Rex Murphy: If CBC cared about diversity, it would host Jordan Peterson global warming talk

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There is no other issue over the past 20 and probably 30 years that has more obtained the attention of the world’s press than global warming.

I know there have been others. But none has had such a continuous and insistent presence.

No other issue has had the sweet, soft, giddy support of the big networks, the great corporations, the trendy school boards, every mad virtue-signalling politician (the chieftain of which is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau), and the whole wide and multitudinous, amoeba-replicative (and dreadful) NGOs — think of the various foundations, of which I nominate the Suzuki Foundation as the Canadian prince of these dull harrying grouplets — as global warming.

I am aware I am using the old and opportunistically discarded brand-name here: global warming.

Global warming was the term du jour when the thesis was we were heading into thermal crisis, the snow caps were to disappear, glaciers would go all water in the next 30 years or so, skiers would stare down snow-clean slopes, the seas would swamp New York and Tokyo, children would weep at bared un-snowed hill-slides.

Alas. Snow kept falling. Seas refused to swell to city-destroying levels. Some winters remained … cold. Ski slopes had snow. And children still in all their sweet joy sledded down the still snow-blanketed hills.

Imagine — the planet’s weather refused to follow Greenpeace’s furious warnings.

Elizabeth May’s hothouse weepings, the latest bulletins from various second-tier folk singers, and people who slept on multi-million dollar yachts on the French Rivera who deplored those who drove pickup trucks in Northern Alberta.

It was for naught. The Earth has its own ideas. And may probably continue to have them. Presuming the cosmos itself doesn’t go woke.

So it was obvious that “global warming,” the doomster’s environmental tagline required what the communication shops call a “re-branding.” And there being no set more adjusted to the miracles of communications management than the herd of apocalyptic global warming warriors, they — perhaps with much polling, and certainly with much cuteness — changed the brand to “climate change.”

Climate change. There’s a conceptual “get out of jail” brand.

A useful digression: I come from dear, sweet Newfoundland.

And I know this will not mean much for you reading who are not from my province — but I grew up in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland.

Placentia Bay is to a changing of the climate as tropical climes are to vividly coloured birds and wet treetops during the monsoon.

In Placentia Bay the climate changes every six minutes. And on rough days, every four. Climate change is a beautiful redundancy. It always changes. And if it didn’t … well, it wouldn’t be climate.

So the new brand of “climate change” had this going for it — it gave a blanket rationale for every twitch and tingle or every “weather event” of any kind, wet or cold, hot or dry, a justification under its pure and infinitely elastic designation.

And every TV station, every “weather specialist” — whatever that strange category is supposed to mean — was on board with pointing to “climate change” as the universal cause.

CBC and TVOntario kept up the silly surmise, having aired Al Gore’s ridiculous, abysmally ignorant “An Inconvenient Truth” as if it was a script from Sinai, not on stone tablets of course, but “verified” by the “scientists” at the Academy Awards.

Climate change as a brand and a switch-name has gone unchallenged by the main media. Most of them have endorsed a silence on respectable, authoritative, independent and resolute minds who offer more than a different view, but a neutral, rational, and science-based contesting opinion on what has become more of a doxology than matter for exchange, debate, and informed challenge.

Consider Dr. Richard Lindzen. His qualifications on atmospheric science are superb. He is not a “culture warrior.” He is not “political.” He is a great thinking mind — that last term is a very high compliment.

He recently gave a long — nearly two hours — interview with Jordan Peterson, on “climate change,” all conducted with great calm and a back-and-forth that followed no script. It was, to my view, one of the cleanest discussions of this issue I have seen.

Dr. Lindzen has the authority of real knowledge on this topic, and therefore his reasonings are worth full and wide attention.

The interview is a model of intellectual exchange, something long lost on our big networks with their fixed views and hollow coverage.

Dr. Lindzen is a font of clear thought, non-agenda-driven deliberation, and direct statement.

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It would be a wild wish to see Peterson’s interview with Dr. Lindzen on CBC or TVO. It would break the hearts of their morning agenda meeting attendees. And would threaten their “diversity” and climate change mandates, which are, apparently, whatever the Suzuki foundation and Steven Guilbeault think are correct must be correct.

Watch this interview, even if you are committed to “global warming” theorizations.

And, to Ms. Catherine Tait, CBC president currently wandering the great Canadian landscape arguing CBC’s relevance and point. Here’s a thought: diversity is a quality of mind and intellect. It is not a submission to current faddishness.

Try airing the interview with Dr. Lindzen as an experiment with diversity of thought.

It may be a strange thing to say, but a broadcaster, subsidized and leaning on past glories, should earn its present-day respect by looking around and giving a glimpse at opinions and perspectives outside the glass case of its own treasured ever-so-correct eidolons of virtue-speak.

National Post

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