Look out, folks! There’s a new rodeo in town – one that goes by the name of ‘Climate Attribution’. It’s got its sights set on every extreme weather event that has ever happened, and it’s not shy about taking credit for them either.
Here is the description of an upcoming session at AGU23, called “Bridging the Gap from Climate to Extreme Weather: Observations, Theory and Modeling”. They’ve got a whole bunch of scientists ready to convince us all how climate change is responsible for just about everything bad under the sun.
Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: Climate Attribution’s Best Friend
What tickles me is that these climate attribution studies all seem to be classics example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. You know, that’s when a sharpshooter shoots at a barn, then draws a target around the closest cluster of bullet holes to boast about his accuracy.
This is precisely what’s happening with these extreme weather attributions. Climate scientists pick out the extreme weather events, paint a target around them, and voila, climate change did it! But what about the regular, run-of-the-mill weather events? Is climate change conveniently on vacation when those happen? If we want to talk about attribution, let’s put everything on the table, not just the extremes that make good headlines.
The “Bridge” to Nowhere
The conference blurb states that it aims to “bridge the gap between climate and extreme weather.” But isn’t this just creating a bridge where no river exists? It seems like a great effort to confirm their biases rather than objectively analyzing the data. And if the bridge does exist, they’ve only built half of it. Where are the studies showing climate change’s influence on mild, sunny days? Or on the perfectly average rainfall?
The Climate Physics of Convenient Omission
This conference promises to delve into “underlying climate physics” that generate extreme weather events. Now that’s a loaded term if I ever heard one. But let’s be real, physics doesn’t just switch on for hurricanes, tornadoes, and heatwaves. It’s always at work. So, why the selective study? Could it be that regular weather events don’t quite have the same ‘doom and gloom’ appeal?
Hitting the Bullseye or Just Firing Blanks?
The conference also promises to explore “the mechanisms by which their statistics vary across climate states, including global warming.” Now, I’m no statistician, but I know a thing or two about playing with numbers. When you’re only focusing on extreme events and attributing them to climate change, you’re not painting an accurate picture. You’re skewing the data to fit the narrative. It’s like firing a round of blanks and claiming you hit the bullseye.
While they’re at it, maybe these rodeo clowns can figure out why climate change is making EF-3 and stronger tornadoes decline in the US for over five decades. But in case that’s just TOO HARD, maybe they can get rid of the evidence, because that’s a lot less work and a lot less embarrassing.
So folks, as we watch this upcoming conference unfold, let’s not forget to keep a keen eye on where these sharpshooters are drawing their targets. How likely is it that they honestly exploring the influence of climate on weather events across the board, or are they just highlighting the extremes for a round of climate change bingo? And remember, it’s all fun and games until someone starts blaming sunsets on global warming.
For a bit of refreshing sanity, here’s Pielke Jr. on the hype over flood attribution:
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Does this climate attribution remind you more of science or sharpshooting?
HT/MM
It is also Noble Cause Corruption, that using bogus attribution does not matter as their hearts are pure.
And anyone who raises doubts is a vendido for the fossil fuel industry!
Reminds me of the old scatter guns rather than Sharp Shooting
With a Scatter Gun you fire a bunch of crap and see what sticks
Problem is, even if they had a scatter gun big enough they still couldn’t hit a barn with an elephant.
You want a big scatter gun, try a Carronade.
Made just half a mile from my house.
See “The Wheel of Fortune” by Willis E.
But even with one of those you wouldn’t make an iota of difference to the raving idiocy of the Climate Attribution section of the Bandar – log, they just don’t believe the evidence.
Buncha Denialists they are
Climate attribution is a “winning hand” probability thing. By changing the rules, a casino can tell approximately how much more money they will win or lose over time but they can’t tell WHO will win or lose. Picking winners to interview is maximal “cherry picking”.
If, over 30 years, the average rainfall in a large area had increased by 10%, all one can attribute is that POSSIBLY flooding events were 10% more common or possibly 10% more volume of water. Or maybe droughts were 10% fewer. Like the casino, they can’t tell who or which table…and publishing stats on all the winners is just thinly disguised good advertising for the casino.
Casinos now have the ability to pick and choose winners. The new slot machines have built in tech similar to cell phone modems allowing management to log in remotely and Tweak Machines remotely.
