https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/alternative-facts
Excerpt: …[A]n excellent new essay by Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute2 published today by The New Atlantis, titled — Did Exxon Make it Rain Today?. Nordhaus does a nice job explaining that disasters occur at the confluence of an extreme event and an exposed and vulnerable society, but most attention these days is paid to extreme events, and climate change in particular:
What determines whether hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and wildfires amount to natural disasters or minor nuisances, though, is mostly not the relative intensity or frequency of the natural hazard but rather how many people are in harm’s way and how well protected they are against the climate’s extremes.
Infrastructure, institutions, and technology mediate the relationship between extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the costs that human societies bear as a result of them. . .
The implications of this point will be counterintuitive for many. Yes, there are many types of disasters, like hurricanes and floods, that are causing greater economic costs in many places than they used to. But this is almost entirely because the places that are most exposed to weather disasters have far more people and far more wealth in harm’s way than they used to. Even if there were no global warming, in other words, these areas would be much more at risk simply because they have much more to lose.
However, what I find really interesting about Nordhaus’ essay is his discussion of how we got to a point where leading journalists and scientists are seeking to deny these rather obvious conditions and instead, to focus obsessively on human-caused climate change, and specifically on the fossil fuel industry as bearing responsibility for increasing disaster costs, contrary to an overwhelming scientific consensus.
Nordhaus explains that climate advocates have a long history of trying to tie disasters to climate change, dating back decades:
Those efforts intensified after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, with Al Gore using it as a centerpiece in An Inconvenient Truth.3 A few years later, in 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists convened a gathering of environmental advocates, litigators, climate scientists, and opinion researchers in La Jolla, California. Their explicit purpose was to develop a public narrative connecting extreme weather events that were already happening, and the damages they were causing, with climate change and the fossil fuel industry.
The proceedings from that gathering, which were subsequently published in a report titled “Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages: Lessons from Tobacco Control,” are revealing.
The IPCC, over decades of reports, has not concluded with high confidence that a signal of human caused climate change can be detected for most types of extreme weather, and especially those that result in the greatest impacts. That remains the case today.
For those wanting to promote climate action using contemporary disasters as a reason to act, the IPCC’s consistent conclusions — no matter how deeply buried in its reports — present a problem.
In a 2018 survey of environmental journalists … Seventy-one percent reported that they never or rarely included opposing viewpoints in their coverage of climate change.
So alternative facts needed to be created. Nordhaus explains:
Myles Allen, the climate scientist who is credited with creating the field of “extreme event attribution,” is described in the report as lamenting that “the scientific community has frequently been guilty of talking about the climate of the twenty-second century rather than what’s happening now.” Yet, he and other scientists at the gathering also acknowledged how difficult it is to identify the contributions of climate change to current extreme weather events. “If you want to have statistically significant results about what has already happened,” another scientist, Claudia Tebaldi, noted, “we are far from being able to say anything definitive because the signal is so often overwhelmed by noise.”
While much of the convening was ostensibly focused on litigation strategies, modeled on campaigns against the tobacco industry, the subtext of the entire conversation was how to raise the public salience of a risk that is diffuse, perceived to be far off in time and space, and associated with activities — the combustion of fossil fuels — that bring significant social benefits.
Nordhaus explains that a three-pronged strategy emerged from the 2012 meeting — lowering scientific standards (from those of the IPCC) to enable stronger claims, redefining the attribution of causality differently than the IPCC, and emphasizing the villainous nature of fossil fuel companies to give people an enemy:
During the meeting, Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard historian of science who popularized the connection between climate and tobacco, argued that scientists should use a different standard of proof for the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events. “When we take these things to the public,” she argued, “we take a standard of evidence applied internally to science and use it externally.” But, she continued, the 95-percent confidence standard that scientists use “is not the Eleventh Commandment. There is nothing in nature that taught us that 95 percent is needed. That is a social convention.”
Others suggested that reframing the attribution of extreme weather to climate change could allow for stronger claims: rather than looking at whether there was any long-term detectable trend in extreme weather, scientists might instead focus on the degree to which climate change increased the likelihood of a given extreme event. And others believed that focusing legal strategies on a villain — fossil fuel companies conspiring to mislead the public about the danger of their product — would result in greater public acceptance of the claims that climate change was the cause of extreme weather.
As it happened, environmental advocates would pursue all of these strategies.
Nordhaus further explains that broader changes in the media occurred at a perfect time to boost these strategies aimed at creating a new narrative:
Not so long ago, news coverage needed to be credible to multiple audiences whose politics and values spanned a relatively broad spectrum of worldviews and values. But the proliferation of media outlets and platforms in recent decades, first with the rise of cable news and then the Internet, has increasingly fragmented media audiences.
