By Linnea Lueken
A recent article from CBC News, titled “Climate change brings unpredictability, and it’s haunting the pumpkin harvest in N.L.,” claims that unusually wild swings between weather extremes in recent years in Newfoundland and Labrador is endangering pumpkin harvests, both being symptoms of climate change. This is false. Pumpkin production is doing just fine, weather variations from one year to the next are the norm and are not unusual, nor is there evidence in the local station data that there is a trend towards greater weather variability.
The CBC piece is not a particularly scientific article, despite quoting one climatologist from Memorial University. It relies largely on farmers claiming that climate is clearly changing because the weather of one season can be “so different” from the previous. Farmers have dealt with changes in the quality of growing seasons from one year to the next forever, literally since the humans have been intentionally growing and harvesting crops.
They focus on the past two years, where “this past summer was particularly cold and wet, especially compared to 2025 when the province experienced record high temperatures and not a lot of rain.”
Because of the weather, pumpkin harvests for some farmers were either behind or the yields suppressed. In a change from the usual pumpkin doom and gloom articles we normally get this time of year, the CBC article admits that “both farmers said that the pumpkins that did grow were great quality.”
CBC News goes on to talk to climatologist Joel Finnis, who they paraphrase as saying “the drastic weather difference between summer 2025 and summer 2026 is evidence of a changing climate — because the warmer the climate gets the more variation in weather conditions.”
This is incorrect. It is surprising that a climatologist would make such a claim when data shows no emerging weather trend of worsening or inconsistent weather. It’s possible this is a misquote or oversimplified to the point of being somewhat ridiculous, but two years of very different weather are not evidence of a trend of any kind. They cannot be, especially with regards to climate change, which is a long-term phenomenon occurring over decades.
Regional weather naturally has at times very large variations from one year to the next, these variations can be the result of natural patterns like the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and more directly for Eastern Canadian provinces, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the influence of the Gulf Stream.
When it comes to summertime temperature, the IPCC doesn’t even predict large changes in variability for the entire world in its AR6 report. Models attempting to predict changes in Newfoundland especially show low agreement, and what estimates that exist there show little to no change. That is using RCP8.5 – a since-abandoned scenario that overestimated warming to an impossible degree.
Using Environment and Climate Change Canada’s adjusted temperature record for St. John’s, which goes back to 1874 and up to 2020, comparing mean summer temperatures over the decades shows no trend whatsoever in temperature swings from one year to the next. I focused on a station nearest to where the most pumpkins are grown in Newfoundland, the St. John’s Adjusted and Homogenized Canadian Climate Data (AHCCD) station, (downloaded here, then processed using Claude.ai). If there is any trend, it is declining. (See figure below)
When it comes to precipitation, again relying on RCP8.5 because it is the only scenario that reaches the very high warming levels that the IPCC wants to fearmonger over, the IPCC does claim that eventually there will be an increase in year-to-year variability. Under lower and more realistic emissions pathways, that change will take a whole lot longer.
Again we should anchor the model-based predictive estimate to real world data. The fact of the matter is that the station data representing St. John, which has been tracked 1874 to 2011, show absolutely no trend towards increased variability in summer rainfall. If there is a trend in that period, there is a downward trend in so-called “weather whiplash” from one summer to the next. (See figure below)
Note the swing between 1967, the hottest and driest summer in this record, and the following summer, 1968, which was the coldest. This is very similar to the 2025-2026 pattern which CBC and their climatologist claimed was evidence of climate change.
This is data from just one station, mind, but it should give anyone trying to claim that recent weather patterns are evidence of increasing volatility some pause.
Much of the northern hemisphere has seen a slight increase in average annual precipitation, but again this is a very mild trend. Still, the CBC article itself quotes a farmer as saying that good precipitation in summer is great for the pumpkin quality.
If all of this wasn’t enough, data from the Canadian agriculture statistics service show no trend in Newfoundland and Labrador pumpkin harvests declining amid climate change. The data only goes from 2007 to 2025, but it certainly shows no evidence that the pumpkin industry in the province is in any danger. Production saw its lowest year in 2010, its highest in 2013, and second highest tied repeatedly in each of the most recent three years on record.
Similarly, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization data show Canadian pumpkin, squash and gourd production has been fairly stable over the past decade, after having risen gradually since the 1990s. (See figure below)
Data provides no reason for Canadians to fear that pumpkins in Labrador and Newfoundland, nor Canada more generally, and definitely not globally, are endangered by climate change. CBC should have had done a little more homework and showed more discernment when making claims about long term climate change based on two years of pumpkin harvests.
