A recent report disseminated by the U.S. Department of Energy (authored by John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick and Roy Spencer) provides a very different view.

The report examined how carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions (as a result of human activity) have affected or will affect climate, extreme weather and other metrics of societal wellbeing. While the report examines the United States, other research suggests what most people intuitively know—because Canada’s climate is colder, global warming could produce higher benefits and lower costs for Canada than the U.S. For example, Canada’s agriculture and tourism industries would likely benefit from warmer temperatures.

So what does the report say? One observation is that “most extreme weather events in the U.S. do not show long-term trends. Claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by U.S. historical data.” Moreover, “forest management practices are often overlooked in assessing changes in wildfire activity.” The same could be said in Canada. There’s good evidence that bad government management of forests—rather than primarily climate change—is to blame for much of the recent wildfire activity.

The authors of the report further emphasize that claims of human activity causing climate disasters are shaky: “Attribution of climate change or extreme weather events to human CO2 emissions is challenged by natural climate variability, data limitations, and inherent model deficiencies.”

A separate article in Regulation Magazine by policy analyst David Kemp makes the same point. Kemp notes that according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), even under an implausible worst-case climate change scenario, it would not be until 2050 to 2100 that heavy rain increases to a point where a real upward trend, beyond what would be considered natural statistical noise, would emerge. For droughts, cyclones, severe storms, river floods, landslides and fire weather, it would take until at least 2100.

The Department of Energy report also finds that “global climate models generally run ‘hot’ in their description of the climate of the past few decades—too much warming at the surface and too much amplification of warming in the lower- and mid-troposphere.” In general, therefore, many projections of future global warming and associated economic damages are “exaggerated.”

In the final chapter of their report, the authors conclude government actions in the U.S., including aggressive regulatory measures, “are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.”

In Canada, government policies would have only a fraction of the “undetectably small” impacts U.S. government policies could have on climate. As of 2022, Canada accounted for only 1.4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with emissions from China (19.2 times higher) and the U.S. (8.4 times higher) much higher than emissions from Canada. That’s unsurprising given Canada’s much smaller population and economy.

When federal politicians or climate activists next claim there’s a climate crisis or climate emergency, or that the latest weather disaster was the result of climate change due to human activity, and that government must take significant and costly measures to reduce climate change, Canadians should be skeptical. The evidence simply does not support such claims.

Matthew Lau is an adjunct scholar with the Fraser Institute.