Inside Politics

UPDATED, with reaction -- The Bernier Letter: The Director's Cut

by Nick Gamache Posted: February 24, 2010 1:30 PM Last Updated: February 24, 2010 8:57 PM
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(Clement Allard/Canadian Press)

Maxime Bernier is in the news again! A couple of weeks ago, he told a Calgary audience that the overall budget is "frozen at $250 billion."

"From now on, any government decision has to be taken within this budgetary constraint," Bernier said. "Every new government program, or increase in an existing program, has to be balanced by a decrease somewhere else."

Today he strikes again in the Opinion pages of La Presse.
 
Bernier argues it's OK to be skeptical of the science surrounding climate change. "...every week that goes by brings more confirmation of the wisdom of our government's moderate position."
 
I was told Bernier would only be doing one interview, with a radio station in his riding. But his assistant also expressed her frustration with La Presse. "They cut the letter! They cut it!"

So I asked if I could get the original. Turns out, Bernier also wrote an English version, so here it is (Note: The sections in bold letters are the ones that didn't appear in today's La Presse): 
 
Greenhouse gases: Caution is the right stance for Canada
Maxime Bernier, MP for Beauce
 
During the Copenhagen summit last December, Canada was ferociously denounced by environmental groups. They accused our government of trying to derail an agreement because it was not ready to sign anything. Critics were raised again at the end of January when Environment Minister Jim Prentice announced new targets for reducing greenhouse gases that were more modest than the previous ones.
 
However, every week that goes by brings more confirmation of the wisdom of our government's moderate position. Since December, the debate over the scientific basis of global warming, which had been stifled for years by political correctness, is finally taking place in the media. The many errors made by the IPCC that have been recently unveiled add more weight to the various alternative theories that have been put forward for a number of years.
 
As one tries to get information about the various aspects of the question, one finds out that it is possible to be "sceptical", or at any rate to keep an open mind, on almost all the crucial aspects of the global warming thesis.
 
For example, although no one disputes that temperatures have gone up over the past hundred years, there is no consensus among scientists as to its degree. Satellite data show less warming than terrestrial stations, which may have been contaminated by heat coming from more extended urban areas.
 
Data from tree rings in the forests even show some cooling; that's why they were replaced by temperatures considered more accurate from meteorological stations in the IPCC graphs. This is what the famous quote about the trick "to hide the decline" by British researcher Phil Jones, which created such controversy during the "Climategate" episode, refers to.
 
Phil Jones has admitted that we still do not know if the medieval period when the Vikings colonised Greenland was really warmer than today. But that if that was the case, it would contradict the claim that our era has been exceptionally warm due to human activity.
 
Moreover, we realize that during the period of greatest concern about warming - the last decade - temperatures have stopped increasing! Meanwhile, the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere, said to be the cause of warming according to the official theory, is still increasing. Some very serious scientists believe that we are underestimating the influence of the sun and other factors that have nothing to do with carbon emissions when studying climate change.
 
Mojib Latif, a German researcher associated with the IPCC who essentially supports the warming theory, said last fall that temperatures may decline for two decades before warming resumes. No model predicted this trend. But the same models claim to predict the number of degrees of warming that the planet will experience by the end of the century...
 
Those are only some of the "certainties" put forward by global warming supporters about which there is no scientific consensus. There is such disagreement that a Canadian climatologist, Professor Tim Patterson of Carleton University, recently declared in a radio interview to an Ottawa station that we should abstain from doing more until we really know what is going on.
 
What is certain is that it would be irresponsible to spend billions of dollars and to impose unnecessarily stringent regulations to solve a problem whose gravity we still are not certain about. The alarmism that has often characterized this debate is no longer appropriate. Canada is wise to be cautious.

UPDATES: 

Environment Minister Jim Prentice told Evan Solomon on Power & Politics that Bernier's views on climate change are NOT the views of the Canadian government:
 

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Both the Bloc Québécois and the Liberals have reacted to Maxime Bernier's open letter.
 
Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe was asked by reporters what he thought of the Beauce MP's opinion that global warming is a problem "whose gravity we still are not certain about."
 
Duceppe said the letter didn't surprise him. Despite what Bernier says, the Bloc leader says the message must have come from above. The Bloc leader says Bernier is eager to get back into Stephen Harper's cabinet and he's willing to put his name on a letter like this because he believes it might help.
 
"I think he (Bernier) has more expertise in Jos Louis than he does about this [climate change]," said Duceppe.
 
Jos Louis are the Quebec-made cream-filled sponge cakes that Bernier infamously brought to Quebec soldiers during a visit to Afghanistan when he was foreign affairs minister.
 
The Liberals have issued a release to respond to Bernier.
 
It quotes Liberal environment and energy critic David McGuinty as saying "Mr. Bernier has conveniently chosen a scientific theory to suit his government's ideological inaction on climate change in the hopes of working his way back into the Prime Minister's good books."
 
Here's the full Liberal press release:
 
Bernier's convenient climate scepticism

OTTAWA - Conservative MP Maxime Bernier is using climate science scepticism to justify his government's ideological inaction on climate change, Liberal MPs said today.
 
"Mr. Bernier has conveniently chosen a scientific theory to suit his government's ideological inaction on climate change in the hopes of working his way back into the Prime Minister's good books," said Liberal Energy and Environment Critic David McGuinty.
 
In a letter to La Presse, Mr. Bernier writes that "scientists believe that we are under-estimating the influence of the sun and other factors that have nothing to do with carbon emissions." He continues, "what is certain is that it would be irresponsible... to impose unnecessarily stringent regulations to solve a problem whose gravity we still are not certain about."
 
"The fact is, no one with any scientific credibility denies the science behind man-made climate change," said Liberal Science, Industry and Technology Critic Marc Garneau. "The Conservatives have no interest in furthering climate change science - like Mr. Bernier, they remain content to oversimplify scientific debates and to grasp for anything that might give them an excuse for doing nothing."
 
The Harper Conservatives recently cut all funding to the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the main funding body for university research on climate in Canada, prompting 1,400 graduate students and researchers to sign a petition demanding new funding to save the foundation as of yesterday afternoon.

Tags: budget, climate change, federal spending, la presse, maxime bernier