The debate on the Kyoto Protocol has deteriorated from science into politics and economics. Environment Canada is on record as saying that they do not wish to discuss the science. The recent regional closed meetings with "stakeholders" deliberately provided no opportunity for dissenters to the politically correct position to state their case. In view of this, a number of Calgary APEGGA members, mostly earth scientists, have formed an organization under the Alberta Societies Act, named FRIENDS OF SCIENCE, to bring alternate science views to the attention of the politicians, the media and the public.

In short, our main arguments are as follows: -Climate Change has been a regular feature of our planet for many millions of years. -The earth has been warming since the end of the last glacial period about 20,000 years ago; there have been smaller undulations since: the Medieval Warm Period, when vines grew in Yorkshire and the Vikings farmed in Greenland and Newfoundland and the Little Ice Age which put Europe in the deepfreeze between 1300 and 1700 AD. We have been warming ever since. -Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rise and fall with temperature increases, not the other way around. In fact the CO2 level trails temperature increases by some 600 years. Human-induced CO2 is therefore only a very small contributor. Counting influences of oceanic absorption and release, deep sea methane upsets and volcanic eruptions, the human factor pales.

-Greenhouse gases make up about 3% of our atmosphere. Of this tiny amount, water vapour counts for 97%. Even Sir John Houghton, one of the British originators of the Kyoto campaign has acknowledged that water vapour and clouds constitute the largest uncertain factors in climate modelling. -NASA's James Hanson, who led the campaign in the U.S. and was the great proponent of human-induced CO2 as the culprit in global warming, reversed himself last year and is now fighting pollution . -Climate changes have been recognized to occur as a result of changes in solar radiation. This radiation changes with the excentricity of the earth orbit, the tilt of the earth's axis, the precession of the axis and sunspot cycles. All of these factors have their own well known periodicities which vary from 100,000 to 11 years. Milankovitch was in 1930 one of the first investigators to mathematically add these "wave functions" and to come up with a curve which fitted the glacial periods over the last 600,000 years very well. His work has since been fine-tuned, but the principle remains intact.

-The evidence used by Environment Canada rests primarily on computer generated General Circulation Models. Environment Canada loves computers. They are also used to provide you with your five-day weather forecast.

Computer simulations depend on a set of assumptions as basic input. These values are often uncertain, incomplete and in some cases questionable. These GCMs are like a house of cards. They can even be manipulated to provide the answer that one desires. In industry we used to refer to these efforts as "Monte Carlo simulations". 

Don't take my word for it. Visit our web-site http://www.friendsofscience.org> , check us out and support us if you can.

Albert F. Jacobs, M.Sc., P.Geol.