From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Roger Pielke Jr demolishes the Weather Attribution con-merchants:
One of the most brazen — and successful — propaganda campaigns sits out in plain sight. I am referring to the concerted effort by climate advocates to create a belief that “climate change” causes bad weather and disasters, and that we can prevent those bad things from happening with climate policies.
By successful, I mean that the propaganda campaign has convinced half of all Americans that “addressing climate change” will lead to “fewer or less severe weather events” that they personally experience and affect their community. As the figure below shows, among climate advocates, this belief is almost an article of faith at 80%.
At the center of the propaganda campaign are scientists who perform political alchemy by turning the symbols, authority, and institutions of expertise into public and policy maker (mis)understandings of climate science. These scientists all well know that “climate policy” — however construed — cannot reduce the number or intensity of extreme weather events in any meaningful or detectable way in my lifetime, or even my future grandkids’ lifetimes.
Today’s post is motivated by the “study” released today on climate change and the recent Nepal flooding and mudslide by World Weather Attribution (WWA) — reflected in the headlines above.
WWA explains, shamelessly and incorrectly, that “no existing early warning system could have provided sufficient lead time or prevented the scale of impacts observed in the worst-affected areas, highlighting the limits of adaptation.” They explain further that “minimising future risk requires a rapid transition away from fossil fuel use and delivering on climate finance commitments for adaptation.”
WWA functions as an advocacy group. It was created by Climate Central — another climate advocacy group — in 2014 and is today located at Imperial College London. WWA is funded by climate advocacy philanthropies: Grantham Foundation, the European Climate Foundation and the Bezos Earth Fund.
Today’s post does three things:
- I show that the A in WWA should not be attribution, but assumption. The headline findings across all WWA press releases result from assuming attribution;
- Further, under the WWA methodology any time series with a trend, up or down, — and in any context — can be “attributed to climate change.” Applying WWA methods, I’ll show how the record 6,776 home runs in MLB in 2019 would have been impossible without “climate change.”
- I’ll also show how any variable with an increasing trend can be used to explain how a particular weather event was made worse. Applying WWA methods, I’ll show how the global increase in patent applications — patent change? — made the rainfall from a Japanese typhoon in 2019 four times worse that it would have been in the 1980s, with fewer patent applications.
Read the full post here.
Roger has replicated 96 WWA studies and concludes:
“WWA, reporters on the climate beat, climate advocates are playing us all for fools and in the process causing great harm to the science of climate change, which is too important to be reduced to propaganda in support of a political campaign.”
