed decades ago. Surely to goodness, exactly how carbon dioxide (CO2) behaves in the atmosphere is “settled science”, right? That more CO2 emitted equals more heat and higher temperature is a cornerstone of the ruling scientific paradigm. And yet, finds Jim Mason, the detailed dynamics of how, when and to what degree CO2 transforms radiation into atmospheric heat are anything but settled. So much remains unknown that recent academic research inquiring whether CO2 at its current atmospheric concentrations can even absorb more heat amounts to breaking new ground in climate science. If it can’t, notes Mason, then further changes in CO2 levels not only won’t drive “global boiling”, they won’t have any impact on climate at all.

Electric Vehicles (EVs) – by which are usually meant battery-operated electric vehicles, or BEVs – have long been touted in many countries as the central element in the strategy for stopping global climate change. Canada is no exception. The Liberal government’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Stephen Guilbeault, has mandated that by 2030, 60 percent of all vehicles sold in Canada must be BEVs, rising to 100 percent by 2035. In anticipation of the accompanying surge in BEV sales, the federal and Ontario governments have offered huge subsidies to battery manufacturing companies. But now, EV sales are stagnating and automobile manufacturers that were rushing headlong into EV production have dramatically scaled back their plans. Ford Motor Company has even decided that, instead of converting its Oakville, Ontario plant to EV production, it will retool it to produce the Super Duty models of its best-selling – and internal combustion engine-powered – pickup truck line.

Heating up the rhetoric: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (top left) has declared; prominent voices such as former U.S. Vice President Al Gore (top right) insist it’s “settled science” that “humans are to blame” for global warming; this view has been accepted by millions worldwide (bottom). (Sources of photos: (top left) UNclimatechange, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (top right) World Economic Forum, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (bottom) Takver from Australia, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

A big part of the justification for forcing Canadians into EVs has been that we must “follow the science.” Namely, the “settled” science which holds that the planet’s atmosphere is heating dangerously and that humans are the cause of this via our prodigious emissions of heat-trapping gases – mainly carbon dioxide (CO2) – which are magnifying the atmosphere’s “greenhouse” effect. Over the past several decades the accompanying political rhetoric has also heated up, from initial concerns over global warming and a threatened planet – terms that at least accommodated political and scientific debate – to categorical declarations of a “climate emergency”. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres asserted last year, “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

The foundational term “follow the science” is loaded, however. It is code for “follow the science disseminated by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” Article 1 of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change actually defines climate change as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity”. Elsewhere the document clearly identities CO2 emitted through the burning of fossil fuels as the causative human activity. So the UN and IPCC long ago limited the scope of what is presented to the public as a scientific investigation and decided not only on the cause of the problem but also the nature of the solution, namely radically driving down “anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.”

The worldwide climate change movement has proved remarkably successful in creating what is known as a “ruling paradigm”. This phenomenon is common in many fields and not necessarily harmful. But in this instance, what is billed as a scientific endeavour has strictly limited the role of open scientific inquiry. The “science” that the movement wants humanity to follow is the result of inferential, inductive interpretation of empirical observations, declared to be “settled science” on the basis of a claimed consensus rather than as a result of controlled, repeatable experiments designed not to reinforce the paradigm but to test it for falsifiability, in accordance with the scientific method. This paradigm has allowed Guterres, for example, to claim that “for scientists, it is unequivocal – humans are to blame.” But it is missing (or attempts to exclude) a key element: rigorous experimentation that subjects the theory on which the paradigm is built to disinterested scientific scrutiny.

Following whose science? The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines climate change as being solely “attributed directly or indirectly to human activity,” particularly the burning of fossil fuels, thus limiting not only the scope of public discourse but pertinent scientific inquiry as well. (Sources: (left photo) Robin Utrecht/abacapress.com; (middle photo) Qiu Chen/Xinhua/abacapress.com; (graph) IPCC, 2023: Summary for Policymakers, Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report)

Thankfully, some scientists still are conducting this kind of research and, for those who value and follow properly-done science, the results can be eye-opening. Two recent scientific papers appear of particular interest in this regard. Each is aimed at assessing the role of CO2 in influencing atmospheric temperature. Nobody doubts whether carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas; the real questions are how much additional radiant energy CO2 is currently absorbing (such as due to the burning of fossil fuels) compared to the past, and what impact this has on the climate.

