Inside Climate News offers false hope in an email subject-lined “How to preserve the world’s largest ice rink as winters shrink”. That rink being the world-famous-in-Canada Rideau Canal Skateway. But their giant outdoor heat-pump solution wouldn’t work even if they were able to pry us from Jack Frost’s clutches despite the Weather Network assuring us on March 20 that… um… got it here somewhere… what’s this? “40 cm of snow to blanket parts of Ontario with a major cooldown”. Which followed a warning that “Winter and severe storms target the Great Lakes”.
Winter shminter. According to ICN:
“At 7.8 kilometers, or roughly 5 miles from end to end, the Rideau Canal Skateway in Ottawa is the world’s largest ice rink and one whose very existence is threatened by climate change. The free public rink has attracted millions of tourists since the city began maintaining it as a skateway in 1971.”
Its very existence, no less. And how bad is it? Well, see:
“Two years ago, in the winter of 2022-23, the skateway didn’t open at all. This year, ice on the canal bounced back, with one of its longest seasons in recent memory.”
Gad. One of the longest seasons in recent memory is the death knell… of your scare story. Which is based on one blazing report from the sort of people who say this sort of stuff:
“This year’s season, which hosted more than 1.1 million skaters from Jan. 11 until it officially closed on March 10, may be an anomaly. Winters in the Ottawa region will be five weeks shorter by 2050 if global greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, according to a report the NCC and the City of Ottawa commissioned in 2020.”
Unfortunately you do not win a prize, not even some of our lovely merch, for guessing that “continue unabated” is code for the ludicrous RCP8.5 scenario. We shouldn’t be able to guess. But we can.
You might get a prize, though not from us, for guessing that way deep down in the story, in paragraph 17, it would suddenly explain that:
“The 2022-23 season, when the canal failed to open, had 160 percent more snow than the average winter. All that additional snow impeded ice formation…”
So not exactly the end of winter, was it? And here you had us thinking warmth was the problem or something. And indeed they then promptly quote “Shawn Kenny, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carleton University” that:
“If it’s warm, you won’t grow ice.”
And while we grant that no sum is too high to pay for that kind of insight into environmental engineering and meteorological processes, we then quote the Spartans’ response to Philip of Macedon:
“If.”
The story also, way down, past some serious projecting about using heat pumps to cool the canal and warm nearby bureaucrats and an admission that Ottawa storm sewers dump warm water into the canal impeding ice formation, buries a good graphic of skateway season length since 1971 that shows some genuine reduction from the depth of the mid-20th-century cooling of the planet that the chic no longer admit to, followed by fluctuations rather than a trend in the last 20 years. Sort of a hiatus if you know what we mean.
Which is our cue to mention an item by Matthew Wielicki that has nothing to do with the Rideau Canal Skateway except it does. The piece starts:
“Every heatwave, drought, or wildfire today instantly generates alarming headlines blaming human-induced climate change, complete with apocalyptic warnings about supposedly “unprecedented” events. Take, for instance, recent headlines like BBC’s alarming narrative about heatwaves, drought, and wildfires, explicitly linking these natural phenomena to modern industrial activity. But what happens when we dare to look deeper into the historical record?”
And then instead of going for a chilly skate in Ottawa it heads down to sunny and in this case very dry Mexico for a look at the megadrought of 500 to 1150 AD that, among other things, wiped out the once-flourishing city of Cantona.
Now the Rideau Canal only dates back to Col. By’s heroic venture from 1826-32 to allow freight and military traffic to get from Kingston to Montreal via a northerly route in the event of a conflict with the United States, admittedly an absurd contingency um ha ha right guys? So we do not have a record of how often it has frozen, and what sort of short- or long-term fluctuations in the skating season have existed. But if we did, can anyone really suppose that it was essentially constant from 1470 to 1970 then shrank suddenly and dramatically?
Well, yes, obviously they can. As Wielicki says:
“despite this clear historical record, modern droughts in Mexico are habitually attributed to anthropogenic climate change without a hint of historical perspective.”
Moreover, he complains:
“the IPCC’s AR6 report, specifically Chapter 14 on North America, fails to meaningfully incorporate or discuss the study’s rigorous historical climate reconstruction. How can the IPCC, a body dedicated to objectively assessing climate science, justify omitting well-established scientific evidence that directly informs our understanding of natural climate variability?”
To which we snidely reply, like the man asked how you get to Carnegie Hall, “Lots and lots of practice.” But if one did use such a reconstruction, what do you suppose it would say about the Rideau Canal Skateway?
Not “Send in the heat pumps”, we confidently assert.
Soooo...Rideau Canal Skateway closing two years ago for one winter is because of climate change?Yeah,ok!And the gall of the city of Ottawa to try and predict the weather and climate 25 years from now!When we can't predict the weather next Tuesday with anything like 100% certainty.