A massive cold spell grips North America, so bad they struggled to play pond hockey in Alberta and created “sun dogs” as well as temperature records. The National Post spoke to “a Canadian optical physicist” about this remarkable visual effect, which she called “the opposite of a mirage on a hot day.” Why not to a climate scientist, as they do for any heat-related or disaster-related event? Because when it’s cold it’s just weather, or in this case, an optical illusion. As for that wildfire in Colorado, well, NBC and others had it down to climate change before the flames were even out. But as Cliff Mass explained, if global warming had any role it was to make it less severe not more, by possibly dampening the strength of the downslope windstorm that pushed a manmade fire across the grasslands. Which were at normal levels of dryness for that time of year. Because climate change.

Recently the University of Manitoba did a sort of end-of-snow prediction that you can file next to Al Gore’s about Kilimanjaro. And of course the settled science was settled in a wrong way and, to quote the Guardian story about it, “Climate models show switch will happen decades faster than previously thought, with ‘profound’ implications”. Such as we’re all going to die: “The implications of a switchover were ‘profound’, the researchers said, from accelerating global heating and sea level rise to melting permafrost, sinking roads, and mass starvation of reindeer and caribou in the region. Scientists think the rapid heating in the Arctic may also be increasing extreme weather events such as floods and heatwaves in Europe, Asia and North America by changing the jet stream.” And don’t forget that thawing permafrost means more methane released which means more warming in a runaway disaster of exactly the sort not triggered in previous warm periods.

Now it all depends on absurd scenarios, naturally. “Today, more snow falls in the Arctic than rain. But this will reverse, the study suggests, with all the region’s land and almost all its seas receiving more rain than snow before the end of the century if the world warms by 3C. Pledges made by nations at the recent Cop26 summit could keep the temperature rise to a still disastrous 2.4C, but only if these promises are met.”

It’s so bad even Gavin Schmidt blew a whistle at the Guardian. “However, Gavin Schmidt of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in the US said the claim of more rapid change was “unsupported”, because some of the new climate models forecast warmer than expected future temperatures.” And besides, it doesn’t really matter whether it snows less or more, now does it?

For instance one of our trolls taunted us with the news that it was snowing brutally in Japan. Likewise Australia’s alarmist Climate Council is equally comfortable with less rain or more as proof of the crisis. Once you’ve convinced yourself that everything is evidence of climate breakdown, you see evidence of climate breakdown everywhere. It’s almost like… a plot.