Extreme Weather Attribution Pseudoscience - Meet The Imperial College Scientist Who "Peers Into The Dark Center" Of 'Climate Disasters'

In 2016, I wrote about ‘Fredi’ Otto et al’s recently invented ‘Dark Art’ of rapid extreme weather attribution here. Six years later she’s still at it, gazing into the ‘dark center’ of extreme weather events, using her pseudoscientific dark arts in order to do so:

https://cliscep.com/2016/08/02/a-brief-journey-into-the-dark-art-of-rapid-extreme-weather-attribution/

I make no apologies for my language here. Extreme weather attribution is pseudoscience, hocus pocus, dark magic, which is increasingly being used to propagandise the weather for the purposes of selling a non-existent ‘climate emergency’ to the public. The abuse of science to serve politics and ideology annoys me greatly, especially when it is done by supposed ‘scientists’ exploiting their positions of academic privilege in formerly highly respected institutions like Oxford University and Imperial College, London. I say formerly because a lot of their prestige has worn off in recent years (e.g. Professor Pantsdown’s ludicrous Covid models came out of Imperial), but supposedly, they are still among the top globally rated institutions of higher education and academic research.

I wouldn’t be concentrating my fire on one person normally, except that the Guardian has seen fit to paint this woman as some kind of climate-saving superhero uniquely invested with the superhuman skills necessary to illuminate the dark centre of climate-related disasters, and apparently she’s quite happy for the Graun to profile her in that way.

‘I am an optimistic person’: the scientist who studies climate catastrophes

Right, yeah, off to a flying start then, complete with red and blue cape. The Wonder Woman of Climate Catastrophes.

Cycling over London Bridge as the dry heat pushed the temperature above 40C and a hot wind gusted down the River Thames, Friederike Otto paused to look at the monument to the city’s great fire more than 350 years earlier.

“The heat was intense, the humidity was so low and there were these winds. You could almost feel if there was one spark now, London will burn again,” she said.

For Otto, who spends her working life looking into the apocalypse of extreme weather, the homes it destroys, the lives it takes, the children it leaves orphaned, she had found herself inside one of her own studies.

Hmmm.

Otto, known as Fredi, and a small team of researchers are the world’s only rapid reaction force of climate scientists [X Men!]. They target extreme weather across the world almost as it happens, reach out to local people on the ground, and carry out deep, rigorous statistical analysis, which is transforming our understanding of how human-caused global heating is affecting the planet and our lives.

Until now, scientists have had to be equivocal about whether a single weather event is linked to global heating. Otto’s work makes the connection between the string of disasters the world is suffering and global heating, much clearer.

‘Rigorous statistical analysis’, eh? ‘Much clearer’ connection between ‘climate change’ and extreme weather, huh? Here is my analysis of just one example of their ‘rigorous statistical analysis’ back in 2016, in my article above:

Take, for instance, the flooding in France and Germany at the end of May this year. They have an attribution! Climate change was definitely implicated in the flooding in France, but the results of the Climate Central World Weather Attribution study are inconclusive for Germany. Which is odd, to say the least, because the flooding in Germany was caused by the same low pressure system as the flooding which occurred in northern France a couple of days later! It would seem that, by crossing the national border from Germany into France, this extreme weather made the leap from ‘cannot be attributed to climate change’ to ‘can be attributed to climate change’!

It turns out that because they deliberately chose to analyse the flooding by looking at slightly different meteorological variables in each country, they were only able to attribute the floods to climate change in France, not Germany. Does that sound ‘clear’ or ‘statistically robust’ to you?

