Movies and Motives
During the winter of 1982, a group of Universal Studio actors and their cast of directors, as well as a camera, and technical entourage would wake up on a large floating barge filled with trailer houses located at the end of the Portland Canal. After a very early breakfast, they would head north through Hyder, Alaska, and onward to a filming location near Premier, British Columbia.
The Pacific Ocean’s Portland Canal starts about 25 miles north of Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and about 65 miles south-southeast of Ketchikan, Alaska. It extends inland 95 miles generally in a northerly direction. It eventually meets the delta of the Bear Glacier River at the town of Stewart, British Columbia, a distance of fewer than 2 miles from Hyder. Dissecting the full length of the canal is the imaginary border between Canada and the United States.
The Universal Studio vehicles would incur traffic from several mining operations and personnel vehicles which used the same road. Canada Wide Mines, a division of Esso Minerals, a copper producer, and Scottie Gold used the road to access their respective operations. The road, known locally as the Granduc Road, is high-mountain, single-lane gravel, with pullouts at strategic locations. To avoid collisions, at mandatory locations, each vehicle had to call out on two-way or mobile radios, with the direction of travel and mileage point.
The movie being filmed was called, “The Thing” and starred among others Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Richard Masur, Richard Dysart, and T. K. Carter. As Arctic researchers, the cast unearths “The Thing” which is “a parasitic extraterrestrial life-form that assimilates, then imitates, other organisms” including the carachters themselves.
The movie is definitely not for the timid.
I write this prologue because it’s an apt introduction to the following climate change commentary and, as well, 40 years ago, during this exact time I was a short-term resident of Stewart, British Columbia.
Anthropogenic climate change is sold and marketed through the emotion of fear. It is not sold by bona fide facts or data unless, of course, someone believes that there is a science that is permitted and proven by consensus. Credible science says any hypothesis must be replicable, reproducible, repeatable, or at least observable. Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) fails miserably in each and every one of these scientific categories.
The fictitious screams of more storms of every type, droughts, fires, and their intensities do not get any truer, just louder. Every event gets adjectives like unprecedented, record-setting, or extreme. These descriptors do not need to be true - they just need to amplify a continued call to the fooled faithful. To accommodate any type of weather incident, global warming was transformed into climate change, but for increased alarmism, it’s now the climate emergency or, worse yet, the climate crisis. Carbon dioxide was much too serene, so it was changed to carbon, greenhouse gas, or carbon pollution.
Oceans have not risen at an accelerated rate since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-1800s. One cannot say the same for the voices of boisterous doom. Relative to the recent inspection, survey, analysis, and assessment of weather stations, we cannot conclude that temperatures have risen with any degree of accuracy or simply been distorted by raw data manipulation.
The Guardian, one of the most significant trolls of climate change for progressive eco-politicians shouts and shrieks their next scare tactic with the linked article, “Next pandemic may come from melting glaciers, new data shows” and subtitled by “Analysis of Arctic lake suggests viruses and bacteria locked in ice could reawaken and infect wildlife” and then, in turn, infect you. Note the ambiguity of the words “may and could”.
A post by Paul Homewood of “Not A lot of People Know That” covers the distortions and misrepresentations of this fairytale.