Chris Neutel

We are being told that the wildfires in Ontario are being driven / fueled by climate change. Specifically, more extreme heat and increased drought. So, unlike the journalists and most meteorologists regurgitating these talking points, I looked at the actual data since 1910. The average number of heatwave days (HWDs) in Canada (which are defined as ≥3 consecutive days with Tmax ≥90th percentile against the 1991–2020 mean per station) was 8.58% lower during the 60-year period 1965–2025 compared to 1911–1960, but the linear trend is not statistically significant at the 95% confidence level. The last eight years have exhibited an unusually high number of HWDs, but it's far too early to tell if that's a sign of things to come or simply an artifact of natural variability. I used 113 long-term (≥80 years of daily data) GHCNd stations to complete this analysis. The only way one can get a meaningful increase in HWDs is to cherry-pick the x-axis starting date and ignoring pre-1960 data. Looking at droughts, I examined the self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (scPDSI) from CRU (data is available through 2024). I then calibrated that to the Drought Monitor over the same period that I analyzed HWDs. There isn't much of a trend there; in fact there is a significant decrease in the worst of the drought categories despite the spike in 2023–24. Very few people these days in this line of work build datasets from scratch. But I do it because if someone makes a claim, it's very easy to test said claims against observational data. In most cases, alarmist narratives crumble with scrutiny. While alarmists get the basics right about the physics of Global Warming Theory in an “all else being equal” hypothetical, the real-world is a far more complex and details are hairy.

Not one worst case alarmist prediction has come true over the last 40 years. Calm down, Sally.