No heat pump? Get the handcuffs!

Fabiano Micoli

March 03, 2025 3 Reactions

Generally speaking, when discussing climate change, the reference point is the period 1850-1900, which is considered to be the beginning of the second industrial revolution when the concentration of CO₂ in our atmosphere began to increase. That reference point is built into the Paris Agreement. Its goal is to limit “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

The CBC noted that the World Weather Attribution report, “in order to be published quickly”, had not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, “but is based on established attribution methods.” So there we have it. The CBC is careful to protect itself from accusations of sloppy work while simultaneously saying in effect that this report is reliable. In other words, the CBC is sticking to the climate change narrative, which for practical purposes means that CO₂ must be blamed for just about any problem, not just extreme weather events or fires.

As an aside to illustrate the misuse of statistics in attribution, try this: go to Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) and type in “X AND “climate change”” where X is any problem. For example, “crime AND climate change” produced 487,000 hits. One article stated: “Between 2010 and 2099, climate change will cause an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases of vehicle theft in the United States.”

Dr. William M. Briggs has a PhD in mathematical statistics. He has dissected hundreds of papers like the one on crime mentioned above, and according to him they all suffer from the same error: they equate correlation with causation. The paper is nonsense. See here for more examples.

Attribution is a big thing in climate change studies and reports. For example, the word attribution appears 1,171 times in the IPCC’s Climate Change 2021 The Physical Science Basis. This is the most up-to-date and authoritative document on climate change that has been published by the IPCC so far.

Environment and Climate Change Canada has been busy with attribution as well. It claims that unusual high temperature in Eastern Ontario in September 2024 “was more likely because of human influence on the climate.” However, during the same time period, heat events in Southern British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Northern Quebec were rated as “much more likely because of human influence on climate” (see here for details).

Why would human influence be only “likely” for some regions and “much more likely” for others for the same time period given that the CO₂ concentration is essentially a global phenomenon and not local in nature?

I submitted an Access to Information Request (known as FOIA in the USA) asking for the scientific explanations behind these claims. After about a month, I received a letter stating that Environment and Climate Change Canada needed an additional 120 days on top of the 30-day normal turn-around period to produce the reports. Oddly, the letter also stated that it needed to consult third parties and that these third parties could block the release of the requested information in court. Isn’t it strange that some third party might block access to my request in court? Is there something to hide? Would it not be reasonable to expect Environment and Climate Change Canada to have at least a one paragraph rationale for each attribution readily available? Otherwise, on what basis did it publish these claims? It appears it didn’t even have those.

I have not yet received the information that I requested, but I’m not sure at this point that it matters much.

Global climate models

There are 47 GCMs (see full list here). These are very large and sophisticated computer programs that collectively have cost billions of dollars to develop. “They calculate the interactions between the ocean, atmosphere and land using factors such as water vapour, carbon dioxide, heat, and the Earth’s rotation as inputs”. They typically require the power of supercomputers and predict how climate will change, not short-term weather.

As noted earlier, attribution in climate is totally based on GCMs, so it makes sense to have a look at their reliability. How reliable are they?

Dr John Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama, has been working with temperature data sets for over four decades. Although he is too humble to admit it, it would not be an exaggeration to say that there may not be a more qualified scientist in the world who could answer that question about reliability.

He examined 102 predictions of temperature for the period from 1979 to 2016 by models from 32 institutions as shown in the diagram below. The blue, purple and green lines represent actual temperature readings. The dotted lines are the temperature predictions from 102 “runs” of the GCMs. The red line is the average of those 102 runs. You don’t have to be a scientist to see that the red line fails to match the observations by a wide margin.

Science deals with theories and observations, and when observations don’t agree with the theory, that theory must be rejected. In other words, GCMs must be rejected.None of this is a secret, and yet, governments around the world are pushing Net Zero based on unreliable GCMs. For example, in Canada, the front-runner to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is Mark Carney. He has pledged to invoke emergency powers to enforce Net Zero (see here starting at 15 min) even though Canada produces only 1.4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Those emissions contribute about 0.0002℃/year to global warming. (Our atmosphere is warming at 0.15℃/decade. 0.015℃/year x .014≃0.0002℃/year). That’s two ten-thousandths of one degree Celsius per year, and let’s not forget that Canada has one of the coldest climates on Earth. Why then would it be necessary, as Mr Carney believes, to invoke emergency powers to avert 0.0002℃/year of global warming?

Somebody should show Mr Carney the graph above.

You may recall the Ottawa COVID trucker protest a few years ago. Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to bring an end to that protest. The police beat up and arrested all of the truckers who remained behind to the bitter end. Does that foreshadow the kind of response we can expect from Carney should he become prime minister? Will the government turn neighbour against neighbour (e.g., heat pump vs no heat pump) as it did during COVID (vaccinated vs unvaccinated)? Will there be snitch lines to report non-compliance with green directives just as the Canada Revenue Agency did for tax cheats?

The Quebec government gave police tools during COVID to quickly enter homes and issue fines if house guests were present or suspected to be present (see here). Are police going to knock on the doors of homeowners to fine or arrest those who refuse or who are late to install a heat pump, for example? Let’s hope not.

How could this be? Well, I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, “Follow the money.” It’s more complicated than money, of course, but according to a June 2022 McKinsey report, US$65 trillion will be spent globally on Net Zero. That’s a lot of pressure behind Net Zero.

Getting back to the attributions discussed earlier, you can safely ignore them as nonsense, because they are based on GCMs, which we know to be unreliable.

Forward this to your friends!  

Fabiano Micoli has a B.Eng. (mechanical), MBA, and BEd (math and physics). He writes from Toronto.

Image credit: Bigstock