Just in time for the holidays, a press release from the Canadian government announcing a handout (bien sur) says “Extreme weather events and natural disasters are a growing threat to the safety and economic stability of Canadian communities.” On the perennial question of whether alarmists think the climate breakdown thingy already happened, is happening now or is bearing down upon us they scoot back and forth with the time-bending agility of Santa himself. So it’s already here, is it? Can they point us to actual data showing that such things are increasing? Their own or, say, something specific in an IPCC report? Or does it just magically become true if they say it often enough?

They’re certainly giving the power of repetition the old bureaucratic try. Indeed the sentence “Extreme weather events… communities” has a tendency to turn up verbatim in press releases from other ministries, proving the robust independent originality of thought and expression that characterizes Canadian politicians. And Environment and Climate Change Canada, determined to politicize weather forecasting then complain about it, turns their traditional December wrap-up of wacky weather stories into dreary polemics in the 2024 edition by saying “With each year, Canada sees the impacts of climate change on weather events, making many extreme weather events more likely.”

With each year. Many events. Who writes this stuff?

Especially as they then list their “most impactful weather stories of 2024” (and who, at least among public-sector communications bureaucrats, can resist “most impactful” as a hook?) and three and a half involve wintery weather, from hailstones to a “winter wallop” to a “deep freeze”, all doubtless the ghastly consequence, of runaway heating, and one is hurricanes. Also the dreaded atmospheric rivers that were once heavy rain.

Evidently bad weather is a new thing. Which makes you wonder what they were babbling about in previous editions when they claimed there’d been “impactful” or possibly just severe storms before there was climate. But now, well, we’re climate-scarred veterans of the rhetorical wars:

“From coast to coast to coast, the severe and unseasonal weather events of 2024 left a memorable mark on the lives of Canadians across the country.”

Once again, they seem to think that no older person ever had a story about a bad storm when they were a kid. Still, we ask whether these severe weather events are really “unseasonal”. Not in the sense that hail isn’t typical summer weather but in the sense that we never had storms remarkable among other things for coming at a surprising time of year until Al Gore’s documentary came along, or Michael Mann’s hockey stick.

So is there any data here? Or just the usual arm-waving about how “Human-caused climate change is increasing the intensity of many severe weather events in Canada”?

Data? We don’t need no stinking data. But alas talk is not cheap when politicians do it. Thus a run-of-the-mill press release to the effect that “Upgrades to disaster mitigation infrastructure to help protect Gingolx Harbour” on the grounds that “Gingolx Harbour faces increasing risks from stronger storms and rising sea levels, which could result in catastrophic damage to the harbour and the sea crafts that use it” carries a price tag of “nearly $20 million”.

Of course the government isn’t merely spending that sum, a banal word and an old-fashioned one. Now, naturally, it’s an “investment”, making it more expensive and pretentious. But speaking of data, Gingolx is right near Ketchikan, Alaska where, as we pointed out five years ago, NOAA data show a steady decline in sea levels over the last century. So the oceans are not rising… unlike the spending, misinformation and polysyllabic verbiage.