One might have thought such work would have been done 30 or more years ago but, apparently, it has not. That additional CO2 emitted into the atmosphere absorbs additional radiant energy, and that such additions do so in a linear fashion, are two of climate change theory’s critical premises. So it would seem crucial to establish scientifically whether gases emitted due to human activity – like CO2 – are capable of raising the Earth’s atmospheric temperature and, accordingly, justify their assigned role of causative agent in humanity’s planet-threatening villainy. The papers discussed below thus deal with questions of profound importance to climate change theory and the policy response of countries around the world.

If CO2 is not actually an effective current driver of atmospheric temperature, the implications are staggering.

How – and How Much – CO2 Traps Heat in the Atmosphere

The first paper developed a mathematically rigorous theory from first principles regarding the absorption of long-wavelength radiation (LWR) by a column of air as the concentration of CO2 (or other greenhouse gases such as water vapour, methane, ozone or nitrous oxide) increases in the atmosphere.

The Earth receives solar energy mainly in shorter wavelengths, including visible light. According to NASA, just under half of this incident radiation reaches the ground, where it is absorbed and transformed into heat. Of that half, just over one-third is radiated back into the atmosphere; about one-third of that amount is absorbed by heat-trapping gases, including CO2. (The air’s main constituents of oxygen and nitrogen are essentially transparent to both incoming visible radiation and outgoing LWR). Importantly, CO2 can only absorb meaningful amounts of LWR in two specific bands, but in these bands, it can absorb all of it.

The greenhouse effect, oversimplified and distorted: This seemingly easy-to-understand info-graphic downplays the fact that a large proportion of incoming solar radiation returns to space, omits the key fact that there would be no life on Earth without the natural greenhouse effect, and leaves out the most significant greenhouse gas of all: water vapour. (Source of image: EDUCBA)

The paper employs formulae whose explanation exceeds the scope of this article, but in simplified terms the theory predicts that at some concentration – designated as “C” – one-half of the LWR in the absorbable band is absorbed. Importantly, the theory postulates that the absorption of LWR does not increase in a linear fashion along with the increase in atmospheric CO2. Instead, as the gas concentration increases, the incremental amount absorbed decreases. At twice the C value – 2C – only three-quarters of the incident radiation would be absorbed. And at 3C, seven-eighths.

By 10C, 99.9 percent of the absorbable LWR is being absorbed. In effect, the atmosphere has become “saturated” with the gas from a radiation-absorption perspective and further increases in CO2 have negligible effect on absorption. This relationship is illustrated in Figure 1. As one can see, it is distinctly non-linear in nature, but is instead exponential, asymptotically approaching 100 percent absorption.

Figure 1: Theoretical graphical depiction of absorption of incident radiation as a function of the concentration of an absorbing gas, in this case forming the core of a theory concerning how long-wave radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface is absorbed by atmospheric CO2. (Source of graph: Jim Mason)

This graph could appear quite scary at first glance. After all, as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, more LWR is being absorbed, suggesting more heat is being retained instead of escaping to outer space. So doesn’t the Figure 1 curve suggest that, with CO2 concentrations rising and potentially doubling during our era compared to pre-Industrial times, global warming is indeed occurring, CO2 is indeed the cause, and the IPCC’s warnings are justified? The answers depend on what the value of C actually is for CO2 and what the concentration of CO2 is in the atmosphere today. In other words, on where the Earth now sits along that curve, and where it sat when the pre-Industrial era came to an end. That, in turn, will require actual physical experiments – and these are covered later.

Figure 2: View from end of air column showing random positions of radiation-absorbing gas molecules, with red circles representing their associated radiation-absorbing cross-section. (Source of illustration: Jim Mason)

The non-linear LWR/absorption relationship can be understood conceptually as follows. Each physical CO2 molecule has what amounts to a surrounding area of radiation-absorption capability to specific bands of LWR. This area is “opaque” to those bands. The LWR rising from the Earth’s surface is absorbed if it travels onto this area; outside of it, it is not. The areas can be thought of as little opaque spheres around each molecule, which when viewed externally look like circles. The area of these circles is referred to as the radiation absorption cross-section.

Viewed from the end of the column of air, the circular cross-sections formed by all the CO2 molecules in the air column will effectively add up to some overall fraction of the air column’s cross-sectional area becoming opaque to the LWR. Radiation that strikes any of that area will be absorbed; radiation travelling through the rest of the column’s cross-sectional area will pass into space.