We had a Win recently and had to wait for a “Floor Person” to show up and pay us. Usually, after gathering our personal information and filling out a W2-G they would open the machine and log the activity before resetting the win and allowing you to continue. This last time though the machine was reset remotely and not by the floor person without opening it. Ergo wins COULD be handed out remotely as well
The IPCC’s use of the term “low confidence” is itself an attempt to mislead. They define it as <10% probability that whatever is true. But that is exactly the same as a >90% probability that it is NOT true. So why don’t they just say “we have high confidence that climate change has NOT made severe tornadoes more likely?” A similar statement could be made about floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, sea ice, sea level rise, polar bears and actual temperature change trends at regional scales. At least that’s pretty much what IPCC says in AR6. Oh yea, saying that would put a bit of a crimp in the Catastrophic Climate Change narrative.
I have high confidence that their wording was deliberately chosen, for the reason that you’ve given. It is 100% spin.
I thought that was more their definitions around “likelihood” than “confidence” ???
Hang on a minute, let me dig up my notes on AR6 WG-I …
.
.
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… Aha ! Here we go …
Box 1.1, “Treatment of uncertainty and calibrated uncertainty language in AR6”, on page 169 :
There you are then, “low confidence” = “the best conclusion based on currently available knowledge” … weasel-words if ever I’ve heard (/ read) them …
In the same box is a list of “likelihood” percentages, which I’ve re-formatted for … erm … “clarity” (?) below, highlighting that your “<10% probability that whatever is true” actually corresponds to the IPCC’s “very unlikely” rather than their “low confidence” :
At Imperial College, the go to is Friederike Otto
She can pin Climate Change on any weather event…
“”Attribution Science Linking Warming to Disasters Is Rapidly Advancing””
…
“Is this actually real science?’””
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/attribution-science-linking-warming-to-disasters-is-rapidly-advancing/
No, it’s rolling the bones
It’s confirmation bias on steroids!
Or maybe “Haruspicy”: divining the future by reading the entrails (intestines) of
sacrificed animals. [and probably about as accurate!]
Climate attribution studies are just pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo. No credible scientist will have anything to do with this nonsense, which tells you all you need to know about the “scientists” who are pushing this drivel.
Not only are they sharpshooting but they are firing blanks
For climate attribution, there has to be a change in weather extremes frequency. For all the major extremes —drought, flood, tornadoes, tropical storms, blizzards, whatever— there been no statistically significant frequency change over the past 30 years. Not in >F2 tornadoes, not in hurricane number or ACE, not in anything, anywhere. Even tho the 2014 US National Climate Assessment chapter 1 claimed otherwise. I debunked each of its examples in essay Credibility Conundrums in ebook Blowing Smoke.
AGU23 has some not very sharp sharpshooters.
there been no statistically significant frequency change
While true, these folk have been very effective at painting a different picture for the average person.
It must make the authors feel good about their papers and conferences, now they have firmed up the connection (between FF and bad weather) and the many peasants should have no doubt that using FF is causing bad weather, so the peasants should stop splurging on luxuries like driving and flying and heating and eating. But it is okay for the authors to use FF because their work is needed, to influence others to stop using FF.
This is called the Kerry Maneuver. John Kerry developed it when he flew to Iceland to claim a prize for fighting climate change. Irony is lost on these people.
Well we just came off of 7″ rain in 30 hours.in southern VT. Not as bad as Irene, when it came at 6″/hr! Still caused some flooding, at least Irene widened the river beds and we got new ditches, culverts and bridges. But certain news outlets have already played the “catastrophic” card.
At least Noaa radio mentioned the prior high water events for flood warnings, some going back to the 40’s.
Waiting for the climate change foot to fall…
I’ve not quite got it clear in my own head but what they’re doing is ‘creep’
They’re picking on individual events and then analysing them down to fractions of a Celsius, 10ths of mph windspeed, mm sizes of hails stones and numbers of raindrops and defining *that* as Crystal Clear evidence of Climate Change.
Things below those criteria don’t count and things above do count.
Seems reasonable – = setting standards.
The creep comes in in that after a few short years, the temp criterion will reduce, the wind requirement will drop, the hailstone size will be reduced etc etc so that what defines as Climate Change will become broader in aspect and easily to achieve.
We’re not that faraway already, isn’t that what happened (certainly to UK) heatwave definition?
Didn’t A Heatwave (say – 1976) require to be 3 weeks long and a temp of over 30°C….
Whereas now, A Heatwave is anything over 25°C lasting for just a few minutes as a ‘Display Team’ squadron of jet fighter aircraft taxi past
That’s what they’re aiming at.
Because so far they’ve failed to even hit the Texas Barn Door let alone have anything to draw a target around.
