Sometimes they make no effort to hide what they’re up to. In a new series at his Substack site “The Honest Broker” (to which you should subscribe) Roger Pielke Jr. lifts the lid on the modern alchemy of attributing individual weather events to greenhouse gases. And while we would be more than somewhat doubtful about the validity of this new science even if it were done with the best of intentions, our doubts become insurmountable after reading Pielke Jr.’s shocking commentary which consist of.... quoting what the scientists themselves are saying.

RPJ begins by noting that even the IPCC is largely unwilling to connect individual weather events to climate change (or greenhouse gases). But that salutary caution is no deterrent to the young Turks at the World Weather Attribution factory doing “tactical science” (RPJ’s term), i.e. science deliberately aimed at supporting political or legal aims rather than uncovering the truth. Is that an unfair characterization? Not according to RPJ:

“For instance, researchers behind the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative explain that one of their key motives in conducting such studies is, ‘increasing the ‘immediacy’ of climate change, thereby increasing support for mitigation.’ WWA’s chief scientist, Friederike Otto, explains, ‘Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.’ Another oft-quoted scientist who performs rapid attribution analyses, Michael Wehner, summarized their importance (emphasis in original) – ‘The most important message from this (and previous) analyses is that “Dangerous climate change is here now!”’”

The emphasis is in the original email in an article which RPJ is quoting. And maybe Wehner should have added two or three exclamation marks to boost its credibility further. RPJ adds:

“Otto and others have been very forthright that the main function of such studies is to create a defensible scientific basis in support of lawsuits against fossil fuel companies — She explains the strategy in detail in this interview, From Extreme Event Attribution to Climate Litigation.”

The whole field is obviously a contrivance to push a foregone conclusion. RPJ discusses the recent history of the IPCC’s handling of extreme weather including its “inability to reach high confidence in detection and attribution of most types of extreme events.” This caution exasperates activist scientists like Naomi Oreskes who fear the IPCC is giving the impression that scientists are, uhh, unable to reach high confidence in such attribution when she and her ilk know better. So they have come up with methods that give them the answers they know must be right, and that can then be used to lash the public. As RPJ says:

“The underlying theory of change here appears to be that people must be fearful of climate change and thus need [to] come to understand that it threatens their lives, not in the future, but today and tomorrow. If they don’t have that fear, the argument goes, then they will discount the threat and fail to support the right climate policies. Hence, from this perspective, the IPCC’s failure to reach strong claims of detection and attribution represents a political problem – a problem that can be rectified via the invention of extreme event attribution.”

Note that the IPCC’s difficulty in finding a strong link between foul weather and warming, or GHGs, is considered a political problem, not a scientific reality. And RPJ predicts that there will be an eventual clash between those who support the more cautious stance of the IPCC and the WWA steamrollers. Which may be true, but our money is on the WWA steamrollers flattening the IPCC in their determination to get victories from sympathetic judges that they have thus far failed to get from the general public or from their fellow scientists.

Stay tuned.