It is easy, too easy, to accuse people you’re arguing with of being blind to the facts because they interpret them differently, with or without the pejorative “ideological” tacked on. But sometimes it really does happen, causing headlines like the Guardian’s “Dramatic slowdown in melting of Arctic sea ice surprises scientists/ Natural climate variation is most likely reason as global heating due to fossil fuel burning has continued”. At least they saw what was happening, even though they weren’t expecting it. Even worse is the tendency of alarmists to see what isn’t happening, or not to see what’s right there.

For instance a New York Times columnist just wrote:

“The global landscape is now inarguably dominated by two rival superpowers, the United States and China, and in the post-pandemic period, one of them gambled hugely on A.I., while the other wagered hugely on green technology. The future now hangs in the balance while we wait for the bets to come in.”

There are a great many things wrong with that passage. But for our purposes let’s just focus on China having “wagered hugely on green technology” although even Reuters sees that:

“China commissioned 21 gigawatts (GW) of coal power plant capacity in the first half of 2025, a new report found on Monday, the highest since 2016 even as the country is building record amounts of clean energy…. a response to power shortages and blackouts in 2021 and 2022…. China has committed to phasing down coal use during the 2026-2030 period and says that coal power is meant to serve as a back-up to clean energy going forward, but the CREA researchers said that’s not happening in practice because of a lack of incentives to phase down coal power generation.”

Nowhere in that story is there any factual discussion of this alleged “record amounts of clean energy” including what proportion of Chinese generation it represents or whether their statistics are believable. But such considerations don’t stop academics from posting, and Canadian pundits from reposting, things like “Want to lose to China. Discontinue wind power.” If only they had Google on their computers. (Or, say, a question-mark key.)

This sort of thing is everywhere. A piece in the Globe & Mail by “an independent economist who has advised two Canadian prime ministers and a cabinet minister” though possibly not well starts out:

“Wildfire incidence has risen sevenfold in Canada’s boreal forests and 11-fold in Western coniferous forests over the past 20 years as climate change has accelerated. Beyond the immediate effects to our well-being and quality of life are the real and growing economic costs of all forms of environmental damage – climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss and resource depletion – as the frequency of environmental shocks rises.”

Bosh. In fact as a share of global GDP harm from natural events is falling. As for wildfires, they’re down too, and picking a couple of bad years as proof of a trend is ignorant or worse. Worse being Matthew Wielicki’s warning that Nova Scotia’s irrational and Draconian ban on going for a walk in the woods made COVID lockdowns seem like practice for climate ones especially as:

“The sweeping controls are sold as science, yet the long-term wildfire data do not show a national, CO₂-driven escalation. Canada’s own databases show big swings year to year, a record spike in 2023, and very quiet seasons… including an exceptionally low 2020. That is not a steady climate signal; it is variability.”

Then there’s the Bangkok Post headline, on a widely reprinted AFP story, that “Man killed in Spain wildfire as European heatwave intensifies”. Which is about as solid a piece of causality as “Man killed in Spain wildfire as Blue Jays’ pennant run continues”. But do not suppose the story deigns to examine evidence that wildfire fatalities are on the rise. Everybody just knows.

Then there’s a Scientific American claim that:

“Meltwater from a glacial lake outburst is flooding Juneau, Alaska. Such events are likely to happen more often as climate change destabilizes ice and glacial lakes fill with more meltwater”.

Can’t they even keep their non-stories straight? If all the glaciers are vanishing, they can’t be pumping ever-more meltwater into lakes right? And to repeat, “climate change” isn’t a causal force, it’s a statistical description.

Meanwhile back at the North Pole, the Guardian story leads off in this classic fashion:

“The melting of sea ice in the Arctic has slowed dramatically in the past 20 years, scientists have reported, with no statistically significant decline in its extent since 2005. The finding is surprising, the researchers say, given that carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning have continued to rise and trap ever more heat over that time. They said natural variations in ocean currents that limit ice melting had probably balanced out the continuing rise in global temperatures. However, they said this was only a temporary reprieve and melting was highly likely to start again at about double the long-term rate at some point in the next five to 10 years.”

So what they’re saying, other than the usual heat is climate, cold is weather, is that the theory that rising carbon emissions trapping ever more heat would definitely melt the ice, especially as the Arctic is warming faster than whatever, has not been empirically verified. Instead there’s been a 20-year “hiatus” which could lead someone to think the melt from the cyclical peak in 1979 to 2005 was itself weather. But not them. Instead it’s “only a temporary reprieve” and the ice you can see is not real, unlike the double-the-long-term melting you can’t but they can.

Who are you going to believe, your own eyes or a catechism?