Climate change changes your life, now

Houston, you have a problem

Vincent J. Curtis

23 Feb 24

RE: How global warming is reshaping life in winter. Op-ed by H. Damon Matthews and Mitchell Dickau. Matthews is a professor and climate scientist in the department of geography planning and environment at Concordia University. Dickau is a Ph.D. candidate in the same department and the same school.

The opinions of the two researches who claim that global warming is causing changes of “life in winter” suffers from two flaws: one factual and the other analytical.

The factual flaw is that the globe simply hasn’t warmed to any significant degree since 1998.  Global temperature measurement by satellite began in 1979, the coldest year of the 20^th century, and the end of the decade of the “coming ice age.”  Temperatures warmed until 1998 and then the world entered into the “global warming pause.”  This inexplicable pause is why “climate change” took over from “global warming” at the climatic boogie-man.  Finally, 2023 was warmer than 1998 after the Tonga Hunga volcanic eruption of 2022 filled the stratosphere with water vapor.  Temperature fluctuations of a few tenths of a degree Celsius are the substance of this alleged “warming.”

The second problem is analytical. If it doesn’t get as hot in summer as it used to, then winters can be warmer without any change in annual average temperature, and the researchers looked only at winters.  The number of extremely hot days has been falling in North America since the peak of the 1930s.

I’ve experienced Alberta winters since 2015; some are better than others, but all are marked by several periods of -30C temperatures.  It dropped to -37C for a week this January.

There is no climate crisis: don’t be snowed!

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