Is Canada's 'warming' just politically driven data corruption?

"Canada is warming at roughly double the global average rate," according to scientists at Environment and Climate Change Canada(ECCC). But it looks like this claim, regularly repeated by politicians and media across the board, is yet another example of made up evidence to support a politically correct narrative. And, given that Canada represents such a large fraction of global land surface area, one naturally wonders if the world is actually warming at anything like the rate we are told it is.

A new report demonstrates that the data ECCC has been relying on may be hopelessly corrupted by fundamental mistakes that are responsible for almost all the supposed warming. Rather than being the poster child for global warming, Canada may actually be the latest example of why the public increasingly do not believe anything we are told by governments about climate change.

Scientists can certainly make errors when analysing data, but sometimes, instruments or other effects can lead to skewed data that is more difficult to detect. When it comes to climate change, such errors can have devastating consequences since severe climate change policies based on flawed studies not only affects businesses, but all citizens who are forced to pay for "climate action" and costly and unreliable alternative energy technologies.

On December 23^rd, 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 (Complexity Science). The report was published by CORRELATION Research in the Public Interest, a registered not-for-profit corporation based in Ottawa, Canada, regarding what appears to be a significant error in Canada's temperature data from Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), a temperature artifact that does not represent actual warming. This artifact could "be responsible for essentially all of the calculated warming for many Canadian locations over the past six or seven decades." The temperature dataset, the Adjusted and Homogenized Canadian Climate Data (AHCCD), was available to the public and is used for calculating long-term temperature trends in Canada as well as data for global temperature analyses.

Hickey writes that "surface air temperature records are affected by many biasing factors, related to changes to instrumentation, observation methods and procedures, and the environment surrounding the instruments." This means that results published could be skewed to show warming, cooling, or varying trends when none exist. Using a wide variety of temperature monitoring stations, as well as comparing surface air temperatures records with other temperature records from satellites, for instance, will help minimize biased results.

When data from different stations is combined to form long-term temperature records, gradual biases can cause the record to shift upward or downward even if there is no real temperature change. These biasing factors could include factors such as the growth of trees in the vicinity of the thermometer, aging of the thermometer, or other changes to the station's environment. In an attempt to make long-term climate trends meaningful, scientists adjust the data to remove these non‑climatic influences. They also homogenize the records-this means aligning data from different periods so that the dataset behaves as if the station had been measuring consistently all along. If these modifications are not made properly, the effect of these factors "influences the long-term trends calculated from the temperature series in a manner that is not reflective of regional climate variability but rather only the conditions in the local surroundings of the thermometer," Hickey writes.

The AHCCD from ECCC consists of daily minimum, maximum, and mean surface air temperatures from hundreds of stations across Canada. Using this data, various scientists have calculated that the surface air temperature has increased 1 – 2 degrees Celsius over the past six to seven decades. Yet in 1998, a stepwise (sudden) increase of approximately 1 degree Celsius occurred in the temperature record at most stations across Canada. This increase could be responsible for almost all of the claimed warming calculated for Canada over the past six or seven decades. This leads Hickey to conclude that "The reported climate warming of Canada appears to be entirely from a temperature measurement artifact." Hickey also explains, "1998 is the year in which a set of 72 Canadian reference climatological stations were first added to the Global Climate Observing System (Milewska and Vincent 2016)."

A coincidence that that is exactly when the sudden jump occurred? Not likely.Temperature data from Moncton, New Brunswick is shown below as an example to illustrate the increase

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Temperature data from Dr. Hickey's report shows the mean (Tmean),maximum (Tmax), and minimum (Tmin) temperatures recorded.

The significant increase in temperature (a "step" in the data) occurred at many other stations throughout the country in exactly the same year. Such a sudden shift only becomes apparent after data from further years are collected, but it needs to be investigated to determine if it is natural or not.

Despite the apparent flaw in their records, Environment Canada essentially dismissed the finding even when alerted to the artifact and other serious problems in their data by Hickey when he was a Bank of Canada employee.