Financial Post Editor Terry Corcoran looks a little like a cat with big, canary- yellow feathers sticking out of every orifice now that it appears the Conservatives have successfully scuttled any international commitment in the Kyoto agreement.
His piece today is rife with the spin that we have come to expect from him on this issue:
Kyoto, he says, was negotiated by “Al Gore and Jean Chretien among a cast of loopy godfathers…” and is still supported by the same “Al Gore and other extremists.”(my emphasis).
Corcoran then offers a couple of lame alternatives to life after Kyoto, but settles on “doing nothing” as the best course.
“Another reason for doing nothing is that the science of global warming is not yet science. No matter what man does, the climate is going to change in strange and unpredictable ways in the future. If some 21st century Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin should come up with proof that man is pushing the world toward catastrophe, then maybe somebody could do something.”
If Isaac Newton was to show up in the National Post office with an apple in his hand, Corcoran would claim that the father of physics pulled it prematurely from the tree in a self-serving effort to get government funding for gravity research.
The science seems convincing enough to the 2,000-plus scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (if not the handful of contrarians whose work appears so frequently in Corcoran’s pages). The science is even sufficient to win over extremists like Royal Dutch Shell and BP.
No, we don’t need a new Newton or a reincarated Franklin. We just need an intelligent antidote to the strident anti-science bias of our second-string national newspaper.
