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Warmer weather would not only save the city cash, it would keep cash in the city and help bring new cash in. 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.

Before Toronto council salivates over its looming weather windfall, however, a brace of fresh air is in order. The warm weather confidently predicted in the city’s $250,000 report, produced between 2008 and 2011 by a local firm called SENES Consultants, is already out of date. Data released recently by both the British Met Office (the UK government’s weather office) and NASA show that global warming stopped about 16 years ago. When and whether warming will resume again is anyone’s guess — all of the climate models produced by the global-warming-is-coming school of thought have failed in their predictions.

Some predictions by climate scientists are holding up, however — ones that indicate Earth could be in for an extended cooling period. Russia’s Habibullo Abdussamatov collects what may be the most accurate, undistorted climate-change data available from high above the atmosphere, via the Russian segment of the International Space Station, whose research he heads. 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.