Just heard an excellent, very energetic and entertaining speech by Marc Morano of Climate Depot here at our Economic Education Association of Alberta annual "Essentials of Freedom" conference. (It's on tomorrow as well if you're in Calgary and can join us.) Marc showed some clips from his film Climate Hustle and highlighted some of the absurd contradictions in the predictions of climate change alarmists, where falling or rising temperatures both cause drought and floods at the same time, as well as higher and lower crime, terrorism and probably a cracked kitchen sink as well.

Great stuff.

It’s time to set the record straight on "man-made" climate change. And that’s what I’m going to do with my new documentary project looking at what we really know about the Earth’s climate, not just cherry-picking from the last ten years or a hundred, but looking back thousands, millions and hundreds of millions of years. It’s going to expose a lot of hype, bad science and unjustified shouting on the part of the alarmists and lay out what we really know.

The climate has always been variable. And yes, sometimes it changes in ways that can spell trouble. But hysteria, misinformation and name-calling won’t help us deal with anything that might be coming our way. Virtually everything the conventional wisdom maintains on climate, about what we know and about what’s probably happening, is demonstrably false and it’s time to cut through the scaremongering and tell the real story.

I’m really excited about this project. I’m convinced the time is right to push back against the exaggeration, alarmism and intellectual bullying. But to make it I need your help. We’re crowdfunding it, as we have our last four documentaries. So it will only happen if you and people like you contribute, large amounts or small, and crucially share it with friends, family and associates in person, on Facebook and Twitter, by email and any other way you can.

I’ve set a minimum goal of $50,000 because for that I can make a documentary on this vital topic. But I want to be completely frank that to make a truly polished film, to get the gear we need, to travel to important locations and to help sustain us in our work, we need to get well past that minimum, to a "stretch" goal of at least $100,000.

So if you’re ready for some sound information and straight talk on "man-made climate change", click on the Kickstarter link to back the project, and share it as widely as you can.

To support the documentary, click here.

"Doubt comes at the window, when inquiry is denied at the door." Benjamin Jowett

On March 17 and 18 I'll be helping host the Economic Education Association of Alberta annual conference on "Meeting the Climate Change Challenge." We'll be gathering in Calgary to talk about the science, the policy choices and the rhetoric surrounding the alarmist vision of disastrous man-made global warming, not because the environment isn't important but because thinking sensibly is. We've got a great lineup of speakers and panelists, which you can see here, including my talk on "The Environment: A True Story".

So register now and join us in March for a compelling discussion that dispels myths and cuts through shrill rhetoric to make sense of this crucial issue.

Happy Birthday Vendsyssel-Thy Island. Formerly part of the Jutland peninsula, it achieved geographic independence thanks to a flood on February 3, 1825 that washed away its connection to the mainland. Yes folks, it is more extreme weather. How dare it?

A fair question. Evidently Vendsyssel-Thy, or the storm, didn’t know that only with man-made emissions of CO2 rising fast have we had fires, floods, windstorms and all that jazz. The Danes are still trying to cope even though it’s their second-largest island after Zealand (no, it’s nothing to do with New Zealand, named for a Dutch province with the equally boring name of "Sea Land"). It wasn’t thought of as one place before it got cut off and old habits die hard. But I digress.

The point here is that it actually was an island before about 1200, when some sort of weather event created a sand "tombolo". (I didn’t know either but I Googled and it’s an Italian word for a sandbar or sandspit that links an island to the mainland at which point the island becomes a "tied island".)

What does it all mean? Arguably not much. Except in this regard: Every time a storm does something dramatic today, and with so many more people living in coastal areas storms tend to have a more dramatic impact, a bunch of people who should know better start running around flapping their hands and saying it’s global warming or "climate change" and TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It). But it’s not.

It’s just more weather. Some is good, much is bad. But it’s been happening for a long long time and will probably keep doing so.

On this date in history in 1886 one Karl Benz became a hero of entrepreneurship and then, I suppose, a massive ecological villain when he patented a gasoline-powered car. People like me have long praised the automobile as a classic private solution to a pressing public problem, the increasingly intolerable fouling of cities and destruction of forests by… the horse.

I know, it sounds a bit silly. But major cities were being buried in horse poop, drowned in horse pee, and afflicted with tens of thousands of dead horses a year. And more and more forest land was being cleared for pastures to grow the hay all these creatures consumed.

If government had taken charge of the problem, there is no telling what disaster would have ensued. Instead entrepreneurs created a new form of transportation, less picturesque in ways that make me genuinely sad but enormously more efficient and effective. You could not have cottages for the middle class if we all had to take horse carts to them, nor supermarkets or indeed almost any facet of modern life. You could also not have carts that play what was once quaintly called "high fidelity" music, heat your seat and protect you from the elements while a gentle push of your foot accelerates you to 100 km/h. And now that we have seen modernity in all its horror, maybe future waves of technology can allow us to decentralize, slow down, and get back in touch with nature external and internal while retaining some of the gains like, say, laptops that can edit video. Just to pick an example at random.

Of course today the reaction is likely to be that by inventing the gas-powered car Benz (yes, of Mercedes-Benz) played a major role in dooming the planet and its inhabitants to climate change that will drown, fry or otherwise exterminate us all. But even if one grants that he’s about as much of a benefactor to humanity as, say, Sauron, surely we can at least draw the lesson that if we want alternatives to current technology including fossil-fuel-dependent vehicles and power plants, we are far likely to get dynamic, unpredictable, astoundingly effective solutions from the private sector than from central planning.

In turn they may raise new dilemmas over time to replace the ones they solve. But it sure beats government intervention, which reliably creates new messes without fixing the old ones.

In my latest National Post column, I challenge climate alarmists to explain the past before they predict the future, as the scientific method requires.