Sadly, we live in an age when the global media has discovered that if they all repeat the same narrative they can convince the world that black is white. Unfortunately Dr. Gerry Turcotte has fallen victim to this in his June 19 column “Weathering the Storm.”
In regard to his assertion that “every province is experiencing record wildfires,” I refer readers to the latest report from the Canadian Interagency Wildfire Centre (up to 2022, the last year of complete data). This report has all kinds of information about fires in Canada. Its data clearly shows a decline in fires over the last 30 years.
Dr. Turcotte also refers to “distant island nations sinking beneath rising seas.” In the journal Anthropocene Vol. 33, Holdaway, Ford and Owen write regarding islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans that “studies have shown that islands have persisted, and in many cases increased in size, since the mid-20th century.”
This is one of many articles with similar observations.
The Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Professor Jim Skea, has said there is no “existential threat to humanity” if global temperatures increase by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. And 2022 Nobel Prize winner in Physics John Clauser has said he believes climate change is not a crisis and that the IPCC is “one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation.”
That makes two Nobel prize winners in physics joining the Clintel World Climate Declaration that “there is no climate emergency.”
Norman Reilly
Coquitlam
Re the Aug. 28 story “Retired Calgary bishop wants to break the silence”:
I’m truly grateful someone had the courage to speak out about the destructive involvement of the media regarding the residential school missing children claims. But do all those people who now have a tainted and hateful view of the Catholic church because of it know the truth?
I use the word hateful because that is what I have experienced, but my greatest concern is people within the Church or non-Catholic spouses whose growing faith was destroyed because of these media-hyped inaccuracies that were never corrected.
I was told that we can’t make the truth public because it will undo all the progress we have made in reconciliation, but how can that be true? As a parent and grandparent myself it would help more for healing to know that there are no missing children.
I ask that we put our full support behind Bishop Emeritus Fred Henry.
MaryAnn Hessels
Delta
