Lacking in analysis

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Apr 23

RE: McMaster hunger strikers and Mac Divest got it right. O-ed by James S. Quinn, Professor of Biology, McMaster University, and chair of Mac GreenInvest.

It is remarked of teachers that you can tell a teacher, but you can’t tell him much.  Such appears to be the case with Mac Professor of Biology James S. Quinn.  He writes that Mac hunger strikers and Mac Divest got it right because they agree with him, the head of Mac GreenInvest.  He’s been on the divest kick since 2014.

Quinn’s underlying assumption is that by adopting the heroic measures he recommends McMaster University can save the world from global warming.  Let that sink in.  China and India don’t figure into this thinking, making his entire position ludicrous.  Never mind that the panic is over a rise in CO2 concentration from 0.035% to 0.042% in the atmosphere.

Professor Quinn opens his piece with this statement, “No matter which way you cut it, the supply of, and demand for fossil fuels is at the root of climate change.”  Later, he uses the more honest ‘global warming’ in place of the non-falsifiable ‘climate change’.  Climate change replaced ‘global warming in the debate in 2005 after the pause in global warming made the proposition that rising CO2 levels would cause the atmosphere to warm embarrassing.  Hence the switch to the non-falsifiable.

He says that fossil fuel companies knew by the 1980s that their product causes global warming.  Well, they couldn’t know that because one can’t “know” what isn’t true.  He says that profiting from fossil fuel extraction is wrong, but doesn’t explain why.  His moral judgement goes unexamined and unexplained, and a Marxist would find profiting from any investment to be wrong.

The fact is, the globe isn’t warming, though an El Nino event is expected soon.  There is no correlation of CO2 levels with warming, or anything else weather related despite what you read.  And a scientist’s skepticism ought to be aroused if he learned of:

-          The fraud in the hockey stick graph, exposed by Canadians Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick;

-          The climategate emails;

-          All the failed forecasts, like the Arctic Ocean being ice-free in summer, and that California would never see snow again;

-          The years long pauses in global warming despite rising CO2 levels;

-          NOAA’s data tampering that has it cold when glaciers are retreating and hot when glaciers are advancing; and

-          Previous waves of scaremongering: the coming ice age of the 1970s, and the danger of the ozone hole over Antarctica (still open 36 years after the Montreal Protocol.)

The global warming hypothesis is a heresy of science, and is believed in by some with the full ardour of a heresy.  Moralistic investing of other people’s money that keeps them from making money is itself morally wrong.

When a biologist offers authoritative positions on investments, morals, and is completely wrong about global warming, you can judge for yourself the value of that “authority.”

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