Canada Files | Patrick Moore | Season 2021

♪ >> Hello, and welcome to another edition of Canada Files .

I'm Jim Deeks.

Our guest on this episode is going to challenge a lot of our viewers thinking, including mine.

His name is Patrick Moore.

He's a well-educated environmentalist and writer.

He lives on Vancouver Island in the northwest of Canada.

Patrick was one of the founding members of the famous environmental watchdog group, Greenpeace, nearly 50 years ago.

As you'll discover, his views on many environmental issues today are more controversial than you might expect.

>> Patrick Moore, welcome.

Thanks for joining us on Canada Files .

Give our viewers a sense of your qualifications to discuss environmental issues and your opinions on them, a quick overview of your credentials.

>> I grew up on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island on a float camp in the middle of a rain forest and nature.

I went to school by boat to a one-room schoolhouse to grade eight.

That was as far as it went, so I was sent to boarding school in Vancouver.

An English-style boarding school called St. Georges.

I received an excellent high-school education there, focusing on the sciences.

I enrolled in science at the University of British Columbia.

I did a year of forestry first because that's the background I come from on Northern Vancouver Island.

I excelled in the life sciences: biology, biochemistry, genetics, a little forestry.

Then I enrolled in a PhD in ecology.

At the time, the word ecology had not yet been printed in the popular press.

Nobody knew the word.

I believe I'm the first ecology PhD in Canada at that time at the University of BC.

I studied pollution, pollution control, environmental policy.

I wrote a thesis on a mining project and the impact it was having on the environment.

While I was doing that, I found out about this little group called Don't Make a Wave Committee .

It was beginning to meet in the Unitarian Church in Vancouver.

I joined them and we became Greenpeace .

I was on the first voyage of Greenpeace to stop US hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska and the next 15 years.

>> You were with Greenpeace for 15 years.

You were president of Greenpeace Canada for nine years.

The relationship didn't end very well.

Tell us about that.

>> It wasn't that it didn't end very well-- I decided I didn't like the direction that Greenpeace was going.

We had Save the Whales , Stop the Baby Seals Slaughter, ended toxic waste dumping all around the world.

Especially in Europe where they didn't have any clean water or air legislation like we did in North America in the early 80s.

We did a lot of really good work.

But by the mid-80s, I was one of five international directors with David McTaggart as our chairman.

None of them had any formal science education.

They started adopting policies, in particular, a policy to band chlorine worldwide that I completely disagreed with.

Of all the natural elements, chlorine is the most important for public health and medicine.

There are places where you shouldn't use chlorine.

The reason it's in our drinking water and swimming pools is the biggest advance in the history of public health.

85% of our pharmaceuticals are made with chlorine chemistry.

25% of them have chlorine in them.

So chlorine is really important.

I didn't leave then.

What really made me leave was that Greenpeace, which started as green for environment and peace for civilization-- human beings living in peace, dropped the "peace".

And decided that humans were the enemy of the earth.

Instead of being humanitarian in their orientation, they became anti-human in orientation.

It's the same today.

People are perceived almost as they're the only evil species.

It's too much like "original sin", for me.

I believe that we are part of nature and nature is all one.

We all came from the same beginning.

Everything that is alive today--every individual of every species represents a continuous, uninterrupted successful reproduction since the beginning of life.

If you don't have children, that ends your line.

Everyone here has a line going back to the beginning of life.

That to me is the important factor.

We are all on the same "time front".

They say that there are older and newer species No.

everything is on the same time front.

Our evolution goes back to the beginning, just like every insect and fish.

I see the main lesson in ecology is, we are all one nature on this planet, living among each other.

All alive, the ones that are.

More species have gone extinct than exist today.

But there are more species today, than ever have been, in the history of life.

Life has continued to proliferate as a tree all the way to the present time.

There are a few thoughts as to why I left Greenpeace because they decided humans were the worst species in the world.

I don't believe that.

Most humans are good.

