A FLOOD OF BAD SCIENCE.

As flood waters recede from the shores of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, Canadians have been left with the impression that man-made carbon-driven climate change was the cause. A few environmental scientists drew a direct link, including Paul Beckwith, the University of Ottawa climate scientist well-known for wrongly predicting in March, 2013, that all ice would “vanish” from the Arctic by the end of that year. Now he sees the floods-climate cause-and-effect as being “very clear.” Prime Minister Trudeau blamed the floods on climate change. Environment Minister Catherine McKenna delivered a categorical statement: “This is something that is real. … We are seeing the impacts of climate change.”

The insurance industry also self-servingly promotes the climate change angle. “As a result of the warming climate, floods are becoming more prevalent worldwide. Flooding is the most frequently occurring natural hazard in Canada,” says the Insurance Institute. An insurance executive warned recently that “As climate change unfolds, expect to see extreme weather-related damage continue to trend upward.”

What Canadians witnessed throughout the springflood period is climate politics — and climate corporatism — not climate science. The media played along with the politics, as it has with climate and weather for more than two decades. In 1995, the UN agency charged with producing climate-science research concluded that “Over all, there is no evidence that extreme weather events, or climate variability, has increased, in a global sense, through the 20th century.” That didn’t stop the CBC and others from repeatedly linking weather events — droughts, floods, ice storms, hurricanes, heat waves, cold snaps — to climate change all through the 1990s right up to this week’s news reports, even as the science suggests otherwise.

The latest authoritative research on floods and climate — a 2014 report from a group of scientists led by Zbigniew Kundzewicz at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research — concluded “We have only low confidence in numerical projections of changes in flood magnitude or frequency resulting from climate change.”

Regarding Canada specifically, Kundzewicz et al (see excerpt elsewhere on this page) said “In the United States and Canada during the 20th century and in the early 21st century, there is no compelling evidence for climatedriven changes in the magnitude/frequency of floods.” Kundzewicz also cited a specific 2009 paper by Canadian scientists that found no evidence of escalating flooding. Instead, it noted “weak signals of climate variability and/ or change present in the timing of floods in Canada during the last three decades.” As for the intensity of floods, “Most of the significant trends are negative trends, suggesting decreasing magnitudes of snowmelt floods in Canada over the last three decades.” For the Great Lakes, the evidence pointed to lower water levels over the previous three decades.

Lower water levels? Great Lakes residents with long memories — like, way back to 2014 — might recall the last great climate alarmist water-level scare. “Water levels of the Great Lakes are declining,” said a 2014 Scientific American story. “The lakes are at historically-low levels.”

That was followed by a major study, from the Mowat Centre and the Council of the Great Lakes Region, ominously titled “Low Water Blues: An Economic Impact Assessment of Future Low Water Levels in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River.” After noting there was much debate over the future of water levels, it cited a science paper from the Great Lakes Integrated Science and Assessment Centre and its conclusion that “most climate models project that evaporation from the Great Lakes will outpace increases in precipitation,” and that “with more water leaving the basin than there is returning, the result could be less water remaining in the Great Lakes.” The risk of falling water levels presented a major multibillion-dollar economic risk and challenge.

And so it goes with climate science. All the bases are covered. If we get hot or cold, wet or dry, floods or droughts, if there are more hurricanes or fewer hurricanes, it can all be pinned on carbon emissions and climate change.

As the Kundzewicz paper notes, the belief that floods are worse today is mostly a function of improved and expanded reporting of disasters and the fact that people settle in areas that make them and their insurable assets more exposed. And then there’s the media and what Kundzewicz refers to as the “CNN effect.”

Major floods in the United Kingdom in recent years have been routinely associated with climate, despite evidence to the contrary.

A new study by University of Liverpool geographers looked at high-magnitude flooding across Britain since 1750. Conclusion: While recent floods are “notable,” Britain has historically experienced “several comparable periods of increased flooding.” Indeed, there have been periods of greater flood frequency over the centuries. All of which means that “the current flood-rich period is not unprecedented.”

Under the CNN effect, every event is unprecedented until proven otherwise, which it usually is.

THE GREAT LAKES FLOOD-TOCLIMATE LINK NOT SUPPORTED.