Turn down heat on rhetoric

Exaggerated climate claims costing us money: Report

Unsubstantiated claims about the effect of human-induced climate change on weather are prompting governments — including Canada’s — to impose excessive regulations and costly new programs on businesses and taxpayers, according to a new report by the Fraser Institute.

“Based on such assertions, governments are enacting ever more restrictive regulations on Canadian consumers of energy products, and especially Canada’s energy sector,” the paper by the fiscally conservative think tank says.

“These regulations impose significant costs on the Canadian economy, and can exert downward pressure on Canadians’ standard of living.”

Study author Kenneth Green argues the evidence “is clear — many of the claims that extreme weather events are increasing are simply not empirically true. Before governments impose new regulations or enact new programs, they need to study the actual data and base their actions on facts, not unsubstantiated claims.”

“Earth Day (April 22) has become a time when extraordinary claims are made about extreme weather events, but before policymakers act on those extreme claims — often with harmful regulations — it’s important to study the actual evidence,” Green said.

Green acknowledged that evidence compiled by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “does suggest that some types of extreme weather have become more extreme, particularly those relating to temperature trends.”

However, “many types of extreme weather show no signs of increasing and in some cases are decreasing” Green said.

“Drought has shown no clear increasing trend, nor has flooding. Hurricane intensity and number show no increasing trend.

Globally, wildfires have shown no clear trend in increasing number or intensity, while in Canada, wildfires have actually been decreasing in number and areas consumed from the 1950s to the present.”

Green’s arguments fly in the face of the majority of climate scientists, along with the views of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.

It describes human-induced climate change as a full-blown “climate crisis” in which Canadians “are already seeing the impacts … across the globe, with more severe and more frequent wildfires, floods and droughts in many parts of the world” affecting “our economy, our infrastructure, our health and overall well-being.”

Indeed, arguments such as those made by Green in the Fraser Institute paper inevitably attract allegations of “climate denialism” by the Trudeau government, which describes itself as being on the front lines of fighting climate change.

But the reality is Trudeau’s government is engaging in its own form of denialism.

This happens when it implies Trudeau’s national carbon tax — or for that matter any of the more than 100 programs to address climate change on which the federal government is spending more than $200 billion of taxpayer money — will lead to less severe weather in Canada.

That claim is nonsense because Canada’s emissions, at 1.6% of the global total, are insufficient to sway climate change, as Yves Giroux, the independent parliamentary budget officer, has reported.

In fact, Canada could reduce its emissions to net zero by tomorrow and it would have no effect on climate change, or the weather in Canada or anywhere else.

Climate change is a global issue driven by global emissions.

Trudeau’s climate plan gives his government the moral authority to urge major emitters such as China and India to cut their emissions. But anyone who believes there will be fewer wildfires, droughts or floods in Canada because of Trudeau’s carbon tax is dreaming in Technicolor.