Extreme Weather Attribution For Dummies: 2024 Edition
Executive Summary:
Heatwaves and droughts: It’s climate change wot dunnit innit. Don’t need no stinkin’ peer review or data cos it stands to reason!
So, yes, Human-caused climate change meant an average of 41 extra days of dangerous heat this year, scientists say. Cue the usual feeding frenzy of the captured mainstream media echoing the ‘experts’ assessment of extreme weather events throughout 2024. Those ‘experts’ are Friederike Otto of Imperial College London and her extreme weather attribution outfit, World Weather Attribution. Says Otto:
“The impacts of fossil fuel warming have never been clearer or more devastating than in 2024 and caused unrelenting suffering,” said Dr Friederike Otto, of Imperial College London and the co-lead of WWA. “The floods in Spain, hurricanes in the US, drought in the Amazon, and floods across Africa are just a few examples. We know exactly what we need to do to stop things from getting worse: stop burning fossil fuels.”
It’s all so simple. All we’ve got to do to stop bad weather happening is give up the ICE car and the gas boiler, stop eating meat and dairy, sign up for a 100% renewables flexible smart electricity tariff from that nice man at Octopus Energy and buy a heat pump and EV! What’s stopping you from making weather great again right now?
But just to show you how extremely elemental it is dear Watson, I’m going to reveal to you now the wonders of the pseudoscience of extreme weather attribution re. floods and heatwaves, as presented in stunningly simple detail in the WWA 2024 Extreme Weather report:
Firstly, heatwaves:
Virtually every heatwave that happened in 2024 was made hotter and more likely because of climate change (TM). So much so that Otto and her pals don’t even need to bother with individual extreme weather attribution analyses now. Let’s conveniently forget about the fact that the actual cause of global warming (and quite likely some notable extreme weather events associated with changes in dynamical circulation patterns) in 2023/24 has been a sharp decline of low level cloud, shall we. Because that doesn’t fit the narrative, obviously.
Then flooding:
15 out of 16 events studied were clearly influenced by climate change, which is not surprising cos that’s what they expected! Hotter air holds more water; it’s Clausius-Clapeyron innit!
Conclusion
The burning of oil, gas and coal are the cause of warming and the primary reason extreme weather is becoming more severe. Last year at COP28, the world finally agreed to ‘transition away from fossil fuels,’ but new oil and gas fields continue to be opened around the world, despite warnings that doing so will result in a long term commitment to more than 1.5°C and therefore costs to people around the world. Extremes will continue to worsen with every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming. A rapid move to renewable energy will help make the world a safer, healthier, wealthier and more stable place.
This is what ‘science’ totally captured by politics and Green corporate cronyism looks like. It’s ugly as hell and it threatens our very lives and livelihoods, and it must be resisted. Let’s hope the incoming Trump administration will give it a good kicking because Europe looks like it’s lost.
I literally could not live with myself if I lied as these folks do. But similar to everything that is upside down, lying is the new truth. 🙄
These people aren't lying; they are simply seeing the world through a lens that requires that some leaps of logic, some disregard for inconvenient alternative interpretations, and a strong belief in the narrative. Which is itself partly political.
All of this is easy to achieve if everyone else one knows is constantly reinforcing this methodology and interpretation. It is easier to herd than not.
The problem isn't that the methodologies or interpretations are askew; it is the willingness of their proponents, or their necessity, to reject the alternative. In this, the rejection is based upon belief and not scepticism, which is the basis of scientific enquiry. Always has been, until recently.
It's not eased by an apparent political slant being offered by commentators, both left and right; nor by the overwhelming political bias toward left leaning ideologies in universities across the West, and the decline of a 20th century pluralism that saw media, government and the academy held in a workable if tense balance, reflected in the broadly moderate politics of the public to whom these entities referred - at election time, through the transactional nature of news consumption, or the effect both of these mechanisms had upon education policy and practice.
Since the abandonment of the public for the more rarified atmosphere (!) of elitist (and latterly, identarian) political belief, and the rise of social media, the decline of legacy media and its replacement by anyone with an opinion (factual or merely nutty), the heavens have been let rip. And here we are. IMO. 🤔