Oh No! Flooding Attribution: Historical Data Defenestrates Clausius-Clapeyron

Oops, there goes Freddie’s fave line whenever it rains hard and somewhere gets flooded:

“It’s climate change wot dunnit - cos Clausius-Clapeyron, innit!”

Regular readers will know that Clausius-Clapeyron refers to the simple, physical thermodynamic observation that warmer air is able to contain more moisture and thus, logically, is able to precipitate that extra moisture under certain conditions, manifesting as extreme, heavy rainfall. Friederike (Freddie) Otto and her colleagues at World Weather Attribution just love it because, even when their sophisticated climate models and statistical analyses fail to pinpoint a definite link between a severe rainfall/flooding event and ‘climate change’ (i.e. a slightly warmer atmosphere), they can just fall back on the ever trusty Clausius-Clapeyron Clause and state, with unashamed, bare-faced confidence, that the ‘balance of probabilities’ suggests that man-made climate change contributed significantly to the event because it’s got warmer, humans caused the warmth and therefore humans must have caused the extreme rainfall. Simples.

Chris Morrison at the Daily Sceptic writes:

Few fearmongering scares cause more deliberate panic than sudden and overwhelming flooding. The ancients were at it in the Bible and the Net Zero fanatics use it to drive modern-day mass climate psychosis. Fake pseudoscience attributions of heavy human involvement are fed to activist journalists who promote the invented idea that there is a ‘climate emergency’. But a recent scientific paper has blown all this Noah-inspired nonsense out of the water. Studying both documentary and geological flooding records, a group of European scientists found that over multi-century and millennial periods across parts of western and southwestern Europe, floods have been of a much higher magnitude than those of the present day. In the UK, flooding in the Severn area during the last 70 years “was not considered exceptional” in the context of the 4,000-year record.

The science team, including Professor Mark Macklin of the University of Lincoln, showed that flood magnitude was “significantly higher” before the 20th century, despite there being a negligible greenhouse gas contribution from humans. In a phrase that strikes down much of the pseudoscientific weather-attribution copy, it is noted that this means “natural variability might be significantly higher than assumed by climate modellers”.

The scientists state clearly that any attempt to attribute anthropogenic causes to extreme events such as droughts and flooding needs a sufficient length of events to enable comparisons to be drawn. Attempts using computer models to attribute recent floods to human causes have been made, the authors note, but such assessments “have failed to correctly analyse the true frequency and magnitude of past floods, when anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing was low”. It becomes clearer by the day why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pointed out in its latest assessment report that human involvement in almost all extreme weather categories is almost impossible to discern. In fact this inconvenient conclusion has directly led to the major growth of modelled attributions. Activists have become increasingly frustrated by the IPCC and pressed ahead with their pseudoscience due to the the need for lawfare material and ‘trusted media’ scare stories.

Oh dear, Otto and her pals might have to scout around for something new to blame floods on climate change - because historical geological/documentary climatological and weather data trumps their models, their dodgy statistical analyses and even simple physics. The atmosphere is a lot more complicated than simple thermodynamic laws would suggest - who knew?

It’s not just floods either. Hot, dry weather leading to wildfires, another favourite of WWA’s mission to blame all bad weather and natural catastrophes on ‘climate change’, has also come under the spotlight very recently, courtesy of theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. Chris Morrison again:

Climate change was a major factor behind the recent Los Angeles wildfires, reported Matt McGrath of the BBC last January. According to a ‘scientific study’ instantly produced by World Weather Attribution (WWA), the prevailing weather conditions were made about 35% more likely due to humans using hydrocarbons. The WWA study, according to the trusting McGrath, is said to confirm this somewhat precise attribution of blame. Possibly the BBC and most of the mainstream that also parroted the WWA line might consider some corrective copy in the light of a devasting critique of the claims from the theoretical physicist, science writer and prominent youtuber Dr Sabine Hossenfelder. In a YouTube video broadcast here that has gone viral on social media, she elicited an astonishing admission from one of the report’s authors that, “as you can see from the numbers, the changes in intensity and likelihood are unsurprisingly not statistically significant”.

So that’s hot, dry weather and very wet weather climate change ‘rapid attribution’ debunked. Maybe it’s time for Otto and pals to give up the day job.