- Cats ate my bug. So says a piece in Scientific American, reprinted from The Conversation aka The Rant, about how many insects feral cats devour. Now in our view there is no bug shortage. But we do want to note the strange mix of sense and nonsense in the piece. First, we agree that cats should be kept indoors, for their own sake and that of birds in particular. We realize cats are animals, and predators (and prey). But nature is red in tooth and claw and man is red in tire and outdoor cats deplete already bleak urban ecosystems and get run over. But of course the piece says “Many invertebrates are in decline globally due to urbanization, habitat destruction, increases in both light and pesticide pollution, and climate change” and we challenge them to explain how after the first four there’s anything left for a very mild temperature increase, normally benign for life, to exterminate. You just have to say it. And second, it reflects the modern urban environmentalist conviction that nature is brittle. Is it really credible that cats are going to drive “a freshwater crayfish native to southeastern Australia” to extinction in your yard? No. As the piece concedes, they lack evidence to do anything but scaremonger. So they scaremonger. For our part we say let your garden go wild, and keep your cat tame, and nature will flourish. Even if it gets ever so slightly warmer.
- Oops. The Toronto Star “First Up” morning email (unaccountably posted as “Morning News Digest” instead), while warning you that it’s unpleasant when it’s hot inside your house, blurts out: “You think this is hot? Well, it is. For sure. Hot enough that some restaurants shut down Tuesday. But Mark Colley looks back at the hottest week in Toronto history, a time in 1936 when the pavement melted, berries roasted on the vine and thousands of people slept outside on the Toronto lakefront.” What? Hotter in the 1930s, just as the unadjusted North American temperature records show? Say it ain’t so. I’m afraid it is so, kid.
- According to Euronews, amplified by MSN and yahoo!news, “Mysterious Atlantic ‘cold blob’: the only place on Earth that keeps getting colder”. Now this story is predictably untrue; there are other parts of the planet that have been cooling. (If you Google “places that have cooled in recent decades” you get a list, which means the writer and the editors did not even bother Googling. The US Climate.gov site even provides a map.) But the other point here is “mysterious”. Once again the settled science can’t explain it so they go oh that’s weird but the science is settled.
- Speaking of which, from the “they knew” file, and we don’t mean Exxon, a website has compiled a fact-based list of prestigious institutions that knew RCP8.5 was not business as usual, that it was in fact preposterous, and kept using it anyway. As the site says, “This is not a story about a scientific error that went undetected. By 2020, the problems with RCP8.5 were published in the world’s most prestigious journals. Every institution that kept using it after these dates made a choice.” Indeed. A revealing choice.
- A newsletter from the Canada West Foundation asks “Why hasn’t Canada developed the Arctic?” Having been there, we’ll tell you and them. Because it’s miserably, wickedly cold and cold is hostile to all life including human. Things break. Toes freeze. Winds howl. It’s another world, beautiful and awe-inspiring but not a better one to live in.
- Finally, the Cornwall Alliance complains that “Vatican Newspaper Taints ‘Encounter of Faith and Reason’ With Climate Falsehood” and explains that “the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano joins in the fearmongering of climate alarmists whose credibility suffers from a lack of scientific facts. Drawing on UNICEF’s The Children’s Climate Risk Report 2026, the paper’s front-page, June 16 story, ‘Emergenze climatiche: Il cielo sopra i bam (Climate Emergencies: The Sky Above the Children),’ claims that half of the world’s children are ‘threatened daily’ by ‘extreme climate events.’” It really is peculiar, especially for an institution routinely if not necessarily fairly accused of opposing science, to try to rebut criticisms by making a statement that is utterly ludicrous. In point of fact deaths from natural disasters have plummeted since 1900, not just per capita but in total even as the human population has soared. One is tempted, with BG Frank Savage (Gregory Peck) in Twelve O’Clock High, to retort “And you, Padre. Your business is sin. Hereafter, you’ll confine yourself to that theatre of operations.” At least until you learn to stop trying to seem cool on science and start trying to be right on it instead.
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22 Jul 2026 | News Roundup