At some concentration of molecules – dubbed C in this essay, as mentioned – half of the column’s cross-section will be opaque and absorbing the incident LWR. This is illustrated in Figure 2. It is of relevance that because the gas molecules are randomly present in a column of air, when viewed from the end they will overlap; the overlapping areas cannot absorb the same radiation twice. C is the concentration at which the effective opaque area, taking into account all the overlapping, is one-half the column’s cross-sectional area.

If the gas concentration is then increased by C, i.e. is doubled, the new molecules will also have an associated opaque area equal to half of the column’s cross-sectional area. Half of this, however, will coincide with the half that is already opaque, so will have no impact. The other half, or one-quarter of the column’s cross-section, will become newly opaque and start absorbing LWR. If the concentration is again increased by C, the new molecules will also have a total opaque area equal to one-half the column cross-section, but three-quarters of this will coincide with already-opaque area so only one-quarter of that one-half, or one-eighth in total, will become new radiation-absorbing opacity.

Figure 3: Illustrative depiction of radiation-absorption cross-section illustrating how the transparent area, where additional molecules would be exposed to the radiant heat source and, therefore, would absorb radiation, is progressively reduced as more molecules are added; after several more iterations, this leads to radiation absorption “saturation” after which no further radiation is absorbed no matter how many more absorbing molecules are added, since all radiation in that wavelength band is already being absorbed. (Source of illustrations: Jim Mason)

This progression is illustrated in Figure 3, but is perhaps more easily visualized in Figure 4. Here, the half of the cross-sectional area of air column that was rendered opaque by the CO2 molecules is shown as being all on one side of the column. The opacity caused by each successive addition of C number of CO2 molecules is shown in a different colour and is positioned to highlight the impact on the remaining transparent cross-sectional area. As can be seen, each successive increase in concentration of C increases the amount of radiation absorption by decreasing amounts – by a factor of two. After ten such increases, the transparent fraction of the column would be reduced to 0.1 percent of its area so that 99.9 percent of the incident radiation is being absorbed.

Although the foregoing description is conceptually correct, a full understanding of natural processes and of the theory requires taking several other considerations into account, most of which are outside the scope of this discussion. One aspect that is important to understand: as mentioned above, CO2 and other greenhouse gases only absorb outgoing radiation efficiently in particular regions (bands) of the electromagnetic spectrum; they absorb little or none in other bands and are therefore “transparent” to any radiation in those bands. The above discussion applies to the regions of the spectrum where the gas can absorb radiant energy at 100 percent.

Figure 4: Alternative depiction of the reduction in incremental radiation-absorbing area as the absorbing gas concentration is increased in multiples of the concentration that absorbs 50 percent of the incident radiation. As in Figure 3, successive sets of molecules are indicated by red, orange and yellow with another set added, induced in green, while blue represents the remaining transparent area. (Source of illustration: Jim Mason)

Another aspect – which becomes important in the following section – is that the Earth’s surface temperature varies by location, weather, time of year and time of day. This will affect how much radiant energy goes out in various wavelengths in various places, and the absorbing gas’s absorption capacity. While the theory holds that this does not alter the basic non-linearity of absorption nor the “saturation” phenomenon, it could alter the point at which “C”, or 50 percent absorption, is reached – something that can be tested through experimentation.

Net of all this is that if the theoretical formulation is correct, one would expect to see a curve similar to Figure 1 for any individual greenhouse gas – or combination of gases – and a radiant energy source of any temperature, with the curve’s specific shape depending on the gas and/or mixture of gases and the temperature of the radiant energy source. From such a curve, it would be possible to determine the concentration at which the gas is absorbing 50 percent of the maximum energy that it will absorb when its concentration is increased to a very large value.

The paper that develops this theoretical formulation is entitled Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases and was co-authored in June 2020 by William A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer. It is highly technical and would be very difficult for anyone without a strong background in mathematics and science, ideally physics, to understand. Accordingly, the accompanying figures in this article that illustrate the paper’s key ideas in a format accessible to the layperson were produced by me, using information derived from the paper’s figures and text.

‘In order to properly understand the greenhouse effect one must take into account the nonlinearity of the effect of increased concentration of greenhouse gases,’ Watkins notes. ‘The source of the nonlinearity may be thought of in terms of a saturation of the absorption capacity of the atmosphere in particular frequency bands.’

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Van Wijngaarden is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York University in Toronto with a more-than 40-year academic track record and nearly 300 academic papers to his credit, while Happer is Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University in New Jersey who had a 50-year-long academic career and nearly 200 papers to his credit. Both authors also have numerous related academic achievements, awards and organizational memberships, and have mentored hundreds of graduate students. Happer happens to be an open skeptic of the IPCC/UN climate change “consensus”, while Van Wijngaarden has testified in a court case that the IPCC’s climate models “systematically overstate global warming”, an assertion that is incontrovertibly true.

