By Kennedy Maize

“What has come to be known as ‘weather attribution,’ research assigning causation to observed weather events, is fraught with methodological problems. Veteran climate scientist Roger A. Pielke Jr. in his Substack publication The Honest Broker calls it ‘weather attribution alchemy’.”

Last year was hot, unusually so. The global temperature was almost 0.3°C above 2022 levels, so much higher that even conventional analyses of global warming didn’t appear to explain it. As a recent article in Science magazine notes, iconic climate scientist James Hansen was suggesting that a new, air-pollution-driven warming mechanism might be at work. NASA’s Gavin Schmidt posited that a novel, unknown force could be involved.

Wrong, says a team of six climate scientists led by Shiv Priyam Raghuraman (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana). The culprit is more likely the familiar climate confounder, El Niño (technically, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation or ENSO).

Writing in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, published by the European Geosciences Union, the scientific team writes,

our results underscore the importance of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation in driving the occurrence of global warming spikes such as the one in 2023, without needing to invoke anthropogenic forcing, such as changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or aerosols, as an explanation.

They add:

Global-mean surface temperature rapidly increased 0.29 ± 0.04 K from 2022 to 2023. Such a large interannual global warming spike is not unprecedented in the observational record, with a previous instance occurring in 1976–1977. However, why such large global warming spikes occur is unknown, and the rapid global warming of 2023 has led to concerns that it could have been externally driven.

And:

Here we show that climate models that are subject only to internal variability can generate such spikes, but they are an uncommon occurrence (p = 1.6 % ± 0.1 %). However, when a prolonged La Niña immediately precedes an El Niño in the simulations, as occurred in nature in 1976–1977 and 2022–2023, such spikes become much more common (p = 10.3 % ± 0.4 %). Furthermore, we find that nearly all simulated spikes (p = 88.5 % ± 0.3 %) are associated with El Niño occurring that year.

The University of Illinois research fits with an August paper by four researchers from CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway. Published in the Communications Earth & Environment journal, Bjørn H. Samset et al. wrote:

2023 was the warmest year on record, influenced by multiple warm ocean basins. This has prompted speculation of an acceleration in surface warming, or a stronger than expected influence from loss of aerosol induced cooling…. We show that the strong deviation from recent warming trends is consistent with previously observed sea surface temperature influences, and regional forcing.

“Weather Attribution” Alchemy

What has come to be known as “weather attribution,” research assigning causation to observed weather events, is fraught with methodological problems. Veteran climate scientist Roger A. Pielke Jr. in his Substack publication The Honest Broker calls it “weather attribution alchemy.”

Pielke notes that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) describes weather attribution research as seeking “to attribute aspects of specific extreme weather and climate events to certain causes.” The IPCC adds:

Scientists cannot answer directly whether a particular event was caused by climate change, as extremes do occur naturally, and any specific weather and climate event is the result of a complex mix of human and natural factors. Instead, scientists quantify the relative importance of human and natural influences on the magnitude and/or probability of specific extreme weather events.

Pielke offers three important aspects of weather attribution.

• It is “tactical,” meaning political, “research performed explicitly to serve legal and political ends.” He notes that a key motive for the work of the UK-based World Weather Attribution (WWA) project is “increasing the ‘immediacy’ of climate change, thereby increasing support for mitigation.” WWA founder Frederike Otto has said, “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.” Pielke says that “tactical science is not necessarily bad science, but it should elevate the degree of scrutiny that such analyses face, especially when they generally are not subjected to independent peer review.”
• Weather attribution reflects the IPPC’s inability to find with high confidence “increasing trends in the frequency or intensity of most types of impactful extreme events — notably hurricanes, floods, drought, and tornadoes.” He writes, “For instance, the IPCC has reportedincreases in heat waves and in heavy precipitation, but not tropical cyclones (including hurricanes), floods, tornadoes or drought.” Climate activists view this as a political obstacle to their policy agenda, “a problem that can be rectified via the invention of extreme event attribution.”
• The weaknesses of weather attribution should not obscure the importance of the climate issue, but that isn’t a license to ignore scientific integrity. “We live in a time when far too often calls for scientific integrity are criticized by political campaigners (including scientists),” he argues, “when certain scientific understandings do not align perfectly with this or that political agenda.”

