WaPo Cites NASA Hydrologist: It Is "Indisputable" That Global Warming Is Causing Extreme Droughts And Floods

BS Detector Goes Off The Scale

This has got to be one of the most egregious abuses of science and data which I have come across - and there’s been quite a few over the years coming from the climate change fanatics’ camp! The Washington Post headline is also highly relevant to another post I recently wrote:

California Dreaming: Natural Weather And Real Snow Are Things Of The Past

In that post I criticized ‘climate engineering researcher’ Dane Wigington for claiming that it is “not debatable” and there is “no question” that extreme weather globally (floods and droughts) are being geo-engineered.

Anyone claiming that there is “no question” surrounding such an obviously contentious issue, where hard evidence is in such short supply, is obviously not to be taken seriously. I have plenty of questions and I’m sure others do too. To me, this seems like the exact equivalent of the Covid jab fanatics claiming that natural immunity ceased to exist in 2020. Wigington is claiming that at some point natural weather ceased to exist and has been replaced by a malign global geoengineering agenda. This is not scientific, even though he claims it is.

I pointed out that the geo-engineering theorists appeared to be becoming as fanatical in their beliefs as the global warming fanatics. The WaPo article is a timely and perfect illustration of the fanatical, anti-scientific stance of global warming advocates, even those supposedly claiming to be ‘scientists’. They too are claiming that at some point natural weather ceased to exist and has been replaced not by geo-engineering but by ‘global warming weather’. We are obviously dealing with birds of a feather here, but it’s the global warming fanatics who are threatening our very way of life at this point in time with their ridiculous assertions. It’s the global warming fanatics who have all the money and influence and who own the main stream media and who own academic publishing institutions; hence they can push this crap out daily, using ‘scientific research’ to add a veneer of respectability to their unscientific, biased, baseless, ideologically driven claims.

Cliff Mass, an actual scientist, a meteorologist who studies actual, empirically based natural weather rather than the imagined artificial kind, is scathing of this latest report:

When a reporter describes research as "indisputable" you know they have little understanding of the scientific process.  Science is ALL about disputing and questioning each other's facts and interpretations.   

The  "indisputable" information in question comes from a single new research paper "Changing intensity of hydroclimate events revealed by Grace and Grace-FO" by Mathew Rodell and Bailing Li of NASA Goddard and published in the journal Nature Water.

This article describes the measurement of the Grace satellites, which can measure the water content of soils from space.  Importantly, they only analyzed the period 2002-2021.  

Their whole claim of a global warming signal is based on two observations:  the last few years had several droughts/heavy rain periods, and the earth has been warming over the past decades. 

 Therefore, global warming/climate change is probably the cause.  Correlation proves causation.  Poor science logic (see below).

It’s that bad, but in actual fact it’s worse than bad because there is no correlation, at least as far as one can discern by looking at the graph which the authors produce of extreme hydrological events.

The dots on the upper graph are extreme hydrological events by continent, both drought (below line) and floods (above line). The black line is the sum of the absolute values of the two extremes. You can immediately see that up until 2018, there is no trend in extreme hydrological events. After 2018, they increase rapidly, peak and then start to fall just as rapidly. The authors are claiming that this 3 year blip in the record is “indisputable” evidence of causation by global warming and that the correlation with global mean surface temperature (graph below) proves this! Seriously!

Cliff says:

The paper (and the Seattle Times/WA Post article) highlight that the number and intensity of extreme events have risen.

However, the increase in the intensity of extreme hydrological events has been limited to THE LAST THREE YEARS ONLY.  That is true for the number of "events" as well.  

What was global warming doing during the previous 15 years?   On vacation?

In short, there is no longer-term trend in extreme hydrological events that would make you think that global warming/climate change was the cause. Virtually no change from 2002 through 2018.  

This is a substantial problem for their hypothesis

The change in extreme hydrological events (abruptly increasing only in the last few years ) is very different from the trend of the global temperature (distributed over the entire period), undermining the authors' claim that global warming might be the cause.   

If you look carefully at the authors’ graph, you will notice that after 2018, there appear to be a lot more ‘extreme’ hydrological events, but they don’t appear to be any more severe than in the preceding 15 years, barring just one (in North America)*. So, the sudden increase in the black line on the graph would appear to be almost entirely attributable to an increase in the frequency of said events. This is not what the authors claim. The WaPo says:

The researchers say the data confirms that both frequency and intensity of rainfall and droughts are increasing due to burning fossil fuels and other human activity that releases greenhouse gases.

Are you kidding me? One of the authors, Rodell, also comes up with this gem:

“I was surprised to see how well correlated the global intensity was with global mean temperatures,” said Matthew Rodell, study author and deputy director of Earth sciences for hydrosphere, biosphere, and geophysics at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

I’m just some random internet blogger with a couple of degrees in sciences, I’m not a deputy director for earth sciences at NASA, but even I can see that this claim is complete bullshit. The claimed “indisputable” research is indisputably junk. Just how low can science fall, because it’s in the gutter at the moment and it’s not even looking up at the stars courtesy of clowns like this whose clown routines are being propagated in the popular press under the banner of ‘scientific research’.

But you don’t have to take my word for it, or even Cliff Mass’s word, an actual tenured academic meteorologist, you could ask the expert opinion of an atmospheric scientist from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at Monash University. You could, and this is what Dr Kimberley Reid would tell you:

"Global rainfall data is notoriously scarce, so I think that innovative methods of tracking changes to the water cycle such as through the GRACE satellite mission are really cool. 
 
However, there appear to be errors in the statistical analyses related to the climate sections of the study, so I would be cautious about overinterpreting the link to climate change.
 
First, it’s not mentioned in the methods that the authors "detrended" the global temperature and event intensity data before calculating the correlations. And based on the results, I suspect they didn’t. Since the correlation results are used as the main evidence for the climate change link, I would hesitate to give that conclusion much credence. That doesn’t mean climate change isn’t potentially affecting the water cycle, it just means the events mentioned in the study may have a variety of causes.
 
Why you must detrend: Statistical theory dictates that you must remove the trend in the data before doing a correlation analysis because if you don’t, all you are showing is that the two variables are both influenced by time – not that they influence each other. A real-world analogy is that the number of years I’ve been alive, and the number of premierships won by the Melbourne Football Club have a high correlation because they both increase with time, even though I have never kicked a footy on the MCG before and therefore probably didn't cause any wins.
 
Second, 20 years is not a long enough dataset to draw conclusions about relationships with El Niño and La Niña (ENSO). El Niño and La Niña occur every 2-7 years on average, so in 20 years, there may only be, at most, 10 occurrences, which isn’t enough to make conclusions about cause and effect. Other studies have shown that El Niño and La Niña are still a major influence on floods and droughts in Australia although rising global temperatures are likely to start to have a bigger impact later in the century.
 
Those two issues should have been picked up on during peer review, but the processes designed to maintain scientific rigour are not infallible, unfortunately."

Oops. I wonder if WaPo will be reporting on this?

*Correction: there’s another extreme event right at the top of the chart, in Africa, so that’s two out of a total of 17 after 2018, which exceed the severity of previous years.