It's Wired's Turn To Hero-Worship Friederike Otto Whilst Grossly Misleading The Public About Her UK 40C Attribution Study
‘Fredi’ is the darling of the lame stream media at the moment, who it would seem are singularly intent upon bigging her up by falsely attributing scientific rigour and undeniable evidential value to her extreme weather attribution studies. It’s pissing me off to be honest; no, not because I harbour some personal grudge against Otto (she just happens to be the public face of WWA - and a climate activist), but because of their dishonesty and misdirection, which they carry out so easily, reaching a wide audience, but which takes a lot of thought, time and effort to try and correct whilst reaching a very limited audience.
After the Guardian extolled the virtues of Climate Change Wonder Woman and her magical, miraculous, marvellous extreme weather attribution studies, Wired have now picked up where they left off and have decided to concentrate on the extreme marvellousness of her 2022 UK 40C ‘extreme heatwave’ (all sixty seconds of it at RAF Coningsby) attribution study. At least Wired managed a more flattering photo than the Guardian (although I’m not so sure about the purple jumpsuit hand-knitted by someone’s granny):
Wired think that her attribution studies are so forensically, scientifically watertight, that they can be used in a court of law, which would be hilarious if it were not for the fact that sooner or later, the climate lawfare rabble will attempt to use one of these attribution studies to try and ascribe blame to countries or corporations for an individual extreme weather event and thereby exact financial compensation for ‘damages’ caused by that event. Seeing as how the judiciary, like all other institutions, is captured by the globalists, this is a worrying development.
If attribution studies can tell us that a disaster was made more severe because of climate change, they also point toward something else: Who might be held responsible. Richard Heede, a geographer from California, has spent decades delving through archives to estimate companies’ carbon emissions all the way back to before the Industrial Revolution. The result is known as the Carbon Majors: a database of the world’s biggest polluters up to the present moment. The 2017 Carbon Majors report found that half of all industrial emissions since 1988 could be traced to just 25 corporate or state-owned entities. The state-owned fossil fuel firm Saudi Aramco alone is responsible for 4.5 percent of the world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions between 1988 and 2015.
This data is extremely useful for people trying to bring legal cases against fossil fuel firms. In May 2022, a group of scientists and lawyers traveled to the Peruvian Andes to inspect a giant glacier that looms over the crystalline waters of Lake Palcacocha. If the glacier collapses into the lake, scientists fear it could submerge the nearby city of Huarez. Peruvian farmer Saúl Luciano Lliuya thinks that polluters should foot the cost of defending the city from floodwater as global warming has shrunk glaciers around Lake Palcacocha, increasing the risk of dangerous flooding. The target of the lawsuit is the German energy firm RWE, which was responsible for 0.47 percent of all industrial greenhouse gas emissions between 1751 and 2010, according to Heede’s data. Lliuya is suing for just £14,250 ($17,170)—that’s 0.47 percent of the cost of protecting Huaraz.
If Lliuya wins the case, it could set a precedent that polluters can be held legally responsible for the effects of their emissions anywhere on the planet. “That would really change this narrative that we’re operating in,” Otto says. It would also make the work of weather attribution even more critical. If scientists know that climate change had made flooding in an area twice as severe as it would have been, for example, they can use that evidence to estimate how much individual companies and states contributed to that disaster. One of Otto’s students is already working on a legal case in Brazil that involves weather attribution. “We have seen a huge interest in that. It’s not just journalists calling and wanting to know, but also lawyers,” Otto says.
You can see where this is going can’t you and you can see why Otto and her admirers in the left wing media are getting so excited about this ‘science’ of extreme weather attribution which can supposedly dust the fingerprints off extreme weather events to find the guilty party - man-made climate change. I’m not going there right at this moment and law is not my thing. All I know is that these ‘attribution studies’ are crap and should never pass the high bar required for use as scientific evidence in a court of law.
Where I am going is back to this wretched UK ‘40C heatwave’ attribution. Wired says:
In the case of the UK heat wave, World Weather Attribution was ready with its report just nine days after temperatures reached their peak.
