Western Canada has had a cold, wet fall with worrying implications for farmers unable to get millions of dollars’ worth of crops in from the fields. But now it’s hitting where it gets attention, in the nation’s capital, which had one of the longest snowiest winters on record in 2018-19, only ridding itself of the white stuff in mid-April. By late on a frosty Remembrance Day we had a record dump of the stuff, 9.4 cm breaking the 1983 mark of 5.2 and then the windchill hit minus 24. Then we set a record for cold going back to 1933. At some point evidence matters, right? And as our Climate Emergency Tour indicates, in Ottawa as elsewhere it’s not a freak event. It’s the continuation of a very long non-warming trend.
It’s not just Ottawa. B.C. has been chilly. And the U.S. had a lethal blast of cold from Texas to New England including storm-related traffic deaths and what NBC called “bone-chilling temperatures” that set records from Oklahoma to Wisconsin to Illinois.
The explanation for this phenomenon, which the climate alarmists reliably predicted after it happened, is that warming is disrupting the jet stream and driving cold air south. But it’s an ad hoc explanation not an integral part of the theory. If it were integral, they’d have seen it coming. And if next winter was warm, what are the odds that instead of hailing it as proof of warming they’ll say OK, you can relax, climate change isn’t disrupting the jet stream.
So no, it’s not just Ottawa and it’s not just weather. It’s winter and it came early because what the alarmists said would happen did not.