Bruce Dowbiggin
The Right To Criticize Climate Change Has Cost Mark Steyn Almost Everything
“Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.” author Michael Crichton, 2003
It’s a fair guess that when historians look back at the current era it will not be referred to as The Enlightenment. The purpose of our contemporary scientific inquiry, as those deceived by the Covid hustle will know, is not shedding light but shrouding and blinding honest inquiry.
If The Enlightenment was a ray of sunshine to expose truth, then the Suppression is a blow torch to destroy discussion.
Nothing better illustrates this destruction of creative scientific debate than the current Mann v Steyn, Simberg lawsuit. Climate-science salesman Michael Mann sued Rand Simberg and Canadian Mark Steyn in 2012 for defamation after the two men publicly disparaged Mann’s “hockey stick” graph that purported to prove that the late twentieth-century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years.
Two Canadians, my friend Michael McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, then snapped the hockey stick narrative, leaving Mann vexed and his Green buddies vengeful. Steyn gleefully took up their findings. (Those familiar with Steyn will know that his facility with words is withering upon his subjects.) Mann decided to sue Steyn and Simberg in the Democratic swamp of the District of Columbia, arguing they’d ruined his reputation and devastated him financially.

Howler monkeys in Legacy Media (hello Bill Nye) sensed a kill and a chance to remove an annoying “denialst” But, like his successful 2012 defence of a free-speech case in Canada while Steyn wrote at Macleans, Mann v Steyn, Simberg is not about science or policy. It’s about the U.S. First Amendment guaranteeing free speech, something the Left used to cherish (see: The People vs Larry Flynt.)
For the Al Gore glee club, dissent is heresy. So, for various reasons, none of them good, the case stalled in the D.C. court system for 12 years, costing Steyn his health (he’s in a wheelchair after suffering three heart attacks) and millions in legal fees. The case has finally come to court and is now with the jury. Because D.C. juries— and D.C. media— are highly partisan to climate-change Democrats predicting an outcome is foolhardy.
But after being raked in testimony for his case Mann— who has not paid a cent in legal costs— will likely not be advertising this as his shining moment. “Ill-advised and embarrassing” “thin-skinned and quick to attack.” Seeks “conflict, seeking to pick fights” and “Mann did in fact breach the ethical standards” are snippets of the testimony he endured. So far, his powerful groupies ranging the Clintons to the Biden are staying loyal.
Steyn, too, has his wounds from his principled fight. Most would have saved their sanity. He has said many times that the process of defending himself against the insanity of WOKEdom is the punishment itself. Seeing him physically struggle in court to deliver his case is ample proof of the price he’s paid for mocking the party line on climate.
(Note: We are unabashed fans of Steyn’s work since he began warning of a coming Dark Age brought on by unlimited immigration and Leftist overreach. This website <NotThePublicBroadcaster.com> is in no small measure a homage to his courage and vision.)
But here we are. No matter the outcome, the coordinated forces of censorship and intimidation will have a partial victory by showing what even a correct criticism of them brings. As they are doing with their legal and political mobbing of Donald Trump they are warning any future critics that they, not science, will re-write the past and create the future.
The implications the Left has invited with its acceptance of climate change, DEI, ESG and the many other acid acronyms are widespread. As just one example, we have been preparing a book on an academic institution whose focus is on the preservation of the culture, art and significance of the Middle Ages.
We have asked a number of the interview subjects for their predictions on why the events of a thousand years ago (or earlier) are significant. What do they tell us about our present state of anti-humanist culture? Is their hope for a new enlightenment in a WOKE world?

