Chris Morrison reports on the flap over Climate Crisis
media tactics in his Daily Sceptic article Climate Activists Frustrated by IPCC’s Refusal to Link Extreme Weather With Carbon Emissions. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Last June, the state-reliant BBC reported that human-caused climate change had made U.S. and Mexico heatwaves “35 times more likely”. Nothing out of the ordinary here in mainstream media with everyone from climate comedy turn ‘Jim’ Dale to UN chief Antonio ‘Boiling’ Guterres making these types of bizarre attributions. But for those who closely follow climate science and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “such headlines can be difficult to make sense of”, observes the distinguished science writer Roger Pielke. In a hard-hitting attack on the pseudo-scientific industry of weather attribution, he states:
“neither the IPCC nor the underlying scientific literature comes anywhere close to making such strong and“ certain claims of attribution”.
Pielke argues that the extreme position of attributing individual bad weather events is “roughly aligned” with the far Left. “Climate science is not, or at least should not serve as a proxy for political tribes,” he cautions. But of course it is. The Net Zero fantasy is a collectivist national and supra-national agenda that increasingly relies on demonising bad weather. With global temperatures rising at most only 0.1°C a decade, laughter can only be general and side-splitting when IPCC boss Jim Skea claims that British summers will be 6°C hotter in less than 50 years. Two extended temperature pauses since 2000 have not helped the cause of global boiling. In addition there are increasing doubts about the reliability of temperature recordings by many meteorological organisations that seem unable to properly account for massive urban heat corruptions.
The big problem for ‘far Left’ climate extremists is that event attribution is a form, in Pielke’s words, of “tactical science”. Such science serves legal and political ends and is not always subject to peer review. As the BBC and other media outlets can attest, the work is “generally promoted via press release”. It has been developed in response to the failure of the IPCC to detect and attribute most types of extreme weather including drought, flooding, storms and wildfires to human involvement, notes Pielke. Worse, the IPCC can find little sign of human involvement going forward to 2100.
Scientists cannot answer directly whether particular events are
caused by climate change since extremes occur naturally.
Meanwhile the IPCC is somewhat dismissive about weather attribution, or as Pielke terms it, “weather attribution alchemy”. It notes: “The usefulness or applicability of available extreme event attribution methods for assessing climate-related risks remains subject to debate.” The IPCC is a biased body full of climate alarmists, but its inability to attribute single events to humans is obviously highly irritating and somewhat inconvenient for activists and their media counterparts.
Dr. Friedericke Otto speaking with reporter at Oxford.
Dr. Friederike Otto runs World Weather Attribution (WWA) out of Imperial College London and is a frequent presence on the BBC. WWA is behind many of the immediate attributions of bad weather to human causes and its motives are clear. As Dr. Otto has noted: “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.” Otto is clear that the main function of such studies, part-funded by Net Zero-supporting billionaires and heavily pushed by aligned mainstream media, is to support lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. She explains this strategy in detail in the interview, ‘From Extreme Event Attribution to Climate Litigation‘.
The inability of the IPCC to attribute bad weather to humans has been viewed by climate advocates as “politically problematic”, continues Pielke. He notes the work of climate activists Elizabeth Lloyd and Naomi Oreskes who are worried that the lack of attribution “conveys the impression that we just do not know, which feeds into uncertainty, doubt or incompleteness, and the general tendency of humans to discount threats that are not imminent”.
Perish the thought that there should be uncertainty, doubt
or incompleteness in the settled world of climate science.
It is of course different from all other branches of science in that all its opinions are right and consequently there is no need for the unhelpful process of constant inquiry and experiment. It need hardly be added that no doubt exists at the BBC, where former Radio 4 Today Editor Sarah Sands wrote the foreword to a WWA guide for journalists. Recalling when the late Nigel Lawson suggested there had been no increase in extreme weather, Sands noted: “I wish we had this guide for journalists to help us mount a more effective challenge to his claim.” These days, Sands enthused, attribution studies have given us “significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse”.
