I Decline an Invitation

Vincent J. Curtis

12 Aug 2025.

I received the following invitation to attend a “TD Walter Bean Lecture” at the University of Waterloo, to be delivered by Sir Andrew Steer, as follows:

Hi Vincent,

The climate crisis is accelerating — and so is the need for courageous leadership.

Join us Monday, September 29 for a compelling public lecture from Sir Andrew Steer, former President & CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund and one of the world’s most influential climate leaders.

From building resilient cities to restoring ecosystems, Dr. Steer will explore what’s working, what’s failing, and how countries like Canada must lead — at home and on the global stage.

I replied as follows:

Dr. Frayne;

I’ve been a critic of the global warming/climate change fraud for over 30 years. Regardless, the question for Canadians is why, given that Canada is responsible for only 1.5 percent of global CO2 emissions, should Canada attempt to lead on anything related to CO2 reduction? Canada isn’t a part of the problem and therefore can’t be part of the solution. India and China far surpass Canada in emissions, and they’re doing nothing to slow the growth of their emissions of CO2. Even now, our burning forests are emitting multiple times the amount of CO2 that Canadians themselves emit annually, making a mockery of any feeble attempts on our part to reduce our CO2 emissions by some fraction.  A question, often asked but never answered, is by how many degrees will sacrifices by Canadian reduce the global temperature in the year 2100? The answer is in the hundredths of a degree Celsius. Immeasreable.

The very concept of a global temperature, on which the climate change panic rests, was destroyed in 2007 by two Canadians, mathematician Chris Essex of UWO, and Ross McKittrick of UG. They observed correctly that the earth, not being at thermal equilibrium and temperature being am intensive thermodynamic variable, the earth has no temperature, and that statistics can’t supply what physics denies. Their paper is found in J. Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics Vol 32 No 1 pp 1-27. They demonstrated that, given the many ways of calculating an average, from a set of numbers, trends of temperature both up and down can be obtained from the same data set by different methods of calculating the average.

Given all this, that Canada should lead on anything related to climate change reduction, is absurd, and never mind the implicit assumption that climate change can only be for the worse!

To save both ourselves the embarrassment of my heckling the speaker, I must decline your invitation.

Regards;

Vincent J. Curtis. M.Sc.

 

The C2 we could have had

Vincent J. Curtis

5 Oct 23

The squad support light machine gun, or LMG, has been a part of Canadian fighting technique since the Hundred Day campaign of WWI.  Then, an infantry platoon was task organized into one section of Lewis gunners, one section of grenadiers, and two sections of riflemen.  When encountering a German machine gun nest, usually featuring a water-cooled Maxim MG-08, the Lewis gunners would put continuous suppressive fire on the nest, enabling the grenadiers to get close enough to take it out with Mills bombs, predecessor of the 36 grenade.

After the war, Canadian defence went to sleep.  The British, however, closer to the danger, kept awake enough that they had ready to manufacture the Bren LMG and the No. 4 Lee-Enfield.  During the war, Canada’s John Inglis Company manufactured Bren guns, both in .303 British, and, for the Chinese Nationals, in the rimless 7.92x57 mm Mauser calibres.  The Canadian government created Canadian Small Arms, a Crown Corporation, to manufacture No. 4 Lee-Enfield rifles in a factory in Long Branch, Ontario.

When WWII was over, millions of rifles and thousands of Bren guns were left in Canadian hands.  Bolt-action rifles were obsolete, and semi- or fully automatic rifles were the firearms of the next major war.  NATO was formed in 1949 to keep the Soviet Union from invading through the Fulda Gap; and, NATO being a collection of countries, standardization became essential.  One of those standardizations was on the 7.62 x 51 mm NATO cartridge.

No particular design of rifle was chosen as the NATO standard, and Canada settled on the FN FAL pattern, which was dubbed the FN C1A1.

FN in Belgium had been a distributor of Colt Patent Firearms in Europe since 1900.  One of Colt’s designs was the Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, which the United States Army adopted in 1918.  The BAR was never tactically deployed in WWI, but the BAR remained in American service as a squad support weapon.  FN sold commercially a few Colt-made BARs in Europe in the 1920s, and in the early 1930s FN tooled up to manufacture their own pattern BARs.  FN made some improvements, such as adding a pistol grip.

For FN, WWII came and went; their factory was overrun, but the Germans didn’t use the BAR.  A number of militaries were then in the market for new weapons, and FN sold them their improved BAR, named the BAR-D.  The principal improvement to the sturdy and reliable BAR was a quick detachable barrel, making the FN BAR a true LMG.  Anyone who’s changed barrels on the C6 will be familiar with how that detachment system worked, and when the 7.62 mm NATO cartridge came along, the BAR-D1 was chambered in that calibre.

John Inglis hadn’t made a Bren in a decade, and it made no sense tooling up to convert 3,000 Canadian Brens into 7.62.  The factory in Long Brach was also long idle, and it was tooled up to make the FN C1A1 under licence.  The C2 was just a C1, except for a heavy barrel, and a three position change lever, which permitted automatic fire.  Its standard magazine was 30 rounds instead of 20, for the C1; and it was nothing for Long Branch to make a heavy barreled version of their standard production rifle.

The lack of a detachable barrel, and being on the light side for an automatic rifle, made the C2 rather ineffective as a support weapon, and it was uncontrollable in longer bursts.  For a little more money, Canada could have purchased 2,713 BAR-D1s from FN instead, since it also used FN-FAL magazines, and Canada would have had an excellent Bren replacement in the section support role.

Canada, in the C6, did get a BAR, of sorts.  The working parts of the C6 are nearly the same as the FN BAR, except turned upside down for feeding from the top.

The BAR-D1 is the C2 that Canada should have had, but luckily didn’t need.

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