Although their paper was not peer-reviewed and, to date, has not been published in a major academic journal, and although both scientists have endured smears in news and social media as climate skeptics or “deniers”, there has not been any known attempt to refute their theory following publication, such as by identifying errors in the logic or mathematics of their theoretical formulation. Accordingly, their paper is in my opinion an example of good science: a coherent theory aimed at explaining a known phenomenon using rigorous scientific and mathematical principles and formulae, plus supporting evidence. It is also, critically, one that can be subjected to physical experimentation, i.e., is disprovable, as we shall soon see.

Running hot: William A. van Wijngaarden (top left) and William Happer (top right), two highly credentialed physicists with outstanding academic track records, are among scientists who are openly critical of the IPCC’s accepted climate models which, as 40 years of temperature observations have clearly shown, “systematically overstate global warming”. (Source of bottom graph: CEI.org)

This opinion is supported by the fact that the same phenomenon of non-linearity and absorption saturation, along with an associated equation referred to as the Beer-Lambert Law, is discussed by Thayer Watkins, a mathematician and physicist, and professor emeritus of economics at San José State University. “In order to properly understand the greenhouse effect one must take into account the nonlinearity of the effect of increased concentration of greenhouse gases,” Watkins notes. “The source of the nonlinearity may be thought of in terms of a saturation of the absorption capacity of the atmosphere in particular frequency bands.”

Subjecting the LWR Absorption Theory to Experimentation – Or, Science the Way it Should be Done

The second paper was published in March of this year and reports on experiments conducted to test van Wijngaarden and Happer’s theory, in accordance with the standard scientific method, using several different greenhouse gases. If the experiments were properly designed to realistically duplicate natural processes and if they then generated results inconsistent with the theory, then the van Wijngaarden/Happer theory could be considered disproved. If the experiments produced results consistent with the theory, the theory would not be proved but would increase in plausibility and justify further experimentation.

Figure 6 clearly shows experimental curves that are qualitatively the same as the theoretical curve in Figure 1 derived from van Wijngaarden/Happer’s paper and the equation noted in Watkins’ website discussion.

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The experimental setup is depicted in Figure 5. It was designed to allow the concentration of CO2 within a column of gas (in kilograms per square metre of column area, or kg/m2) to be varied in a controlled way and to measure the fraction of the incident radiation that is absorbed at any concentration. The “column” of gas was contained within a cylinder comprised of a 1-metre length of 150 mm diameter PVC pipe, with polyethylene windows at either end to allow ingress and egress of the radiation. CO2 concentration was changed by injecting measured amounts of the gas via a central valve. Water valves on the cylinder bottom were used to allow an identical volume of gas to escape, thereby maintaining the pressure in the cell. (The background gases into which the CO2 was mixed are unimportant since these remained constant, with only the CO2 concentration varied.)

Figure 5: Diagram of the laboratory setup for measuring the absorption of thermal radiation in CO2. (Source of illustration: Climatic consequences of the process of saturation of radiation absorption in gases, Figure 7)

The radiation source was a glass vessel with a flat side containing oil maintained at a constant temperature. Adjacent to the flat side was a copper plate with a graphite surface facing the gas cell. This ensured that the radiant source, as seen by the cell, was uniform in temperature over the cross-section of the cell and had the radiation profile of a black body at the chosen temperature. The selected temperatures of 78.6°C and 109.5°C were, states the paper, “chosen randomly but in a manner that allowed reliable measurement of radiation intensity and demonstrated the influence of temperature on the saturation mass value.”

Results for CO2 are illustrated in Figure 6, which is taken directly from the paper. The two selected temperatures are separately graphed. Figure 6 clearly shows experimental curves that are qualitatively the same as the theoretical curve in Figure 1 derived from van Wijngaarden/Happer’s paper and the equation noted in Watkins’ website discussion. From the graph it is possible to determine that the concentration of CO2 that results in absorption of 50 percent of the absorbable radiation – the value of C introduced earlier – is about 0.04 kg/m2 for a LWR temperature of 78.6 °C (the one that is closer to the actual average temperature of the Earth’s surface, which NASA lists as 15 °C).