So they looked at rainfall in each country separately and compared the current rainfall with the past rainfall in each region. The 1-day rainfall in Germany was truly exceptional (in terms of the past records), even more so than the 3-day rainfall in France, but, because observations showed a significant decline in 1-day rainfall in the region [Germany] and because only 1 climate model predicted a small increase in response to climate change (contrary to observations), they could not draw any firm conclusions on attribution. It was just a really extreme event. With France, all the climate models predicted a large increase in the probability of extreme 3-day rainfall in the Loire and Seine basins. So despite the fact that observations showed a positive but not significant increase in 3-day rainfall in both French regions, simply because the models were in good agreement and all predicted a large increase in the probability of such intense rainfall occurring, these researchers concluded that the exceptional rainfall in France could be attributed to climate change! On that basis alone!

In reality, 3-day extreme rainfall has not increased significantly in France and has even declined very significantly (over 1 day) in Germany (since 1960 anyway). A very unusual storm comes along and upsets the apple cart in both regions, days apart, but climate scientists can only ‘fast attribute’ the French floods to climate change because their all singing-all dancing computer models predicted an increase in the probability of such events occurring (after 1960) in France only. Wow. That’s ‘climate science’s quick-as-you-can extreme weather attribution’ in action! Are we not amazed, astounded, gob-smacked and humbled? Or maybe just gob-smacked?

Pseudoscience. Hocus pocus. Black magic. Like I said. But this was just the beginning. They started out as they meant to continue. I’ve exposed quite a few ‘attributions’ from World Weather Attribution over the years, but let’s look at one of their most recent, the extreme high temperatures recorded in the UK in July 2022, which the Guardian boasts about on her behalf thus:

In 2022, Otto was busier than ever, peering into the dark centre of many disasters: the tropical cyclones in Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique, the heatwaves in India and Pakistan, droughts in west and east Africa, floods in Brazil, floods in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, the last heatwave in the UK, drought in western Europe, flooding in Germany, the floods in Pakistan, and most recently severe flooding in Nigeria, Niger and Chad.

I looked at the UK extreme heat attribution here:

UK Heatwave Attribution II

Here is a stunning example of their ‘rigorous statistical analysis’ in that particular (non-peer reviewed) study:

Including Climate Change and Excluding Everything Else

That’s what the authors do here. They assume that the long term rise in global temperature (attributed almost entirely to man-made greenhouse gases) is the main driver of very brief periods of extreme temperatures locally. They mention other factors which might also have an influence, but then totally ignore them in order to arrive at their event attribution!

Statistical Analysis - Temperatures at 2 Stations were so Extreme they were Impossible!

You read that right. Impossible. They had to include the impossible event in the trend in order to make it fit the statistical trend! Got that?

It is assumed that the distribution of temperature extremes shifts due to global warming without changing the shape.

So there you go. Using their GEV fit, the authors of this current attribution study make the above assumptions (i.e. they exclude the probable) and they find that, in 2 stations out of 3, the temperatures recorded would be impossible even in a world which is 1.2C warmer due to global warming! Thus, they have to shoe-horn those ‘impossible’ extreme temperatures into a new statistical distribution in order to arrive at realistic probabilities of the return times.

So, their ‘rigorous statistical analysis’ was basically pants, but that wasn’t the end of it. Even their climate model simulations failed miserably to make the link between this very brief extreme UK heat and ‘climate change’!

Climate Model Simulations Also Fail To Simulate Extreme Temperature Observations

The climate models also confirm the results of the statistical analysis, namely that the extreme high temperatures recorded, especially on the 19th, are just too extreme. In fact, the climate model simulations predict only a 2C rise in extreme temperature for this event, not a 4C increase as observed.

The climate models were 100% out compared with observations! This is compounded by the fact that the climate models they used were biased towards high climate sensitivity (degrees centigrade rise in global mean temperature per doubling of atmospheric CO2).

It is absolutely shocking and a damning indictment of modern ‘science’ that the Graun should cite this shoddy piece of work as a glowing example of ‘rigorous statistical analysis’ and elevate the author to the status of some scientific wizard guru who can ‘peer into the dark centre of climate catastrophes’ and reveal all for the benefit of us uneducated simpletons. Bullshit!