One effect of climate change is to induce people to regard any odd weather as significant even when weather has always been odd. It’s a one-size-fits-all explanation that makes journalism much simpler, as in “California’s Highway 1 is among the world’s truly magical stretches of road. But since January 2023 it hasn’t been possible to drive the full 656-mile length of it. The highway is missing a middle, following landslides last year. Our correspondent reports on the iconic route’s slow surrender to climate change.” Or The Atlantic “Weekly Planet” blaming climate change for a decline in America’s public swimming pools. Because everybody knows. Even when they don’t; hence a story on a landslide that blocked the Chilcotin River in British Columbia quoted a randomly-selected money-quote geologist that “This particular landslide, I don’t think, has any link to climate change, but we certainly should expect more big landslides as our climate warms and gets wetter.” So climate change causes even things it doesn’t cause.
For instance, the May 15, 2024 issue of the local Ottawa hobby-gardener publication Trowel Talk insisted that:
“Climate change is not just about the temperature getting warmer, it is also about conditions becoming more and more unpredictable. For instance, in 2022, on April 30, the temperature in Perth reached 30°C. All the folks in our allotment garden raced out and brought large, beautiful tomato plants. On June 4 we had a hard frost and most of the plants were frozen.”
Yet the July 15 issue kicked off with:
“For gardeners who try to grow food crops, no two seasons are alike: it’s either late frost, hail, August drought, or a visiting bunny.”
Exactly. And for farmers who try to grow food crops, it always has been. Is there any staler farmer joke than one involving endless griping about the weather? But what need is there of evidence?
The May Trowel Talk item went on to claim without evidence that the bad 2023 wildfire season was part of a trend, that “much of the boreal forest was also destroyed,” that Eastern Ontario never used to have floods or tornadoes and that its weather is becoming more unpredictable. It's not that statistics aren’t available. They are, because Canadian governments have been keeping good ones going back decades and in some spots like Toronto over a century. They just don’t support any of these clichés.
Still, everybody knows. Thus a CP story cheerfully asserts that Canada’s Environment and Climate Change Minister just promised $89 million in free money for climate projects and:
“Steven Guilbeault made the announcement in British Columbia, where he says ‘evidence of climate change is striking,’ referencing extreme weather events including flooding, drought and ‘devastating’ wildfire seasons.”
And nobody, least of all journalists, asks him for actual evidence as opposed to waving his arms about flinging cash.
The tendency to see all evidence through a distorting climate-change lens was also on display in a National Geographic story about crossbreeds of grizzly and polar bears (“grolars” or “pizzlies” depending whether the father or mother is the grizzly), which declared that “some researchers warned that the Arctic could become prime territory for hybrids due to climate change” right above a picture of two such cubs at the National Zoo in… 1937. And a widely printed piece about the erosion of iconic sandstone arches in Utah that even after granting that sandstone is soft and the landscape has been changing forever, and that human vibrations are a big issue including for the just-crumbled “Toilet Bowl” at the Lake Powell reservoir in Utah, crammed in that “The reservoir’s water levels have been declining due to drought and climate change since 2001, according to the National Park Service.” So there. (A Mexican pyramid from the Michoacán Kingdom also just went due, we’re told, to “an increasingly chaotic global climate” in which it sometimes rains quite hard. Mind you in that one we’re also told the site was “the headquarters of the P'urhépechas people, the only empire the Aztecs couldn't conquer. The culture still thrives to this day.” Oh really? They still cook, communicate and travel as they did a millennium ago?)
Now part of the problem, of course, is that anyone angling for a government research grant is well-advised to indicate that their prospective paper will underline the perils of man-made climate change and the urgent need for governments to get more money and power to save us from it. Thus a garden-variety ad in the June 8 National Post gave us that warm feeling with “How university research helps combat forest fires and climate change/ UBC researchers digging deep for innovative solutions for wildfires”. And the advertorial from “Postmedia content works” began:
“With temperatures reaching new heights across Canada, 2023 was a record year for wildfires in various parts of the country. In B.C., wildfires have become common in areas such as Lytton, West Kelowna and the North Shuswap in recent years”.
One trusts that the researchers actually know that wildfires have always been common in those heavily-forested areas. And that temperatures are not “reaching new heights across Canada”.
In fact the record highs by province were set in 1931 in Alberta, 2021 in BC, 1936 in Manitoba, 1935 in New Brunswick, 1921 in Newfoundland and Labrador, 2021 in the Northwest Territories, 1935 in Nova Scotia, 1989 in Nunavut, 1975 in Ontario, 1935 in Prince Edward Island, 1921 in Quebec, 1937 in Saskatchewan and 2004 in Yukon. If you were looking for a really hot decade based on those stats, for which Chris Martz has now done a map like the one he did for the United States, but this time with Environment Canada data, you’d almost have to go with the 1930s, which hold the record for six of our 13 provinces and territories, with the 1920s tied with the 2020s for second. Strange, isn’t it?
I am an electrician/handyman/ general dogsbody and I would like to declare from my own observations and without carrying out any tests whatever, that the climate of Ireland is , (as it has been for all of my 62 years ) miserable.
I would love some global warming, in fact each year I pray that the temperature will increase and the clouds will go elsewhere, but No, not a bit of global warming comes our way. I wouldn't mind so much but I'm actually paying for it (global warming) through my extra taxes but it has never arrived. I want my money back so as I can be cold and wet in more comfort.