Pielke writes that “some dismiss entirely the possibility of human-caused changes in climate while others quickly claim that every weather event is more extreme or more common due to climate change. These extreme positions are roughly aligned with the far right and far left respectively — and discussion of climate science and policy has long been dominated by these extremes.”

Tilak Doshi

The Irrationality of Western Energy Policies

What leads a country to begin winding down domestic oil and gas production while promoting the use of imported wood – a wasteful and inefficient fuel — for power generation?

What leads policymakers to shut down a nation’s last and still-functional coal generating power plant after almost 150 years of using coal and within months arrive at a situation where blackout prevention notices have to be issued to its power generators?

The UK is by no means the only Western country to go down this perverse path of deindustrialization and national economic suicide. Why are energy policies of leading Western countries afflicted by magical thinking and irrationality?

The Western World is in a hypnotic trance from 30 years of relentless propaganda pushing climate alarmism.

Energy Policy Mayhem

Evidence abounds of the mayhem that passes for energy policy in the West. It is only appropriate to start with Germany, the epicentre of the green trance that policymakers there have been hypnotized into. This follows decades of worship in the Church of Climate in the media and spouted by its intellectual chattering class.

Let’s start with the destruction of thousands of acres of ancient Teutonic forests – the setting for the folktales of the Brothers Grimm — to make way for wind farms. The irony is lost on Germany’s green ideologues that their energy policies threaten endangered species of birds and bats in its sacrifices at the altar of Mother Gaia. Consecrating thousands of windmill crucifixes with arms of petroleum-based glass-fiber-reinforced polyester resins manufactured in Chinese furnaces fueled by coal or natural gas may seem particularly absurd to those not steeped in that miasma of green ideology.

Another example of Germany’s green lunacy include the shutting down of their nuclear power plants, only to then approve putting dirty lignite-fired power plants back online for German households to keep warm in the winter of 2022/23.

German commentator Pierre L. Gosselin published an article earlier this year that asked bluntly, “The ‘greener’ Germany gets, the bloodier its economy becomes. How much can an economy bleed before it dies?” Adding to the economic gloom afflicting the country for the past two years, Reuters reported in July that the economy is expected to contract by 0.2% in 2024 from a previous projection of an anaemic 0.3% growth. It beggars belief to call this an “unexpected” contraction as the news wire does when the link between high energy costs and deindustrialization has been so widely discussed in the media.

Let’s turn to other absurdities. We recently learned that in the wisdom of Scandinavian planners, dairy farmers in Denmark face having to pay an annual tax of 672 krone ($96) per cow “for the planet-heating emissions they generate.” This policy proposal came in the wake of widespread farmers’ protests in Europe which escalated – across the width and breadth of the continent, from Sweden to Spain, Poland to Portugal — since they first started in the Netherlands in October 2019.

The Great European Farmer Revolt led to the shocking win in March by the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) in the Netherlands, putting it ahead of the governing party in the Senate. In a reaction to left-wing green parties in government, farmers became an important part of the equation in the country’s political future. As part of the EU Green Deal to make agriculture consistent with being “carbon-neutral” by 2050, Brussels’ bureaucrats assured their citizens that their farms would be rendered more “sustainable”, “environmentally friendly” and “biodiverse.”

Perhaps the pride of place belongs to Ed Miliband (“Mad Ed”), UK’s Secretary of State for the oxymoronically-named Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. UK’s “net zero” policies, pursued by both the Conservatives, in power for 14-years, and the new Labour government, have compromised the country’s energy security like nothing else. In Mad Ed’s short time in office, the country’s last coal plant and its Port Talbot steel plant shut down, regulatory approvals for solar farms were rushed through over-riding local community objections, and the North Sea’s oil and gas field development have been sacrificed to an unchallenged climate lawsuit launched by Greenpeace.