Today, media outlets large and small compete in a far more crowded marketplace to reach much narrower segments of the population. This incentivizes them to tailor their content to the social and political values of their audiences and serve up spectacles that comport with the ideological preferences of the audiences they are trying to reach. For the audiences that elite legacy outlets such as the New York Times now almost exclusively cater to, that means producing a continual stream of catastrophic climate news.
I suspect that the only place that most of you reading this will encounter Nordhaus’ essay is right here at THB.4 Reporters on the “climate beat” know very well that acknowledging the existence of Nordhaus’ essay or the arguments he makes might offend the politics of their employers, readers, and colleagues.
Nordhaus explains that a large majority of environmental journalists refuse to engage narrative-challenging viewpoints (emphasis added):
Reporters and editors at these outlets are also well-aligned ideologically with their audiences. A national survey of political journalists and editors working for newspapers at the state and national level conducted in 2022 found that those identifying as Democrats outnumbered those identifying as Republicans by 10 to 1. A 2018 survey of environmental journalists by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, meanwhile, found that 70 percent reported trusting information from environmental advocacy organizations versus fewer than 10 percent from business groups. Seventy-one percent reported that they never or rarely included opposing viewpoints in their coverage of climate change.
Most “journalists” are partisans, and the only practical way to get opposing information is to go to a different site with different politics.
CounterPunch, a proudly Marxist site, reads very much like the Democratic Party on environmental issues.
“CounterPunch, a proudly Marxist site, reads very much like the Democratic Party (a very Marxist Party) on environmental issues.”
I am pedantic enough to claim the post 1971 Democratic Party is closer to Italian fascism than Leninism. They allow heavily “regulated” “private” businesses, but are basically socialist, in their desire for central planning of the economy.
NB: I do not use the Stalinist definition of “socialism”.
Of course. You can’t keep publishing “The science is settled” if you publish information that negates that narrative, or you look foolish. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy that anyone who identifies themselves as an “environmental journalist” instead of a “news reporter” places themselves into.
They’re just keeping their powder dry.
We should not underestimate the planning that has gone into their long game strategy…UN control over humanity. CC is just a political weapon to manipulate the gullible masses into accepting their domination.
Their acolytes are funding attribution studies as we speak. 1/2 will find attribution, 1/2 won’t…they will cherry pick the ones they want. The media will hype the cherry picks, extremists will say “see we’ve been saying that for years”….
The fact is, no one can ever find that attribution, because they can’t see the future. If Storm A is said to be caused, or made worse, by “climate change”, any worse storms which occurred prior to “climate change” would negate such an attribution. And, since we know “f*** all” about natural variability in the past (Ed Cook’s words in the CRU emails), there is simply no way to say anything we experience now is unprecedented in any way.
If anyone tells you they can spot the human fingerprint in “climate change”, they are lying to you.
Enter Gavin Schmidt.
Whose paycheck depends on climate catastrophe.
Actually, while so-called “climate scientists” may have little to no data to prove or disprove the past climatic performance, real scientists have massive amounts of data to show that climate change and climate-related disasters dominated geohistory and human history in past eons. The climatistas simply ignore all of that mass of contrarian data because it is an “inconvenient truth”.
Here is a simple concept about weather and climate effects over time:
The human population of the earth in 1,000 AD is estimated to have been 100 million – a time when human ability to cope with weather was nil. Prior to about 1800 AD the human population had risen at a relatively slow and stable rate, but around 1800 – when the industrial age was in full flower and technological progress skyrocketed – human population also skyrocketed. By 1800, the rate of technology advancements of food production; transportation (steam powered ships and railroads; roads; canals); materials production (ie steel and iron vs wood), flood protection (dams, levies); navigation (the ability to calculate longitude; chronometers; barometers); large scale land surveys (transits vs chains); medicine and health care; and a host of other technology advances made human capacity to avoid or resist climate impacts increase at an accelerating rate.
The phenomenon described above is referred to as “the industrial age”, which continues today and is greatly enhanced by “the digital age” of the last 75 years. The climatistas bemoan the industrial age as a dark period of human development that brought us the “climate change” bogeyman. But if climate change has been such an unmitigated disaster for humanity as they claim, then the warmunists need to explain how the human population grew from about 1 billion in 1800 to 8 billion in 2024.
As business people like to say, “the bottom line is the bottom line”. Human population is the bottom line for how humans cope with the natural environment.
Ironically, as the predominant standard of living improves, and the ability of humans to cope with climate disasters and aging increases, human reproduction rates decrease and population growth rates slow. For obvious reasons unrelated to any claimed “climate change”.
Any actual climate change is mere “noise”, while human ability to cope with climate change is the real “signal”.
Jeezuz! Would 50/50 be ok?
We are few and they are many yet we still cause the alarmists great consternation. It seems their insecurity demands a homogenous response rather like the communists. In the absence of adequate science the dead and dull hand of the social sciences is laid over the debate. I say social sciences but what I really mean is pseudoscience which is much preferred by our political class.