The urge to re-write the past to suit today’s political whims, said one subject, is fatal to academic and cultural appreciation of the time of Chaucer, Dante and Bede. Her field of study, she said, is white Christian men in Europe a thousand years or so ago. She cannot change that description. Nor will she allow the re-writing of this period of history by ahistorical radicals seeking to bolster the present by falsifying the past. Is that the end of her funding?
That is what Mann sought in engineering the climate record of proxies in a handful of pine cone and ice core samples in eastern Russia. Like most climate diehards, he claimed to see lower temperatures in the past, thereby making today’s readings seem hotter. This allowed gormless climate wind therapists like Barack Obama to claim that 97 percent of scientists agree with Mann’s “consensus” on climate change— a claim repeated endlessly by the climate cabal. This support empowered Mann to sue anyone who disputed his conclusions.
The late author Michel Crichton saw this Ship of Fools coming in 2003 when he warned, “I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled..”
Sadly, Crichton died in 2008, and Mann and hysterics like Greta Thunberg went unchecked into the bloodstream of Western society. The bland acceptance of “the effects of climate change” commercials now being peddled by Justin Trudeau’s governments is testament to the power of this lie. (Asking a climate scientist about the impacts of global warming is like asking a bureaucrat about the benefit of larger government.)
Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg sought to mock that pretence. They may even win their legal case. But the herculean struggle just to remind the public of some simple truths on science tells you that we are in dangerous times populated by scoundrels and opportunists who will not be stopped until they dictate every aspect of society.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
NFL Ice Bowls Turn Down The Thermostat on Climate Change Hysteria
Oh, the weather outside was frightful. But the football was so delightful. Week 15 of the NFL season was a cryogenic success of snow and sub-zero temperatures. Here were the temperatures at game time this weekend.
Chicago: -11 degrees C.
Cincinnati: -12 degrees F.
Kansas City: -8 degrees C.
New England: -2 C (with an 87 percent chance of snow).
Philadelphia: -2 degrees C.
New York -1 degree C.
Pittsburgh: -7 degrees C.
For fans of NFL football none of this seemed out of character with late-season football. There are legendary games played in arctic conditions. The windchill for the 1967 Dallas/ Green Bay NFC championship was -25 C.
Chargers at Bengals: Jan. 10, 1982 (-24 C, feels like -39 C).
Seahawks at Vikings in NFC wild-card matchup Jan 10, 2016. -21 C with wind chill -25C
Dolphins at Chiefs: Jan. 13, 2024 (-4 degrees, feels like -27 degrees)
As recently as last week’s Bills win over the Bengals games are often played with drifts of snow on the field and the mercury bottoming out. While Canada’s Grey Cup game is played at the end of November it’s still had some brutal weather history of its own.
The point of this meteorology meandering is that, according to our good King Charles III and many other doomsday cultists the concept of snow and cold was supposed to be a figment of the past by now. For almost half a century Michael Mann and the climate prophets of IPCC have been predicting the end of snow and the onset of warmist floods and burning forests. They gambled trillions of the public’s dollars on the certainty that the public would buy computer modelling and data-distortion predicting doom.
For decades it has worked. The careers of people like critic Mark Steyn have been ruined, heretics declared and fortunes dissipated by the trust-fund fanatics who bankroll wackadoodles like Stephen Guilbeault, the convicted felon who Trudeau made Minister of the Environment. No matter how absurd or devious the source, it was a gospel that the fiery inferno was coming next Tuesday. But the weather has remained stubbornly resistant to Elizabeth May’s catechism of climate.

Yet, some dedicated climate advocates and their followers are finally changing their tune in the face of their own observation of lying liars like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. The share of Americans who say climate scientists understand very well whether climate change is occurring decreased from 37 percent in 2021 to 32 percent this year. A similar October study from the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute found that “belief in human-driven climate change declined overall” since 2017.
Reports the uber-liberal L.A. Times: “The unraveling of climate catastrophism got another jolt recently with the formal retraction of a high-profile 2024 study published in the journal Nature. That study — which had predicted a calamitous 62% decline in global economic output by 2100 if carbon emissions were not sufficiently reduced — was widely cited by transnational bodies and progressive political activists alike as justification for the pursuit of aggressive decarbonization.
But the authors withdrew the paper after peer reviewers discovered that flawed data had skewed the result. Without that data, the projected decline in output collapses to around 23%. Oops.”
Even stalwart media apologists for climate hysteria like the Times are starting to have doubts. Under the headline “The left’s climate panic is finally calming down” they describes “Erstwhile ardent climate-change evangelist Bill Gates published a remarkable blog post addressing climate leaders at the then-upcoming COP30 summit. Gates unloaded a blistering critique of what he called ‘the doomsday view of climate change,’ which he said is simply “wrong.”
Trump-besotted American Democrats seeking to soften their Woke image before the 2026 midterms are likewise carving out more moderate positions on climate “that could well deprive Republicans of a winning political issue with which to batter out-of-touch, climate-change-besotted Democrats. But for the sake of good governance, sound public policy and the prosperity of the median American citizen, it would be the best thing to happen in a decade.”
Sadly Canada under Mark Carney remains a staunch climate warrior. The removal of Guilbeault as federal Environmental Minister may have seemed a step toward sanity, but there is no hint that the billions of dollars from hidden money spigots will be closed down any time soon. The B.C. government’s acquiescence to the climate propaganda of Indigenous bands shows no sign of abating. Indeed, it is just ramping up in the land claims that threaten to make home ownership a thing of the past.

PM Mark Carney is a dedicated temperature fabulist going back to his days as governor of the Bank of England. His first fights in Canada were over taxing carbon and hobbling her energy industry. As we wrote in this November 2024 column, the certainty in which the Canadian Left revels is actually dividing, not uniting citizens.
So perhaps if enough citizens spend an afternoon shivering in the stands of a wintertime football game we might achieve a small piece of sanity and learn that that , while climate is always changing, it’s not worth the price we’ve paid this century.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his 2025 book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Hunting Poilievre Covers For Upcoming Demographic Collapse After Boomers
For those not familiar with hunting seasons in Canada it may come as a surprise that the nation has a year-round hunting season. That would be the targeting of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre by the massed army of Liberals, their bots and the richly endowed media pack. Forget he’s never held power. He’s to blame for the ills in Canadian society.
It has been a good hunt. After floor-crossing by dissident CPC, the Liberals are one seat from the majority that Canadian voters denied them in the spring. (They’ll likely get the majority soon.) MPs who a day earlier were at Conservative Xmas parties suddenly sang the praises of Carney. MPs in ridings targeted by the Chinese suddenly joined Team Elbow Up.
All the while the media corps landed blows from their perch. Robert Benzie: “I know that Premier [Danielle] Smith is very unhappy privately with Pierre Poilievre because she thinks that [MOU motion] is undermining this [pipeline] project.” The nadir of the media dog pile was formerly eminent scribe Robert Fife who sniped, “Conservatives persist with cute legislative tricks, while the government tries to run a country.” Run a country. That’s rich.
From his lips to Liberal brains, however. “.@CBCNews and @AlJazeeraWorld viewers consider themselves uniquely informed, says @ElectionsCan_E report. The two TV networks were named by self-described “informed” voters when asked where they got their news. “
It is, seemingly, a great time to be a Liberal. Or not. While Operation Poilievre was gathering steam for Xmas polling revealed that Liberals and Conservatives remain locked in a tie, and Canadians continue to express ambivalence about the country’s direction, mixed feelings about their leaders, and sharp divides by generation, region, and policy concern. These generational discrepancies continue to be buried.