Figure 6: Absorption of incident radiation versus concentration of CO2, with concentration expressed as a weight per cross-sectional area of atmospheric column (kg/m2), using two experimental LWR temperatures. Absorption is effectively measured as the fraction of the total incident radiation that is absorbed in the test column, which is determined by comparing it to an identical test column that maintains the zero-point concentration throughout. The reason that A saturates at less than 1 is because there are many wavelengths in the incident radiation that CO2 does not absorb, which pass through the column regardless of the CO2 concentration, with only the other wavelengths being absorbed. (Source of graph and mathematical formula: Climatic consequences of the process of saturation of radiation absorption in gases, Figure 8)

As the paper notes, the chosen temperatures, while higher than the Earth’s mean surface temperature, facilitate reliable measurements of the radiation intensities and clearly show the effect of temperature on the saturation mass value or, equivalently, the value of C. Specifically, the graphs clearly show that the value of C decreases as the temperature of the radiant source decreases (although with only two points, the nature of the relationship cannot be reliably determined). The implications are discussed in the following section.

This experimental paper is entitled Climatic consequences of the process of saturation of radiation absorption in gases and was co-authored by Jan Kubicki, Krzysztof Kopczyński and Jarosław Młyńczak. It was published in the journal Applications in Engineering Science and cites copious sources, though it does not appear to have been peer-reviewed. Kubicki is an assistant professor in the Institute of Optoelectronics in the Military University of Technology in Warsaw, Poland. Kopczyński appears to be a colleague at the same institution specializing in the atmospheric distribution of aerosols, while Młyńczak is an adjunct professor at the same institution. All three have authored or co-authored a number of scientific papers.

Is CO2 Even Capable of Driving Global Temperatures Higher?

According to a reputable atmospheric tracking website, on September 2, 2024 the Earth’s atmospheric CO2concentration was 422.78 parts per million (ppm). Each ppm worldwide equates to a total atmospheric weight of 7.82 gigatonnes (Gt). The cited concentration therefore amounts to 3,300 Gt of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. Since the Earth’s surface area is 5.1 x 1014 m2, assuming a uniform CO2 distribution, this concentration can be translated into the units used in the above-cited experiment as 6.48 kg/m2 across the Earth’s surface.

This figure might appear at first glance to be a misprint, as 6.48 kg/m2 is approximately 160 times the CO2 C value of 0.04 kg/m2 – the concentration that absorbs 50 percent of the incident LWR. Six-point-six times the C value – the level that absorbs 99 percent of the incident LWR – is still only 0.264 kg/m2. Beyond this, further increases in gas concentration have no impact on absorption or, hence, on temperature. The Earth’s current concentration of CO2 is, accordingly, over 24 times as high as what is needed to achieve the 99 percent absorption value established by experimentation.

Long past the point of change? The Earth’s currently estimated CO2 concentration of 422.78 parts per million (ppm) is 27 times the estimated CO2 saturation level; even in the pre-Industrial era, CO2 concentrations were more than 12 times that level, suggesting the current rise in CO2 concentration is incapable of driving global temperature. (Source of graph: climate.gov)

The implications of this are quite staggering. According to climate.gov, the CO2 concentration in the pre-Industrial era was 280 ppm and prior to that it oscillated between about 180 ppm and 280 ppm. This means that even the pre-Industrial CO2 concentrations were between 64 and 100 times the C value, as well as being more than 10 times the concentrations needed to reach 99 percent absorption. The CO2 concentration, then, was saturated multiple times over with respect to LWR absorption. A glance back at Figure 2 once again makes it clear that at neither of these CO2 concentration ranges (covering present times and the pre-Industrial era) were the changes to CO2 concentration capable of having any substantive impact on the amount of LWR being absorbed or, consequently, on atmospheric temperatures – let alone the Earth’s whole climate.

Further, they probably never did. According to the published paper Geocarb III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 Over Phanerozoic Time, the CO2 concentration has never been less than 180 ppm during the so-called Phanerozoic Eon, which is the entire time during which all the rock layers in the geological column, from the Cambrian upwards, were deposited. So there has never been any point during this significant span of Earth’s history when the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was not “saturated” from a LWR absorption perspective. Consequently, throughout that entire period, if the new theory and recent experimentation are correct, changes in CO2 concentration have been incapable of having any discernible impact on the amount of LWR absorbed by the atmosphere – or, accordingly, on the global climate.

It’s true that increasing CO2 concentration could be capable of driving global atmospheric temperature higher – but only if it began at vastly lower concentrations than exist at present or at any known previous time. If such a time ever existed, it is long past. At the current order of magnitude in its concentration, CO2 simply appears not to be a factor. If further experimentation also generates results consistent with the van Wijngaarden/Happer theory, it would appear that CO2 is incapable of having any impact on atmospheric temperature at all. It cannot, accordingly, be the primary source of “global warming” or “climate change”, let alone of a “climate emergency” or “global boiling”.