Naomi Oreskes: “. . . the 95-percent confidence standard that scientists use “is not the Eleventh Commandment. There is nothing in nature that taught us that 95 percent is needed.”
95-percent confidence is only two standard deviations. Three standard deviations give a 99-percent confidence. Particle physics requires a five standard deviation confidence. Even so, how do you relate CO2 concentrations to temperature increases, when there isn’t a thermodynamic temperature defined for a system that’s not in equilibrium?
Ms. Oreskes is bastardizing science.
All scientists are competent practitioners.
No scientist would ever lie.
No scientist would ever comment in a field where he/she does not have extensive experience and qualifications.
All scientists know all that is known in their respective fields and come to accurate conclusions from that knowledge.
No scientist could be corrupted by money, fame or power.
No scientist would ever be influenced by politics or peer pressure.
Scientists are right every time.
If you believe even one of the above abbreviated listings, you have never met an actual scientist.
Try applying the same standards to media sources and journalists.
My son was a scientist with PhDs and multiple other degrees in math and physics, both theoretical and applied. He believed all of the above.
He now is a professional musician. He chose to pursue his love.
From the article: ““If you want to have statistically significant results about what has already happened,” another scientist, Claudia Tebaldi, noted, “we are far from being able to say anything definitive because the signal is so often overwhelmed by noise.”
What signal? There is no signal.
There is a signal, but the claim was not that it was an anthropogenic signal.
This signal (analysis of alternatives) could be celestial on solar irradiance ToA.
It could be deforestation or UHI or blacktop or any of a near infinite number of factors.
The first IPCC was chartered to learn how climate worked both natural and human affected.
That was dropped and the assumption since was it is all human caused.
There is a signal hidden in the noise. But not a predominately or exclusive anthropogenic signal.
“we are far from being able to say anything definitive because the signal is so often overwhelmed by noise.”
Well there’s the problem right in front of us. A supposed scientist is convinced the signal is there, she just can’t detect it with any certainty. She has her conclusions and just needs to fudge the numbers to fabricate some evidence in support. It is a tacit admission of doing not science, but propaganda. In science conclusions come after the observations and statistical testing, and if those activities don’t yield a signal then there can be no conclusions.
100% Thank you Andy. Please remind Richard Greene of that next time you cross his path.
Critical thinking at its best.
Attribution studies raise red flags. Arguably they are the only tool available for studying the relationship between weather and climate change. However, they do not provide conclusions that can be tested by observation which is what science is all about.
The DROP in EF4 & EF5 tornadoes is statistically significant—very significant.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, one would expect warming due to increased greenhouse gases to yield this reduction.
And we should expect the number of the strongest tornadoes to continue to drop.
So, the only solidly significant result of global warming is a benefit.
Yet we want to destroy our economy to stop this.
One of the key points made here pertains to “places most exposed to weather disasters have far more people and wealth in harm’s way than they used to”. So a high magnitude hurricane that would have struck the current Miami area in say 1650 would have affected only the geographical features, while no structural damage would have occurred with few lives lost. Today, such a storm would cause billions in damages and maybe thousands of deaths. Yet the alarmists try to make things sound that before the recent time, such extreme natural events never occurred because carbon emissions were low or non-existent.
I would compare the current “Climate Science” and attempts to use current weather events as confirmation to TV’s Stargate-SG1 and Wormhole Extreme.
Both Stargate-SG1 and Wormhole Xtreme are strictly Sci-Fi. But Wormhole Xtreme was a fictional TV show allowed within the fictional SG-1 TV show to give it “plausible deniability” if the stargate program was ever discovered.
However, in “Climate Science”, weather events are presented as “plausible confirmation” of a fictional and dubious claim.
“Others suggested that reframing the attribution of extreme weather to climate change could allow for stronger claims: rather than looking at whether there was any long-term detectable trend in extreme weather, scientists might instead focus on the degree to which climate change increased the likelihood of a given extreme event.”
Focus instead on the discrete solar forcing of Northern Annular Mode anomalies driving mid latitude extreme heat and cold waves and the associated regional floods and droughts, then the attribution of climate change can be faithfully reframed. Coupled with the knowledge that negative NAM as the result of low solar drives warmer phases of ENSO and the AMO.
Over half of the heliocentric superior conjunctions of Jupiter and Neptune since 1500 are associated with severe cold winters, such as 1888, 1940, 1977, 1991. And the very coldest winters in Europe like 1684 and 1709, and 1595 which Kepler had predicted by ‘magnetic angles’ of the planets.
All the biggest heatwaves are there, 1934, 1936, 1949, 1976, 2003, 2006, 2018, prediction is simple.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQemMt_PNwwBKNOS7GSP7gbWDmcDBJ80UJzkqDIQ75_Sctjn89VoM5MIYHQWHkpn88cMQXkKjXznM-u/pub
Analysis of alternatives drives critical thinking.