From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Steve Milloy

President Donald Trump is driving climate researchers literally to the ends of the Earth as they try to save their taxpayer funding. Expect to see a slew of hand-wringing reports about, and even perhaps from, the Thwaites (aka “Doomsday”) glacier in West Antarctica.

The glacier got its nickname from a Rolling Stone reporter in 2017 in an article titled: “The Doomsday Glacier:  In the farthest reaches of Antarctica, a nightmare scenario of crumbling ice – and rapidly rising seas – could spell disaster for a warming planet.”

Past the ominous title, the scare is that the Thwaites is melting and could raise sea levels by 10 feet, which would submerge about 2-3 percent of the global land mass, excluding Antarctica.

Last May, the Trump administration announced it would cut funding for the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a football field-long icebreaker that has been taking researchers to study the Thwaites glacier. In its 2026 budget request, the National Science Foundation said it was terminating the lease. There is no replacement ship on the horizon.

Researchers wanting to go to Antarctica, where it is now summer, have had to scramble for ships. This scramble has been made more challenging because ship owners and researchers, afraid of losing taxpayer funding, are also taking reporters and their crews along to dramatize the budget cuts using the backdrop of the scariest thing they can imagine – the Doomsday glacier.

New York Times reporter Raymond Zhong has already filed articles since Dec. 30. PBS has a reporter aboard a ship sending alarmist reports. Undoubtedly, there are other reports on their way as well.

Will the Doomsday glacier live up to its name? Or will it be another in a long line of failed, if not dishonest, apocalyptic climate predictions?

It seems to be true that the Thwaites glacier is melting. But there’s much more to consider just than that.

The rate of melting is very slow. A 2023 study estimated that over the next 50 years, the Thwaites glacier might add as much as a few millimeters (about one-tenth of an inch) to global sea level over the next 50 years. That is a far cry from the claim of 10 feet of sea level rise.

Next, the fate of the Thwaites doesn’t seem to have anything to do with emissions or “global warming.” Research indicates that there are 91 volcanoes under the West Antarctic ice sheet. Not surprisingly, the Thwaites glacier is melting from the inferno beneath.

Of course, the Thwaites couldn’t be melting at the surface because there’s been no warming in West Antarctica since the late 1990s. In fact, West Antarctica has cooled by about 3°F since 1999.

Another recent study reported that the Thwaites glacier started melting in the 1940s as the result of an El Nino, a little-understood, but periodic natural warming of the Pacific Ocean: “The glacier retreat in the Amundsen Sea was initiated by natural climate variability in the 1940s. That ice streams such as Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier have continued to retreat since then indicates that they were unable to recover after the exceptionally large El Niño event of the 1940s,” the researchers concluded.

The more one reads about the Thwaites glacier, the easier it becomes to understand why they have to call it the “Doomsday glacier.” Once you understand the non-threatening reality, the only way to make it scary is to give it a scary name and hope people are too frightened to look past it.

Three cheers for Trump for defunding this and other climate research. As these researchers lose their funding, maybe they can move to Hollywood and try writing disaster scripts.

Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.  

By Garry Clement

This year also reaffirmed Canada’s habit of strategic hesitation. Despite overwhelming evidence and allied action, the federal government continued to delay meaningful steps against hostile foreign actors operating within our borders.

As 2026 starts with high-consequence geopolitical events in Venezuela and Iran, Canada continues to present itself to the world as stable, prosperous, and benign. Yet the defining lesson of this past year is that our perceived strength is increasingly an illusion — a façade sustained by political denial, regulatory weakness, and the monetization of risk.

Across multiple fronts — land ownership, real estate, immigration, organized crime, and national security — the same pattern has repeated itself. Warnings were issued. Evidence accumulated. And Ottawa largely chose inaction.

The result is a country drifting further into vulnerability while congratulating itself on tolerance and openness.

Canada’s economy remains dangerously reliant on sectors that are poorly regulated and easily exploited: real estate, land, natural resources, and mass immigration. Throughout the year, investigative reporting and law enforcement intelligence continued to show how foreign capital — often opaque, sometimes criminal — flows freely into these systems with little resistance.