For her part, Otto is keen to crack down on the heretics. She was at the forefront of the recent notorious retraction of a paper in a Springer Nature journal that stated there was no evidence that the climate was breaking down. Written by four Italian scientists and led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti, they argued that a climate emergency was not supported by the data. Otto, who had previously worked in the Oxford School of Geography for 10 years, claimed the scientists were not writing in good faith. “If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly and publicly saying it should never have been published,” she demanded.
A recent scientific study has confirmed that natural and climate-related disasters are declining during the 21st century. Getty Images/iStcokphoto
Declining Weather Disasters Prove Doomsters Wrong (Alimonti et al.)
Benny Peiser makes the case in his NY Post article Despite climate-change hysterics, weather disasters have decreased. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
A recent scientific study has confirmed what climate realists have been highlighting for some time: Natural and climate-related disasters have been declining rather than increasing during the 21st century.
In a paper published this year in one of the world’s leading journals on environmental hazards, Italian scientists Gianluca Alimonti and Luigi Mariani analyzed the number and temporal trends of natural disasters reported since 1900.
A 2015 study by 22 scientists from around the world found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. Thus the planet’s recent modest warming has been saving millions of lives.
Based on the best available data, the two scientists concluded the 21st century has seen “a decreasing trend [of natural disasters] to 2022” which is “characterized by a significant decline in number of events.”
The researchers emphasized that their conclusion “sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by UN bodies which predict an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming.”
“Our analyses strongly refute this assertion,” they wrote.
For years, international agencies such as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Meteorological Organization and the International Red Cross have claimed that climate-related disasters are escalating.
Floods lead a near doubling of disaster events from 1980 to 1999 compared to 2000 to 2019, according to a report by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
“Weather disasters are striking the world four to five times more often and causing seven times more damage than in the 1970s,” the WMO reported in 2021.
Disaster and weather officials affiliated with the UN claim this dramatic rise is due to global warming: The changing climate, they say, is making weather disasters stronger and more frequent.
Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States.
The increased frequency of heat waves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events prove the negative impact of a warming world, according to various UN agencies and nongovernmental organizations.
Yet, as the actual data used by these organizations reveals, the last 20 years have in fact seen a significant decline in such events.
It turns out that climate alarmists have based their claims on a highly misleading comparison of disaster data of the late 20th and the early 21st centuries.
By their tally, the period from 1980 to 2000 saw about 4,200 natural disasters —with the number increasing sharply, to more than 8,000, during the first 20 years of this century.
This conclusion, however, is fatally flawed: It fails to take into account the huge increase in the global reporting of disasters engendered by the invention and rapid global dissemination of new communication technologies since the 1980s.
The arrival of the internet and other new communication tools has undoubtedly accelerated the reporting of disasters from all corners of the world — events that were significantly underreported in earlier decades.
As well, the number of people killed by natural and climate-related disasters has fallen steadily over the past 120 years — from 500,000 deaths per decade in the early 20th century down to less than 50,000 per decade in the last ten years.
And, contrary to claims by NGOs and government officials, climate-related disaster losses have also declined as a percentage of global GDP during the last 30 years — from about 0.25% of GDP in 1990 to less than 0.20% in 2023.
The study by Alimonti and Mariani vindicates what we at the Global Warming Policy Foundation have been pointing out for a long time: Climate-related disasters are not on the rise, despite warming temperatures.
International agencies and the news media have hyped climate disasters for far too long, while ignoring the factual downward trend.
”First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” as the saying goes. UN agencies and NGOs have been misleading the public for years. It’s past time for the truth to win out.
Benny Peiser is the director of the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation.
See also
Our Weather Extremes Are Customary in History
Figure27: Annual count of EF3 and above tornadoes in the US, 1950–2021. Source: Source: NOAA/NCEI.106, 107
via Science Matters
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October 9, 2024 at 12:46PM
