So -- who has the real goods on this climate-change thing?

I see that all the politicians are getting on the global-warming grandstand. That means we won’t be inundated with doom-and-gloom warnings just from scientists, pseudoscientists, activist groups, backyard pundits and just plain flakes about how “We’re all going to die!” just after the polar bears succumb, but now we will have to bear with sloganeering from every goddamn political weasel in every party in the Western World ad nauseam.

Well, at least we won’t have to bear with political action, just sloganeering. Politicians are good at offering lists of intentions that they have absolutely no impulse to act upon. They just want to say it before their adversaries do so that they can’t be accused of ignoring a phenomenon – if it is a phenomenon rather than just natural meteorological course-of-events – and giving ammo to their enemies.

Five years ago climate change got a minuscule amount of ink in the press, and virtually zero discussion in the electronic media. Now you can’t open a paper without some bozo or bozette waxing philosophical about the fact that even those of us in more northerly climes are going to shortly be dealing with tse-tse flies and jungle-rot – that is if we haven’t drowned in the ever-rising oceans. Oh dear. It might even happen in the lifetimes of some of us.

But, I’m not about to ignore the matter. I’ll take my cues from George W. (hah!), Tony Blair (double hah! – the second hah! is for his wife Cherie who makes my skin crawl), and stodgy old Stephen Harper here in Canada. And I say, the moment those folks stop flying in airplanes and being squired around in huge vehicles, I’ll do likewise. I’ll say the moment our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan give up their Hummers and switch over to little underpowered hybrids, make room for me on that old bandwagon – provided it’s a hydrogen-fueled bandwagon.

Anyway, I do my part. I drive a little four-banger, I used 60-watt bulbs (unless I actually want to see to read), and I’d use those curly fluorescent bulbs that the Greenies of the world push us to use if only they’d sell them for the price of a regular bulb, rather than a rip-off price of about 95 times as expensive. And you know I will start to do even more than that the day that China indicates it actually does give a rat’s-ass about what all the rest of us seem to be obsessing about. However, it hasn’t done that yet. It hasn’t even given lip-service to the fact that its trains are all coal-fired and much of its electricity is generated in coal-burning plants. And with a population of 70 trillion or some such, you can probably deduce that China contributes just a little more to global warming than does, say, Canada, with a population the size of a Chinese small town.

Don’t misinterpret what I’m saying here. Global warming just ‘may’ be as serious as we think it is, and human activity just ‘may’ be responsible for some of it, but I am yet to see any genuinely serious approaches to it other than Gore’s politically-motivated grandstanding (as he is squired to speaking engagements in a limo; and I’m not making that up), a lot of scientists of various descriptions giving vent to their opinions. Scientists like Canada’s eco-warrior ‘darling’ (to some) David Suzuki who waxes prophetic about everything, including global warming, even though he’s a biologist and, to my knowledge, doesn’t have the designation meteorologist attached to his creds.

On the other hand, there are other qualified scientists who think it’s all bushwa, and just a natural course-of-events – the planet has warmed and cooled in cycles since the beginning of time.

So, I don’t know who’s right. Do you? Really?

I like to be on the side of the gods, but I’m still uncertain as to which side the gods adhere, and I don’t think George Bush is in a position to tell me, despite his newfound climate sensitivity.