With a name like
Friends of Science, even before you read the rest of their billboard you just know they're anything
but. I assume that even more shamelessly cynical names, such as
Widows and Orphans United for Unicorns, were already taken.
But wait! There's still more good news! Not only are you and your smog-spewing classic Hudson Land Tuna not responsible for drowning the polar bears, it turns out that it's all good:
So, you see, sure the world's getting hotter, but it's the
sun's fault, not Big Oil's. That, plus
the world isn't getting hotter. It's just entering a perfectly natural phase of life that contrarian climate pseudo-scientist Ross McKitrick apparently likes to think of as The Menopause. It's all in your head; open a window.
This video of old men eating lunch is waaaay too long (but I repeat myself); if you've got better things to do just check out the section from 3:00 to 5:30, where Purfesser McKitrick derives his acclaimed No-See-Um Theory, graphically proving that the more data you ignore, the less you know. The man is definitely, definitely on his way to Stockholm. He is, perhaps not surprisingly, an actual professor of economics at the actual University of Guelph, who, I'm guessing, must already have actual tenure (otherwise I'd assume he'd be more hesitant to professionally embarrass himself like this in public):
Friends of Science is a Canadian non-profit founded in 2002, in reaction to Canada's signing of the Kyoto Protocol, by certain grumpy old men of the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists...the good folks working hard in the trenches every day to bring the blessings of tar sands and fracking to your kitchen sink. For a brief golden moment in the early oh-ohs it was very nearly A Thing (funded by Dark Oil Money...of course...washed through a blind account at the University of Calgary controlled by political science professor Barry Cooper), but that was before every Tom, Dick, and Harry became his own pseudo-scientific climate denier, stealing the Friends' schtick. Today the Friends are pretty much reduced to plastering up billboards outside of Calgary, where half the people driving by have pockets bulging with dilbit money...talk about preaching to the choir.
It is, of course, always important to laugh in the face of intentional evil, so take a break and drop by FoS' subtly hilarious doppelganger, Friends of Gin and Tonic. How hard can it be to make fun of an organization that responds to the "myth" that CO2 is a pollutant with this Actual FAQ:
This is absolutely not true. Nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere. We could not live in 100% nitrogen either. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is.