Mr. Moore had a conversation with Grégoire Canlorbe, an independent journalist, during his stay in Paris in December 2017 for the climate-realist conference day. The interview was conducted on behalf of the French “Association des climato-réalistes,” the only climate-realist organization in France.
Patrick Moore, PhD,
is a Canadian activist,
and former president
of Greenpeace Canada.
Since leaving Greenpeace, which he helped to found, Moore has criticized the environmental movement for what he sees as scare tactics and disinformation, saying that the environmental movement “abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.”
Selected quotes from the interview
"I was doing a PhD in ecology, so I was involved in a science education and, although there were a few people in the original group who had some science education, in the end, science was lost altogether in the Greenpeace evolution ...
Ecology is about the interrelationships among all of the different forms of life, including humans of course.
If you look at the environmental movement position on energy today, they are against fossil fuels, they are against nuclear energy, they are against hydroelectric energy, they are against 98.5% of the world’s energy.
This would be suicide, not just economic suicide but really suicide, like dying.
Why did I leave Greenpeace finally?
Because they adopted a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide.
And of this I thought how ridiculous, I’m in this group where all the other directors have no science and they’re saying we should ban the element chlorine from existence in human affairs.
They didn’t seem to understand that chlorine was the most important element for public health and medicine and when I saw this I realized they really didn’t care about people.
Yes, it’s been very obvious for some time that the Russians, particularly Russian scientists, do not believe that man-made climate change has been a catastrophe of some kind.
I mean, most scientists will say, yes of course, there are over seven billion humans and our missions and our activities, especially the clearing of ecosystems for agriculture, it’s obviously having some effect on the world but whether it’s having a huge effect on the climate is very much debatable, and I don’t really believe it is true.
Microclimates, yes, cities have made changes that had make it warmer inside, for example, the “urban heat island effect” as it is called.
So everywhere you go where there is a city with a lots of concrete and lots of heat being used in the buildings, you will find that it is warmer in the city than it is out in the country right nearby.
So yes we do have an effect on temperature, climate etc.
But to say it’s a catastrophe, that is the difference.
There is no catastrophe, there is nothing happening today, not one thing, in the weather or the climate, that is anywhere nearer out of line with the last 10,000 years of climate since we came out of the last natural glaciation into this interglacial period about 10,000 years ago, the climate has been relatively steady in within a few degrees centigrade of the temperature and storms have always happened.
So Russia has long been skeptical and never really was a climate believer.
Then you have India and China, both of whom kind of play along with the politics of climate change, but are really in no way doing very much on the policy front to address this so-called problem.
They are just moving forward with their development and they don’t really believe in the same way that people in Western Europe and North America have this belief in dangerous climate change caused by humans.
So I am very heartened by the fact that president Trump is taking the position he is, because we are being led down a path towards disaster not by the use of fossil fuels but by this hysteria about climate change and carbon dioxide.
I had been a skeptic for over 30 years, going back to 1989 when this issue was first raised to a high public level in the media.
It was clear to me at the time that we should question this very seriously, this idea that carbon dioxide is somehow pollution, or will destroy the world.
When in fact carbon dioxide is the basis of all life.
We don’t have any scientific proof that CO2 is the main cause of the little bit of warming that has occurred in the last few centuries.
It’s been 300 years since the dates of the little ice age, about 200 years from the modern minimum, when there was a second wave of cold right through the world, due to the lack of activity of the sun, something that people now are saying is about to repeat itself.
We will see.
But the factor that matters is the world has been warming gradually for 300 years, long before we started using fossil fuels.
Even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on climate change says that humans are responsible for most of the warming since the mid-20th century, that’s 1950, only 67 years ago.
So they (IPCC) say for the first 4.6 billion years of the earth history, the climate was changing due to natural factors, like solar and Milankovitch cycles and ocean currents, there are many natural factors that affect the climate, but since 1950, 67 years ago, humans are now the dominant force in the climate change on the earth?
There is no proof, if there was a proof, that human CO2 emissions were the cause of warming in the climate, they would write it down on a piece of paper, so we can read it and see it, but they have no such proof.
All they have is the hypothesis based on the idea that CO2 is a greenhouse gas like water vapor, only water vapor is probably a 100 times more important than CO2.
