Canadian Govt. Scrapped 100 Years Of Inconvenient Data On Climate Change

by L.  Goldstein, Sep. 22, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Canadians already suspicious of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax will likely be even more suspicious given a report by Ottawa-based Blacklock’s Reporter that Environment Canada omitted a century’s worth of observed weather data in developing its computer models on the impacts of climate change.

The scrapping of all observed weather data from 1850 to 1949 was necessary, a spokesman for Environment Canada told Blacklock’s Reporter, after researchers concluded that historically, there weren’t enough weather stations to create a reliable data set for that 100-year period.

“The historical data is not observed historical data,” the spokesman said. “It is modeled historical data … 24 models from historical simulations spanning 1950 to 2005 were used.”

These computer simulations are part of the federal government’s ClimateData.ca website launched by Environment Minister Catherine McKenna on Aug. 15.

She described it as “an important next step in giving our decision-makers even greater access to important climate data for long-term planning. The more each of us uses this type of information, the more it will help.”

Blacklock’s Reporter, which describes itself as “the only reporter-owned and operated newsroom in Ottawa” focusing on intensive reporting of government documents, notes that in many cases the observed temperatures scrapped by Environment Canada in creating its computer models were higher in the past than today.

For example, Vancouver had a higher record temperature in 1910 (30.6C) [87.08F] than in 2017 (29.5C) [85.1F].