Is Canada really warming at double the global average rate, as the Canadian government says it is? A new report says no, because the data Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) uses are apparently corrupted by fundamental mistakes, mistakes so severe that when corrected, all the supposed warming of the past six or seven decades vanishes.

Given that Canada represents a large fraction of global land surface area, one naturally wonders if the world is warming at anything like we are told it is.

A Report That Challenges Canada’s Warming Narrative

This discovery should have generated mainstream media headlines across Canada. After all, the mistakes in the Canadian temperature data were discovered over four years ago by Dr. Joseph Hickey, a highly qualified Canadian data scientist, and the group I lead, the International Climate Science Coalition – Canada, has been publicizing the story for the past month.

But don’t expect mainstream media in the Great White North to say anything about this. Most of Canada’s press are heavily subsidized by the federal and provincial governments, which would probably not appreciate the story being covered. Dr. Dave Snow, Associate professor in political science at the University of Guelph, writes:

“Canada has created a bevy of policies, ranging from subsidies to tax breaks to mandated contributions from foreign tech companies, that undoubtedly constitute a major portion of news outlets’ revenue and journalists’ salaries — potentially upwards of 50 percent.”

Publicly questioning government narratives on something as significant as climate change is a risky proposition for any editor when doing so leaves their paymasters with egg on their faces.

Why the Media Stayed Silent

Here’s what governments in Canada — and the media outlets reliant on their largess — would rather you never heard. On December 23, the report “Artificial stepwise increases in homogenized surface air temperature data invalidate published climate warming claims for Canada” was released by Dr. Joseph Hickey, a data scientist with a PhD in Physics. The report was published by CORRELATION Research in the Public Interest regarding a significant error in Canada’s temperature data.

The 1998 Temperature Jump and the Data Problem

Using the data from ECCC for hundreds of stations across the country, scientists had previously calculated that the surface air temperature has increased 1-2 degrees Celsius over the past six to seven decades in Canada. Yet in 1998, the exact year in which 72 Canadian reference climatological stations were first added to the Global Climate Observing System, a sudden stepwise increase of approximately 1 degree Celsius occurred at most stations across the country.

Numerous studies in scientific literature assert that sudden temperature jumps like this are not due to real climactic change but instead are caused by temperature measurement artifacts corrupting the data. They contend that this data should therefore be removed from the record. Even though one of the studies explaining this was authored by Dr. Lucie A. Vincent, the senior Environment Canada Research Climatologist, the temperature jump was left in ECCC’s data and is still there to this day. Hickey concludes, “The reported climate warming of Canada appears to be entirely from a temperature measurement artifact.”

Ignored Warnings From Within Government

Hickey first discovered this in 2021 when he was as an analyst for the Bank of Canada and so was barred from sharing his findings with the public. After leaving the bank, he secured his communications with Environment Canada via an access to information, which is why we know what happened next.

In that year Hickey alerted Environment Canada to the problem and explained in detail to Vincent that the sharpness of the temperature increase, and its magnitude, indicate that it is not due to real climactic change. He also laid out a thorough analysis of potential sources of the artifact, which could include land use changes and instrumentation changes. Both of these could easily cause a one-degree shift in the temperature data. Moreover, he explained, “there are no other similar large and geographically widespread discontinuities in the AHCCD dataset [Environment Canada’s flagship temperature dataset] at other years.” This increase could be responsible for almost all the claimed warming calculated for Canada over the past six or seven decades.

Vincent essentially brushed him off, did not provide an explanation for the step increase, and said that the shift “is probably due to climate variability only.”

Why Flawed Data Still Drives Climate Policy

So, Canada is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fight climate change largely based on data that the government scientist most involved in its generation can only say is “probably” indicative of warming.

Hickey was not the only Bank of Canada employee to find fault with ECCC’s temperature data. In his December report, he writes:

“On December 7, 2020, Bank of Canada Economist Julien McDonald-Guimond sent an email to Environment Canada researchers with an inquiry about the …daily temperature records, noting he had found some cases in which the daily minimum temperature was greater than the daily maximum temperature for the same day and for the same AHCCD station.”

In fact, there were more than 10,000 instances of days for which the daily minimum temperature was greater than the daily maximum temperature.

Environment Canada Climate Data Analyst Megan Hartwell replied to McDonald-Guimon, saying that “We were quite surprised by the frequency of the issue you reported, and have taken some time to go through the data carefully.”

That ECCC were surprised by McDonald-Guimond’s finding is cause enough to worry. But the fact that they now “have taken some time to go through the data carefully” begs the question: didn’t they go through the data carefully before releasing it the first time?

Environment and Climate Change Canada have yet to respond to Hickey’s December report. They have some explaining to do.