Here We Go Again! Pakistan Floods Nothingburger 'Attribution' Study Hyped by the BBC and its Warmist Lead Author

Regular as clockwork now, within days or weeks of an extreme weather event, be it flooding, heatwave or devastating storm, the climate crisis hypesters sell it to the public as the latest ‘evidence’ of their entirely mythical man-made ‘climate emergency’ whose solution requires a very illiberal dose of global communism. The Pakistan floods are no exception and World Weather Attribution has rushed out an analysis, which the BBC hypes like mad, as does its lead author, quoted by the BBC, in order to try and convince us all that a very inconclusive study is somehow scientific evidence that global warming played a ‘significant role’ in the Pakistan floods.

Here’s the BBC hype:

Climate change: Pakistan floods 'likely' made worse by warming

Global warming is likely to have played a role in the devastating floods that hit Pakistan, say scientists.

Researchers from the World Weather Attribution group say climate change may have increased the intensity of rainfall.

Read further than the headlines though and you will actually discover that - amazingly - the BBC is a bit more balanced in its reporting than the lead author of the study. Of course, if the BBC had been even more unbiased in its reporting, the headline would have read something like ‘Pakistan Floods Attribution Study is Inconclusive’. But give them some credit, they do at least mention the caveats in the text:

Right from the start, politicians pointed to climate change as having made a significant contribution to the desperate scenes.

But this first scientific analysis says the picture is complex.

But extreme rainfall events are hard to assess. Pakistan is located on the edge of the monsoon region where the rainfall pattern is extremely variable from year to year.

Further complications include the impact of large-scale weather events such as La Niña, which also played a role in the last major floods in Pakistan in 2010.

During the 60-day period of heaviest rainfall this summer scientists recorded an increase of about 75% over the Indus river basin, while the heaviest five-day period over the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan recorded a rise in rainfall of around 50%.

The researchers then used climate models to determine how likely these events would be in a world without warming.

Some of the models indicated that the increases in rainfall intensity could all be down to human-caused climate change - however there were considerable uncertainties in the results.

The lead author, Friederike (‘Freddie’) Otto, is not so reserved about her own inconclusive analysis. She is quoted as saying:

"Our evidence suggests that climate change played an important role in the event, although our analysis doesn't allow us to quantify how big the role was," said Friederike Otto from Imperial College London, one of the report's authors.

"What we saw in Pakistan is exactly what climate projections have been predicting for years. It's also in line with historical records showing that heavy rainfall has dramatically increased in the region since humans started emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And our own analysis also shows clearly that further warming will make these heavy rainfall episodes even more intense."

"So while it is hard to put a precise figure to the contribution of climate change, the fingerprints of global warming are evident."

This is total bullshit. If you cannot quantify the influence of man-made climate change on an event, if you can identify various other natural influences which also likely played a role, then you cannot, by definition, state that your scientific “evidence suggests that climate change played an important role in the event.” But the weasel word here is ‘suggests’. ‘Scientists’ suggest, empirical evidence does not. It either stands up to scrutiny or it does not. Just to drive home the point that Otto is in fact misrepresenting the results of her own analysis, here is what that analysis says:

Many of the available state-of-the-art climate models struggle to simulate these rainfall characteristics. Those that pass our evaluation test generally show a much smaller change in likelihood and intensity of extreme rainfall than the trend we found in the observations. This discrepancy suggests that long-term variability, or processes that our evaluation may not capture, can play an important role, rendering it infeasible to quantify the overall role of human-induced climate change.

I’ll be going through the actual study when I get the time and reporting on its main conclusions, but it looks very much like, having failed to find any significant, conclusive, scientific and observation-based evidence that climate change played a significant role in the Pakistan floods, the authors and the media have just winged it to give the public the impression that the study did find evidence of a significant role. Appalling.