In this episode of The Cory Morgan Show, I speak with Michelle Sterling from the Friends of Science about the devastating flooding in British Columbia, Canada, and how climate change is playing a major role in the problem. We've seen Elizabeth May and Catherine McKenna take full advantage of the situation and try to blame it on climate change, but there's more to it than that.
00:04:52.000Well, I guess the top of the news right now is, you know, the terrible flooding and, and, and tragic tragedy that's going on in British Columbia.
00:05:03.000I we've seen, as I said, in my introduction, Elizabeth May and Catherine McKenna taking advantage of that situation
00:05:09.000and trying to blame it on climate change.
00:05:11.000And we need a little bit of reality added to what, what the causes of the circumstance are out there.
00:05:16.000You said you had some information about the lake out there?
00:05:20.000Well, especially in the Fraser Valley, the whole area there around Abbotsford is actually Sumas Lake.
00:05:28.000It's a lake that was drained about a hundred years ago.
00:05:31.000And in this little clip from Vancouver traces, it says humans have lived here for at least 10,000 years,
00:05:40.000but many are unaware as they drive between Abbotsford and Chilliwack that they're driving along the bottom of a drained lake.
00:05:48.000And the scariest part at the end, almost prescient now says the lake has been home of the Sumas First Nation since time immemorial
00:05:56.000and would return in a few days if the Barrowtown pump station stopped running.
00:06:02.000And last night Abbotsford had an emergency declaration evacuation because they were very concerned that it would go.
00:06:10.000And I guess there's still some concern about the Nosek River, which is in the States, as I understand, flooding back over into the Canadian side.
00:06:22.000And not to mention there's still lots of flood melt, snow melt coming down off the mountains.
00:06:28.000So it's a big catastrophe already and could get worse, sadly, but it's not a climate change event.
00:07:27.000So take the last 72 hours with 150 millimeters of water, and you get some idea, not just of the depth, but the forces that are at work on these watersheds.
00:07:38.000So this burdensome weight is also flowing down these mountains.
00:07:43.000And this is why we see the Coquihalla ripped to shreds, you know, tremendous forces far beyond what humankind can, can even defend against in many cases.
00:07:57.000I mean, the force of water can, can strip them out and clean and no time.
00:08:00.000I mean, hydraulic gold mining used to be quite common a long time ago, and it did terrible, uh, environmental, uh, damage to areas that took, uh, decades to recover.
00:08:09.000But, you know, we discovered that water could be very powerful in, in washing away hillsides.
00:08:13.000Unfortunately, it could do that beyond our control as well.
00:08:33.000Um, so you had to be near enough to walk.
00:08:36.000And that's why people built around rivers and on floodplains and floodplains are very fertile.
00:08:42.000Um, Parker Gallant sent me something yesterday showing that in Manitoba, for instance, 70% of the population live on a floodplain at high risk.
00:08:52.000But in Manitoba, they created, uh, I think it's called Duff's Ditch.
00:08:57.000Um, they built a huge diversion, uh, tunnel.
00:09:01.000Um, and that has really saved the city quite a few times.
00:09:05.000They, it's still always going to be subject to flooding because it's very low land.
00:09:09.000And again, it's the bottom of a glacial lake called Lake Agassiz or Agassiz, however you'd like to say it.
00:09:16.000Um, so that, you know, this is quite prevalent across Canada that many places are built on floodplains and they're not built for these, uh, larger floods.
00:09:26.000They're built for, you know, sort of small, uh, two or three feet coming up from the river.
00:09:31.000They don't, they're not built for these kinds of, of floods.
00:09:59.000Sorry, I interrupted you, but that's the big problem with people claiming this is climate change.
00:10:04.000You know, you're going to have a whole faction of very influential people.
00:10:07.000I mean, remember in the Deloitte report, the government of the various governments in Canada have funded 31 ENGOs with $2.1 billion.
00:10:17.000And these are all the climate change activists, and they're all going to be yapping about, you know, so we have to reduce fossil fuels and build wind and solar farms.
00:10:27.000When really we have to build dikes, we have to build resilient housing, maybe even on stilts.
00:10:33.000You know, we maybe have to rethink how some of these communities that are being wiped out are going to be rebuilt.
00:10:39.000But certainly wind farms and solar farms are not going to do anything to prevent any future catastrophes like this.
00:10:47.000No, I mean, we can't carbon tax our way out of this.
00:10:50.000And we know areas that are prone to disasters.
00:10:53.000If anybody travels the Gulf of Mexico, you do see the houses are all in stilts because they periodically get hit with hurricanes.
00:10:58.000It's been hit down there for a thousand years and probably will be for a thousand more.
00:11:02.000Yeah. And, you know, that's I guess also we had mentioned something about the Calgary Declaration for a Climate Emergency.
00:11:09.000And that's really sort of the insult, shall we say, of these cities declaring climate emergencies when very real, destructive, tragic emergencies, real emergencies like the one going on in BC happen.
00:11:25.000And yet these people sitting in council chambers are voting for a climate emergency declaration when nothing of the sort is going on.
00:11:37.000You know, this whole climate emergency thinking comes from misuse of what's known as the RCP 8.5, which is a scenario that is implausible.
00:11:50.000But it's the one that's been most used in evaluating future projections of climate change and temperature.
00:11:57.000And that's why it feels like there's been a catastrophe.
00:12:00.000But the most recent IPCC report, if you actually read the full report and not the politicized summary for policymakers, if you read the full report or if you read proper analysis of the full report, like by Roger Plk Jr., you find that actually this RCP 8.5 is no longer being used.
00:12:22.000It's not considered to be our future and that means the climate emergency is over and we do have time.
