My wife keeps telling me I should be more dog — I should just live in the moment, stop reflecting on the past and let the future take care of itself. But I can’t help it. My past is too full of mishap to be comfortably ignored, and I have no reason to believe that the future will be any different; therefore, I worry about it. And whilst I have no great expertise to bring to bear that enables me to predict the precise nature of my fate, there is certainly no shortage of experts around who delight in filling in the picture for me. One such expert is Professor Friederike Otto of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group, whose party piece is to reflect upon past calamity and come out with statements such as, “This is definitely what we will see much more of in the future”. In fact, that’s precisely what she told the World this week after storm Boris had just finished ravaging Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Austria and Italy, leading to at least 24 deaths and billions of pounds of damage. But how can she know this? The BBC explains:

Scientists at WWA work out how much of a role climate change played in an extreme weather event by comparing it with a model of how bad that storm, drought or heatwave might have been in a world where humans hadn’t been burning fossil fuels for nearly 200 years.¹

And these models are very good, don’t you know, because they can fill you in with numbers:

But if warming reaches 2C, similar episodes will become an extra 5% more intense and 50% more frequent, the WWA warned.

The trouble is, however, that specific events such as storm Boris cannot be predicted by these models, and so the art is to wait until they happen, and then attach the reality of the experience to a set of scary future statistics, resulting in a mind-set that couldn’t possibly be any less dog. It is an approach that has worked very well for Professor Otto and her colleagues, and it has made a huge contribution to the zeitgeist that seems to have given the UK’s Foreign Secretary, David Lammy a free pass in declaring that “nothing could be more central to the UK’s national interest than delivering global progress on arresting rising temperatures.”²

But just how good have these experts been in predicting the increasing number of unpredictable events? Is anybody keeping track? Well, there has been one recent prediction relating to the numbers of the unpredictable that has thrown quite a light on the skill of these models, and the light proved to be quite unflattering. According to a logic that Otto would readily recognise, warm oceans provide the ideal conditions for tropical storms. For example, in 2023, the hottest Caribbean sea temperatures on record led to 20 named storms in the Atlantic, the fourth most active hurricane season on record. This year the seas have been just as hot and so, according to the models, there would be at least as many named storms – somewhere between 15 and 25 were confidently predicted. The season is now nearing its end, and the count is in:

Seven. That’s right, a measly seven named storms.³ So what went wrong? Where are all of the missing hurricanes?

Well, from the perspective of the experts, nothing went wrong. Their models were correct but the climate made a few mistakes that they couldn’t possibly have been expected to foresee. At least, that’s the explanation that has now been provided:

With the moist monsoon air reaching further north than usual, easterly waves are emerging into the ocean via Mauritania or Western Sahara rather than Senegal or the Gambia. There, the ocean is cooler, and, as the waves rotate, they bring in cooler, drier air from the north, so there is not as much energy for waves to turn into storms. Effectively, if these waves are the seeds of major storms then they have been planted in the wrong soil: unable to receive the warmth and moisture they need to develop into hurricanes.

Okay, I’ll buy that. But I still want to know why the climate models were unable to anticipate this ‘wrong soil’ development. This isn’t a case of a single storm failing to materialise, where the capriciousness of the weather gods can be blamed for a no-show. This is virtually a whole storm season being wiped out. Science earns its spurs in predicting this sort of thing – not coming up with neat, after-the-fact explanations.

The reality is that life is very complicated and experts rarely have a sufficient understanding to enable accurate predictions. But that doesn’t seem to bother them all that much. If one restricts oneself to statistical forecasting, rather than the prediction of specific events, then the chances of a failed prediction coming to the public’s attention are greatly reduced. As far as storm prediction is concerned, it’s just a sequence of specific predictions that were never actually made, and so were never wrong. And by the time someone has twigged that something did go wrong, the experts will have already come up with their expert explanation as to why the statistics didn’t play the game. That’s why we call them experts. Meanwhile, the models will have been tweaked:

State-of-the-art climate models suggest that in a warming climate, the west African monsoon may become wetter and shift further northwards, potentially resulting in similarly quiet hurricane seasons in future.

And then, when that doesn’t happen, we’ll have even newer models. But what we will never learn, it seems, is that the experts are still hedging their bets:

Researchers at Colorado State University, widely considered some of the most accurate hurricane forecasters, have estimated a 50% chance of a return to normal hurricane activity in the next two weeks.

Have they now?

Footnotes:

[1] Actually, Mr BBC man, it’s not one model. It’s a group of models cherry-picked by Otto, supposedly selected according to their suitability for the given attribution exercise. This collection is then treated statistically as though it were a random sample taken from the space of all possible models.

