Global Warming:

The first cold snap of the season followed by double-digit warm front is as good a time as any to talk about global warming.

Is our planet undergoing a warming trend? Didn't feel like it a couple of days ago, with the wind chill reaching minus 17 here in the middle of November in normally balmy southern Ontario.

But that’s just the ups and downs of local weather and has nothing to do with climatic shifts. Geologists tell us that at one time there was a sheet of ice a couple of miles thick where Toronto now sits. One theory says that its sheer weight crunched the earth’s crust down to the depth of Niagara Falls to create the Niagara Escarpment. 

Then it began to thaw. The gradual melt, according to the geological sleuths, has been happening over a variously-estimated 10,000 years. Over at least 9,900 of those years, the thaw happened without automobiles, coal-fired hydro generating plants and all the poisonous industrial emissions modern society is accused of generating. The people making these accusations are the global warming cheerleaders.

Researchers in the terrestrial sciences tell us that the Ice Age we are now emerging from is only the most recent of several they could trace back through millions of years. There were no reckless human industrial conspiracies then. There was no American economy with its seething industrial might and power generation, no China introducing new coal-fired hydro plants almost on a monthly basis, nor India with its rapidly accelerating industrial growth. If Canada’s notorious Tar Sands were exposed at all, they were an important destination for aborigines seeking pitch to patch the seams of their birch bark canoes.

But none of this seems to deter the hyperventilating zealots who have turned global warming into a religious cult almost as virulent as lunatic-fringe Islam. The planet is warming up and it’s all due to the generation of thousands of tons of greenhouse gases is their mantra. 

The greenhouse gas they are referring to is carbon dioxide, which happens to be the vital ingredient plants use to convert sunlight energy into sugars: i.e. food. Without carbon dioxide, life could not have evolved at all on this planet. 

If this gang's negative view of carbon dioxide makes no sense to you, don’t worry. Logic is not a vital part of their head space. These youngsters from the chaotic end of our social spectrum will not be deterred from belief in their own negative sloganeering.

I can even recall when this global warming propaganda was launched. It was initiated by Soviet planetary probe Venera back in ‘83. After many tries, Venera finally succeeded in descending all the way down to the surface of Venus and sending back colour photos and pressure and temperature data of the hell-like surface conditions in the brief time before it melted.

The event disappointed all the science fiction fans who were used to reading fanciful stories about Venusian adventures with fictional heroes like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. These tales were almost always enhanced by comic art showing beautiful, scantily-clad humanoid female inhabitants. 

Before Venera, cloud-shrouded Venus, second brightest object after the moon in the night sky, was regarded, somewhat hopefully, as a habitable terrestrial twin, inhabited by friendly humanoids. All this made sense at a time before we learned Venus was orbiting short of our star’s Goldilocks zone.

Naturally, this new information was a huge disappointment to scientists and science fiction fans. Totally ignoring the fact that planet Venus was about one-third the distance closer to the Sun than Terra, various scientific types began to speculate that the heat that fried Venera must have been generated by the Greenhouse Effect.

They speculated that this was caused by a set of conditions where the thick cloud cover blocks the radiation of surface temperatures back out into space, thus making the planet hotter and hotter......and it could happen right here on Terra, they said. The Greenhouse Effect theory was born.

Right away, the media jumped on it and speculated that indeed, it might be happening even as we speak. They ran in every direction with this speculative analysis, hyping it up to sell shampoos, sanitary napkins, toilet paper and hair club products for men. Mesmerized viewers bought the media hype wholesale. 

CBC’s The Nature of Things added Global Warming to its growing list of dire events we should lose sleep over. As usual, David Suzuki upgraded the stress level by adding stern warnings that it may already be too late to do anything about it. CBC set out to beat Nova, Nature and similar documentaries trying to out-hype each other for the viewers’ undivided attention and an increased share of the advertising revenue.

Al Gore wrote a compelling book about it which is about as factual as you’d expect from a US politician with an agenda and waited for the profits to roll in while flying all over to preach the message personally to the converted. All this was eagerly covered in breathless detail by the sensation-mongering media. They just couldn't get enough of it.

Many of these documentaries include extensive quotes by various scientific types claiming that there might indeed be some merit to the argument. This includes the group from Australia who were going to celebrate last Christmas among suitably snowy scenery by hiring a charter to take them to Antarctica. 

They set out to confirm global warming by measuring the loss of ice over the last 100 years. The measurements had initially been taken and recorded by an Antarctic explorer a hundred years earlier, so, given that time span, the task to confirm global warming should have been a slam dunk, right? A lot of ice ought to have melted in 100 years if the planet was indeed warming.

Well, it didn't quite work out like that. To begin with, their ship got stuck in the ice about 70 km farther out than the explorer was able to achieve 100 years earlier. Ice-breakers they called up to break them loose got stuck a significant distance even further out. Finally, in desperation, they were lifted out by helicopters from China. Exactly how long their charter boat and ice breakers stayed stuck went unreported.

What did they blame this fiasco on? Well, Global warming, of course. Believe it or not, they attempt to save face and justify this string of blunders by blaming it all on global warming.

Nobody appears to be asking when the alleged warming trend is expected to stop and turn around, heading back up to another terrestrial snowball, or if it has already made that U-turn. That would be too logical a question.

As a matter of fact, the question of whether our planet was headed back toward another ice age was posed by one of Toronto's newspapers during a mid-'70s ice-pellet blizzard. But that was before the media feeding frenzy that turned the Greenhouse Effect theory into a doomsday cult.