>> Clearly you and Greenpeace found different roots to pursue your focus on the environment.

Unfortunately the relationship with Greenpeace deteriorated.

I don't know if you're Public Enemy #1 to Greenpeace, but a quote from their website says, "You are a paid spokesman for the nuclear industry, the logging, genetic engineering industry... who exploits long-gone ties with Greenpeace to sell himself as a speaker and pro-corporate spokesperson".

That's harsh.

Is it accurate at all?

>> They wrote that 30 years after I left in 1986.

It wasn't until 2007 that they took my name off the list of founders of Greenpeace on their official website.

They did that because of all the issues we opposed while I was there, the only one I have changed my mind over the years is nuclear energy.

We made a huge mistake by lumping nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons as if it was an evil technology.

Nuclear energy should be lumped in with nuclear medicine.

As a beneficial use of nuclear technology.

Nuclear energy is one of the safest technologies we have ever built.

I won't go into the numbers but I assure you, in terms of energy produced versus casualties created nuclear is #1.

Fossil fuels causes a lot of damage and accidents compared to nuclear energy.

For some reason, the environmental movement has maintained its stiff opposition to nuclear energy.

Russia, China and India are the biggest builders of nuclear today.

North America and Europe have basically stopped building new reactors which is a huge mistake.

If we want to make inroads into the use of fossil fuels-- I'm in favour from a conservationist view, not an environmental view.

We should build more nuclear the only technology besides hydro.

Hydro electric is tapped out in most parts of the world.

Nuclear can be built anywhere, as many as you want, because there's fuel for thousands of years.

When I came out against nuclear energy, 30 years after I left Greenpeace, that's when they started their campaign against me.

>> Let's talk about the climate change issue.

We can talk about nuclear as part of that.

There are sources online that describe you as a "climate change denier"-- a pejorative used against people who may have different views.

Is an accurate description for you?

Are you a denier?

>> I don't deny that the climate is changing.

It always has.

It always will.

Sometimes relatively quickly.

Sometimes like now, very slowly.

Compared to the way climate has changed in the past, this is nothing.

It's just getting a bit warmer in the modern warm period.

There's no actual proof that CO2 has anything to do with it.

It was already warming from 1700 to 1850, when we started using fossil fuels.

Since then, the use of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions have grown exponentially.

The temperature has just kept rising at the same rate it was from 1700 to 1850.

We could go into a million things but what they should call me is a "human catastrophe climate change skeptic".

I'm skeptical that humans are causing a climate catastrophe.

I'm not skeptical of the fact that humans might be a small part of climate change.

But it is not perceptible looking at the full baseline of temperatures going up and down through the ages.

The historical record going back 500 million years, from ocean sediment analysis, does not give credence to the idea that CO2 is the main cause of changing temperature on this planet.

It simply doesn't.

If we get to my book later, I'll tell you how that works.

To call me a denier is to associate me with the Holocaust.

That's why they do it.

The only other time I know where the word "denier" was used in a political sense was for people who deny the Holocaust.

When they are saying "climate denier", they are basically saying "Holocaust-denier".

They're saying the climate change is going to be a holocaust of some sort.

And that's not true.

>> Are you saying that climate change, as we have been led to understand over last 2 decades is basically a hoax?

That we don't have anything to worry about?

>> Climate change has become a rather toxic combination of extreme left ideology and warped science.

Science is being used in a way that was never meant.

An example is the idea that there is a huge consensus in favour of the humans causing climate crisis theory.

Or narrative , as they call it.

Use "story" or "fairytale" when "narrative" is mentionned.

The fact is there is no proof that we are causing this.

It is being used by the media, activists, politicians, and scientists who are on serial public money with grants to study this.

It's being used to scare people.

That makes more money come from media, for activists... scientists, and politicians getting votes to save your grandchildren from a certain demise.

That is the hoax part of it.