So they just say this, they say CO2 is a greenhouse gas, therefore it’s the cause of climate warming.
They have no proof whatsoever to back it up.
And that’s why, in a way, it’s very frustrating, because you start right there with them just saying, “Well it’s simple physics the science is settled, the argument is over.”
What can you say to that?
They’re basically saying, “Don’t bother talking to me, because I’m the truth even though I have no actual evidence for it.”
This is why many people believe that climate change has actually turned into a new kind of religion, with even the Pope of Rome coming in with an encyclical in which he is denigrating humans.
For ever since humans have been around, there’s always someone who is predicting doom, “the end is coming” and this to me is only an internal reflection on their own short life, they’re afraid of dying and so they project that on the all world, they’re afraid of the world dying.
... we don’t have really good numbers before that but we have pretty good numbers from proxies, from marine sediments for the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, going back half a billion years.
What you see from now is a gradual, not perfectly even, but a gradual decline in carbon dioxide from at least 5,000 parts per million, in other words 0.5% or half a percent, back in those days 500 million years ago, to the lowest level ever in history during the last glaciation, 20 000 years ago, CO2 bottomed up at 180 parts for million, which is only 30 parts per million above the death of most plants.
Plants not only need carbon dioxide to survive, they need a certain level of it, in the same way that we need oxygen to survive ... it is obvious that if we have not intervened by putting some of the CO2 back into the atmosphere, that was taken out of it by plants to make fossil fuels, by green organisms to make fossil fuels, and by the shells of marine organisms to make calcium carbonate.
I was reading Richard Lindzen saying this morning, that the temperature has risen by a 1°C approximately in the last 150 years.
During that time, every single measure of human welfare has improved, including environmental quality, especially in the wealthy countries, where we can afford to build the technology to clean the air in the smokestacks from the coal plants, and in our exhaust from our cars.
These days what comes out of the exhaust of a car is almost all water and carbon dioxide, both of which are essential to life.
... the most important thing that can happen now, on the global basis in terms of the evolution of the movement to stop this hysteria about climate change and CO2, would be for the United States to overturn the endangerment finding of the Environmental Protection Agency which calls CO2 officially a “pollution,” when in fact it is fertilizer for plants.
This is what has to be understood.
Most people don’t even understand that humans are a tropical species.
We evolved at the Equator, in a hot climate, that’s where we came from, that’s what we’re adapted to.
That’s why we warm our houses in France and Canada.
Because it is too cold outside for us, we would die there.
It’s only because of fire, clothing and housing, shelter, that humans can live outside the tropics.
If only people would stop exaggerating this idea that the earth is getting too warm, it is colder now than has been in almost the whole history of life on this earth.
There was no ice on the North Pole and the Antarctic millions of years ago.
There was no ice.
This is the first ice age in 250 million years, that we’re in now.
There was another ice age 250 million years ago but in between then and now, the earth has been warm.
Much warmer than it is today.
Every single species that is alive on earth today, their ancestors lived through that warmer time.
If you look at the climate debate, coming back to that for a moment, the people who are the true believers in this debate, place themselves above we, lower mortals, we deniers.
That is a false pretense.
They make it appear that they know more than those of us who do not accept their dogma.
It is not becoming of scientists to hide behind dogma and ideology.
The whole purpose of science is to question, always to question, especially when you have an important subject, that is very controversial and very important for the future of civilization, our economy, our society, depends on energy and these are big issues, that we’re debating.
And you come then to this claim that there is a 97% consensus among climate scientists that humans are causing dangerous climate change.
For a start, that’s a lie, because there is no controversial subject that would ever have a 97% support.
The very definition of a controversial subject is one where people are divided, not like almost unanimous; otherwise there would be no question.
The fact that so many people are questioning this so-called “truth” of a dangerous climate change, it is in itself indicative that there is no consensus.
But then coming back to the really important point: consensus is not a scientific term, it is a political and social term and they have no business using the word “consensus” around science.
... I have a very strong opinion on the climate issue and it’s very strongly in favor of the direction that President Donald Trump is taking the United States, and hopefully the world to throw out this ridiculous doom and gloom scenario around carbon dioxide, the most important food for all for life."