Unsurprisingly, it was reported in July that Britain fell out of the top ten manufacturing nations list for the first time. Mr. Miliband’s decision not to challenge a lawsuit filed by Greenpeace has compromised the country’s investment environment. According to Brendon Long, director of research at investment company Zeus Capital, Mr. Miliband’s decision would put wider investment in Britain at risk. He said: “London has fallen out of the top 10 capital markets in terms of monies raised from initial public offerings. That might reflect that financial markets are increasingly concerned with the UK as a jurisdiction that values and defends property rights and the sanctity of honouring agreements made.”

To be fair to Mad Ed, some of these developments were already underway during the previous Tory government’s term of office. Nevertheless, he has built up a CV that would be the envy of the wildest left-wing Brussels bureaucrat. One could even ignore his cringe-worthy bizarre video of him singing and strumming a ukulele in front of a windmill.

But most egregious in the Labour government’s short record of rule is its move to cut winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners while pledging nearly £22bn for projects in unproven technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions. Rubbing salt into the wound, Ed Miliband insisted in July that Labour will honour its pledge of £11.6bn in overseas climate aid.

It is not much better across the pond. President Biden promised to make climate change front and center of his administration’s policies across the whole of government. This has been followed by the duplicitously-named Inflation Reduction Act which unleashes a debt-driven tsunami of subsidies on favoured “green” industries – solar, wind, EVs, batteries, hydrogen. I have written on Biden’s fractured and contradictory energy policies elsewhere (here, here and here).

Models Not Fit For Purpose

These absurd and immiserating “net zero” policies of the West imposed at great cost to ordinary working men and women are justified by the true believers in the Church of Climate by invocations of the “climate crisis”. Mr. Miliband and his ilk would respond along the lines that when the house is on fire, you don’t muck about but do “whatever it takes”. Doubtless, the lockdown and vaccination mandates imposed by “experts” in response to Covid would be offered as an example.

These twin hysterias – Covid and climate — share much in common. Both spring from not-fit-for-purpose and impossible to validate computer models that escalated alleged risks on flimsy assumptions. An unpublished 16^th March 2020 bombshell report by Professor  Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, warned of 510,000 deaths in the country if the country did not immediately adopt a Covid suppression strategy.

By March 25th, Ferguson’s predicted half a million fatalities in the UK was adjusted downward to “unlikely to exceed 20,000”, a reduction by a factor of 25. This drastic reduction was credited to the UK’s lockdown which, however, was imposed only 2 days previously. It was later found that Dr. Ferguson’s model was not fit for purpose.

Much as Ferguson’s model drove governments to impose Covid lockdowns affecting nearly 3 billion people on the planet, Professor Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” model was used by the UN’s IPCC, mainstream media and politicians to push the man-made global warming (now called climate change or climate crisis) hysteria over the past two decades. But like Prof Ferguson’s model, Dr. Mann’s work seems more in keeping with junk science.

Hysteria attracts governments, activist academics in search of research grants, and left-wing billionaire foundations that support the vast enterprise that is the climate industrial complex. The great essayist H.L. Mencken had this to say about governments: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

But it would be naïve to view the climate industrial complex as a vast conspiracy. Steve Koonin in his book Unsettled offers a more plausible explanation, seeing a “self-reinforcing alignment of perspectives and interests” devoted to promoting climate alarm. Thus, governments do practical politics a la Mencken, hubristic academics “save the planet” with junk science and hyperbolic claims, NGO’s and crony businesses grift for regulatory rents, intellectuals virtue signal with luxury beliefs and the mass of followers know little but feel a lot.

A version of this article was published by The Daily Sceptic (https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/19/the-irrationality-of-western-energy-policies/)

Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes, and a member of the CO2 Coalition.

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