The Canadian government puts out an endless barrage of press releases starting with some variant of “Across the country, the impacts of climate change are becoming more severe and more frequent with extreme events like floods, wildfires and heatwaves on the rise. Gradual changes, like thawing permafrost in the north and rising sea levels in coastal regions, are also affecting the safety of our communities and quality of life.” What they never provide is any data showing that these things really are on the rise, or that they are “affecting the safety of our community” or their “quality of life”. And if they can’t be bothered to do the detailed, boring work of, oh, let’s say checking their own abundant data including the historical stuff, luckily for them they can now find a handy compendium of the key evidence in a highly accessible 88-page summary by Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy and the Heartland Institute, Energy & Climate at a Glance: Canadian Edition and available from the International Climate Science Coalition.

The government view seems to be that if the fool natives don’t understand spoken alarmist, repeat it verbatim. Though to be fair to them they do know how to cut and paste… sort of. Thus another press release began:

“Across the country, the impacts of climate change are becoming more severe and more frequent with extreme events like floods and wildfires and more gradual changes like thawing permafrost and rising sea levels, affecting the safety and quality of life of our communities.”

OK, so, they lost the “on the rise” in the Ctrl-C Ctrl-V process. But hey, they’re trying. Extremely trying.

Here are more deep thoughts in the same vein. Very much the same, in fact:

“Across the country, the impacts of climate change are becoming more severe and more frequent with extreme events like floods, wildfires and heatwaves on the rise. Gradual changes, like thawing permafrost in the north and rising sea levels in coastal regions, are also affecting the safety of our communities and quality of life.”

One shudders to imagine the conversations within ministerial and bureaucratic offices. Did you get that press release out? Oh yeah. Did you get in that really cool but about “becoming more severe”? Oh yeah. Does anyone care? Oh no. Except some weirdo who noticed it was just tired and tiresome boilerplate. The guy you offered an interview with then realized who he was. Narrow escape there, sir. He’d have asked you for evidence. Brutal.

Of course sometimes, to liven things up, they go with a totally different nearly identical opening, like say:

“In recent years, Canadians have witnessed the rising frequency and severity of extreme weather events, like floods and wildland fires, destroy homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure, which leave lasting impacts on communities right across the country.”

Lasting impacts on communities right across the country? Pfui. Show us these famous communities, with a few conspicuous exceptions like places that always had fires and had another one, who’ve had their critical infrastructure permanently impacted. It’s not just trite, it’s made up.

As Roger Pielke Jr. catalogues, loose talk about how “climate change is showing its claws” worldwide may be a giant rhetorical advance on the sludge pouring out of Canada’s ministry of free money on false pretences. But factually it’s the same sludge. As a proportion of world GDP, disaster losses have been declining for more than 30 years even as the climate “crisis” wrecks everything including people’s judgement. And if the Canadian government bothered to collect statistics, or look at the ones it does collect, they’d get the same result here.

Or they could look at that Energy & Climate at a Glance: Canadian Edition. Mind you they’d find it depressing, because the first half is devoted to their own climate plans and the hogwash numbers behind their claims that it can be done at all, let alone affordably. And then the second half summarizes the highlights of “the science”, from the paleo record to the trifling human contribution to the total load of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to the failure of the models, the distortions of the Urban Heat Island effect and then, as if it weren’t enough of a downer already, “Chapter 4: Extreme Weather and Weather-Related Disasters Are Not Getting Worse”. From droughts to cyclones to the IPCC’s own views to heatwaves to wildfires and on it goes. Including cataloguing the enormous benefits fossil fuels bring to our lives, including poor people in poor countries, all of which would be foregone for no benefit if not for the saving grace that their plans are hopelessly impractical.

The truly sad part here is that none of this data is really new. The booklet does a nice job of pulling it all together, but it was already out there for anyone who cared to look. And the Canadian government has put sufficiently vast resources into the “climate change” file, tens of billions of dollars in fact, that surely it could have had someone look this stuff up even if only to try to rebut it instead of just repeating it ad nauseam.

Instead they try to bore us into submission. How can they stand to hear themselves talk?

P.S. Ironically, especially in light of the point we made elsewhere this week about the public doubting that they even believe their own dull words, Canada’s Trudeau ministry in its 2015 climate plan evidently stressed energy efficiency in the revised National Building Code to the total neglect of “climate resilience”. Now for our money it’s between home buyers, home builders and home insurers how much “crack-resistant foundations” matter, or “wind-resistant hurricane straps for roofing joists” (on which to be fair a trip to your own attic might not be reassuring) or stucco rather than vinyl if your house is likely to burn down. But if the government is going not merely to yammer at us about it, but coerce us, then yes, it would be nice if their binding rules bore some relationship to their professed concerns. Though we are inclined, as so often, to avoid blaming on hypocrisy what can be attributed to witlessness.