- It’s cool to learn that sea sponges sneeze in slow motion. Possibly cooler than watching it, which might well prove both dull and disgusting. But what’s not cool is that in order to get a grant to pursue this eccentric but compelling interest, it’s best to say “climate” no matter what’s really going on. As in “cameras installed on the sea floor by Ocean Networks Canada in an effort to study the sponge’s response to the changing climate and weather patterns.” Sea sponges being, we say based on research the government did not fund, “primarily marine invertebrates of the metazoan phylum Porifera, a basal animal clade and a sister taxon of the diploblasts”. And in case it’s all Greek and Latin to you, they apparently predate the Cambrian Explosion of multicelled life and have presumably been sneezing slowly without muscles for over half a billion years, due to man-made gasses. Yeah. That’s the ticket.
- Of course California’s wildfires should be blamed on climate change because everything bad is climate change and all effects of climate change are bad. So Bloomberg did. And it would be playing spoilsport to note, h/t Tony Heller, that “In 1898, the entire northwest quadrant of Colorado burned. Atmospheric CO2 was below 300 PPM” and that “In 1917, it was 128F in Southern California and Ojai burned to the ground”. So we did.
- Speaking of the magic climate word, the Department of Canadian Heritage or what’s left of it after a decade of government relentlessly tearing down our past put out a press release saying “Today, Taleeb Noormohamed, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, announced $500,000 in funding for the renovation and modernization of the Manitoba Theatre for Young People (MTYP)…. The Government of Canada has contributed more than $1.8 million to the project through two programs: Canadian Heritage’s Canada Cultural Spaces Fund and Infrastructure Canada’s Green and Inclusive Community Buildings program.” Yes. Because going green means handing woke theatre productions in famously frosty Winnipeg another couple of million dollars of your money.
- And we all didn’t see it coming: Ottawa Weather Records declares that “For the 1st time in recorded history, #Ottawa recorded a mean humidity above 75.5% during a year (2024).” Previous moist years are scattered across various decades back to 1952 when records started, with 1956 and 1954 in 5th and 6th place. Let’s see a computer model explain that phenomenon… and let’s not see an alarmist declare it proof of man-made doom.
- We don’t need no stinking credible science. The Guardian runs a piece by two authors, one of whom is doing five years for violating the rights of his fellows, headlined “Scientists prize neutrality – that doesn’t cut it any more. In 2025, they must fully back the climate movement”. And who exactly thinks that scientists have been neutral, dispassionate or objective on climate until now?
- Also, while everyone else was getting the Orange Man Bad vapours or, in Canada’s political class, competing to see who could bray most loudly and vacantly that they loved our nation’s independence without being able to think of one thing about Canada they actually like, the Economist dared suggest that Trump’s plan to acquire Greenland might actually be a worthwhile contribution to the security of the free world provided they paid a fair market price with the consent of the island’s inhabitants, a price they estimate at $50 billion or $1 million per Greenlander. Only to spoil it all by saying “The island sits between America and Russia in a part of the world that is becoming more navigable as Arctic ice melts.” Better reduce that offer because it’s not melting.
- America’s outgoing Energy Secretary, another post we’d all be better off without, is in trouble with auditors for an EV publicity road trip in 2023 in which she and her team apparently exceeded expense allowances and also stayed in excessively pricey hotels. Which is bad. But what’s worse is that this four-day jaunt through Appalachia was to boast of how much the government was spending on subsidies for EVs, thus sticking the American public with the excessive cost of the subsidies themselves and of the whole EV misadventure. A point underlined by the team’s “difficulty finding enough charging stations” and high-handed conduct in response.
What is the mean humidity of lb.Ottawa for the last 75 years? Something might be the “highest” average humidity but you need to post the baseline, and how you measured it, not to mention the error bar. I’m just guessing, but I’ll bet the deviation was only a few percentage points, and that the error bar is a minimum or +/- 0.5%, and probably more if they were honest.
And even if the mean humidity in Ottawa actually is unusually high, don't count out the lingering effects of the Hunga Tonga eruption there and in many other places...
I truly despair for humanity. We listen to charlatans (Media) and make policy, on government level to spend trillions on things that will not benefit humanity one iota. I saw a post today, in Australia, climate change is true because fires in California and Victoria. What? Immeasurable percentage of the earth surface has fires ? So that is global? Both places have fires all the recorded history.