[2] How the UK can deliver global progress given the decidedly non-global scale of its emissions is not entirely clear. It appears to depend upon some form of dark energy that enables Lammy to force China into submitting to his personal charm.

[3] Admittedly, the season started off strongly. Hurricane Beryl was the earliest category 5 storm on record.

Recently, many media outlets touted a new scientific study “A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature” as proof that the current modest rise in temperature over the last 150 years is going to be catastrophic. The data and the methodology used strongly suggest that such claims are false.

For example, in their coverage, The Washington Post (WaPo) quoted one of the study authors, saying:

At no point in the nearly half-billion years that Judd and her colleagues analyzed did the Earth change as fast as it is changing now, she added:

“In the same way as a massive asteroid hitting the Earth, what we’re doing now is unprecedented.”

How absurd. In no way is a world ending event from space anything at all like the gentle warming we’ve seen over the past century.

Second, using the proxy data that their research was limited to, there is no way of determining whether the speed with which past temperature shifts occurred was faster, slower, or similar to what we are experiencing at present.

Bloomberg, in We Just Got a Wake-Up Call From the Time Before Dinosaurs, said this: “Earth has been through periods of rapid climate change before. They all produced mass death.” The implication is that we are on the same track as the dinosaurs, which ironically were ended by “a massive asteroid hitting the Earth.”

Tech news had this foreboding headline: 500 Million Years of Climate History Tells Us of a Coming Catastrophe

All of these media outlets predict doom and gloom in our immediate future due to climate change, but in doing so, they completely ignore the bigger picture presented by the study. Most importantly, the study itself made no predictions of future doom due to climate change; such dire predictions are spun entirely by the media.

What is clearly evident in the graph provided by WaPo and the graph in the actual study (Figure 1 seen below), yet ignored by the media, is that fact that the present-day is the coolest Earth has been in 485 million years. Furthermore, the media completely ignored the fact that the wide swings in temperature recorded throughout history all naturally happened well before humans and the industrial revolution came on the scene.

Note the blue line in Figure 1 (added), denoting that according to their data, the present-day is the coolest in that 485-million-year history of temperature.

Yet somehow, this is lost on the media. WaPo focuses entirely on the small blip at the very end of the graph, with their own magnified version, seen below:

WaPo completely ignores the evidence in presented research, such as the recent surface stations project conducted by The Heartland Institute, showing that the Urban Heat Island effect and the poor placement of temperature stations used to measure temperatures, from which long-term trend data is gathered, may account for as much as 50 percent of recent warming, with the remainder likely being partly or wholly natural.

Then WaPo sounds the obligatory “climate crisis” alarm, saying:

The planet has been heating up for the past 20,000 years – but human-caused emissions in recent centuries have pushed the rate of warming into unprecedented territory.

Without rapid action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 F (17 C) by the end of the century — a level not seen in the timeline since the Miocene epoch, more than 5 million years ago.

That is false. We are not in “unprecedented territory.” The graph itself proves that as does other parts of the WaPo article, such as, “At its hottest, the study suggests, the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) — far higher than the historic 58.96 F (14.98 C) the planet hit last year.”

Of course, that 96.8°F peak happened well before humans even existed, suggesting that the planet has, as a result of entirely natural factors, dramatically warmed and cooled in the past without any human contribution whatsoever. To be clear, WaPo cites no data or theory, and certainly nothing contained in the study suggests, that human CO2 emissions could lead to the highs reached in the past. A 1.5 or 2 degree Celsius is increase is not dangerous, and certainly doesn’t get the world from its present 14.98℃ to the 36℃ figure WaPo is discussing to scare its readers.

This passage from the WaPo story does come to the honest conclusion that Earth tends to run warmer than today throughout its geological history:

The study also makes clear that the conditions humans are accustomed to are quite different from those that have dominated our planet’s history. For most of the Phanerozoic, the research suggests, average temperatures have exceeded 71.6 F (22 C), with little or no ice at the poles. Coldhouse climates — including our current one — prevailed just 13 percent of the time.

Therefore, it is quite possible Earth will return to a “hothouse climate” without any help from humans at all.

It is clear that the media wanted to spin this scientific study, which makes no alarming claims at all, into a tool to bolster their erroneous viewpoint that the world presently faces a “climate crisis” caused by humans. However, the data clearly show that the Earth’s temperature and the climates of its varied regions, have shifted radically in the past, that present temperatures are much cooler than has been the norm for the majority of Earth’s geological history, and that humans have lived through both cooler and warmer temperatures than we are currently experiencing at various points in history.

It is a shame, but not unexpected, that the mainstream media spins reports such as these into something frightening. Such behavior is not only dishonest, but reprehensible.

Originally published on Climate Realism

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.