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LETTERS: Numbers don’t support climate change argument

Editor:
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Editor:

Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie’s statement, on behalf of the GVRD, that climate change will cause an increased number of days with high temperatures (25 degrees or higher specifically mentioned) caused me to wonder whether we have already seen any signs of such changes.

Looking at the Environment Canada website, it turns out that between two White Rock monitoring stations, we have climate data going back to 1929.

It is generally accepted that 30 years is sufficient to show changes in climate, so that gives us three 30-year periods to analyze.

After a long process of downloading and summarizing the data, there is certainly a pattern that emerges, but it isn’t one that fits the GVRD narrative.

What we see in terms of the average number of days where the high temperature was at or above 25 degrees in each year during the decade:

1930s - 26 days

1940s - 15 days

1950s - 9 days

1960s - 11 days

1970s - 9 days

1980s - 12 days

1990s - 13 days

2000s - 10 days

2010s - 13 days

From the late 1940s to the late 1970s there was a very marked cooling trend, that led to the climate disaster porn of the 1970s being focused on glaciers overrunning Manhattan.

The very mild warming since then has produced our current version of death-by-heat climate-disaster porn.

We would have to double the number of 25-plus days to equal the 1930s for hot times.

It would be instructive for students who want to learn climate science, rather than climate activism, to delve into these numbers, and see the many cases where data is missing, or poorly handled.

We are making decisions costing tens of billions of dollars based on data that we have spent a pittance on collecting.

Ed Beauregard, Surrey