These new cultists are willing to completely ignore the effects of barely understood sun cycles and the planet's estimated 500 active volcanoes pumping countless cubic miles of emissions into the planetary biosphere, while blaming automotive exhausts and hydro smokestacks. As we already know, logic is not their strong suit.  

Meanwhile, the clever Chinese must be chuckling up their sleeves after having signed an agreement with the Americans to cut down on their emissions by the year 2030--guaranteed.

It is easy to speculate at this point that the Chinese see our global warming enthusiasts and our social consciousness that accepts such wild theorizing as a not particularly bright bunch that might be kidded along, but should be approached only with great caution.

Note: Another figure on the number of active volcanoes on this planet offered lately is 1,500. No doubt there will be other stats from time to time. Take your pick.

Cowboys and Indians:

Canada’s aboriginal problems aren’t new. I was personally made aware of them one moonless night away back in the middle of the last century while stuck in the mud on the old #5 highway in Saskatchewan.

Following a rainy weekend, I was trying to get back to my rural school site on a Sunday night in May. The spring of ‘53 was particularly wet in our area, the gravel roads soggy and only marginally passable to wheeled traffic. 

The old highway, following the 90-degree survey lines of 1905, was yet to be grasped at both ends and snapped straight, parallel to the CN Railway running cross-country in a straight line from Winnipeg to Saskatoon and points west. It was still waiting to be paved in the years that followed.

At one particularly sloppy stretch between Canora and Mikado, the Pontiac slid into a set of deep ruts and bottomed out. About 100 yds ahead was another vehicle stuck on the other shoulder at the edge of the watery ditch.

My only choice was to walk to a nearby farm yard belonging to an acquaintance and ask for a tow out of the muddy patch, but it was past 10 pm and the lights in the farm house were out, a sure sign that the family was asleep. That would have to wait until morning.

A farm truck hummed into view, veered over to a different set of ruts and roared on by without easing up on the gas pedal. The driver was not about to reduce momentum to help anyone, which was probably a smart, if not exactly friendly, move on his part. 

The driver of the stuck vehicle up ahead got out and walked back. It was Ray, a family acquaintance from my childhood in the Elbow of the Assiniboine. 

Ray was an Indian from the Key reserve. He was a graduate of the Mission school at the northern edge of Kamsack and, contrary to popular mythology, was not known to voice any complaints about it. 

He joined the Canadian army at the onset of the war and participated in the liberation of Holland, helping to wipe the stubborn Nazis off the muddy Scheldt Estuary. In the process, he earned himself a chest full of citations for bravery above and beyond the call of duty. 

He was fortunate enough to return alive with all of his body parts intact and with the dream of investing his military credits in a modern dairy farm on the reserve. That much I knew of the man. 

After a short pow-wow we both agreed it would not be good ethics to awaken a sleeping farm family. It would be best to wait until morning and I offered him the use of the back seat in my car because he said he had five other men from the reserve in his car with him. They got as far as this mud hole on a return trip to Yorkton.

He walked back to the car and yanked a couple of fur robes out from under his passengers. He offered me one, climbed into the back seat and made himself comfortable in the other. 

We got to talking before sleep overtook us and he told me the sad tale of what happened to his dairy farm dream. 

“I got some pure bred Holstein breeding stock and set up the proper pasture and shelters for the cattle,” he said. “But it wasn’t long before those *&^%$# Indians began cutting the barbed wire and pulling up the fence posts. They turned the cattle loose to wander out all over the reserve. In less than a couple of years it got to the point where it became unprofitable for me to carry on.”

It was a sad tale and I asked Ray why any sane person would do such malicious damage.

“Sane person? Hey, we’re talking about those @*&^%$# Indians here,” he said. “They didn’t want to see me succeed in the white man’s world.”

Being unfamiliar with aboriginal politics, I could not understand how such an attitude might develop on a reserve and said so.

“I guess these guys were happy with their Indian status and were not about to risk making any changes to their way of life,” Ray continued. 

“So they did what they could to keep me from spoiling things for them. These guys are happy with their regular pogey which they get for doing nothing at all and that suits them fine. As they see it, last thing they need is an Indian neighbour showing some signs of initiative.”

It was about midnight when, warm in those comfortable fur robes, we were lulled to dreamland to the soothing chorus of frogs in nearby ponds and puddles. Secure in the knowledge that only a madman, a country school teacher or a carful of Indians would be crazy enough to use that muddy highway at night, we drifted off to sleep there in the middle of the road.

When we awakened in bright sunlight, farmer Phil was up and about and we got him to start up the old McCormick-Deering farm tractor and haul us out onto firmer gravel. The mud had chilled and stiffened enough during the night to provide reasonable traction. I paid for the tow and we were soon on our way. 

I got to my farm school cottage on time and was able to start the day in presentable shape after firing up the wood stove and heating a kettle of warm water to wash and shave. 

My lesson plans with 42 students in 10 grades would keep me busy until 4:00 pm. After that, I was free to think about what Ray had said and try to find some logic in it.

It was obvious that Ray’s attempt to establish a nutritional food source for the families in the Key reserve away back in the 1940s was killed by mindless home-grown activists of the day. It’s a 70-year-old story and, if you follow the news, paying particular attention to present day Indian activism, nothing has changed much. 

Today, in the white man’s world, that kind of behaviour is described as being pro active. Years of mindless sloganeering is selectively referred to by the hooded activists and amateur anarchists as affirmative action. 

Back in my youth, we had few delusions regarding such activity. We knew them as simple-minded s--t disturbers.