The “Canada Action Plan” Crystal Ball Check Revisited transcript

John Robson:

For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson with another trip down memory lane, to Canada’s definitive 2001 climate change assessment and action plan. And also to our second-most-popular video, “Canada’s 2001 climate predictions. How did they do?“, which has had 400,000 views since being released in June 2019, and which we think some of our newer viewing and reading friends might have missed and might appreciate.

The main point here is that, if governments don’t know what’s happening, they can’t possibly know what to do about it. But it’s also important to note that if they were as sure 20 years ago as they are today, and were completely clueless back then, it calls into serious question how solid their understanding is today.

This video looks at the disastrously wrong predictions the Canadian government made about climate change at the turn of the century based on the climate models that they’d spent many millions of dollars developing. It was on the basis of those predictions that they wanted to convince the nation to rally behind their costly and impractical plans to slash energy use. Because, as we show, the predictions weren’t just wrong, they were all wrong in the same direction. There was a systemic bias in the direction of creating the impression of a climate crisis that the data just didn’t show.

Narrator:

The fact that the Canadian climate model is biased towards too much warming is no secret among scientists. In 2020, a team of British climate scientists looked at how climate models from around the world since the late 1970s compared to reality in the lower part of the atmosphere, called the troposphere, which is the region where greenhouse gases are believed to have their clearest effect. All the models they examined warmed too much, but they singled out the Canadian model for its singular bias: “We draw attention to the CanESM5 model: it simulates the greatest warming in the troposphere, roughly 7 times larger than the observed trends.”

John Robson:

And what does our federal government say about their model that warms seven times faster than observations? Why, they rely on it: “to provide science-based quantitative information to inform climate change adaptation and mitigation in Canada and internationally.”

So if you ever wonder why here in Canada we can’t have nice things any more, it’s because when they’re setting emission control policy the government relies on a model that predicts seven times more warming than has actually been observed.

But the issue here isn’t simply that the government has overstated the global warming problem. It’s they keep underestimating the difficulty of the emission-control problem.

Narrator:

Despite Canada having missed every emissions target it ever set, Prime Minister Trudeau insisted in October 2022 that Canada would actually hit its targets for the first time, seven years into his premiership, because “Every other plan was based on targets. Any politician can put forward a target. Can you actually put forward a plan to do it?”

He seems to have forgotten that previous Prime Ministers put forward lots of plans to cut emissions. It’s just that none of them were feasible or practical. Including the 2016 “Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change” put forward on his watch.

John Robson:

In fact way back in 2002, when Canada’s government ratified the much-hyped 1997 Kyoto Protocol that, Wikipedia drones, “commits state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on the scientific consensus that (part one) global warming is occurring and (part two) that human-made CO2 emissions are driving it”, I wrote in the Ottawa Citizen that while many people were elated by this news, and others were alarmed by it, I was bored.

The Canadian government, I insisted, had no idea how to implement Kyoto because it had no idea what was going on with greenhouse gasses or the climate, so, we wouldn’t see emissions reductions or much of anything else. And we haven’t.

So my prediction holds up pretty well. How about theirs?

Narrator:

The global warming issue depends heavily on computer model forecasts about climate problems that greenhouse gas emissions will supposedly cause decades from now. But it turns out that climate experts and government officials have been making these kinds of forecasts for a long time, warning about things that, by now, should already have happened, if their models are as accurate as they claim.

John Robson:

So I think it’s time we checked how good their crystal ball turned out to be. Before we put any trust in their new forecasts, I say we’re entitled to see how good the old ones were.

Narrator:

For our first trip back to the future, we want to look at this 2001 pamphlet, which the Government of Canada mailed out to people across the country to build support for their costly new climate policy plans two decades ago.

“The Earth is getting warmer … We are changing our climate,” the pamphlet warned.

John Robson:

It swept aside any uncertainties and insisted that we are the cause, it’s going to be harmful, and we need to take action now (that is, in 2001) to stop it from happening.

