National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 23

nationalpost.com NATIONAL POST, SATURDAY, JULY 4, 2009 Russell: 'Readers occasionally ask how the Letter of the Day is selected. At the risk of giving away trade secrets, its not rocket science9 PABAIE BED LEFTIES 0 The theories of "eco-terrorists" such as James Lovelock, BRUNO COM BY WIKIPEDIA says Conrad Black, are now being severely challenged. Conrad Black There fell solemnly from a recent Saturday edition of a Canadian newspaper a well-printed, stapled booklet of 50 pages, on magazine stock, called Corporate Knights. Wishing to know more about contemporary Canadian business leaders, I started leafing through it, and shortly came across a peppy message from the publisher with an accompanying photo that showed her to be a pleasant and purposeful-seeming youngish woman. Beside her was a declaration that any contributor whose writing was found to be influenced by an advertiser would be dismissed.

The magazine is a quarterly and has a staff of 25 named people, including interns, and didn't have much advertising. I am quite familiar with the commercial economics of publishing periodicals, and this one would require heavy subsidization. I surmised this was partly accounted for by the advice that some research and reporting received "the financial support of Industry Canada." Persevering determinedly through my edition, I quickly discovered an article entitled "A Roundtable, a Feast, and a Chivalrous Scientist." The gracious man of science being profilled was none other than James Lovelock, "world-renowned scientist and originator of the Gaia hypothesis." It was at this point that I began to suffer glottal stops. Gaia is billed by its author as "a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system, which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet." This isn't a scientific formulation at all; it's just a cargo cult-level platitude counseling against excessive spoliation of resources. Lovelock's new book, which he was promoting in Canada, is billed as his last, to the relief of the many eco-sceptics who have tired of the man's decades of flogging eco-terror.

In it, he effectively abandons the theory that the world is on suicide watch, but says that people may perish from their own wastefulness, extinguish- about climate change. Hundreds of scientists have apos-tacized, including Nobel Prize winner (Physics) Ivar Giaever; the world's first female PhD in meteorology, Dr. Joanne Simpson; and the Japanese environmental chemist Dr. Kimimori Itoh, who participated in the UN climate reports of recent years, but now regards the theory of man-made climate warming as "the worst scientific scandal in history." The Earth's temperatures generally have not changed the achievements of Reagan and Thatcher; he is one of the Democratic Party's noisiest economic junkyard dogs. As I was wondering what possessed Industry Canada, and I presume, some of the "sustainable" corporations which are not allowed to influence content in the magazine I was reading, to bankroll this hobnobbing with the most cliched roues of the chronic-conferencing left, there came a revelation: Corporate Knights dinner with Gwynne Dyer.

Gwynne Dyer! From what dank catacomb did the Knights exhume that bedraggled old ringtail? The most unrelievedly gloomy, implacably alarmist, Americophobic, Israel-baiting heirloom of Cold War defeatism, so dyspeptic he made Admiral Gene La Rocque seem like Douglas MacArthur, Gwynne Dyer devised a new scenario every fortnight for 20 years for how the United States would destroy the world. The suspense was thick and pungent as I read on: What new grotesqueries had this paleolithic Cassandra in mind for his Knight-errant hosts? He did not disappoint: We are on the knife-edge of global war over climate and famine, and a possible American invasion of Canada to steal Canada's fresh water. I put down the magazine after this, at page 15; I could not go on. It was strangely nostalgic to read Dyer's fatuities again, but we are being railroaded by a mob of charlatans and poseurs. When George Soros, James Lovelock, Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz and Gwynne Dyer are singing off the same song sheet, it's time to change the music.

The backers of the Corporate Knights should invite them to generate a serious debate and to give equal time to the larger and more rigorous group that dissents from the climate change industry's fear-mongering. Nigel (Lord) Lawson, a brilliant former chancellor and authority on environmental policy, has written a much better book on the subject than Lovelock and is coming to Canada soon. Let the Knights have him to dinner; they will get a lot more for their supporters' money than Gwynne Dyer's call to the battlements to defend Canadian water from the U.S. Marines, much less James Lovelock's war trumpet to cover the ocean floors with transmogrified barnyard animal excrement. National Post cblettersgmail.com of idealist seeking real social change hangs out with political hacks like Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff.

"Based on his visit to Bob Rae's office, your letter-writer thinks that these are the bad boys and rebels that Canada needs," Ms. Andrais continued. "While truly idealistic Iranians are putting their lives on the line for change, there is no way they should be confused with young Liberals, or even these old ones." National Post prussell nationalpost.com "Rebel-Bob Rae Jfi 4 When George Soros, James Lovelock and Gwynne Dyer are singing off the same song sheet, it's time to change the music enough to lose too much when the burst, as many in the auditorium would.) Others in the Davos photograph included Lord Stern, George Soros, and Joseph Stig-litz, all such pillars of the chic left that they are almost part of the furniture in the awful hotels of Davos. Nicholas Stern is the British Labour Party's official dissembler of justifications for mad environmental radicalism, which, as noted above, would be colossally "unsustainable" and bring down economic misery on a large share of the population of any country that took it seriously. George Soros is as sharp and avaricious a speculator as there is in the world, but he has been a champion of every left-wing cause within reach, including the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and opposition to Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative, which one the last round of the Cold War and is now all that gives any comfort of missile defence to the neighbours of Iran and North Korea.

