It recently rained heavily in Toronto. And the roads flooded, houses and basements were inundated, the main train station had water cascading down its broad stairways, and officials gave confused and incompetent alerts regarding road closures before, of course, blaming climate change with an almost triumphant “told you so”. We, however, are the ones who get to say told-you-so because, as we reminded them, we explained the real situation back in 2019, in a video “Urban Flooding – It’s Not About Climate” that specifically included the frequent flooding of the Don Valley Parkway (our illustration was from 2014) which, as the name suggests, is a big paved thing in what used to be a river valley. So yes, it’s us that told them so.

In that 2019 video we interviewed Trevor Dickinson, a professor emeritus of engineering at the University of Guelph, who told us that the changes in climate in Ontario over the decades had actually reduced spring flooding, because more of the snowpack melted early and more precipitation came in winter as rain rather than snow. But total precipitation had not increased.

As for summer conditions, there had been no increase in flooding in rural areas, only in cities. So unless you believe “global” warming targets asphalt and cement with pinpoint accuracy, the inescapable conclusion is that the flooding is due to changing land-use patterns, specifically paving everything without making proper provision for absorption and runoff.

There simply has been no trend toward increased rain in southern Ontario according to government data. Or consider this statement from the Canadian government’s 2019 Canada’s Changing Climate Report:

“There do not appear to be detectable trends in short-duration extreme precipitation in Canada for the country as a whole based on available station data. More stations have experienced an increase than a decrease in the highest amount of one-day rainfall each year, but the direction of trends is rather random over space. Some stations show significant trends, but the number of sites that had significant trends is not more than what one would expect from chance”.

But these are mere facts. And one growing problem with, and for, climate alarmism is that it has torn loose from its evidentiary moorings. Those who believe in this mythical beast do not bother to check, oh, say, the Historical Total Precipitation page at the Weather Dashboard for Toronto from that hotbed of non-denialism, Environment and Climate Change Canada:

Perhaps because, horror of horrors, the average daytime high temperature in Toronto in July has flatlined since, um, 1840, as per this chart courtesy of yourenvironment.ca:

It is understandable that Toronto mayor Olivia Chow, a compulsive virtue-signaling progressive bored by and unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of governing (as a Toronto Sun headline on a Brian Lilley column sneered, “Flooded roads and subways but we have bike lanes!”), would try to wash her hands of a massive infrastructure failure and pin it on you-know what. The Toronto Star reports that:

“In a draft motion the mayor plans to send to next week’s council meeting, a copy of which was shared with the Star, Chow warned that because of climate change ‘Toronto is experiencing more frequent and severe storms, resulting in flooding events that impact our road and transit network, our homes and businesses, and our infrastructure.’”

As Dickinson noted in that 2019 video: “And it’s then convenient, in a sense, to blame climate change and say, “Well, my gracious, our floods are due to increased rain storms,” rather than to accept the responsibility that we haven’t really done as good a job as we should have in managing the storm water.” Which is her fault unlike whichever of her political or ideological opponents she thinks have been ignoring climate change and obstructing decisive action. But Toronto actually isn’t experiencing more frequent storms, more severe storms or both so it’s just vacant blame-shifting.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also fingered the dreaded “climate change”, making international headlines by saying in a chronologically muddled way that “With climate change there are going to be more extreme weather events”. But if there are going to be, then there aren’t already, so this was just rain. Besides, he’s the one who’s supposedly been saving us from climate change for the last nine years so whose fault is it if it’s still rampaging?

Here let us clarify our reference to climate change above as “this mythical beast”. It’s not because the climate does not change; on the contrary it is not we but the AGW zealots who are “deniers” of the long history of often abrupt changes in often-ugly weather. It’s because when things like temperature or rainfall or some other weather phenomenon change systematically over a significant period of time, it’s not because of some Platonic or Godzillic “climate change”, it is climate change. Climate being simply long-term weather patterns in a given area, climate change is changes in long-term weather patterns in a given area so it can’t also cause them. And it matters because if, for instance, neither rainfall nor temperature change in a city, there is no climate change to speak of, lurking somehow abstractly in the ether and doing all sorts of mean nasty ugly things that suddenly erupt as, well, in this case, Toronto’s lack of significant trends in rainfall.

Engineer Robert Muir provides the following charts from Environment and Climate Change Canada’s own Engineering Climate Database (the intrepid can unearth it from this download folder), showing the frequency of downpours of various durations over the past eight decades:

Notice anything odd? Right. The climate has apparently been changing in the direction of fewer rainstorms in Toronto on every timescale from 5 minutes to 24 hours.

Knowing better, one news story described it as “record-breaking rainfall” right after declaring it “the fifth-wettest day in the city’s history” so it broke the record for not being a record. CNN went even further, with record-breaking recordness in that it was the wettest July 16 at Toronto airport ever and “Record-setting storms have wreaked havoc across the Caribbean and parts of North America this summer” although all it could come up with was Beryl being the earliest Category 5 “ever observed in the Atlantic” not the strongest, deadliest or any of that guff. But you see, everybody knows.

What they would know if they had Google on their computers, and a little bit of persistence, is that the wettest days ever at the airport were “July 8, 2013, 126 mm, Oct. 15, 1954 (Hurricane Hazel), 121.4 mm, July 28, 1980, 118.5 mm and Sept. 18, 1948, 108 mm”. So a clear non-pattern. And while this July might rival the wettest July ever at Toronto airport, a record set in 2008, the wettest month ever at the airport was, again, in October 1954 because of Hurricane Hazel.

If you just keep Googling, you also make the odd discovery that soggy Hazel was only the 5^th-deadliest hurricane ever in Canada, and that the four that were worse came in climate-change-ravaged 1882 (“Labrador”), 1927 (“Nova Scotia (3)”), 1873 (“Nova Scotia (1)”) and, killing more than all the others on the top 10 list, an estimated 4,000 or more, 1775 (“Newfoundland (1)”). So apparently with climate change there have been fewer extreme events. But who’s counting?

Not, it seems, the politicians fast turning Canada into a Third World country, or much of the press meant to be holding them to account.