Dear King Person, please forgive a possibly maladroit form of address as we have never been to Buckingham Palace. Nor indeed to address the U.S. Congress and deftly combine bland generalities about shared values of Christian liberty that avoid direct reference to specific rough spots past or present with pointed messages wrapped in velvet. And we will not ask you to exercise your moral authority to try to restore sanity and decency across a broad range of Canadian public issues in short order because we have both been to the historical section of the library and know attempts by kings named Charles to take full control of the policy agenda did not end happily. But there is a place that, we say with as little condescension as the situation permits, we have recently been whereas you have not, at least not since 1975, namely the Arctic. And we must therefore petition you to stop saying nonsense like “the disastrously melting ice caps of the Arctic”. It’s not happening. You have been badly advised. We have pictures and can send them. And if a critical step in restoring said sanity and decency in affairs of state is for people to stop saying the thing that is not, we ask that you lead the way with your customary and remarkable combination of tact and purpose.
We trust that you are not simply reading, or relying on people who read, publications like the Guardian. Their columnist Gaby Hinsliff wrote in January:
“For decades now, politicians have been warning of the coming climate wars – conflicts triggered by drought, flood, fire and storms forcing people on to the move, or pushing them into competition with neighbours for dwindling natural resources…. By the early 2040s, forecasts suggest global heating could have rendered the frozen waters around the north pole – the ocean separating Russia from Canada and Greenland – almost ice-free in summer.”
Accompanied by, and we realize it was almost certainly the editor’s choice not the writer’s, a picture of US VP Vance in Greenland in March 2025. Not one of Hinsliff in the Arctic in March 2026. But here’s one of one of me in the Arctic in March 2026. The southern Arctic. Notice the lack of climate wars, and the extraordinary white stuff all over everywhere.
We realize that you are not at liberty to speak your mind in public with perfect frankness, as a matter of convention and because the role of a constitutional monarch would be substantively undermined by any such habit. We would not have the Canadian monarchy go the way of that of, say, Egypt, to say nothing of France. But surely you do have the right to refuse to utter lines given to you by politicians, bureaucrats or lackeys and if it is an open question we urge you to test it.
Especially as, speaking of the French monarchy, a classic linguistic/philosophical example of a grammatically sound sentence devoid of meaning is “The present king of France is bald.” Even if, in fact, Prince Jean Carl Pierre Marie d’Orléans, Count of Paris does appear to have a receding hairline. But we digress.
The point is, to speak of “the disastrously melting ice caps of the Arctic” obliging us to do something is quite literally babble since they are not melting, let alone doing so disastrously. And here we wish again to applaud your focus, including in your recent address to Congress, on the long run. You are quite right, 1812 notwithstanding, or (harrumph) 1776, that:
“The alliance that our two nations have built over the centuries, and for which we are profoundly grateful to the American people, is truly unique.”
And immediately after stepping into the Arctic ice and mistaking it for an ocean, you observed that:
“Our defence, intelligence and security ties are hard wired together through relationships measured not in years, but in decades.”
Quite. Jolly good show. But sire, the same is true when it comes to climate. Indeed, climate is by definition the average weather condition in some place, big or small, from East Anglia to the Arctic to the Earth, over 30 years. And thus changes in the ice are measured not in years, but in decades, and even centuries.
As we observed earlier this spring, careful measurement of Nile river minimum depths near Cairo over more than six centuries, from 622 to 1284 AD, reveal extraordinary and dramatic trend-like objects, lasting decades or more, all around a stable average. And if an aide, or worse a minister, were to hand you a script containing a claim that those “wild swings” were actually the work of human hands we trust you would return it to them unrecited. (As for the Guardian, do not think it is your friend or a reliable source of information even if it does call you “Charlie” which we would never presume to do.) So what of Arctic ice?
For starters, we do not have six centuries’ worth of detailed records on it, for the period from Aethelbert of Kent through Edward I. (And may we add what a pleasure it is to be able to make such a reference to someone who won’t have to Google either monarch?) But we do have the Viking voyages of discovery that indirectly brought your ancestor William of Normandy to the shores of Britain and the throne you now occupy, and the Little Ice Age that killed off the English wine industry to the great relief of French producers. And much else besides.
Lest we lose our audience in the minutiae of British history, consider only that some presumably well-meaning but ill-informed advisor has not taken into account that scary claims about Arctic ice depend, essentially, on a trend from the beginning of the modern satellite era in 1979 through the early 21st century, a mere 33 years, after which the melting stopped. Since 2012 there’s been no trend, which essentially proves nothing because of how big the planet is and what kinds of forces can lead it to cool for, say, 40 million years. Which is a long time even by the standards of genealogies that situate Alfred the Great somewhere before the middle but after the start.
Indeed, a more recent statistical analysis took the apparent pattern in Arctic ice since 1979 and fit the curve two different ways, one showing the average decline from to the present as a straight line and the other showing the decline to 2006 as a straight line down and the period from 2007 to now as a straight line that was level. The latter was actually a better fit and thus showed a pause lasting 19 years not 13, and the trend some people will not let go of despite logic and evidence continuing for just 27. And a man with your sense of history must also realize that if Arctic ice was increasing from the 1940s through 1979, as it was, or perhaps we should say from the reign of George VI to a third of the way into that of Elizabeth II of happy memory, surely not because of CO2, then a blip that ended well before her reign did proves nothing. Especially as nobody knows how often in the past the ice did the one, the other, or both.
We admire the tact with which you urged both Britain and America to get past the doubts the current administration has with respect to its trans-Atlantic partnership, and acknowledged that the UK has not been pulling its weight. And we don’t expect you to leap up and down hollering that CO2 is plant food and there is no climate crisis. But we do humbly petition Your Majesty to take the long view and the responsible one, and not stand calmly at the podium intoning that we’re all going to die because the Arctic ice cap is melting.
We wouldn’t even if it did. And we assure you it’s not. We’ve been there.