Narrator:

The pamphlet went on to list the following predictions:

• Canadian cities will experience longer and more intense heat waves;
• These heat waves will make air pollution get worse;
• Sea levels on the northern coast of British Columbia will rise by up to 30 cm by 2050;
• Crop yields on the prairies will start declining due to increased droughts;
• There will be more frequent forest fires;
• And water levels in the St Lawrence Seaway will fall by up to 1.25 meters this century.

John Robson:

Now those warnings sound pretty familiar, because we’re hearing them today. But it’s been more than 20 years since the Canadian government declared the debate over, and made those predictions in that pamphlet. So, let’s see if any of them came true.

Narrator:

More Heat Waves.

John Robson:

Environment Canada’s long term temperature archive for every city in Canada can be seen online at YourEnvironment.ca. Toronto’s records go back to 1840, and summertime daily highs have barely changed over the past hundred years.

Now, here are the monthly average daytime highs for June, July and August, the hot months, since 1990.

There’s simply no evidence of longer or more intense heatwaves over the past few decades. We invite you to use the site to check out other large urban areas in Canada for yourself – and good luck finding anywhere that shows a trend of longer and more intense summertime high temperatures.

Narrator:

More Air Pollution.

Environment Canada maintains air pollution records for most major Canadian cities back to the early 1970s. In 2017 the Fraser Institute took the data and produced this report. It clearly shows that, instead of going up, heat-related pollution levels have been steady or declining in major urban areas for at least the past 20 years.

John Robson:

So far on the government’s predictions, we’re zero for two.

Narrator:

Rising BC Sea Levels.

John Robson:

Global tide gauge data is maintained by the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level in Liverpool, England, and it too is all available online. According to the government’s 2001 pamphlet, sea levels along the northern BC coast should be going up by about 6 cm a decade due to climate change.

Northern BC coastal sea levels have been measured at Prince Rupert since 1925 and, in fact, water levels rose up to the mid-1970s, but since then they haven’t changed much at all. And a little further north in Ketchikan Alaska, they’re actually going down.

This graph compares what the government forecast and what has actually been observed since the early 1990s.

Another swing and a miss.

Narrator:

Falling Prairie Crop Yields.

Is prairie grain production declining due to drought, or anything else? Statistics Canada has measured annual prairie crop yields since 1908. Since the government published its prediction of falling grain yields, total wheat and canola production on the prairies has soared by over 60%, while spring wheat production per hectare is up about 66%.

John Robson:

Another failed prediction.

Narrator:

More Forest Fires.

John Robson:

The National Forestry Database, again operated by the Canadian government, provides estimates of the number of forest fires every year, and the national record goes back to 1970. It seems that the number of forest fires in Canada since 2001, when the pamphlet was published, has actually been going down slightly, not up, as the government’s model forecast.

Another wrong prediction.

John Robson:

Declining St. Lawrence Water Levels.

The government predicted that St Lawrence River water levels would fall so quickly they should be down by about 25 cm by now. The Water Survey of Canada is a government agency that monitors water flow and levels in all major Canadian river systems. Their data collection is easily accessible online.

Here’s the monthly average data for the St Lawrence from the monitoring station near Cornwall, Ontario, going back to when the seaway opened in 1959. And here’s a chart of the data up close since 2000, comparing actual St Lawrence levels to the government’s predicted rate of decline. As you can see, the level changes a little from year to year, but it isn’t declining the way the government forecast.

John Robson:

So that’s zero out of six predictions right. That’s like striking out twice in one at-bat. Their forecasting model did far worse than random guessing would have, or monkeys throwing darts.

And it would be bad enough if they made all these mistakes while admitting that, yes, the science is uncertain, it needs to be debated, climate’s complex. But they were doing the opposite.

Already, more than two decades ago, they had shut down the idea of debate, and civil discussion, and insisted that the science was settled, and they knew what it said. But the science that produced these forecasts was hopelessly inaccurate.

The government used worthless computer projections to engage in fearmongering aimed at silencing critics and intimidating Canadians into supporting a costly policy agenda.

Narrator:

So you don’t have to take at face value any of the government’s current forecasts about the supposed dangers of climate change until they can explain why so many of their past predictions were wrong.

John Robson:

For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson, and that’s our updated crystal ball check on the Canadian government’s 2001 Climate Action Plan pamphlet.