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1919 or 2019? The Movie

24 Oct 2020 | Crystal Ball

John Robson:

Imagine you’d never heard of global warming, greenhouse gases, or climate change. Ahh, blessed hermit solitude, you might say. But supposing it somehow happened, and then someone pried you out from under your rock and asked you to make a list of all the important things that had changed in the world in the last century, say between 1919 and 2019. You’d come up with a very long list. Cars, phones, incomes, medicines, airplanes, technology of all kinds, personal computers, and then social customs from clothing styles to gender roles, demographics, political systems, the world wars. Pretty much everything has changed dramatically.

Never mind Skype, Zoom vape or “cell” (outside a prison or a lab). Words like fax or nuke or “televisor”, even flapper would be meaningless. But what about those rising temperatures?

Well, imagine you could bring a group of people forward from 1919 to today, have them spend a week observing our world, and then ask them to list the 10 most important changes. Because modern people might feel obliged to include climate. But I’ll bet you not one in our group of people from 1919 would mention the temperature increase, and the reason they wouldn’t mention it, is they wouldn’t notice it.

Now how can that be, given the barrage of claims that climate change is the most dramatic crisis the world is currently undergoing? I mean, it must be waaaaay hotter, right, with all those disastrous impacts like forest fires, hurricanes, floods and droughts. Isn’t it?

We’ve all seen the charts showing rising global temperatures. And it looks pretty dramatic. But did it really make a difference in our lives?

Plenty of people think not, including yes, scientists. For instance climatologist Lennart Bengtsson, who said “The warming we have had over the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.

Eh? Ridiculous, you might think. Climate change dominates everything else. It’s an emergency. Everybody knows it. Why, Nancy Pelosi just told us “Mother Earth is angry” and her noted scientific colleague Joseph Biden added “The science is clear, and deadly signs like these [fires] are unmistakable — climate change poses an imminent, existential threat to our way of life”.

OK, then here’s a test for our time-travellers, for you, for the alarmists, and everyone else. One that turns our crystal ball around and looks backward not forward, which ought to make it dead simple if climate change has been such a big deal. I should be able to show you climate data from 1919 and 2019, and you’d easily be able to tell which is which.

So I’m going to do that. I’m going show you pictures of things from everyday life, in fact, as well as well as graphs of temperature and precipitation data from various locations across Canada, and that way you can see just how much things have changed from 1919’s clumsy biplanes, lack of television and cool, pleasant vistas.

So here we go!

Our first stop is Canada’s capital, home of much climate alarmism and a professed belief in “evidence-based decision-making”. And one of the lines you’re looking at shows the sequence of 365 daily average temperature readings for Ottawa in 1919, and one shows them for 2019. Can you tell which one’s from global warming-ravaged 2019?

Well, if you guessed the green line, you got it right. But you were just guessing, right? Either that or you’d seen the quiz in our newsletter a year ago.

But what about all that extreme weather buffeting us, burning us, boiling us and besoaking us? OK, here are Ottawa’s daily precipitation records. Again, which one is from pre-climate emergency 1919?

It was the blue line, if you couldn’t tell.

Now one of these is an aircraft from 1919, and one is from 2019. Can you tell which is the more recent one?

Obviously it's number two, right? There wasn’t any guesswork involved in that. That one was dead simple.

Unlike this one: Because one of these lines shows, again, the sequence of 365 daily average temperature readings for the town of Ranfurly in rural Alberta, east of Edmonton, in 1919, and one shows the temperature in Ranfurly in 2019. So which one’s which?

If you guessed the red line, you got it right. But again, you had to guess. So here are the precipitation totals for the same two years in Ranfurly. Which one is cool, comfy pre-climate emergency 1919?

Just in case you had trouble telling them apart, it was the orange line.

Now, one of these images shows cars and motorcycles in 1919, and one shows them from 2019. Can you tell which is the earlier?

Number 1, obviously.

Once again, you weren’t guessing on that one because (drum roll please) it’s obvious. Whereas here are the daily average temperatures for Fredericton, New Brunswick, in 1919 and 2019.

Which one is the post-apocalyptic nightmare called 2019? It was the green dashed line, unobviously.

So now let’s dash straight east across the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to Saint John’s Newfoundland to see the precipitation records for the same years.

Any guesses which is 1919, without extreme weather?

In fact it's the black dotted line.

Now any guesses as to which of these pictures is from a hospital surgery in 1919, and which one is from 2019?

No, no guesses. It was blindingly obvious.

On the other hand, telling which of these lines is the 1919 daily temperature record for Welland, Ontario, down in the Niagara fruit belt, and which one is from 2019 is, well frankly, it’s a coin toss.

If your coin landed the right way up, you know 1919 is the green dotted line. But how can it be so hard to tell this major change when, for instance, you won’t be stumped for three seconds by the next item?

One of these clips shows common workplace clothing in 1919 and one in 2019.

And of course the first clip was from 1919. But if the temperature has changed so much in Welland, there should be an impact on fruit crops and everything.

Problem is, it hasn’t. So you get the idea. And we’re not just picking our climate data from a few places. Here we’re going to show you temperatures for 1919 and 2019 from: Saskatoon; London, Ontario; from Atlin in British Columbia, once a boom town, now a little off the beaten track; from Banff, Alberta, famous resort town, still on the beaten track, or at least it would be if it weren’t for the pandemic; Nicolet, Quebec; and Winnipeg, Manitoba.

And now here are some precipitation records for 1919 and 2019 from: Vancouver, British Columbia; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Kingston, Ontario.

You’ll notice that in all those cases I didn’t give you the answers. And if you can’t tell which one’s which, well, that’s the whole point. And it’s true for all kinds of places in Canada.