From farmland acquisitions on Prince Edward Island and the Prairies, to urban real estate markets untethered from domestic incomes, Canada has treated ownership and sovereignty as inconveniences rather than safeguards. Weak beneficial ownership registries and limited enforcement ensure that we often do not know who truly controls critical assets — and, worse, seem uninterested in finding out.

This is not economic growth. It is asset stripping disguised as prosperity.

The most brutal manifestation of these blind spots remains fentanyl. In 2025, Canada further cemented its reputation as a preferred destination for laundering synthetic drug profits. Chinese triads, Mexican cartels, and domestic gangs continue to exploit casinos, shell companies, and real estate — not because they are clever, but because Canada is permissive.

Each overdose death is more than a public health failure. It is a financial crime, a national security issue, and a policy indictment. While peer nations have hardened their anti–money laundering regimes, Canada remains slow, fragmented, and politically cautious — a combination that organized crime understands perfectly.

This year also reaffirmed Canada’s habit of strategic hesitation. Despite overwhelming evidence and allied action, the federal government continued to delay meaningful steps against hostile foreign actors operating within our borders.

Some critics charge that Mark Carney’s Liberals are already seeking to water down the long-delayed foreign agent registry, with fines of as little as $50 for non-compliance, while the government has estimated almost 1,800 entities would be expected to register, with 50 additions every year, if this future law were adhered to.

The failure to decisively confront Iranian regime proxies, foreign influence operations, and transnational criminal networks reflects a broader unwillingness to accept that Canada is no longer insulated by geography or reputation.

Our allies increasingly see Canada not as a leader, but as a weak link.

Perhaps nowhere was short-term thinking more evident than in immigration and education policy. Foreign students have become a financial lifeline for institutions, yet oversight remains inadequate. Education visas increasingly function as labour permits in all but name, feeding industries already plagued by regulatory gaps.

Public safety consequences — including in commercial trucking — are no longer theoretical. Nor are concerns about transnational criminal exploitation of these pathways. Yet the federal response continues to prioritize revenue and labour supply over integrity and enforcement.

These are not isolated failures. They are symptoms of a governing philosophy that treats risk as politically inconvenient and accountability as optional. Critics are dismissed as alarmist. Warnings are reframed as xenophobic. And systemic problems are deferred until they become crises.

Canada has been entrusted with extraordinary abundance — land, resources, institutions, and social cohesion. Over the past year, it has become clearer than ever that we are squandering that inheritance.

A nation can only live on reputation for so long. The erosion visible in 2025 will accelerate unless decisive reforms follow: real transparency in ownership, enforceable anti–money laundering laws, a serious national security posture, and immigration systems rooted in integrity rather than expedience.

Canada does not need to abandon openness. It needs to pair openness with vigilance.

The year behind us should be remembered as a warning. Whether the year ahead becomes a correction — or a collapse — will depend on whether leaders finally choose stewardship over denial.

As former Conservative immigration minister Jason Kenney and Conservative Senate leader Leo Housakos have noted, as reported in The Bureau’s analysis of the information war emerging from the Trump administration’s indictment alleging a Maduro narco-state conspiracy, the events in Venezuela are global in nature, and connect directly to Canadian vulnerabilities to transnational money laundering and lax immigration controls that are strategically leveraged by hostile regimes from Beijing to Tehran and Moscow.

And according to Housakos, due to actions emanating from Central and South American authoritarian regimes, including Venezuela, and ultimately instigated by enemies from Beijing, Tehran and Moscow, the upshot is that Western democracies are now facing hybrid warfare threats unprecedented since the Second World War.

In other words, through the tools of transnational drug mafias, political corruption, disinformation, terror and protest, human trafficking, and weaponized migration, Xi, Putin, and the Iranian clerics are attempting to destabilize our societies, softening our defenses before kinetic warfare, or defeating us from within without firing a shot.

Without urgent and decisive leadership in Canada, and the moral clarity and just force that has been in such lack, the continuity of our nation’s great promise is increasingly in doubt.