00:12:29.000Well, we spend our time nitpicking over emissions and virtue signaling with climate emergencies when we got real things we could work on, like forest fires.
00:12:37.000Proper forest management can really mitigate and reduce the risks and intensity of forest fires, but we aren't focused on that because everybody's talking about this bigger climate change picture.
00:12:47.000That's right. I mean, if you look at Logan Lake in BC this summer, they were surrounded by fire, but they followed all the fire smart recommendations.
00:12:57.000And anyone who's listening, if you're in Canada, I suggest that you look up fire smart and see how you can protect your own home or your own community by using these recommendations.
00:13:09.000And also in the States, you can look up fire wise.
00:13:12.000So there are very practical considerations, you know, like moving shrubbery 100.
00:13:18.000I think it's 100 meters from your house.
00:13:20.000You know, just the setbacks of vegetation makes a huge difference as to whether or not your house goes up in flames or whether just your shrubs go up in flames.
00:13:31.000Having a metal roof, cleaning out your drains and gutters, you know, a lot of them are fairly simple, but people maybe don't think about them or they have all kinds of junk stacked on their deck.
00:13:43.000Well, if you get any kind of embers that land on that junk, it'll go up on your deck and then your house will go up.
00:13:51.000So, you know, fire smart, fire wise, the Logan Lake success was never headline news across Canada.
00:13:58.000The only thing they talked about was the wildfire that burnt down Lytton and Lytton actually has been burnt down four times before in the past.
00:14:07.000So, you know, people also need to take a look at history before they start putting the climate change label on top of everything.
00:14:14.000Because most of these things happened before.
00:14:32.000And if we keep talking about this big, broad picture, you might ignore the smaller things that are actually going to have a much more direct impact on your safety and the protection of your property.
00:14:41.000I mean, once in my parents' house, which they had parched the basement and done all kinds of things to protect it, there was flooding in the basement.
00:14:50.000And I went outside to see what was happening.
00:14:52.000And I realized that the county had never dug a ditch on one side of the road.
00:14:57.000And all the water was pouring through the ditch and straight into their backyard and into the basement.
00:15:02.000So, you know, things like that, if you do a proper reconnaissance of your property and watch when it rains, where does it go?
00:15:13.000And, you know, you can get professional people in to help you redirect that water, not to mention all the other things that there's lots of tips online.
00:15:23.000Of course, you know, when it's catastrophic flooding, some of those things are beyond anyone, but, you know, to label it as climate change is ridiculous.
00:15:38.000So getting to the broader picture, I mean, the Glasgow conference came out 40,000 of our betters gathered mostly by air and have determined how they're going to save the world.
00:15:48.000What was your interpretation of their conclusions this time around?
00:15:51.000Well, you know, it's amazing how they all got together and decided on things that probably can't be done.
00:16:02.000Like Robert Lyman wrote a report for our short commentary for us called Theatre of the Absurd.
00:16:11.000And he's saying, you know, that all of these conferences, they don't have any legal effect, which is pretty good other than Kyoto.
00:16:21.000But then we backed out of it, which is smart of us.
00:16:24.000They're mostly based on bribes, like the Paris Agreement was based on the bribe of providing $100 billion a year to developing nations for them to get on board.
00:16:37.000And this Green Climate Fund would be handed out to them with no accountability.
00:16:42.000And just so you know, the people who could apply for the Green Climate Fund would include wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia, China, and some of the other very wealthy oil producing nations.
00:16:58.000And countries that would have to be paying in would be countries like us and bankrupt Greece would even have to pay into this fund.
00:17:06.000So this time, like they never did get that money together.
00:17:10.000And actually in the September of 2019, China and India went to the New York Climate Conference and said, hey, pay up.
00:17:18.000You know, you wanted us to be on board.
00:17:54.000The price is going up with the energy crisis.
00:17:57.000But, you know, you can store at one power plant enough coal for a whole year, which you can't do with anything else.
00:18:06.000I mean, this is why the UK is having energy problems because they've run out of reserve natural gas.
00:18:14.000And of course, natural gas can't just be dumped on the ground.
00:18:18.000It has to be in highly pressurized containers.
00:18:21.000So you have to have a constant supply and you have to have experts running it.
00:18:25.000Whereas with coal, I mean, even if you're an ordinary citizen, if you have a lump of coal, you can put it on the grill.
00:18:30.000You can put it on the grill and, you know, you can you can generate heat or cooking and COP decided to move toward ending inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.
00:18:42.000But unsurprisingly, there is no reference to eliminating hopelessly inefficient subsidies to wind and solar.
00:18:49.000And COP26 agreed to recognize a need for a just transition.
00:18:57.000Well, who would argue for an unjust transition?
00:19:02.000Just transition is code for endorsing the need for governments having subsidized non-fossil fuel alternatives and driven energy miners out of business.
00:19:12.000Then to subsidize the unemployed workers so they can move to lower paying jobs.
00:19:23.000It's called the theater of the absurd.
00:19:26.000And so if you want to read all the details that Robert writes up here about what they quote unquote accomplished, please feel free.
00:19:36.000It's they really didn't accomplish much.
00:19:39.000And they did launch this group called the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance.
00:19:44.000Well, these are this includes Quebec and California, which is ironic since Quebec has a huge oil and gas industry and in refining.
00:19:54.000And California is also competing all the time with Texas.
00:19:59.000But it's no doubt that this alliance makes it more palatable to their citizens because they're both so green in Quebec and California.
00:20:12.000And, you know, so I mean, I actually Alok Sharma at the end of the COP conference was almost crying.
00:20:21.000And this is a grown man crying about a conference that didn't come together the way they assumed it would, you know, which really is theater of the absurd.