So now they’re using a bigger door, using sawn-off shotgun and racing up to meet it
I’m sitting here (Argentina) in my office, shivering, in the midst of a really cold spell, waiting for that Global Warming Deal to kick in, and not even slightly amused by dysfunctional green idiots who don’t like heat.
You can’t fool us, Ron. We know it’s winter there. 🙂
Why does the headline mention Texas, when the conference will be in the beautiful, peaceful, sanctuary city of San Francisco? I wish all attendants had to spend all week there.
Roger Pielke, Jr notes that the IPCC is careful to not officially attribute extreme events to climate change, yet the usual suspects (NPR, NYT & WaPo) never show such restraint. Makes me wonder if the useful idiots in the media are being fed through unofficial back channels at the IPCC or via other non-IPCC sources.
No, the Green Blob is a whole ecosystem. What the scientist conclude in their papers may be hemmed in by uncertainties and caution. But then some advocacy group with no scruples will extract parts that suit them and claim “scientists say…”. The news media will then unquestioningly pick that up and run with it. The scientists won’t have to get their hands dirty making unfounded claims. There are other creatures in the swamp to do that for them.
I think you’re correct. I can almost forgive the advocates and the media for their role in this mess. But not the ‘uncertain and cautious’ scientists – they make out like bandits on taxpayer-funded grant money, while simultaneously basking in the ‘glory’ of the alarmist movement and maintaining an air of academic respectability. They are not only the first link in the chain, but they are the great enablers of this fraud, and are abject cowards.
And here is a perfect example from California.. as reported by BBC
It seems that some houses have fallen into a ravine in a place called ‘Rolling Hills’
(I understand now why Hollywood Comedy is a mystery to the whole rest of world)
See the screenshot from BBC;s video..
“””Officials are blaming heavy rain
So I effs straight off to Wunderground to discover that Rolling Hills has had 2mm of rain inside the last 6 weeks, in 2 or 3 short sharp showers around 7th and 8th June
Now then: “Rolling hills” are what we call in the UK = Drumlins
Drumlins are = bees (the black & yellow stinging things that sometimes make honey) and they occur in ‘swarms’ as exactly do Drumlin hills
Drumlin hills are made of sand – in the UK that is = Glacial Till
So the reason rolling hills has fallen into a ravenous steep sided ravine is exactly same reason why Hemsby (on the Norfolk coast bang next door to ‘California as it happens) why Hemsby fell into the sea
The sand dried out, ceased to have any cohesiveness and collapsed.
The California houses went with it just as they are doing on coast of Norfolk.
It did that because of Aridification (exactly NOT = heavy rain) and Aridification is just a fancy name for Soil Erosion.
wake up people, stop passing the Junk Science Buck
BBC story here
“Over six thousand drumlins have been located in Southern Ontario. They are composed of medium textured till with little heavy clay or light sand. In places lenses of gravel & sand or stratified clay may be found.”
Glaciers do wonders to the landscape.
Here’s a link to a site that explains the whole geological features of the Palos Verdes Peninsula where Rolling Hills is located. The land on that peninsula has been rolling and moving for a long time.
https://www.csudh.edu/earth/palos-verdes
Landslides taking out houses built on hills or “canyon edges” have been happening in California for as long as I can remember. We used to joke that we had four seasons: wind, fire, rain, and landslide. When I was in school, it seemed to be an annual occurrence. They never learned.
“You know, that’s when a sharpshooter shoots at a barn, then draws a target around the closest cluster of bullet holes to boast about his accuracy.”
Close. Almost Texas. Louisiana Sharpshooter Fallacy maybe?
This is more of a guy with a wooden gun, pointing his gun at the barn and yelling BANG!, and drawing a target around a cluster of nail holes, and then boasting about his accuracy.
It’s not science. How can it be science when the conclusions are determined before the “study” begins? It is, however, designed to look like science to a non-scientist, so the conclusions can be broadcast in the mainstream media – “scientists say” or “new study shows”. It’s also designed to look like science to other scientists, as long as they are already believers and don’t look too closely.
No, it’s not science, but it IS climate science.
For those who don’t remember, this attribution malarky was an Obama era policy.
https://freebeacon.com/politics/hacked-memo-reveals-steyers-wh-climate-policy-influence/
Attribution initiatives started cropping up immediately. E.g.
https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/about/
It’s just another arm of the propaganda campaign.
This so very much reminds of the precision versus accuracy argument:
A rifle can be precise, and shoot really tight groups – but not necessarily at the target you’re aiming for.
An accurate rifle might or might not shoot as tight of a group, but at least it’s on target.
