- A Reuters sports-related newsletter “Inside Track” starts its Feb. 27 edition with “The Winter Olympics are already in the rear-view mirror – the medals packed away, the snow settling back into the mountains – but sport, as ever, barely pauses for breath. Seasons turn, engines fire, and old rivalries sharpen.” And note please that there’s not a trace of the media prattle in the runup about how climate change was melting the Olympics. Not even they believe it.
- As Nero Wolfe once said, pessimists only get pleasant surprises. Alas in our ongoing dim view of Canada’s alleged economic pivot from woke climatry to productivity we are not surprised, or pleased, that the fabled Memorandum of Misunderstanding between the federal government and that of the province of Alberta continues to look like a trade of higher industrial carbon taxes now for pipelines never. But we are pleasantly surprised that the formerly-named “Pathways Alliance” of major oil sands producers seeking a Net Zero pathway to extinction for their industry now calls itself the Oil Sands Alliance and seems to want to survive. Apparently agreeing with your sworn enemies that you should be destroyed wasn’t the stroke of PR genius they once inexplicably believed.
- Matthew Wielicki points to the Central England Temperature record, the longest instrumental record in the world albeit not all with thermometers you’d trust to a decimal place, to show that something’s wrong with the whole Enhanced CO2 Hypothesis, as Javier Vinós dubbed it. Specifically, a warming from 1695 to 1735 as sharp as that in the very late 20th and early 21st centuries which cannot be attributed to CO2. And we say it’s still worse, because there’s clear warming from 1880 through 1990 that is not just disproportionate to the small rise in atmospheric CO2 in that period, it’s much steeper in the earlier portion when the rise in CO2 was trivial. Unfortunately, Willis Eschenbach chimes in with a claim that the CET is simply not standardized enough to draw long-term conclusions. And it’s really important to know what we don’t know even when, or indeed especially when, we like the look of something at first glance.
- Well, it is instructive. After a previous administration closed the Canadian consulate in Milan to save money, at no apparent cost in services, the federal Liberals reopened it in 2020 and spent $18.7 million to retrofit it as an energy-efficient showcase. It’s something of a poster for the green energy transition… unfortunately revealing it as somewhere between a pipe dream and a fancy but unaffordable PR exercise. (That it came in a year when cabinet promised to cut unnecessary spending and “refocus government spending to deliver for Canadians” only adds to what the then-Prime Minister referred to as “teachable moments” when he messed up.)
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04 Mar 2026 | News Roundup