The findings revealed the unprecedented scale of the record-breaking temperatures. Otto’s team estimated that climate change had made the UK heat wave at least 10 times more likely, and that in a world without global warming peak temperatures would have been about 2 degrees Celsius lower. The weather was so unusual that, in a world without climate change, it would have been statistically impossible to reach such high temperatures in two out of the three weather stations the scientists studied. In the world of climate attribution science, this is about as close as you get to a smoking gun. “People always want the number, and sometimes you can’t give a very satisfactory number,” Otto says. This time, however, Otto had no shortage of numbers to share with the reporters who were ringing her up.
‘Smoking gun’? You’ve got to be kidding. Somebody’s obviously smoking something, but it’s not a gun!
Firstly, yes, they did find that, in a world which was 1.2C cooler than today (1850 - ‘pre-industrial’), this heatwave would have been 2C cooler. But guess what? The actual heatwave, according to observations, facts, empirical data, was 4C hotter than pre-industrial, which means that the models only project half the warming in maximum daytime temperatures which has taken place! Wired don’t mention that, strangely. They also don’t mention that, even in a 1.2C warmer world, the temperatures recorded at two of the weather stations would have been virtually impossible. All they say is that they would have been statistically impossible in a 1.2C cooler world, implying that this is the ‘smoking gun’ which proves climate change dunnit (in the conservatory, with the revolver, I presume!). This is a hideously malign misdirection. I can show you why. Here are the graphs of statistical return times of the maximum temperatures at the individual stations, in a climate changed world (red) and 1.2C cooler world (blue) from Otto’s study. Magenta line is the actual recorded maximum temperature:
GEV stands for Generalised Extreme Value distribution. You can see it shifts up uniformly with global warming. The outer lines are the upper and lower 95% confidence bounds.
As you can see, in the case of Cranwell, the red (1.2C warmer world) line intersects the majenta line somewhere beyond a return time of 1000 years. Being a log scale along the horizontal axis, I imagine this means that, even in a warmer world, the temperature at Cranwell can be expected to happen only about once every 1500 years, i.e. it’s still a very rare event. Looking at St James’ park, the red central line never intersects the majenta line, even out to 10,000 year return times and it doesn’t look like it is going to beyond that. Even the upper 95% confidence bound does not intersect the majenta line. This effectively means that the temperature recorded at St James’ Park is impossible in a 1.2C warmer world - therefore something else other than climate change must have contributed to this extreme reading.
At Durham too, the central estimate never gets anywhere near the majenta line, but the 95% CI upper bound does intersect beyond a return period of 1000 years. This implies also that the temperature recorded at Durham is virtually impossible. So that’s two out of three stations where the recorded temperatures would have been impossible or nearly impossible even in a world warmed supposedly by emissions of greenhouse gases. You’re telling me that this is good enough to put before a judge in order to force fossil fuel companies to pay out millions in compensation to the alleged victims of extreme weather caused by alleged man-made climate change? In what Kangaroo Court?
I know I said the human centipedes were consuming each others effluent, a round robin of attribution, but I hadn't considered they were smoking their own effluent. The only hope is they persue this to the point of a singularity where they disappear into their own anal cavities.
One takeaway I've learned with the Branch Covidian cultists is that facts really don't matter. People who react emotionally don't care what the truth may be. In some sense that's true with all of us. Good or bad strong emotions can blind any of us to reality. Anyone who's ever been in deep love or deep fear and has perspective 5 years later can attest to that.
I've found humor to be a better persuader than charts and tables of mean temperatures or IFR/CFR comparisons...
One root absurdity is the obvious rebranding that happened about 10 years ago. If I suddenly changed my name from Jeff to "Lord Zoltan the supreme leader" you would correctly think that's important. Well 10 years ago their name of this fear porn narrative was "Global Warming". This changed, almost overnight, to "Climate Change" which is even more absurd than Lord Zoltan.
Sometimes just pointing this key point out plants a splinter in a tiny remaining brain of a climate cultist.