Various news outlets pass on some propaganda about the end of Canadian winter and totally miss the obvious point. According to the CBC version, the cities of Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa have lost 19, 13, 6, 5 and 4 days below 0C between 2014 and 2023. But the provinces they’re in have only lost 4 (BC), 2 (Ontario), 1 (Quebec), 2 (Alberta) and (Ontario again) 2. So what we have here is clearly an Urban Heat Island effect. QNED.

We say “pass on some propaganda” because the story is essentially regurgitating material from an outfit called “Climate Central” that boasts of being:

“the only climate communications group that produces and disseminates localized and visual content weekly and at national scale; co-houses scientists, journalists, and technologists; and conducts and catalyzes original, peer-reviewed scientific research to fill critical communication gaps.”

So they don’t create content, they create messaging around one particular polemical point of view. Which they don’t deny. On the contrary they boast of it:

“At Climate Central, we envision a world where public will to address the climate challenge is robustly deep, broad, and sustained – where it becomes a core element of culture everywhere.”

So obviously a totally disinterested and impartial view. So instead of saying that some advocates say winter is going the way of Frosty in the song, while others hold other views, the sort of thing journalists once did or at least claimed they did, CTV, the CBC and so forth present it as gospel truth. Including that Canada is… wait for it… “warming faster than the global average”. (BTW we deniers may have all the money, but Climate Central has dozens of staff and representatives of big companies on their board.)

The CBC story also reports that the wizards over at Climate Central “counted the change in the number of days above zero during that time period compared to what they would have been without human-caused climate change driven mainly by the burning of fossil fuels” without explaining, and apparently without wondering or asking, how the wizards know what the weather would have been like in some other scenario, presumably one in which we hit Net Zero suddenly and convulsively on Jan. 1, 2013. It really has to be that one, because otherwise, if the baseline is 1850 and there’s no Industrial Revolution, then or starting around 1776, then presumably 2013 would also have been colder so you’re comparing one thing you don’t know about to another thing you don’t know about and pronouncing yourself certain.

Oh, and speaking of the Urban Heat Island effect, had the journalists actually read the report and understood it, they’d have found that “Cities across Asia and Europe experienced the most lost winter days due to a warming climate.” (Admittedly buried at the top of page 6 in a 10 page document, so some real digging needed here.) Cities. Not countries. Not rural areas. Weird, huh? Not by any chance measuring temperature at the airport, are we?

P.S. We actually did dig through the report, which offered link-like objects not actual links to their “Climate Shift Index”, and found that it actually points to a paper whose authors include at least one key figure at… wait for it… World Weather Attribution, co-founder Friederike Otto; it’s hard to be sure about the others since WWA is huge and sprawling and fabulously wealthy and doesn’t list its people on its site. But WWA like Climate Central is partly funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, speaking of having all the money. It’s a small world… since CC actually founded WWA. No red flags for journalists? And to think the MSM is losing credibility.