- Plunge watch: during the summer we were keeping track of media outlets using “scorch” and “soar” to underline their devotion to the climate cult and their unoriginality. But then watching freezing rain somehow descending even though the thermometer read -9C, we got to thinking about how rarely stories mentioned temperatures plunging, or things being frostbitten, even though the winter has been, well, so wintery even Wenceslas would have put on an extra cloak before venturing out.
- Oh, that. Heatmap Daily runs a piece by Jael Holzman, one of their writers who is also “the front person of a band called Ekko Astral”, about how “I expected touring the whole country with my rock band could change me. I didn’t think it would shatter my understanding of the U.S. energy transition.” And yes, there is something to be said for going and looking at the evidence instead of just theorizing. But she or he (in fact she, and proud owner of a B.A. in English Language and Literature so not a climate scientist) saw what they expected while claiming not to: “What I hadn’t considered about this cross-country rock n’ roll tour, however, was that it would take me through the fields of wind turbines and solar projects being built across the country that I’d reported on but mostly hadn’t seen in person… I kept longing for us to have the capacity to tour by electric van. But setting aside the limited availability of electric vans for touring purposes, the sheer logistical requirements of going electric would be difficult for any touring band.” Oh. That. As in one rule for thee, peasant, and one rule for me, creative genius with a conscience.
- Now you tell us: the BBC “More or Less” podcast says “Whether we like it or not, global warming is happening. The global temperature has already gone up, and it’s going to go up more, because the atmosphere is already full of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and we’re continuing to add to that stock.” And of course if it’s already full we can’t add more. Block that metaphor… and the lack of basic scientific understanding behind calling 400 parts per million “full”. But they key point is that it goes on to ask why scientists kept babbling that if we went on this way it would get 5C hotter by 2100, and to answer it “This projection was based on something called RCP 8.5, a statistical scenario used by scientists to model the future of the climate. You can still find scientific papers published in 2025 that make the same claim. However, there’s a good case that RCP 8.5 should never have been used as the business-as-usual scenario. And in hindsight it doesn’t look like an accurate vision of the future at all.” Then it interviews Zeke Hausfather about how just because they were wrong doesn’t mean they weren’t right. But actually RPC 8.5 looked like rubbish ahead of time as well, so the real question is why people like Hausfather didn’t make it stop before everyone else saw through it too.
- Euronews reports that “EU legislators agreed this week on a historic deal to end energy dependency on Russian gas by 2027” with Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen insisting that “Even when there’s peace, we won’t buy Russian gas again…. We should never repeat the mistake of becoming dependent of Russian gas again”. All of which is very true, and commendable. But has it dawned on Jørgensen and his colleagues that they must get reliable, affordable energy from somewhere? Or is it just one more step in reducing Europe to a hungry and helpless sideshow by getting rid of what works and strutting about as if you were at the Congress of Vienna and bestrode the world like a colossus?
- If we are all going to die from climate disasters we’d better do it and decrease the surplus population. Alas, instead Roger Pielke Jr. writes “Congratulations World! Globally, 2025 had one of the lowest annual death rates from extreme weather in history”. Which raises the question whether governments, including the Canadian, will go right on churning out press releases about the rising human as well as financial cost of the supposedly relentless increase in disastrously bad weather. Celebrate the decline? Not on your life.
- It’s not all doom and sneers. We note with pleasure a Toronto Star story “How a resurrected Toronto river led to a flood of flora and fauna not seen in decades” about what happens when effort and money are directed at a real environmental problem, for instance the tendency of urban environments to stifle ecosystems. What’s more, this “renaturalized” mouth of the Don River (and we don’t have to tell you what “progress” did when it became the Don Valley Parkway, do we?) was a flood-protection project that led “to an explosion of fauna and flora not seen since the early 1900s.” Something a great many cities need, unlike bans on “carbon pollution” that feeds the wetlands.
- From the “red green” show, the Canadian Green Party “in solidarity with the Federation of Green Parties of the Americas” freaks out at the removal of the narco-terrorist regime in Venezuela. And Canadian journalist Peter Menzies takes aim at CTV for claiming that “freezing” rain hit Gaza camps and wrote of “displaced Palestinians in dire conditions.” Freeing being here a word meaning plus 13C as the low and 17C as the high. Science did not know water could freeze at such temperatures… but political science did. Remember when environmentalists were focused on the environment? Many of them seem not to.
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07 Jan 2026 | News Roundup
