Media like trout to bait

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Mar 23

RE: Climate change threatens Canadian security, prosperity.  CP story by Jim Bronskill.  The Hamilton Spectator 6 Mar 23.

A two year old CSIS assessment is released, and the media immediately report its obsolete contents instead of questioning the motivation for the release.  The report claims that parts of Canada important to Liberal party success will sink beneath the waves and Canadian prosperity and security will be lost if climate change skeptics get elected instead of the Liberals.

CSIS gave its Minister, Marco “Mendacity” Mendicino, what he wanted to hear, and that’s the takeaway.  CSIS can do little more than review the climate change literature and speculate, since it has no in-house expertise on climate.  There is no data that sea levels are rising, for all the tide gauges around the world show no rise, and the IPCC AR6 report speculates that something like six inches to a foot rise is possible.  To claim that “significant” parts of B.C. and Atlantic Canada will be lost is straight-up fear mongering not intended for public review by the guy who wrote those words; but those words were just too juicy not to be released for their revival effect on sagging Liberal fortunes.  The disappearance of Arctic sea ice has been forecasted for over a hundred years, and has yet to happen, and the Northwest Passage is not going to open any time soon.

The other concerns expressed by CSIS is sheer speculation; guesswork about extremes that might be prepared for.  But the effect on Canadian prosperity by global warming can only be good.  We would have a longer agricultural growing season, require less energy to heat our homes in winter, and the St. Lawrence Seaway would be open year round.  All to the good.

The other concerns expressed in the CSIS report are simply wild: loss of biodiversity and loss of habitat will cause more human-wildlife interaction leading to transmission of diseases to humans (shades of COVID!); desertification of arable land, as if Canada didn’t possess about 20 percent of the world’s free water and the science of irrigation were forgotten; and then shrinkage of fresh water resources.  This is all wild speculation, the blind misleading the blind, that takes no account of possible remediation engineering, but it is exactly what CSIS’s dimwitted Minister wants to hear, for he thinks he has something to throw at those climate skeptics in the CPC.

I don’t believe that CP just happened to find this CSIS report in a random FOIA request.  I’ll bet they got tipped off by the Minister’s office to ask for this; so, technically, it not a leak.  But it continues the climate change narrative untroubled by any contrary news stories, and CP couldn’t wonder about why their good fortune came to be.

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