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A year unlike all the others

12 Jan 2022 | News Roundup

It is now habitual to look back around the beginning of January and declare that the past year was the most climate changey ever. And sure enough, BC premier John Horgan reacted to a cold snap by declaring that “For many, this will be remembered as the year that climate change arrived on our doorsteps. Here in B.C., we faced record-setting droughts, heat waves and forest fires, floods and mudslides.” Though if you had asked him last year he’d have said the same thing about 2020. And just listen to his Minister of “Environment and Climate Change” George Heyman: “We’re seeing and living the effects of climate change, whether it’s extreme weather, whether it’s droughts, whether it’s the two worst wildfire seasons in B.C. history, back-to-back…”. On Dec 5, 2018. Still, the ritual must continue, albeit with an increasingly ritualistic feel.

Thus Discover magazine plods in with “Did 2021 Deal a Fatal Blow to Climate-Change Denial? Data and extreme weather events are making it harder than ever to ignore our warming world. But climate change denial has also taken on a new form.” Apparently we’ve become delayists or something since pronouncing us dead has gotten old.

Discover, using one of those fire photos with a distorting red filter in the name of objectivity, claims that “From brutal heat in North America and Siberia to devastating flooding in China and Europe, 2021 delivered worsening climate extremes of the kind long predicted by scientists. Streetcar cables melted in Portland. A raging river swept away entire homes in Germany’s lush Ahr Valley wine region. And wildfires have set records across the globe in the past two years.” The author, being alas a professor of journalism rather than a “climate scientist”, doesn’t seem to know how to Google wildfire trends.

Meanwhile Canada’s public-payroll alarmist-in-chief, not the volatile freelance David Suzuki but the dependable state climatologist David Phillips, declared that “Not in 26 years of releasing the Top 10 Weather Events has there been anything comparable to this year, where Canadians endured such a stream of weather extremes.”

This quotation was included in a Dec. 15 press release mysteriously not available on the relevant ministry site, although they do have one saying “Today, Environment and Climate Change Canada presented the 26th annual edition of the Top 10 Weather Stories in Canada. This year’s stories clearly demonstrate that Canadians across the country are experiencing unprecedented extreme weather, in the form of devastating flooding, widespread wildfires, relentless heatwaves, and powerful tornadoes. Scientists have made a clear link between climate change and more frequent and severe weather events, which is why the government is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to help prevent the impacts of climate change and investing to increase resiliency.”

Scientists have made a clear link. And politicians have made a clear headline. The government-run and funded CBC reliably parroted the government line, saying “Environment Canada has released its Top 10 weather stories for 2021 — a year that its senior climatologist Dave Phillips calls the ‘most destructive, the most expensive and the deadliest year for weather in Canadian history.’ Though this is the 26th year that Phillips has created the list, he said: ‘No year compared to this year.’ ‘The events are bigger and badder and more impactful now than they were just 20 years ago,’ he said. While scientists have been raising the alarm over climate change for decades, in the past, it has appeared gradual, subtle and distant, Phillips said. ‘I think this is the year that Canadians saw it firsthand.’”

Again, you would not know from his pronouncements in 2020, or 2016, that he regarded climate change as gradual, subtle or distant back then. (Or perhaps that “badder” was a word; the comparative used to be “worse”. Climate change even ruins grammar, apparently.)

Indeed a year earlier we heard that “Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Senior Climatologist, David Phillips, and Physical Science Specialist, Chantal McCartin, have released the 25th annual edition of Canada’s Top Ten Weather Stories. The report indicates that Canada is warming at nearly twice the global rate with parts of western and northern Canada warming three or four times the global average. Sea ice in the North is thinning and shrinking, and our unique ice shelves are crumbling into pieces. While Canada is still the snowiest country, less snow is falling across the south.” And the year before that “For 24 years, Environment Canada climatologist David Phillips has been pulling together an annual list of Canada’s most devastating, frustrating and thrilling weather stories. But as the effects of the climate crisis set in, this year felt different, he said. The stories Phillips had to choose from ⁠in 2019 — tales of historic floods, wayward hurricanes and tornadoes in the Arctic ⁠— have become more extreme and variable than ever.”

So let us guess: 2022 will feel different too, with unprecedented blah blah blah whatever just happened constituting unprecedented and final proof of climate change that ends the debate again.

8 comments on “A year unlike all the others”

  1. I'm waiting for some journalist to declare that the world is warming at a rate three times the global average.

  2. I wrote to TIME magazine recently and challenged the editors to open the discussion. "What if all the cry wolf stories are wrong. What if all the doomsday predictions are wrong. What are you going to tell all the kids on earth after you have attempted to destroy their lives and turn them against their fossil fuel using parents? The truth will come to the surface. You can’t stop it."

  3. Most expensive, most destructive, and deadliest…all artifacts of humans either moving into areas of, not anticipating, or not preparing for weather events. And then blaming the weather that’s already been there for thousands of years.

  4. BC's Environment Minister typifies the trend of the last 30 plus years when the old left draped themselves in green to accomplish the same goals. Heyman's previous employer is the Sierra Club which he ran and whose goals included the reclassification (in order to ignore the 20% of the province consisting of ecologically functioning old growth forests) of old growth to sell in trademark hysterical fashion and now along with other Ministers hailing from the ENGO hysteria industry are taking out 10 to 15,000 (mostly loyal NDP-voting) forest workers from productive employment. The new left could care less about the working class as white collar urban green voters are those who count more. Climate hysteria is their ticket to dominance and it's working.

  5. Well here I am in southern BC. Lots of snow on the ground. Not the worst we have ever, but more tthan most years. We had some fires this summer. But not the worst we have ever seen but more than the least of a fire season. Pictures from the 1800s show mountain tops without trees. But now all mountains have trees. Not enough fires.

  6. Is it possible that there's been an orchestrated effort to have people succumb to 'mass formation psychosis' with the climate change alarmism in order to bring about the Global Reset?

  7. Thousands of years? When exactly did weather start? I thought when there was water and oceans and mountains etc.

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