They are perpetuating a hoax about the future of the world's climate in order to scare people into wanting to buy newspapers, watch tv ads, pay money to scientists and send Greenpeace cheques.

That's why they're doing it.

>> Let's talk about your book that's just published.

It's available on Amazon and Kindle called, "Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom" In it, you suggest environmental and climate change issues, like CO2 emissions and radiation are invisible.

We can't see them.

And other ones are very remote like, starving polar bears and melting ice caps in the polar regions.

Dying coral reefs is another one you talk about.

You say these are largely misunderstood or erroneously taken as fact.

At the same time, we are seeing more violent storms, wildfires.

These are not invisible.

Flooding rivers, vast chunks of polar ice calving off glaciers.

These are not myths.

Do you say these are cyclical and we have to be used to them?

>> I'm saying first, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not say that extreme weather events are increasing.

It says there is no evidence of it.

Yet the activists just ignore that and claim every storm is increased extreme weather.

There is no increase in any extreme weather including hurricanes, tornadoes and fires.

There was so much more land burned by fire in the US in the 20s and 30s than there is today.

The main reason these fires and storms-- they're saying the cause is CO2 which is invisible.

The effect is not invisible, it's the so-called cause .

They can't see what CO2 is doing.

You can't point and say, "Look what the CO2 is doing there."

That's why they use things that are invisible and remote.

Because no normal person can objectively observe and verify the truth for themselves.

That is the scientific principle my book is based upon.

That is what science is.

Observation is the beginning of scientific discovery.

Then you try to verify it by repeating it over and over again under the same circumstances.

When you do that, you put it out into the public for credentialled people, other scientists, to replicate.

If they're able to replicate what you have done, in a laboratory or in the field, you're verging on a truth, fact, theory, hypothesis, whatever.

That's how science works.

Science can't work for the average person if they can't see what they're being told is causing the problem.

>> I'll quote an eminent scientist who works for NASA.

Her name is Kate Marvel.

I don't know if you know of her.

She recently said this regarding the fact the last seven years have been the hottest years on record in the history of climate record taking.

"It's not the sun, not natural climate variability.

It's human actions, specifically human emissions of greenhouse gases, dioxide and methane."

"I'm a scientist, I hang out with scientists all the time."

"We don't agree on anything."

"The fact that scientists agree that it is human activities causing the climate changes that we've seen, that's really really significant."

Do you disagree with that conclusion?

>> Firstly, her funding is coming from taxpayer money.

Secondly, she's making a statement which she has not corroborated with facts.

All she is doing is saying that's what's happening.

She has not shown how she can prove that carbon dioxide is causing warming.

Also the problem thinking the world started in 1850.

She doesn't go back any further than that in her analysis of the global climate.

The global climate goes back to the beginning of the earth.

To the beginning of life-- when it would affect life.

That was 3.5 billion years ago.

For the first 3 billion years of life's existence on earth, CO2 was above 5,000 parts per million.

It is now 415 ppm.

Since the last 150 million years, CO2 has fallen from 2,500 parts per million to the lowest it's ever been in the history of the earth, 20,000 years ago at the peak of the last major glaciation .

Since then, it came up slightly to 280 ppm, at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

They take that as their basemark.

>> One the problems for people like me and our viewers is that environmental science is complex and largely incomprehensible.

If you don't have a PhD like you do.

We don't know what's right and wrong, with arguments on both sides.

A lot of us, unsophisticated in understanding these issues, might fall for the most controversial, or apocalyptic outlook, wanting to believe the negative versus what you're saying is reality.

Is that a fair assessment?

>> It certainly is.

"The end is nigh" has always been with our civilization.

It's a projection of our personal fear of death.

We think the universe is going to die.

Or the earth is going to die.

When there's no evidence having any truthfulness.

The " apocalypse now" thesis is easy to push especially if it's invisible or remote so no-one can see the truth.

That's the main point.

Name a scare story today that is based on a cause that is not invisible or remote.

I've had trouble trying to find one.

