November 2006 ISSUE
READINGS
This Environmentalist’s View of
Climate Change
Isn’t What You’d Expect
The Emperor’s New Climate
By Bruno Wiskel, P.Geol.
Evergreen Environmental
Company
Box 194, Colinton AB
T0G 0R0
A subsistence farmer and conservationist whose other books include Pond Raising
Rainbow Trout is hardly the picture most of us paint of an oil company apologist.
After all, the life of Bruno Wiskel, P.Geol., is about reducing his spending
on fossil fuels, not increasing it.
That makes it all the more interesting that his current effort takes a side that separates him from many of his fellow environmentalists. In The Emperor’s New Climate, Mr. Wiskel and his Evergreen Environmental Company of Colinton, Alta., argue that natural cycles — not human activity — are the cause of global warming.
Anyone who has read Readers’ Forum in The PEGG over the last five years has heard this before. Arguments for and against Kyoto targets, their science and their politics have been well debated on these pages.
However, if you want to find out the nuts and bolts of the anti-Kyoto viewpoint, all in one place and from a writer without an apparent vested interest, this book is well worth your time.
A little more than half of The Emperor’s New Climate details the history and science behind global warming. The rest takes on a list of what Mr. Wiskel calls global warming myths.
It’s all done in a readable, often witty and sometimes cynical way. The Kyoto Accord is about money, not science, Wiskel writes. Reusing your hotel towels is about saving dollars for the hotel — if you want to reduce resources, don’t travel. And wind turbines are better bird killers than they are viable energy generators.
Mr. Wiskel realizes opinions such as these will not be popular with some of his readers. But he’s got a way around that one. If you disagree with The Emperor’s New Climate, he says, you’ll love his other books — which he’d be happy to sell you.