2024 Is To Be THE Year Of Instant, Evidence-Free Attribution Of Extreme Weather To An Imaginary 'Climate Crisis'

I do wonder if Peter Stott and Friederike Otto are going to find themselves out of a job this year as climate activists and the media forego the usual obligatory week or two’s wait for them to produce a formal ‘scientific’ attribution of extreme weather events and just go straight to claiming that it was ‘climate breakdown wot dunnit’.

Here’s Just Sod Off claiming that Storm Henk is directly caused by our government’s genocidal policy of drilling for oil and gas:

JSO don’t need no stinkin’ (pseudo)science; they know that the flooding in Britain this winter, the persistent rainfall and Storm Henk are caused by a carbon-induced man-made climate crisis. As the moronic JSO activist interviewed by Kay Burley on Sky said yesterday: it’s the ‘hottest year ever because climate change - same as if I drop my glass of water it would smash on the floor because gravity, innit.’ Damn, these people are absolute geniuses.

Now the BBC has fired its opening salvo in the coming 2024 evidence-free extreme weather attribution blitz, by abandoning its usual underhand modus operandum of weasel-worded reporting which cunningly leads the reader to conclude that it was climate change wot dunnit and instead going for an all out definitive statement of fact: climate change did do it.

Says David Hansard:

In its attempt to drill into its readers the idea that we are on the brink of disaster, the BBC usually uses what its reporters think is a tried and tested method, or a combination of several. Where there is nothing more than a correlation between variables, it frames an article in a way which implies there is causation. Or it is selective with the evidence, ignoring anything that is inconvenient, including choosing a truncated period of time which suits its views, while disregarding longer-term data which would cast doubt on them. More generally, it simply emphasises some things and downplays others, guiding readers from the beginning of the article to the end along a path clearly signposted ‘Climate Catastrophe’.

This time, however, it went a step further, and its article is a good example of how bold (or reckless – take your pick) it is prepared to be in pushing a narrative of impending environmental calamity. The central claim it made to support its case is demonstrably untrue. It claimed that a big increase in deaths from lightning strikes in Bangladesh is linked to climate change – the story is unambiguously headed ‘Bangladesh sees dramatic rise in lightning deaths linked to climate change’ – because in recent years there have been more thunderstorms. Yet, on the contrary, data show that in the years when deaths greatly increased, there was not an increase in thunderstorms.

The BBC don’t need no stinkin’ extreme weather attribution pseudoscience either. This sets the tone for the rest of the year I think. We should expect this desperate tactic from the media more and more. So newly honoured Peter Stott CBE of the Met Office and World Weather Attribution co-founder Friederike Otto are going to have to up their game methinks and start coming up with some superfast attribution studies before the media and moronic JSO and XR activists beat them to it.