I don't think there is one.

The main ones are all the things they're blaming on CO2.

On Twitter, there's two pictures.

One says "A study has shown horses are getting skinnier because of climate change."

The next panel says, "Pigs are getting fatter because of climate change."

That's how ridiculous it has become.

Almost everything is blamed on climate change, something that is invisible.

What is CO2, which nobody can verify for themselves.

I ask people to think deeply about this hypothesis.

It hasn't been presented as a universal explanation of why these scare stories are so effective.

They are effective because nobody can double-check them.

That CO2 is causing wildfires, warming, hurricanes or tornados.

Those things have been happening all through earth's history.

If you study deep geology, back hundreds of millions of years, you will see this is not exceptional-- what's happening in the weather or the climate today.

It's a easy, mild time in the last couple million years-- the Pleistocene ice age.

Often Canada is covered in an entire sheet of ice.

45 times since the beginning of the Pleistocene ice age.

The last glaciation was just one in 45 episodes during the last 2.6 million years.

Human beings didn't happen in the cold parts of the world until 100,000 years ago.

They brought fire, shelter and clothing so they could live in these cold environments.

>> Are you saying with what we're experiencing today, we shouldn't bother to change our habits for producing carbon dioxide or reducing our carbon footprint?

Are these objectives not useful nor noble and we shouldn't bother?

>> Not 100% percent.

They're not framed properly.

They're saying CO2 is the problem when CO2 is the basis of all life.

All carbon in carbon-based life is from CO2 in the atmosphere or oceans.

CO2 is dissolved in the oceans in great amounts.

There's nearly 50 times as much carbon dioxide in the sea as there is in the atmosphere.

All plants, animals, fish-- all life are made out of carbon.

Carbon comes from carbon dioxide.

When we burn fossil fuels, we are simply releasing carbon dioxide that life absorbed in the deep past and was buried either as fossil fuels or carbonaceous rocks like limestone.

That's where most of it went.

The atmosphere has been depleted of carbon dioxide steadily over the millennium.

The temperature has gone up and down, through ice and hothouse ages.

We are in an ice age now.

Most people think it ended with the last glaciation.

No.

We are in an interglacial period.

Another glacial period is in the cards if things happen in the exact same pattern they have been for the last 2.6 million years.

Since 50 million years ago, we've been in a 50 million year cooling period.

This is in my book and on the internet.

Anybody can find it but nobody wants to look back before 1850.

That's the problem.

Few people have a geological perspective on the earth's age.

>> Do you see yourself as a voice of reason in a sea of hysteria?

>> There is a sea of hysteria because it gets all the media time.

But there is a lot of reason in this world too.

I am part of that in my estimation.

Not being an apocalypse predictor .

I don't think the apocalypse is coming or the world is going to get too hot for life.

That's what they are preaching.

They are 100% dead wrong.

I know the future will prove me out.

>> I'm going to ask you a question I ask all our guests on Canada Files .

What does being Canadian mean to you?

You've travelled the world but you are an environmental climate change skeptic.

Has being Canadian an advantage or disadvantage to you?

>> I'm a proud Canadian and have been since I was little.

I know this is my country-- not nationalism so much as being proud of where you live and what it stands for.

Canada is a good country.

It hasn't really helped me in my career.

I have worked quite a bit in Canada but have spent the bulk of my working life in the US, Australia, Europe and Asia.

I've never been listened to by Ottawa.

I have been before 8 or 10 US Congressional Senate committees in Washington, DC on invitation.

I have never been invited to a parliamentary committee meeting in Canada.

I feel like a bit like a prophet without honour in their own home country.

I'm still a proud Canadian despite all of that.

>> Patrick Moore, thanks so much.

Your views are very compelling and I hope our audience has enjoyed hearing them.

Even if they don't necessarily agree with them.

Thanks for joining us on Canada Files.

>> Thank you for the opportunity.

>> And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you next time for more Canada Files .

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