Soros hears the same drummer as Cyrus Eaton and Armand Hammer, a bridge between ideologies, while also stuffing his pockets with profits from the former communist world. Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize economist who is another desperate partisan, leading the Greek Chorus that the current economic problems debunk ten letter on a timely subject If it's a first-hand account, that's a plus. And if it will get under the skin of readers, all the better the purpose of the Letters page, after all, is to spark debate among readers. That latter factor explains why Tuesday's Letter of the Day entitled "Bad boys and rebels, that's what we need" was selected. Penned by a university student, it recounted how he went to Liberal MP Bob Rae for advice on "what is would take for my generation to have a revolution." His description of that meeting where he saw a university photo of Mr.

Rae social and Michael Ignatieff a rebel with a bad-boy was heartfelt and genu ine, but it appears to have irked many readers. "I am not sure why this gibberish warranted publication in the National Post, much less being Let ter of the Day," wrote Bonnie Andrais. "I wonder what kind ing themselves but leaving our planet in habitable condition. Thankfully, eco-terrorists such as Lovelock are now being severely challenged. The public in most advanced countries were never sold on the more exotic notions of climate change and imperative remedial action to begin with.

And now the politicians are having second thoughts, as well. But don't tell that to Lovelock. According to Corporate Knights, he told a Canadian audience that teeming masses of fugitives from hot countries will shortly be pressing against the border, and that the best antidote to global warming is to turn huge quantities of cow and pig ordure into charcoal and drop it in immense volume onto the world's ocean beds. I looked for more indications that the article was a send-up, unsuccessfully. Has the ecology industry really come to this; to this unlikely tocsin to uplift and frighten the susceptible? That over-indulged industry will have to do better than that to deal with the rising tide of doubts about human-caused global warming.

Australia and New Zealand have rescinded their carbon-emission legislation. The Polish Academy of Sciences has renounced its previous faith in the Al Gore UN conventional wisdom worried that the net result of this affair will be an increase in xenophobia, which will victimize CAF critic Tarek Fatah, Mohamed Boudjenane director general of the CAF, Omar Shaban, you and me. A Canada that is hostile and inhospitable to Arabs, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, First Nations and people of colour would be a diminished Canada. Let us not go there." I The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is addressed regularly in our news section and almost as frequently on our Letters page but it appears that at least one reader is tiring of the topic "I cannot help but notice the unending stream of articles and editorials over whether tional poor house.) The fact is that the world has almost been railroaded by scammers like Al Gore, he who inflicted famine on millions with his nonsense about the potential of corn as a fuel, which priced it as food beyond the reach of much of the developing world. After the hallelujah chorus for James Lovelock, Corporate Knights presented a photograph from the World Economic Forum at Davos, of the director of Corporate Knights with some of the more inevitable habitues of that world's fair of trendiness.

I was on that circuit for many years, including as a session chairman and plenary panellist (most memorably when Rupert Murdoch and I tried to explain to Yehudi Menuhin what the dot-com era would do for the Third World the answer, which we both tried to put diplomatically, was that those countries weren't prosperous third-of-a-century later, Hitch-ens does exactly that with, 'I can still remember the profound sense of loathing and disgust that I experienced at the mere sight of him. Nixon still fills me with a pure and undiluted "Is this judicious commentary?" Mr. Williams asked. "Or is this simply self-indulgence? Or self-therapy? Where are Robert Fulford or Father Raymond de Souza when you need them?" "There is no doubt that Christopher Hitchens has a natural bent for stirring the pot," added Alex Taylor. "Every time he contributes to this newspaper, you can be sure that impassioned letters to the editor will follow.

It seems that those professing the Christian faith are particularly incensed and always rise to the bait. Such heated reactions have got to be confirmation of a successful columnist" I Readers occasionally ask how the Letter of the Day is selected. At the risk of giving away trade secrets, it's not rocket science. We look for a well-writ THE WEEK IN LETTERS Every week, the Post receives hundreds of letters to the editor, providing a snapshot of our readers' collective state of mind. In the column below, our letters editor highlights some of the more passionately argued letters we received last week that did not make it into the paper.

in the last eight years; and the polar ice cap, rising oceans, and the health and weather horror stories that have been used to frighten the world into harebrained self-inflicted economic wounds and nostrums have been scientifically debunked. (This includes the aptly named ObamaPelosi Cap and Trade Bill; if passed into U.S. law in its present form, it will earn its authors dunce caps, and trade economic growth for the na- Palestinians are being anti-Semitic or whether what Israel is doing is considered genocide," wrote Joshua Wasylciw. "I have a revolutionary idea Canada should no longer accept refugees, temporary workers, students and would-be citizens who are Israeli or Palestinian. As is evidenced by the repeated publication of letters to the editor, these new Canadians are not leaving their baggage at the door when they come here.

Why do we want to keep accepting people who clearly have trouble getting along?" I Columnist Christopher Hitchens has the unique gift of being able to amuse some Post readers while deeply irritating others. His column this week on a former president was true to form. "Whatever Richard Nixon's hatreds were, he had the good sense not to put them in writing," wrote Paul Williams. "A Paul Russell When the news broke that Omar Shaban, a (now former) Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) vice-president had posted some anti-Canadian remarks on Face-book on Canada Day, readers were incensed. We published one note in this vein on Friday, subtly headlined: "If you don't like it here leave." That brought in this note.

"I appreciate your efforts to fairly reflect the statements of all parties, warts and all," wrote Henry Lowi. "But I am concerned about the virulent 'Canada love it or leave tone of your readers. I am.