The Canadian Climate Institute hollers “Canada must prepare for a 5°C hotter future and act now to avoid worst impacts: new federal report” and quoted their “Adaptation Research Director” that: “Canadians must prepare for decades of more severe wildfire seasons, more extreme heat days, rising seas, thawing permafrost, and diminishing water resources due to glacier loss. That’s the grim takeaway from the latest edition of Canada’s Changing Climate Report, a comprehensive federal scientific assessment released today.” Or not, because the report actually wasn’t available when they went nuclear over it (or perhaps solar). But it doesn’t matter, because they aren’t interested in the validity of the claims, only their shrillness. The fact that it went down to 4C overnight in mid-September where we are is, of course, of no importance whatsoever.

The report main page offers “Headline statements” for journalists too lazy or clueless to read the actual report (which they didn’t even post) or even the “Report summary“. Including:

“Headline statement 4: Warming temperatures have driven wide-ranging, interconnected, and sustained changes across Canada. The changes include more extreme heat, less extreme cold, longer growing seasons, longer fire seasons, earlier peak stream flow, shorter snow and ice cover seasons, thinning glaciers, thawing permafrost, warming oceans and rising sea level. Human-caused warming is the only explanation for the collective changes observed.”

Once again we encounter the (fictitious) line from Lazar Kaganovich in The Death of Stalin: “There is no other opinion.”

The “summary” is more of the same, including the whole fragile climate thing:

“Changes in climate are occurring across Canada against a backdrop of global climate change. The IPCC concluded that human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming (IPCC, 2021). The IPCC also concluded that limiting human-caused global warming requires net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and that even after net-zero CO2 emissions are reached and sustained, global temperature will remain elevated for millennia.”

Millennia. Fifty years of human CO2 will leave the thing shattered and smoking for thousands of years.

And of course:

“Since 1970, Canada has warmed nearly twice as fast as the global average, and the Canadian Arctic has warmed three times as fast as the global average.”

Just like everywhere.

Now of course when we saw that 5˚C claim we immediately wondered if RCP8.5 had somehow gotten out of its grave. But it’s hard to tell:

“A scenario roughly representative of current global climate policies in which global emissions of greenhouse gases stabilize and then decline towards the end of the century corresponds to a future climate for Canada that is far from benign. Under this scenario, Canada is projected to warm through the century, with an average temperature increase (mean estimate) of 5°C by 2081–2100 relative to 1850–1900, while there is a greater than 50% chance that warming will exceed 10°C in much of Nunavut in winter. Also under this scenario, glaciers in western Canada are projected to lose more than 75% of their ice, intense precipitation is projected to increase by a median estimate of 40% in Canada as a whole, and there is a greater than two-thirds chance that the central Arctic Ocean will be ice-free most Septembers. Moreover, Canada is projected to still be warming at the end of the century under this scenario.”

It’s apparently not RCP8.5, because they go on:

“There is evidence that recent global emissions have dropped below levels projected in high emissions scenarios with no global climate policies and no mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, in part because of the implementation of climate policies in many countries. However, such high emissions scenarios are still informative for climate change risk management. In a scenario with no global climate policies and increasing emissions, average temperature in Canada is projected to increase 6.9°C by 2081–2100 relative to 1850–1900, and changes in climate are projected to be substantially more severe even than that projected under the current-policies scenario.”

Which we cite primarily for the “in part because of” bit where people admitting RCP8.5 was a load of dingoes’ kidneys then backed and filled by saying it had once been plausible but no longer is due to dramatic actions the world’s governments didn’t take. There appears to be no cliché this report won’t peddle unexamined. If you persevere the scenario they are leaning heavily on appears to be SSP2-4.5, though they throw in SSP3-7.0 for scare value although calling 6.9C “substantially more severe” than 5C seems ill-judged. But getting that kind of warming out of SSP2-4.5 takes something worse than bad judgement given what happens if, say, you plug it into models that actually did reasonably well projecting past temperature increases, namely not much. Also, as Roger Pielke Jr. pointed out two years ago, SSP2-4.5 contains projections of population growth that are clearly way too high and if you fix them it gives you total warming by 2100 of about half a degree (it’s about 2.07 above “pre-industrial” total and we already supposedly had 1.5). So how does Canada get 5?

Well, however they did it, we’ll be in hot water, because:

“Droughts and flash floods will become more frequent and severe with additional warming. Summer droughts are projected to become longer and more intense and occur more frequently in central and southern Canada. Increases in the frequency and intensity of atmospheric rivers (in high emissions scenarios) and of extreme rainfall will lead to more frequent and intense flash flooding.”

And of course, as with the projected increase in 50-year “hot extremes” that will start happening 16.2 times if the place warms by 4C, the whole thing is about telling models what to tell you and when they do you go “Gotcha!” And here, again intruding real-world data, Michael Shellenberger just complained on his Public Substack that:

“Real-World Data Do Not Show Droughts Getting Worse Globally. Scientists Invented A “Rubbish” Measure That Does. Researchers created an assumptions-dependent index after rainfall measurements did not show change. Then, they applied it to the past.”

The same is true of almost everything in the report summary. And again, we can’t cite the report because they didn’t bother releasing it and the activists didn’t wait for it to yell that it said we were all going to fry.