Editor:

It has been some time since I have written about global warming, but with Copenhagen going full bore, it is with some satisfaction that I have been vindicated by recent events.

The scandal called "climategate" has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, as delegates form all over the world negotiate frameworks for comprehensive carbon caps so that they can do there best to regulate every little bit of our lives to their political ends.

It was always my position that global warming (now called climate change because the globe isn't warming) is a political movement, not a science based movement. This was evident to me long ago, because anyone with a remotely independent and inquisitive mind and the Internet can seek out enough information in a variety of places to determine that the globe is not warming, the oceans have not risen, and the ice caps have actually been growing in the Antarctic for many years and the Arctic for the last several years.

To have believed totally in global warming is a kind of feelings-based faith and not a particularly knowledge or brain-based activity.

Yes the climate changes, always has, always will, but the link to man-made carbon is not science-based but is just a theory.

Now the confirmation has come in the climategate scandal.

Someone with a conscience released a large volume of emails hacked over a ten year period  from the  scientific players within the main depository of scientific climate data, the Climatic Research Unit CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Britain.

"The material, which covers a period of more than a decade, has led many to conclude that climate scientists associated with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and various government agencies have been cooking the books to make the case for man-made global warming." (National Post).

In short, the emails show that data was manipulated, hidden, and selectively used in a coordinated way to assert the claims of global warming alarmists. It has been politics, not science at play. We have all been duped. Al gore got fabulously wealthy and a Nobel prize; thousands of jet-setting climate change delegates are in Copenhagen, fat at the public trough; and Barak Obama got elected to save us from global warming.

It is time for us all to stand up and let our elected officials know we've had enough debt and expensive policy foisted on us by our governments for this red herring. If we let it go, the powers that be will bury this whole scandal, because it has given them so much power to regulate our lives for political purpose with job and economy killers like carbon taxes and carbon cap and trade.

It is time for us all to engage in a wiser and mature science-based environmentalism that includes conservation, energy savings, wise use of resources, habitat protection, and common sense waste management because we know it is the right thing to do.  Global warming is not this, but is just a hysterical and alarmist political power gambit used to propose indecent destruction of economies and transfers of wealth away from countries such as Canada.

After a thoughtful and prolonged examination of  the concept of global warming, including research into climate history, the carbon cycle, ice data, solar cycles, political history, and pretty much anything I can read on the subject, this panel of one, now known as the Thornbury Panel on Climate Change (TPCC) has rendered its verdict:  Bullcrap.

Lance Burnham,

Thornbury