As was the case in the spring, the Liberals are supported only by the Boomer generation that swallowed Elbows Up nostalgia like a fat man on a donut. The under 60s demo at every level shows the current Carney agenda is a loser for them. In the segment of house-rich Boomers the Libs lead 50-31 over CPC. But in every other category it’s “how can I get out of here faster?”
The 45-59 demo it’s 46-36 Conservatives; 30-44 it’s a whopping 48-31 CPC; 18-29 it’s 40-39 CPC. A healthy chunk of Liberal supporting from the collapse of NDP vote. Where they used to poll in the 20s, the highest demo shows 11 percent support. Otherwise Poilievere would be PM.
Meanwhile, research now finds that 54 percent of Canadians say the growing number of newcomers to the country threatens our traditional customs and values— an increase of sixteen points since 2020. Over the same period, the share of Canadians who say immigration strengthens our society fell thirteen points to 35%
In short, the Carney Circus of marrying Canada to China and the EU is a card trick that will be exposed shortly. But where do we see the Ottawa press corps attention to this impending demographic snow plow? As we wrote in March “It’s not hard to see the (under 60s) looking at the Mike Myers obsession with a long-gone Canada and saying let’s get out of here.
Recently former TVOntario host Steve Pakin attended two convocations. The first at the former Ryerson University, (switched to Toronto Metropolitan University in a fit of settler colonizer guilt.) The second at Queens University, traditionally one of the elite schools in the nation. Here’s what he saw.
“At the end of the (TMU) convocation, when Charles Falzon, on his final day as dean of TMU’s Creative School, asked students to stand and sing the national anthem, many refused. They remained seated. Then, when the singing began, it was abundantly noticeable that almost none of the students sang along. And it wasn’t because they didn’t know the words, which were projected on a big screen. The unhappy looks on their faces clearly indicated a different, more political, explanation.
“I asked some of the TMU staff about it after the ceremony was over, and they confirmed what I saw happens all the time at convocations. Then I texted the president of another Ontario university who agreed: this is a common phenomenon among this generation at post-secondary institutions.”
At Queens, where Canadian flags were almost non-existent, O Canada was sung, but the message of unrest was clear: “Convocation sends a message of social stability,” Queen’s principal Patrick Deane began in his speech. “It is a ceremony shaped in history. You should value your connection to the past, but question that inheritance. Focus on the kind of society you’d like to inhabit.”
You can bet Deane is not telling them to question climate change and trans rights. As Paikin observes, “if we fail to create a more perfect union, we shouldn’t be surprised when a vast swath of young people don’t sing our anthem the way so many of the rest of us do.” So why are the best and brightest so reluctant to see as future in becoming the new professional class that runs society?
In the Free Press River Page searched the source of their discontent. “If the Great Recession, Covid-19, and the spectre of an artificial intelligence-assisted ‘white collar bloodbath’ has taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them. This insecurity, compounded by the outrageous cost of living in many large cities, has pushed the PMC’s anxieties to the breaking point.

“Add that to the triumph of identity politics in professional class institutions like universities, corporate C-suites, non-governmental organizations, and media—itself a byproduct of inter-elite competition as many have observed—and what you have is the modern left.
“… they’ve already come to the baffling conclusion that there’s no difference between class struggle and child sex changes. More to the point, the socialist mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has only ever stood the test of time in Anabaptist sects. It requires a religious devotion to self-sacrifice that is not characteristic of this anxious and hyper-competitive class—as many actual socialists have spent the last decade warning.”
The tsunami over immigration has caused severe dislocations— as PM Steven Harper predicted in the 2015 election debate. He was shouted down by the dopey dauphin Justin Trudeau who opened the sluice gates to every kind of progressive nonsense. Which is now evident.
Like all people addicted, CDN Boomers don’t want the truth. They want performance theatre, T-shirts and hockey games. They blame Trump for their predicament, caught between grim realities. Will they take the 12 steps? Or will their kids have to tell them the facts as they escort them to the home?” We’re now seeing the likely answer to that question everywhere in Canadian society.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his 2025 book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books
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