“It” in this case is: a hit piece on a well-informed public official who had the audacity to push back against an alarmist distortion of climate science. “How” is: get a reliably biased outfit (in this case the Washington Post) to raise a stink about said public official and rely solely for their missive on a misleading quote from a reliably biased “expert”, while failing to tell the readers about all the evidence that (a) backs up the public official and (b) undermines the expert. The occasion was President-elect Trump’s nomination of Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright as Energy Secretary. Wright has stated in the past that the IPCC does not claim there are increases in the frequency or intensity of tropical hurricanes, and the Post said Wright’s claim is wrong. But as Roger Pielke JR. pointed out they didn’t quote the IPCC to prove the point. Instead they quoted a scientist named James Kossin who insisted the IPCC proved it somewhere somehow: “It is extremely easy to show that. It is all there in black and white. There is no gray area.” And Post reporters being what they are, they didn’t bother to check whether Kossin was making stuff up, including by failing to tell them what the IPCC really says, or that, also available in black and white was Kossin’s own retraction of an earlier claim on the matter which the IPCC nevertheless relied on.

To begin with, the IPCC’s own words on the issue of tropical cyclone trends can be found in our unspun edition verbatim quotation, which starts (note TC = Tropical Cyclone, i.e. hurricane):

“Identifying past trends in TC metrics remains a challenge due to the heterogeneous character of the historical instrumental data, which are known as “best-track” data… There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multidecadal to centennial) trends in TC frequency- or intensity-based metrics due to changes in the technology used to collect the best-track data. This should not be interpreted as implying that no physical (real) trends exist, but rather as indicating that either the quality or the temporal length of the data is not adequate to provide robust trend detection statements, particularly in the presence of multidecadal variability.

Which sounds rather, well, gray. They go on:

“Kossin et al. (2020) extended the homogenized TC intensity record to the period 1979–2017 and identified significant global increases in major TC exceedance probability of about 6% per decade.”

What exactly is an “exceedance probability” other than a crime against grammar? As Roger Pielke Jr. explained a year and a half ago, it’s not the same as saying a hurricane was intense. It only refers to a short (less than six hour) interval at a single location at which the wind speed inside a hurricane exceeded a threshold. But the IPCC managed to spin it up so that by the time the topic got to the Summary for Policymakers it was misrepresented as a claim that “It is likely that the global proportion of major (Category 3–5) tropical cyclone occurrence has increased over the last four decades.” The data didn’t show any such thing, the underlying literature didn’t claim it, and the chapter to which they were referring didn’t say it either. But they went ahead and said it anyway, climate science not being like the normal kind.

It gets worse. Even the claim about exceedances turned out to be wrong. It was traced to a single paper by, um, the same James Kossin, who had initially claimed his data showed increased exceedances in most hurricane basins around the world. But then an alert reader noticed that he had done his sums wrong and his table was full of errors. So he had to publish a correction which unraveled his results. As Pielke Jr. noted:

“The trends that the original paper found to be of statistical significance across all of the world’s basins where tropical cyclones occur (officially 7, but condensed to 6 in Kossin et al. 2020) after the correction were only significant in just 2 basins – the North Atlantic and Southern Indian – representing less than 20% of all hurricane activity worldwide. So much for the global findings... The IPCC was apparently unaware of the correction, and continued to promote its misinterpretation of Kossin et al. 2020 as one of the most important scientific results of the entire AR6 assessment cycle, layering unawareness of the literature on top of misinterpretation.”

So when Kossin told the Post that “It is all there in black and white.” he should have added that his retraction was also published in black and white. Or black in eye.

As for the North Atlantic, even that part of the data depended on cherry-picking the start date. In his discussion of this episode Pielke Jr presents a graph showing the Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) in the North Atlantic basin since 1900. ACE is a measure of the energy in all hurricane events, including severe ones. As you can see there is no upward trend:

Mind you, he points out, if you really really want to find a trend, the 1970s was the quietest interval of the past 125 years, so start a trend there and you’ll find an upward-sloping line. It won’t be valid science but it will certainly be good enough for the Washington Post.

P.S. Works great for Arctic ice too.