However, as far as I understand, this whole attribution thing is neither accurate nor precise and unless I’m very much mistaken the whole foundation beneath it has already been thoroughly demolished by Rosss McKittrick.
Attribution is pretty old. Here is an alarmist tome on it from 2016:
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/21852/attribution-of-extreme-weather-events-in-the-context-of-climate-change
All done with climate models of course so junk all the way down. Mind you climate change is not claimed to cause the extreme event, just to increase the probability thereof. The green press immediately calls that cause.
Reminds me of Mann blaming “Climate Change” AND Global Warming for Harvey stalling over Houston.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/28/16214268/houston-floods-harvey-global-warming
Everyone who is having perfectly normal weather, say “Aye”.
Aye.
Aye..
Actually, been pretty dry from the last month, and being in country NSW that means mornings are darn cold, but with clear blue skies, warms up nicely during the day.
Glorious !
I blame all this on CO2, of course 😉
The alarmists have three Achilles heels. Attribution is but one. Second is natural variation, which provably exists but they assume away—an example being the summer Arctic sea ice flub. Third is that their mitigation solutions, renewables and EV’s, simply do not scale. Any meaningful renewable grid penetration means also buying an underutilized backup generating system because of intermittency. And the grid isn’t sized for significant EV penetration. That doesn’t really matter because the requisite minerals for significant vehicle penetration by EV batteries (cobalt, lithium, nickel) and electric motors (REOs) don’t exist at any reasonable cost—and what does is mainly controlled by China.
Should there be a repeat of the 1862 California Great Flood, when the city of Sacramento, California Capital, was submerged for three months, it would be immediately scientifically attributed to climate change.
Scale, meet thumb.
Run lots of simulation of a FAKE model that you PRETEND represents the world without human CO2
Then run lots of simulations with assumed CO2 warming built in, that you PRETEND represents the world with human CO2.
Compare the results as probabilities, and put PRETEND “likely’s” etc on the differences.
It is NOT SCIENCE… it is hocus-pocus
From a statistical perspective this is complete nonsense and I find it extraordinary that the world’s leading statisticians never speak out about it. Of course, they have their careers to think about — they don’t want to be ‘cancelled’ — but don’t they also have a responsibility to reveal the truth about this stuff? So much for ‘principles’.
Btw, if anyone wants to test the truth over this just ask those doing the ‘attributions’ to predict when these things are going to occur rather than explain them after they’ve done so. I can 100% guarantee they’ll be unable to do this for reasons that anyone who understands statistics will be aware of.
It’s absolutely unbelievable that supposedly ‘world leading’ academics at ‘world leading’ universities are getting away with this. When will someone have the guts to stand up and expose what’s happening???? It really is outrageous.
Principles go out the window when the paycheck is in danger.
30 years of weather affects climate by definition. Climate cannot affect weather, that’s the cart before the horse. Cause and effect. So simple a child can understand the concept.
Notice that not even the nick-picker has tried to defend the anti-science of “attribution studies”
For heatwaves, it is easy to assume some outcomes and be wrong.
An outstanding one says that if average temperatures over 100 years have warmed by 2 degrees C, then heatwaves have also become hotter by 2 degrees C. Then, it follows that heatwaves are related to climate change and thus, attribution studies can be used.
Couple of problems.
In the many detailed studies I have done with official Australian data, I find that most locations show no such increase in hottest heatwave temperatures. Some rise a little, some fall a little, but within the noise envelope.
Problem two is that the temperature noise variation over these 100 year spans is so large that a physical effect is usually impossible to show. Pat Frank has shown this with thermometer instrument performance. Bill Johnston on Bomwatch blog has shown this by correcting for the physical effects of rainfall on temperature measurements. Rain cools.
Third problem, the IPCC and The Establishment has uncritically agreed with a handful of Aussie lady academics that heatwaves are becoming hotter, longer and more frequent. Serious cherry picking, most of their analysis ignores data before 1950. It is also suspect from lack of treatment of uncertainty in past temperature measurements. When you analyse actual locations rather than aggregated regional data, you will not find support for IPCC dogma. I wish more people would do this and show the world.
Geoff S
Why is there low confidence that climate change is responsible? Surely that is high confidence that climate change does bigger all?
The wording has been deliberately chosen to avoid saying that. It would damage the overall message that they wish to convey.
All this talk of targets reminds me of this Far Side cartoon.
https://www.pinterest.nz/pin/234468724324527156/
Texas Sharpshooter. That always reminds me of the good ol’ days of the climate crisis debates. No one beat Watts and McIntyre.