Advertisement

News

Don’t sweat the heat. Or the facts.

Today the National Post – a real, honest-to-god newspaper – published a Comment piece by Lawrence Solomon titled “Warmer temperatures would be a benefit, not a problem, for Toronto.” The argument’s right there in the headline. So maybe it’s pointless to even bother reading beyond it. But if you do, you’ll see how Solomon, executive director of the Urban Renaissance Institute and noted global warming skeptic, lays out the various ways in which Toronto will profit from an expected temperature uptick “in coming decades.”

First of all, everybody knows the sun is dangerous. In children’s cartoons the sun is often depicted wearing sunglasses, as if even it’s aware that its UV rays and oppressive heat are hazardous – even to itself! But as a capital-d Denier, skeptic and champion of industrious, freethinking individuals everywhere, Solomon elbows past such crude, pretheoretical baby-think to lay out the real issues that they don’t want you to know about, man.

The piece, which reads like it was written by a lobbyist deep in the pocket of Big Warmth, lays out a bunch of claims you’d expect your dad to trot out four Bud Light Limes into a Thanksgiving dinner. Stuff like:

With fewer weather-related traffic tie-ups, public transit would be faster and more reliable, letting it attract more paying passengers while relieving congestion for car drivers, too. Accident rates would fall, as would insurance premiums.

Maybe a modest surge in TTC revenue could be productively channeled toward offsetting the more than $1.2 trillion annual cost of global warming, provided that the TTC would be boosted enough “in coming decades” to make up for 1.6% of the global GDP. Then again, the way they keep hiking fares, right? Right?!

Solomon continues to advocate for a Toronto-centric global warming revenue model, one that has the potential to reinvigorate our flagging tourist industry.

Older snowbirds would be less likely to flee the city in the treacherous winter months and tourism – a major city industry – would likely swell. Weather would become summerlike in September, typically Toronto’s best tourism month, while the city would become more of a tourist destination during the poorly performing winter months, showering Toronto with Christmas and March Break dollars.

First of all, “older snowbirds” is a bit redundant, given that nobody under the age of 90 would ever use the phrase “snowbirds” in the first place. But this isn’t an altogether terrible idea. Maybe we could attract people would otherwise try to stretch out their travel buck by wayfaring to developing countries, but who won’t be travelling to developing countries because climate change is killing everyone there. Potential tourism motto: “Come to Sunny Toronto, Where a 3.8 Degree Temperature Increase Probably Won’t Get You Killed in a Flash Flood or Forest Fire.”

Also these future tourists better hate eating food. Because there won’t be any.

Just when Solomon has you convinced that global warming will for sure reorient all global political and economic tides around Toronto, somehow, he abandons his thesis altogether.

While many climate-change scientists who predicted rising temperatures have been shocked to see their theories collapse as the actual temperature data came in, Abdussamatov’s theories have been vindicated the unfolding reality conforms with the predictions he’s been making for years. What does he predict? That in 2014 – next year – we will begin a 40-year-long descent into what will be Earth’s 19th Little Ice Age.

Certainly this lone-wolf prediction is reason enough for governments to abandon any investment in reducing green house gas emissions, even though the potential of global cooling down would mean that we’d have to burn more fuel, and generate more emissions, just to stay warm. Like when methane emission levels in Europe spiked during the similar “Little Ice Age” of the 1400s.

Essentially what Solomon seems to be saying is: weather is wacky! It just kind of does what it wants, beholden to no particular logic or trend. Will it be hot? Will it be cold? Don’t ask him. It’s not like he’s a prominent environmental writer or something.

Mediaocrity runs every so often.

johns@nowtoronto.com | @johnsemley3000

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.