You can test it for yourself by visiting the Canadian government’s Historical Data climate and weather site and plugging in any spot you want. But again, you’d have no problem spotting the difference if I showed you comparisons between 1919 and 2019 in any of those cities for any number of things: art or architecture, music, household appliances, dentist’s office, technology of any king. Or if I showed you comparative charts of life expectancy, average income, birth rates, or infant mortality in Canada.

For instance in Canada in 1919, life expectancy at birth was under 60 years. Now it's 82. Which also makes me wonder, if climate change has made everything so much worse, why are we living longer, healthier lives?

Folks, it’s time for some common sense here. When we look at what has had a big impact on our lives over the past 100 years, climate change isn’t even on the list. If the climatologists and meteorologists didn’t keep drawing those charts and making them look scary; if the politicians and activists and celebrities didn’t keep yelling about it, there’d be just as many people claiming it used to be warmer as saying it used to be colder.

All you have seen, even the oldest among us, during your lives, is that wherever you live, the weather is variable. Some years are warmer, some are cooler; some summers are drier; sometimes Spring comes early and sometimes it comes late. And we’re all used to that.

It’s always been that way. But, you may say what about the next hundred years? Won’t they bring truly dramatic changes in climate that overshadow changes in culture or technology? Well, here’s what the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] had to say about this back in 2013.

“For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers. Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.”

Wow. Despite all those lurid “experts say” headlines, the experts actually say the balance between climate and other changes will be the same over the next 100 years as the last hundred, with climate vastly outweighed by the others.

The climate will vary, so will the weather. Some trends may be noticeable, some may even be important. But not compared to all the other stuff.

So, if you’re cryogenically frozen and thawed out in 2119 and subjected to a whole range of new words like teleport and light sabre, and handed some list of the biggest changes between 2019 and 2119, chance is you won’t see the word climate. And if you stick your head out the holographic window you won’t then write it in with a virtual pen.

Uh, unless the glaciers come back. Then you’ll notice.

For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson.

10 comments on “1919 or 2019? The Movie”

  1. Ok the first graph of daily temperatures over 365 days , one being 1919 and another 2019 somewhere in Canada - no difference. The second being rainfall probably in the same place with winter rain could be around 53°N, and much the same 1919 or 2019. We all know the demagogues will freak out when they see this and try and send us down another rabbit hole.

  2. Once again, John Robson, this is excellent information and a great presentation to share with young people who will hopefully start to think for themselves and become aware of misinformation bombarding them. Thank you for being so sensitive to the need to share this information in a way that even a child will understand it.
    I hope everyone will share this widely and support climatediscussionnexus.

    It ought to be illegal to publish text books or online material for students that is factually incorrect and intended to frighten them.

  3. Thank you for this compilation. I've often wanted to reference your comparison graphs and this gives me a great way to present this information to others.

  4. Thank you for this very interesting video based on very accurate and objective comparative data between 1919 and 2019. I think that a possible colder climate scenario ( driven by the effects of solar minimum and increased cosmic rays whose effects on low clouds formation are largely underestimated) should not be excluded in the next decades. I have been reading and studying a lot about the theory of Henry Svensmark, Nir Shaviv et Al and it is certainly a shame that their theory is so neglected and silenced in the mainstream debate.
    I have to congratulate you for the honest and acute critics of the climate hysteria and I thank you again for the weekly update.

  5. "Ah," will go the argument, "but these are just cherry-picked sites. Anyway, it is just local, not regional or global..."
    What does seem to be missed is that the world is filled with these "cherry-picked" sites, showing local data which contradicts the whole narrative - funny, how this data from these sites creates such a different picture when it is "homogenised" to show global trends...

  6. Brilliant! Just a few data-filled minutes suffice to debunk the whole global-warming-climate-change narrative and throw the fear-mongering activists into an existentialist crisis. L

  7. John, I have been following you post for some time now and find them always insightful and instructive. I appreciate the clear eyed and common sense explanations you so eloquently provide. We need more of this kind of information to keep us from sinking into the abyss of ignorance.
    Dana H Saylor Sr.
    A small town country boy

  8. I don't believe John Robson. I put all my faith in Greta Thunberg because it's discrimination to not have faith in a Swedish autistic bubblegummer and let's face it, the Swedes used to be Vikings
    who were really cool.

  9. Today the UK's Prime Minister has launched his new 'Green industrial revolution', which will, amongst other things, "ban the sale of new cars and vans powered wholly by petrol and diesel". Additional initiatives include more nuclear power, more wind turbines, carbon capture and trials on using hydrogen. The aim is to support (for £4bn initial investment) the creation of 250,000 jobs and put the UK on track to meet its goal of net zero emissions by 2050. Putting to one side the huge energy costs of carbon capture and hydrogen production, the electricity to power the electric vehicles and homes is yet to be agreed. Nuclear is essential to get anywhere near the power required. Wind is getting expensive as wind farms are built further offshore and by 2030, the existing ones will need maintaining or replacing. All this because the Government are convinced that there is a problem of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Our life is a carbon-based existence and we need carbon to survive. Plants need carbon dioxide and the more there is, the more they thrive (biodiversity up 14% since 1982). What came first, increased global temperature, or increased levels of CO2? there is certainly a debate about this. It is very likely that the impact of rising carbon dioxide concentrations is currently net beneficial for both humanity and the biosphere generally. These benefits are real, whereas the costs of warming are uncertain. Halting the increase in carbon dioxide concentrations abruptly would deprive people and the planet of the benefits of carbon dioxide much sooner than they would reduce any costs of warming.

  10. Hola John,
    Whilst I agree with every word you have written so eloquently well, wouldn't it be better to also write to other sites that are not so well informed and/or are downright biased?
    Perhaps you have, I hope you have.
    After all, aren't you kind of "preaching to the converted" here

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