- Here at CDN we’re seaing stars over a Scientific American story “Mysterious Illness Decimating Sea Stars Finally Identified” that says “A devastating bacterium has decimated populations of sunflower sea stars, predators that play a crucial role in their environment”. Because back in 2021 we criticized a spate of news stories along the lines of “Climate change wiping out billions of sea stars: study”, saying that anyone reading the stories with open eyes would see that it wasn’t climate change, it was a mysterious disease and that (all together now) sea stars evolved in a much warmer world and don’t like cold. So did Scientific Alarmism note that the climate panic was a mistake once the mysterious disease was unmasked as Vibrio pectenicida? Heck no. They doubled down, with “Researchers are unsure of where this bacterium came from and why it broke out. But there is evidence that warmer ocean temperatures are linked to bigger outbreaks…. And that suggests that temperature and possibly even climate change might affect this disease.” But it’s no mystery where Vibrio came from; people write papers on it and have for years. The only mystery is why climate science isn’t like the other kind where hypotheses get tested and refuted.
- In a similar widely-published piece of reportaganda, AFP catalogues the difficulties of taking blood samples from polar bears not the other way around and in the process, of course, notes that warming in the Svalbard archipelago is happening “three to four times faster than elsewhere,” leaving the precise location of “elsewhere” for you to guess at. And since the ice is melting the polar bears can’t hunt seals as much as they used to, except that um uh the lead scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute polar bear program says “‘Even if they only have three months to hunt, they can obtain about 70 percent of what they need for the entire year during that period. That’s probably why we see they are doing okay and are in good condition’ despite the huge melting of the ice.” So can we relax? No, of course not. “But if warming reduces their seal hunting further, ‘perhaps they will struggle’, he warned. ‘There are notable changes in their behaviour... but they are doing better than we feared. However, there is a limit, and the future may not be as bright.’” So a story about the bears being fine is a story about the bears being in trouble. It would be.
- When the story isn’t directly about climate, reporters have a way of forgetting their lines, though. All excited about the discovery of the remains of a British frigate that fought in the American Revolutionary War and, earlier, against New France, the Washington Post led off “Ferocious winter storms are not unusual on the remote island of Sanday, jutting off Scotland’s northern coast.” And one evidently drove the former HMS Hind, by then a private whaling ship, onto a reef in… March 1788. What? They had bad weather before climate? Chronically?
- We also note a story, not related to climate, about a Paleolithic archeological discovery which is remarkable for its scientific illiteracy. And historical. And linguistic. According to the Associated Press, via the Globe & Mail, “The Paleolithic era, also known as the Stone Age because of the onset of stone tools, lasted from as early as 3.3 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago.” Really? So metal tools were invented 10,000 years ago? Or does “paleolithic” mean “old stone” (in Greek, the reporter presumably also didn’t know) and there was a thing called the “neolithic” (new stone) from the invention of agriculture until that of metallurgy 3,000 years ago? Do they not have Google on their computers to look up “Stone Age” for their stories? Please remember the “Gell-Mann Amnesia” effect referenced by Steven Koonin in Unsettled: when you read a news story about a subject you know well and it’s a mess, don’t forget it as soon as you turn to a story on which you’re not an expert. It’s almost certainly a mess too. (Oh, and this particular author is “a visual journalist” not even a boring written one.)
- How wrong can you get? Well, the CBC is up to the challenge. It bellows “A new study suggests extreme weather caused by climate change is disrupting more and more large events, like festivals and sports.” But you see the problems, right? First, the data clearly show that extreme weather is not getting worse and the IPCC does not claim otherwise. Second, climate change isn’t something that causes weather to change, it’s a statistical description of long-term changes in the weather. Other than that, fine journalism from the Canadian state propaganda outfit that has, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation recently noted, “more than: 250 directors 450 managers 780 producers 130 advisors 81 analysts 120 hosts 80 project leads 30 lead architects 25 supervisors” and “200 Mystery People” all “Paid more than $100,000 per year!” But none, apparently, doing proper fact-checking.
- Springing into incompetence, the Meteorological Service of Canada, a government agency, declares that AI might help it predict the weather less laughably. This insight from an agency that only replaced wooden sticks with electronic snow sensors in 2017. But as Blacklock’s reports, the new proposal “follows a 2020 audit that found Environment Canada was still relying on radar stations so obsolete they couldn’t find parts for repairs.” And had a plan to upgrade its 1,125 land stations “at a rate of twenty to thirty a year” so a mere half-century to finish the job. If you believe they could even carry out that languid plan. But they can fix the weather worldwide. Honest they can.
- Speaking of extreme weather, Ottawa had a lot of smoky hours in 2025, enough to reach 10th place overall in under 8 months. So climate change caused more wildfires gotcha, right? Wrong. The top year is 2023 and then we get, um, 1955, 1953 1956, 1957, 1958, 1962, 1954 and 1959. Not sure why the 1950s were a constant blaze. But if there’s a pattern here, it’s… um… that the minimum years, with none at all, include 1990-2001, 2003-09, 2011-12, 2014-22 and 2024. So climate change is stopping wildfires. Cool. (Oh, and the year with the most days over 30°C in Ottawa? Yup, that’d be 1955 (followed by 1906). Terrible.
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20 Aug 2025 | News Roundup
The point "climate change isn’t something that causes weather to change, it’s a statistical description of long-term changes in the weather" that you make regularly may be somewhat correct, but not completely and it may be interpreted as being pedantic which can cause those in the grey zone to back away from realism.
The counterargument is an extreme case: let's say the weather changes enough to change the climate of a location from a swampy rainforest into a desert. In this case a result of the 'changed climate' will be that there is more drought. As such, one may say about that location that 'due to the changed climate we now have more droughts in this location'. Or rephrased in a more news-item style: 'the local climate change has caused the location to have more droughts'.
I fully agree with your pedantic point about the definition of the term, but if we accept that 'climate change' can be a colloquialism for 'the changed climate of a location', we must also accept that a result of that change CAN be more severe weather of some kind. It isn't currently measurable and it's unlikely to be anytime soon, so I agree with the principle of your statement, but these kinds of petty remarks can end up pushing people away that you may want to pull in.