It’s true. Climate change causes everything or at least is linked by a complex causative chain to everything. Hence Sunak can claim to still be honouring the UK Net Zero legal target whilst he rows back on a few of the more unpopular measures, but when he also comes out with this:
And that starts today, with a new approach to one of the biggest challenges we face: climate change.
No one can watch the floods in Libya or the extreme heat in Europe this summer, and doubt that it is real and happening.
I’m no one. The BBC isn’t no one. Extreme weather attribution ‘scientist’ Friederike Otto isn’t no one:
"After a summer of devastating heatwaves and wildfires with a very clear climate-change fingerprint, quantifying the contribution of global warming to these floods proved more challenging," one of the study's authors, Friederike Otto, of Imperial College London, said.
"While we have some weather station data over Greece, we don't have any weather station data over Libya."
Instead, the scientists had to rely on data based on satellite readings.
But they are confident climate change played a significant role, because there is very strong evidence higher temperatures lead to heavier rainfall and other studies have shown climate change increases the intensity of weather systems such as Storm Daniel.
I’m happy to be a nobody according to Sunak, if it means reading statements like the above and concluding that they are illogical and unscientific. Sunak alternatively dubs nobodies as ‘extremist climate deniers’:
We’re stuck between two extremes.
Those who want to abandon Net Zero altogether – because the costs are too high, the burdens too great or in some cases, they don’t accept the overwhelming evidence for climate change at all.
And then there are others who argue with an ideological zeal: we must move even faster, and go even further no matter the cost or disruption to people’s lives and regardless of how much quicker we’re already moving than any other country.
Both extremes are wrong.
I’m a nobody extremist who does not accept the supposed ‘overwhelming evidence’ of (man-made) climate change and does not accept the alleged ‘evidence’ linking extreme weather (like the Libyan flooding) to a mythical ‘climate crisis’ which was basically invented by the Guardian editorial team in 2019. I’m happy to be a climate denying nobody because it means I get to expose pseudoscience like the World Weather Attribution’s latest analysis of the flooding in Libya, which Sunak may or may not have been aware of when he made his nothingburger speech on watering down Net Zero targets. If I wasn’t a climate denying nobody I would be reading stuff like the BBC article above and believing the absolute crap published therein. So why is it crap? I’ll tell you why. You only have to follow actual science and logic to realise that it’s crap. The summary introduction to the WWA study of the Libyan flooding says this:
The uncertainty in these estimates are high and encompass the possibility of no detectable change, but there are multiple reasons we can be confident that climate change did make the events more likely: from theory we know that an increase in rainfall intensity of around 10%, would be expected given current warming levels, so we could only report that there has been no change if there was a well-known dynamic process counteracting this effect, which there is not. Studies focussing on extreme rainfall with future warming also show an increase in heavy rainfall, rendering it probable that the observed increase in heavy rainfall is indeed a trend due to climate change. For these reasons, we do not give a central estimate of the influence of climate change, as in previous studies, instead giving an upper-bound of the effect.
The theory of increasing heavy rainfall with increasing warming is the so-called Clausius-Clapeyron effect. Basically, warmer air can hold more moisture. This is a fact and is evidenced by very heavy rainfall events in tropical forest areas for example. No problem with that. However, I do have a problem with climate scientists applying this physical principle globally to justify the attribution of highly localised storms and heavy precipitation events to man-made climate change, which has allegedly increased the hypothetical global mean surface temperature of earth by approximately 1.2C since 1850.
I have a big problem with the above WWA statement. It’s basically crazy, nuts, away with the fairies. It says uncertainty is so high that the authors of the attribution analysis cannot say for sure whether there has been any detectable change at all in rainfall intensity. But because of Clausius-Clapeyron and a supposed lack of any physical mechanism counteracting the effects of Clausius-clapeyron, the authors conclude that it simply must have been climate change wot dunnit! That’s basically what Otto herself echoes in her quote to the BBC above. But there’s just a few niggling problems with this approach:
1. There is no detectable trend in extreme rainfall in the southern Mediterranean region. The authors tell us so in the actual study:
There are however different trends within the region with an increase in heavy rainfall in the more Northern parts, but no trends in the more Southern parts (Zittis et al.,2021) which leads to no discernible signals in heavy precipitation for the region overall (Seneviratne et al.,2021).
2. There’s no observable signal for the eastern Mediterranean either:
A recent review of past and future trends in the Eastern Mediterranean region which encompasses the Greece region above, found locally observed increases in heavy precipitation while the trend only emerges for the whole region with warming from 1.5 C onwards (Zittis et al., 2022).
3. The authors contradict themselves because in the actual paper they say:
It has been shown that high internal variability masks the climate change signal in several parts of Europe (Kendon et al., 2023; Aalbers et al., 2017) thus leading to no, or smaller trends than expected from thermodynamics.
So there is a physical mechanism which can counteract the effects of Clausius Clapeyron (thermodynamics): it’s called ‘high internal variability’! Furthermore, to my way of thinking, internal variability (dynamics) might easily be wrongly attributed by Otto-like scientists to Clausius-Clapeyron (thermodynamics = ‘climate change’). Bizarrely, the authors go into detail concerning the proximate cause of this extreme rainfall in Greece, Turkey and Libya, precisely by telling us that it was an Omega blocking high over the Netherlands (which was also responsible for the UK’s brief Indian summer by the way) and a cut off low which caused the extreme rainfall over Spain (dynamics).
But then they tell us it wasn’t dynamics but it was thermodynamics wot dunnit for Libya because nothing exists which can counteract the thermodynamics!!
Free your mind from the garbage. Become a nobody climate denier!
Snort: "Instead, the scientists had to rely on data based on..." blah, blah, blah.
Re: the studies. Complication and convolution to fit the narrative. Thank you. Your posts help laypeople such as myself to be up to speed on this theatre of war.