While experimental results consistent with a theory do not prove the theory to be true, and replication of the initial results by the three Polish researchers would be very desirable, the experimental results to date are certainly inconsistent with the current ruling paradigm that CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are the cause of current climate change and, indeed, that the effect of each increase in concentration is accelerating. According to the rules of decision-making in science, unless the experiment can be shown to be mal-designed or fraudulent, the inconsistency between experiment and theory proves, scientifically, that the current paradigm is false.

The incidence and recession of the Ice Age (top), the Medieval Warm Period (bottom left) and the more recent Little Ice Age (bottom right) are just a few examples of global temperature fluctuations that happened independently of the current era’s burning of fossil fuels or increasing CO2 levels. Shown at top, northern mammoths exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of North American Mammals; bottom left, peasants working on the fields next to the Medieval Louvre Castle, from The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry, circa 1410; bottom right, Enjoying the Ice, by Hendrick Avercamp, circa 1615-1620. (Source of top photo: wallyg, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Moreover, the new theory and experimental result are consistent with numerous empirical observations that are also inconsistent with the ruling IPCC/climate movement paradigm. Examples abound: the occurrence and recession of the Ice Age, the appearance and disappearance of the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods and the Little Ice Age – all without any CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels – the steady decline in atmospheric temperatures from 1940 to 1975 while CO2 levels steadily increased, and the relative flattening of atmospheric temperatures since about 2000 despite CO2 levels continuing to increase. But if the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has long been above “saturation”, then its variations have no real impact on the climate – as these observations indicate – and something else must have caused these climate variations.

‘Despite the fact that the majority of publications attempt to depict a catastrophic future for our planet due to the anthropogenic increase in carbon dioxide and its impact on Earth’s climate, the shown facts raise serious doubts about this influence,’ the three Polish co-authors write in their experimental paper.

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To this can be added the failed predictions of the temperature models and of the dire consequences of not preventing further CO2 increases – such as the polar bears going extinct, the Arctic being free of ice, or Manhattan being covered by water, to list just a few. But again, if the atmosphere has long been CO2-saturated with respect to LWR absorption, then the additional CO2 will have no effect on the climate, which is what the failure of the predictions also indicates.

These results, at the very least, ought to give Climaggedonites pause, although probably they won’t. For the rest of us, they strongly suggest that EVs are a solution in search of a problem. It may be that the technology has a place. The alleged simplicity ought to have spinoff advantages, although the alleged spontaneous combustibility might offset these, and the alleged financial benefit might be simply the consequence of government subsidies. Left to its own devices, without government ideological distortions, the free marketplace would sort all this out.

Climate scare à la carte. (Source of screenshots: CEI.org)

More importantly, these results ought to cause politicians to re-examine their climate-related polices. As van Wijngaarden and Happer put it in their paper, “At current concentrations, the forcings from all greenhouse gases are saturated. The saturations of the abundant greenhouse gases H2O and CO2 are so extreme that the per-molecule forcing is attenuated by four orders of magnitude…” The term “forcings” refers to a complicated concept but, at bottom, signifies the ability (or lack) to influence the Earth’s energy balance. The words “forcings…are saturated” could be restated crudely in layperson’s terms as, “CO2 is impotent.”

Kubicki, Kopczyński and Młyńczak are even more blunt. “The presented material shows that despite the fact that the majority of publications attempt to depict a catastrophic future for our planet due to the anthropogenic increase in CO2 and its impact on Earth’s climate, the shown facts raise serious doubts about this influence,” the three Polish co-authors write in their experimental paper. “In science, especially in the natural sciences, we should strive to present a true picture of reality, primarily through empirical knowledge.”

If, indeed, the CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere is well beyond the level where increases are causing additional LWR to be absorbed and, as a consequence, changing the climate, then all government policies intended to reduce/eliminate CO2 emissions in order to stop climate change are just as effective as King Canute’s efforts to stop the tides. The only difference being that Canute was aware of the futility.

Jim Mason holds a BSc in engineering physics and a PhD in experimental nuclear physics. His doctoral research and much of his career involved extensive analysis of “noisy” data to extract useful information, which was then further analyzed to identify meaningful relationships indicative of underlying causes. He is currently retired and living near Lakefield, Ontario.

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