- When trying to evaluate the likelihood that the Canadian government will succeed in making a policy work, as opposed to succeed in making it sound good, not everyone is a sucker. For instance Electricity Canada, which represents the relevant utilities, has just warned Canada’s senate that green electricity regulations are a nightmare. Of course people being regulated are not dispassionate observers of the design or purpose of the regulations in question. But when they use terms like “unworkable” and “unacceptable” and warn that the Clean Electricity Regulations threaten the reliability as well as affordability of power, it is well worth asking in the spirit of David Hume whether it’s more likely that the warning is reasonable or that the policy is. Especially when they warn that the official estimate for the cost of compliance is about $690 billion, over $16,000 per Canadian and over $64,000 per family of four, and the government itself “assumed the majority of costs incurred by electric utilities would be ultimately passed onto consumers.” And yet that same government says the green energy transition is making us richer not poorer.
- Animal lovers beware: not only is nature red in tooth and claw, lately it’s been blue in iguana as well. Those adorable lizards are not cold-weather creatures and with the extraordinary cold in Florida they are literally falling from trees and, we’re glad to say, being collected by locals and taken to facilities for keeping them warm and safe. But next time you read some news story about how anything cute or useful will die if it gets marginally warmer, grab at least a pinch of salt because cold, not hot, is the big killer. Including, alas, of iguanas.
- So much for climate refugees. Heatmap warns of “Why Driverless Cars Still Can’t Handle Snow/ Black ice is dangerous, even for the robots.” And you might retort that humans don’t always drive well on black ice or, indeed, without it. But what really caught our eye was the opening text beneath that headline: “If all the snow and ice over the past week has you fed up, you might consider moving to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, or Atlanta. These five cities receive little to no measurable snow in a given year…”. Wait. Are you saying warm weather beats the cold kind, after all that heating breakdown stuff?
- Given the kerfuffle when we pointed out, correctly, that Arctic ice was at a 20-year high for that specific date on Jan. 20, 2024, we also promised to keep an eye on Arctic ice even if it subsequently retreated. As we have, and here’s the latest. As of Jan. 20, 2026, it had shrunk slightly, and sat near the bottom of the last decade’s levels, though by Feb. 10 it was back to the middle of the pack. But it’s disingenuous to call 2026 a trend and 2024 a blip. (Or to call Jan. 20 a trend and Feb. 10 a blip.) In point of fact, as noted elsewhere in this newsletter, any natural phenomenon given to large fluctuations, and Arctic sea ice is very much in that category, will exhibit pseudo-trend behaviour just as trees in a forest will grow in ways that create pseudo-paths, but if you follow them, you hit a dead end. If you look at Arctic sea ice over the last 20 years, what really stands out is that the lines bunch together. (And if you care 2012, which set the recent minimum at the peak of the summer melt, was actually pretty robust for most of the winter, spring and summer.) Now again, if all the ice melts the people who said it would all melt get to claim vindication. But so long as it fluctuates within a narrow band, they don’t.
- Speaking of Arctic ice, an alert viewer asks our opinion of the latest video attacking us from the arguably obsessed “Potholer54”. Our opinion is that his Buster Keaton sad-clown avatar is strangely appropriate. He declares it a “howling error” on our part that we said the UK Met Office was caught making up data from a closed weather station and had to stop, and swiftly establishes his mala fides by sneering at “someone called Dr. Robson” as if there were some dispute over my name or identity, and outing me as a historian by showing that we say I’m one at the start of the video, and by again waving a graphic we admitted got bungled in the production process and swiftly replaced. He falsely labels that one an error “on the part of the doctor” without knowing how it happened, or bothering to ask, then brandishes it to argue that we can’t read charts, something he’s so fixated on that he also made at least one video just on it, which characteristically brushed aside the fact that what we said about the chart was obviously correct. In his latest oeuvre he also mocked me for thanking viewers, as if gratitude were widely and rightly considered scandalous or pathetic, and engaged in a diatribe about how “fabricated” necessarily implies a conspiracy theory, including scoffing that people must not own dictionaries without consulting one to discover that a classic definition of “fabricate” is “construct or manufacture”. So you have to wade through a lot of bogus snark to reach the point where he admits that the data we said was exposed as fabricated and removed by the Met actually was removed by the Met after being exposed as fabricated. How’s that an error, let alone a howler? Well, he then insisted that the Met shouldn’t have removed fake data he liked, before condemning relativism. So our opinion is that such alarmism is an echo chamber as unsound on substance as unpleasant in tone. But for people who like that kind of thing, it’s the kind of thing they’ll like.
- Oh, and speaking of fabricating data, or disintegrating it, Clintel in the Netherlands is celebrating that “Dutch climate skeptics vindicated: KNMI reinstates seven pre-1950 heatwaves after long battle”. It took seven years for “KNMI, the national weather and climate institute in The Netherlands” to admit that a lonely band of skeptics who knew their stuff and wouldn’t stop pressing the issue were right that a “homogenization” of early 20th-century temperatures back in 2016 had bungled the statistical procedures in a way that, gosh, who saw that coming, made it seem that recent heatwaves were new and scary not old and irritating. Doubtless Potholer54 will rebuke them for giving up the lovely result.
- As for simply ignoring evidence, Andrew Montford calls out Will Hutton who, far from being some random troll, is “Political economist, author, Observer columnist, President of the Academy of Social Sciences and host of the We Society podcast” for posting as evidence of the climate crisis “Rain again this morning and forecast all day. Time was when British weather changed – not continuous, never-ending rain. Our right wing media shows no interest in discussing or exploring ; it might prove Ed Miliband – an obsessed neo-Marxist the enemy of fossil fuels – is right.” Perhaps because Britain has been as infamous for its weather as for its cuisine since the 1950s, and well beyond, indeed into the days of Voltaire. As Montfort retorts, “This kind of weather is not even unknown in summer. From Evelyn’s diary: ‘Beginning of exceptional prolonged wet spell... Rain fell in London on at least 60 out of 75 days between this date and the 8th September...’”. Which is a reference to the summer of 1725. (But apparently an error re it being John Evelyn’s diary, which stopped in 1706.)
- Our least favourite “experts say” of the week concerns climate. And it’s a headline in the normally sensible National Post that reads “CANADA HAS PLEDGED THE ELECTRIC-VEHICLE SECTOR $50B IN SUBSIDIES. IS IT WORTH IT? CRITICS CALL IT A COSTLY GAMBLE BY OTTAWA AND SOME PROVINCES, BUT EXPERTS BELIEVE THE STRATEGY WILL PAY OFF IN THE LONG TERM”. Critics being the highly-respected Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and “experts” a professor, the editor of an industry publication, and two people in line for handouts. They would be.
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11 Feb 2026 | News Roundup
