In Canada, all problems are now blamed on US President Donald Trump. It’s a fantastic get-out-of-trouble move for politicans like Prime Minister Mark Carney, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and even mayors of towns and cities across the Demented Dominion. But even the malign powers of the Bad Orange Man seem puny in comparison to the amazing powers of — gasp! — CLIMATE CHANGE:

Every now and then I suspect there is a game played by bored elites to see which of them can get away with the most asinine “climate change” claim. There have been some doozies: lack of UFOs, “climate change” anxiety, increased sugar consumption, engineering short people. On and on and on ad infinitum.

Today we meet what could be the winner in the contest. Experts are claiming World Cup matches could be slower. Now instead of ninety-plus minutes running around ending in zero-zero ties and dramatic shootouts, we’ll get ninety-plus minutes of somewhat slower running around ending in zero-zero ties and dramatic shootouts. Because “climate change”.

Seems to me, though, that if we really wanted to save time, we could have all matches begin at the shootouts. The whole tournament could be over in a day. Take that, “climate change”!

Here’s the claim, appropriately announced on a PR site, a site whose specialty is juicing dull and dubious headlines: “Climate Central finds climate change has increased the likelihood of heat that could slow players for 97 of the 104 matches, threatening game speed and fan safety.”

What will happen to the other 7 matches they don’t say. Probably they will end in shootouts.

Details:

Previous research shows temperatures above 82.4°F can reduce sprint frequency, total distance covered, and recovery time, impacting not only player performance and safety, but also match tempo, tactics, and overall style of play.

Previous researchers discovered — and stay with me, here — that when it’s hot outside people outside in the heat act like people act when it’s hot out.

Where would we be without previous researchers?

[…]

As you have surmised, we don’t have to believe any of this: the scenarios are all silly, proving that the stunning new research is purely performative, a way to signal the vices and predilections of the researchers. As proof, we oblige the PR site which asks us to quote this:

As global temperatures continue to rise, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, the 2026 World Cup could become another example of how climate change can disrupt sports and traditions people cherish, forcing a reevaluation of how the game is played.

This is all ridiculous, and only saved by the charge of falsity by adding that “could.” Meaning might, which also means might not.

They also provide this quote they ask us to re-quote:

Alex Jacobs, professional player formerly with the Jamaican Premier League:
Heat is not new. But extreme heat — made more likely by heat-trapping pollution driving climate change — might just be a difference maker in this summer’s edition of the biggest sporting event on the planet.

Way these quotes work is that either the PR firm, or the organization employing the PR firm, write them for victims, who are sought out and asked to sign on. The people allowing their names to be used are, of course, fully responsible for the words used, and even often believe them. But there’s no mistaking that stilted prose of the manufactured quote. Nobody talks like this. This prose is not conclusive, but whenever you see it, it’s a darn good reason to dismiss the claims made.

Of course, using a highly visible public event to advance the climate change agenda is nothing new, they’ve literally been doing it for decades now. Media outlets have always had a bias toward the most dramatic outcome, if only for marketing purposes — “if it bleeds, it leads” — but even the more skeptical outlets have drifted in the climate hysteria direction over time:

We have complained many times that the public is presented with a picture of climate science systematically biased towards alarmism. And it’s not just our anecdotal impression. We have data, in the form of a new study from the US National Bureau of Economic Research saying the government delegates who write the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) overstate the science in the underlying report, and then the media further overstates what’s in the SPM. The study authors used multiple AI systems to extract key scientific statements in every IPCC Assessment Report since 1990, track how they were summarized and what the accompanying media coverage said. Using a statistical model they measured the way the statements get changed or twisted at each stage. There were some surprising results and some unsurprising. Unsurprisingly the data showed the UK Guardian has by far the most climate coverage of all major media outlets and is also the most biased. Another unsurprising result is that the overall media bias regarding the severity of climate change has been consistent over time. A surprising result (to many, but not to us) is that the only major media outlet exhibiting precisely zero bias was Fox News. Otherwise most right-leaning outlets adopted the left-leaning outlets’ alarmist bias as of 2007, again unsurprising to us. And there’s much more.

The authors identified three forms of bias: severity, in which a summary picks the upper end of a range of claims, uncertainty, in which a summary downplays caveats and qualifiers, and scenario in which worst-case scenarios get foregrounded. They used a numerical scale from -2 to +2 that captured bias in either direction: a positive number indicated that the summary was biased towards alarmism and a negative number indicated a bias in the opposite direction. Then they averaged the bias measures together and measured them at two stages in the game of telephone. The “TS-to-SPM” stage compared statements in the author-written Technical Summary to how they were worded in the government-written Summary for Policymakers. The “SPM-to-media” stage looked at how statements in the SPM were then reported in the press. The authors examined the TS-to-SPM stage for every IPCC Assessment Report from 1990 to 2023. They only looked at the SPM-to-media stage from the 2001 Third Assessment Report (AR3) because that’s as far back as their media library went.

[…]

That’s right, folks. Even the right-leaning outlets have also gone in for alarmist bias, at least since 2007. Indeed, the media’s bias converged in size and direction over time, as shown in this chart:

For the AR3 in 2001, right-leaning outlets on average understated the climate findings while left-leaning outlets overstated them. But thereafter both sides shared the alarmist bias. Which reflects the success of alarmist activists in the post-An Inconvenient Truth era (2006) driving skeptical voices out of the media. That campaign didn’t eliminate bias, it only replaced one form by another, with the result that the overall media landscape became entirely one-sided.

The uniformity of the bias can also be seen in this chart:

The right-leaning outlets in red are about as bad as the lefties in blue, except for Fox News which is the only outlet with no measurable bias and the Wall Street Journal which had an overall negative (anti-alarmist) bias.