A headline on a Canadian Press item in CTV News gasps “Canada’s ‘exceptional’ drought hints at future climate, need for action: experts”. Ah yes, experts. Normally they say but here apparently dry mouth stopped them part-way through. Pity it wasn’t thought instead. Because after declaring that the early part of the summer was unusually dry, they proceed to crumble their own thesis and not notice. “What has stood out about this year is just how widespread those drought conditions have become, said John Pomeroy, one of Canada’s leading hydrologists. The only other year in recent memory when drought was so widespread was 2023, he said. ‘It’s a coast-to-coast-to-coast drought. So that’s quite exceptional,’ said Pomeroy, the director of the Global Water Futures Observatories project at the University of Saskatchewan.” Now “quite exceptional” except it also happened two years ago means what exactly? Right. Well done. It means it’s not exceptional. But you just know what the experts trying to say will say. Computer models see a Mad Max future. Until we get a wet summer when, well, here comes the flood.

The experts are right there on cue. As are the credulous journalists:

“As climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, is expected to increase the likelihood and severity of drought, experts say Canada needs to accelerate the transition to clean energy while also increasing the country’s resilience to these extremes.”

Is expected to. By whom exactly? And how exactly will building windmills make it rain? It is prudent to beware the experts who say, and the journalists who say they say, and the “studies” that show what the journalists say that the experts say, and above all  it is vital to beware the passive voice, in journalism as in life generally. Mistakes were made. Money was wasted. Windows were jumped out of. And in this drought story:

“The threat of drought is likely to increase across many regions of the country, including the already drought-prone Prairies and interior British Columbia. It’s also expected to lead to earlier and faster snowmelt, drying out basins that depend on that water.”

In fact, of course, the more naturally variable conditions are the longer the time series you need to have any confidence that you’re seeing a trend rather than just the usual random fluctuation. And rainfall is notoriously variable. Ask any farmer. If it’s not too wet it’s too dry, except for the rare normal year when the bugs eat everything instead. But in climate science, unlike the normal kind, you don’t follow established statistical methods. You yell that the sky is on fire and we did it.

Including, Matthew Wielicki notes from a very different and wetter place:

“This week, the headline star is a warm patch in the North Pacific. Read a little and you will notice the same move every time. Report the dynamics that actually warm the surface, then pivot to greenhouse gases. Weather.com explains the dynamics plainly. ‘The main culprit is a stubborn high-pressure system’ that weakens the winds and ‘upwelling,’ letting the surface layer warm. Then it adds the climate hook: ‘As our planet warms, the concern is that these Pacific blobs will become more frequent. And in fact, they are.’”

And you know that how? As he goes on to observe, we know very little about such phenomena. But with climate science, knowledge is obsolete.

As for the experts who say, well, you know what’s coming no matter whether they’re calling the current drought a long-term one-year trend, or the current wildfire season, or heavy rain, or early frost due to global warming or whatever dang thing just happened. So on the Canadian prairie:

“the most important thing that we need to do to mitigate this growing drought risk is reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

QED.